Too many video game commercials are basically aimed at people who already know about the game. And, since they only run video game commercials during shows that have been determined to be popular with the nerd demographic (SG-1, Family Guy, etc.) its basically like dropping hints to your parents that your birthday is coming up.
Valve: Hey guys, you know what happens on October 10th?
Core Demographic: Of course we do. You used to money from our pre-orders to pay for this ad in the first place.
Not that I condone breaking EULA's or anything, but how are they going to know whether or not your friend gave you the gift of The Green Backs for your gift subscription from The Orange Box? And, why should Valve care? Anyone who is given HL2 and EP:1 are going to buy at least Episode 2 a few weeks later and probably Portal and TF2 - all ala carte.
I have studied (some) biology, especially from an evolutionary perspective. There are aspects of our immune system that deal with macroscopic threats - parasites, foreign bodies, etc. In modern, industrialized society intestinal parasites and unremoved splinters aren't really a problem so a part of our immune system is left with very little to do. Like a bored child or pet, our immune system goes looking for something to do. It overreacts to pollen, proteins in common foods, and animal dander.
With the proliferation of antibacterial products, I worry about two things. In the short term, what kind of new allergies will people develop as chemistry continues to replace people's immune systems? In the long term, what kind of backlash are we going to see when microbes begin to develop some sort of resistance to alcohol and other antibacterial agents?
Ever since Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, they've done nothing but produce Halo for the XBox. No PC ports, no different games, they're barely even allowed to produce story-driven single player content. Go back and look at Bungie's pre-Xbox games: the Marathon series (which was intended to tie in to Halo), the Myth series, even Pathways into Darkness was more original than Halo 3.
I was angry with Bungie when, just a few months before Halo was to be released as a Mac exclusive, Microsoft bought them out and put them to work. But eventually I began to feel sorry for them. Bungie has had its creativity stifled for quite some time now and they've finally realized it.
Its not so much that people are lazy/greedy/cheap. Well, they are, but that's not the main point. A lot of people remember when it was common practice to tape a favorite song that played a lot on the radio or a favorite movie that was on TV. Nobody hunted you down and demanded your first-born child in exchange for the terrible act of saving something that was being broadcast through the air.
Now, we recording industry execs who don't want you to make copies of media you own, don't want you to load media on to digital media players for your personal use, and who are beginning to become uncomfortable with the idea of a person buying a CD and being allowed to listen to it whenever they want forever for free. How long will it be before we're expected to subscribe to an album indefinitely or pay a few cents ever time we play the song?
There's nothing wrong with wanting to protect your product and make money, but don't be greedy and don't be belligerent. When I hear that a recording company has been awarded nearly $10,000 per song that some person was sharing, I certainly don't feel sorry or guilty over all the money the recording industry claims to be losing to piracy.
Definitely. If the recording industry feels the need to squeeze people for this much money, then from now on they can make ALL their money through litigation. There's a difference between protecting your assets and alienating your customer base.
Because before episodes of Buffy became to ultimate form of artistic and intellectual expression, "tabula rasa" was a philosophical concept developed by ancient greek philosophers. It means "blank slate" and is related to the notion that humans are born as blank slates, having no inborn knowledge, ideas, etc.
So, its not a 90's pop culture reference. Its just a fancy way of calling your new game "New Game".
Game Publisher: This is a sophisticated game with mature content intended for an older audience. We're not marketing this game to children.
Ratings Boards: Games are only played by children. This game has sophisticated, mature content that is inappropriate for children. We ban this game and swear vendetta against your families.
Game Publisher: What if we make the "blood" green . ..?
"Because its a prereq for General Chem. 1 and 2, we use the first three chapters of the textbook for that course."
Every major publisher, including (probably) the publisher of the book you use, offers a "custom printing service". They would gladly print just those three chapters and nothing else, or whatever scheme you can come up with -- chapters 1-3, 6, 10 and 13, etc etc.
In my experience, as a student and professor, "customized textbook" translates into "must buy from bookstore and sell back to bookstore". My school used a custom publication for Chemistry for quite a while, but has recently adopted a more up-to-date text.
International editions _do_ sacrifice quality. The material is there, but there's no mistaking an international book. Hell, I've bought back copies that are quite plainly photocopies of the original text -- shadow effects on the edge of a page. And personally I'm all for students saving a buck, but mark my words -- within 10 years there won't be an "international edition" anymore. The publishers know those books are coming back into the states and aren't really happy about it, and moves are being made to curtail that particular practice.
The international editions my students have been showing a pretty good quality. They're softcover, but the pages are full-color, glossy, machine prints, not photocopies. I'm sure some seedier web sites are selling photocopied books, and one gets what one pays for. Sure, I'd like to see "international editions" disappear too. As long as their replaced with reasonably-priced "budget" or "entry-level" editions.
So, although it's easy to blame the bookstore, in most cases the professor is the one making choices as to what book is used in their classes (at least, one should hope so). You are admittedly guilty of requiring your students to get the $180 package when they only need a small part of that book and even though you have the means to acquire a better deal for them, you don't. Maybe because you didn't know about the option, maybe because your higher ed book rep is a snake, maybe because you don't care.
I guess I should clarify that I am but a lowly adjunct/lecturer who has little say in what classes I am assigned, let alone what shiny new book the chemistry faculty decides to use. I won't take the you in "you don't care" personally though:)
Again, I can only speak for my store, but I know our average margin on both new and used books, and we're a fairly large school -- over 30,000 undergrads -- I'm not eating steak. The clothing and gifts people, though...
Where have I heard this argument from before . . . Oh yes! The music and film industries. Its amazing how nobody's really making money off the $200 9th editions of Ten Pounds of Calculus which added a table of figures to chapter 18 and some missing commas in the photo credits.
Hyperbole and griping aside, textbook prices are really getting out of control. Considering the growing number of college students and the accompanying increase in demand for these books, I can't see why the prices continue to go up. We know its not the bookstore's fault, they're just following the MSRP. You can't blame the professors because half of them don't make the decisions on books and the other half are funding research and paying rent by writing these books. The publishers need to step up and make some changes in their business practices. Offer more decent textbooks on CD. The publishers overhead and production costs will go down and they can pass at least some of the savings on to the students.
So, now book sellers don't want you to do price comparisons? College textbooks are so ridiculously overpriced, its a tragedy. I've been lecturing at a community college for over three years now. One class I do is a non-credit pre-Chemistry class. Because its a prereq for General Chem. 1 and 2, we use the first three chapters of the textbook for that course. The $180 textbook. Many of my students aren't even planning on taking General Chem at my school or at all. But, if they want to be able to keep up with the homework, they have to get the book.
And its the same for all my classes. Books are $100 to $200 new, the bookstores almost never have used books, and if they do you know they bought them back from the previous owner for pennies on the dollar. I start each of my classes every semester by showing the students the "required text" and then explaining how they can get by with an older edition or with some internet research.
Lately students have been finding the wholesale-priced "international editions" online which saves them money without sacrificing quality. But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?
You know what might help? Some pictures taken by the later Russian missions or from a telescope showing the Apollo sites . . . like I originally posted about.
Do such pictures exist and can someone maybe direct me/us to them? Thanks!
Neither of those require a human presence to set them up.
How do you figure? In order for a seismometer to function, it must be anchored to the ground properly, be placed on level ground, and calibrated. You can't just drop one from an orbiter. Same goes for a mirror array.
Now, yes, the Mars rovers were dropped from the sky and functioning on their own within a few days. But (1) That was 2004, not the late 60's or early 70's. And (2) to my knowledge the Mars rovers aren't carrying equipment as sensitive as a seismometer. There really are limits on the kinds of equipment that can be set up or operated by remote/robot. Its why people like this (http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/frequent_questions/grp13/question1188.html) still have jobs.
We get telemetry back from the Moon. There's a mirror array up there so that we can bounce a laser off the moon and measure its distance. There's also a seismometer that beams back earthquake data.
Are there any Russian or telescope pictures of the Apollo sites online? I get students who ask me about this occasionally and some long-distance pictures of the junk we left on the moon would satisfy most doubters.
A good game demo or the opening tutorial section of a game can give you a good idea of what's in the game and how it feels to play. An RPG where your character is shooting a gun and an FPS may look the same as screenshots or a demo trailer. But, the two kinds of games play and feel very different.
Playing the game would allow a ratings board to get a sense of context, as the article states. It would also give someone an idea of the kinds of choices the player has. In God of War you can can choose to kill a medusa by stabbing it repeatedly or by twisting its head off. All choices made by the player are bloody violent. In BioShock you can choose to rescue the Little Sisters or exploit them - a choice with positive and negative moral significance. A person may rate the violence and mature content in a game differently if they knew that those negative actions weren't obligatory.
Also, maybe if the people who claim that violence in video games causes players to become more violent in real life actually played some of these games, they'd understand how ridiculous such statements are.
The same argument can be made for Mac users running Windows via Boot Camp. But, native software has a tendency to be more stable and be optimized for the hardware.
Are you kidding? These rovers are functioning way beyond their mission parameters. They've collected more data than anyone expected. We've gone from "What if there's water on Mars" to "How much water is there on Mars?". The rovers survived a Martian dust storm! Martian dust storms have been known to cover the entire planet.
Let's put it this way. If your car was as well-designed and resilient as these rovers it would run on empty for 100 miles, drive up mountains, and review your tax returns.
If you want your obscure research paper to receive mainstream media coverage and net you loads of grant money, be sure to link your work to one or more of the following "hot topics":
meteor impact
dinosaurs
mass extinction
global warming
DNA
obesity
energy efficient cars
OK, fine. There's a gap in the asteroid belt indicating that several large objects were knocked loose some time in the past few million years. And, yes, those objects will be most likely to fall towards the Sun and insect the orbits of the inner planets. That doesn't mean you've found where the infamous dinosaur-killing meteor came from. That's pure speculation! That gap could just as easily been left by the meteor that caused the P/Tr extinction or by a meteor that hit Venus.
Sure. Mac gamers have been mourning the loss of Bungie as a Mac developer since Halo disappeared from the G4 and reappeared on the XBox. But even worse, it must suck a little over at Bungie. ALL they do is Halo and they must be getting tired of it from a creative perspective. Taking a dip in your Master Chief-built money bin can only go so far to relieve creative frustration.
Its interesting how everyone seems a lot more concerned with the language used to report this bit of science rather than the discovery itself. The comments on the original blog entry are quite interesting. Several people complain about the "southern slang" or "aww-shucks" style of writing. I looked at it and thought "hip-hop lyric" myself.
We're all getting at something, aren't we? I also wonder if people complained this much when science journals began switching from Latin and German to English.
I'm looking forward to switching to iWork now that Apple's got a spreadsheet module in there. But they still haven't replaced the Drawing/Painting modules! I use Appleworks Paint to remove extraneous arrows or labeling from graphics I put in slideshows or to knit photos together for small panoramics. Its amazing how useful that Magic Lasso tool is! There are a lot of simple things that I just can't figure out how to do in Photoshop.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you people have any idea how hard it is to teach astronomy when half the class snickers every time the 7th planet is mentioned?
In light of the public's growing familiarity with anatomy and diminishing mental age, the IAU should rename Uranus.
All together now: yur-en-us - Uranus.
Too many video game commercials are basically aimed at people who already know about the game. And, since they only run video game commercials during shows that have been determined to be popular with the nerd demographic (SG-1, Family Guy, etc.) its basically like dropping hints to your parents that your birthday is coming up.
Valve: Hey guys, you know what happens on October 10th?
Core Demographic: Of course we do. You used to money from our pre-orders to pay for this ad in the first place.
Valve: Well, don't forget to buy the Orange Box!
Not that I condone breaking EULA's or anything, but how are they going to know whether or not your friend gave you the gift of The Green Backs for your gift subscription from The Orange Box? And, why should Valve care? Anyone who is given HL2 and EP:1 are going to buy at least Episode 2 a few weeks later and probably Portal and TF2 - all ala carte.
I have studied (some) biology, especially from an evolutionary perspective. There are aspects of our immune system that deal with macroscopic threats - parasites, foreign bodies, etc. In modern, industrialized society intestinal parasites and unremoved splinters aren't really a problem so a part of our immune system is left with very little to do. Like a bored child or pet, our immune system goes looking for something to do. It overreacts to pollen, proteins in common foods, and animal dander.
With the proliferation of antibacterial products, I worry about two things. In the short term, what kind of new allergies will people develop as chemistry continues to replace people's immune systems? In the long term, what kind of backlash are we going to see when microbes begin to develop some sort of resistance to alcohol and other antibacterial agents?
Ever since Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, they've done nothing but produce Halo for the XBox. No PC ports, no different games, they're barely even allowed to produce story-driven single player content. Go back and look at Bungie's pre-Xbox games: the Marathon series (which was intended to tie in to Halo), the Myth series, even Pathways into Darkness was more original than Halo 3.
I was angry with Bungie when, just a few months before Halo was to be released as a Mac exclusive, Microsoft bought them out and put them to work. But eventually I began to feel sorry for them. Bungie has had its creativity stifled for quite some time now and they've finally realized it.
Its not so much that people are lazy/greedy/cheap. Well, they are, but that's not the main point. A lot of people remember when it was common practice to tape a favorite song that played a lot on the radio or a favorite movie that was on TV. Nobody hunted you down and demanded your first-born child in exchange for the terrible act of saving something that was being broadcast through the air.
Now, we recording industry execs who don't want you to make copies of media you own, don't want you to load media on to digital media players for your personal use, and who are beginning to become uncomfortable with the idea of a person buying a CD and being allowed to listen to it whenever they want forever for free. How long will it be before we're expected to subscribe to an album indefinitely or pay a few cents ever time we play the song?
There's nothing wrong with wanting to protect your product and make money, but don't be greedy and don't be belligerent. When I hear that a recording company has been awarded nearly $10,000 per song that some person was sharing, I certainly don't feel sorry or guilty over all the money the recording industry claims to be losing to piracy.
Definitely. If the recording industry feels the need to squeeze people for this much money, then from now on they can make ALL their money through litigation. There's a difference between protecting your assets and alienating your customer base.
That sounds more like a religious (dare I say Christian) interpretation. And, by religious, I mean it makes society and civilized people sound evil.
Because before episodes of Buffy became to ultimate form of artistic and intellectual expression, "tabula rasa" was a philosophical concept developed by ancient greek philosophers. It means "blank slate" and is related to the notion that humans are born as blank slates, having no inborn knowledge, ideas, etc.
So, its not a 90's pop culture reference. Its just a fancy way of calling your new game "New Game".
Game Publisher: This is a sophisticated game with mature content intended for an older audience. We're not marketing this game to children.
Ratings Boards: Games are only played by children. This game has sophisticated, mature content that is inappropriate for children. We ban this game and swear vendetta against your families.
Game Publisher: What if we make the "blood" green . . .?
Every major publisher, including (probably) the publisher of the book you use, offers a "custom printing service". They would gladly print just those three chapters and nothing else, or whatever scheme you can come up with -- chapters 1-3, 6, 10 and 13, etc etc.
In my experience, as a student and professor, "customized textbook" translates into "must buy from bookstore and sell back to bookstore". My school used a custom publication for Chemistry for quite a while, but has recently adopted a more up-to-date text.
International editions _do_ sacrifice quality. The material is there, but there's no mistaking an international book. Hell, I've bought back copies that are quite plainly photocopies of the original text -- shadow effects on the edge of a page. And personally I'm all for students saving a buck, but mark my words -- within 10 years there won't be an "international edition" anymore. The publishers know those books are coming back into the states and aren't really happy about it, and moves are being made to curtail that particular practice.The international editions my students have been showing a pretty good quality. They're softcover, but the pages are full-color, glossy, machine prints, not photocopies. I'm sure some seedier web sites are selling photocopied books, and one gets what one pays for. Sure, I'd like to see "international editions" disappear too. As long as their replaced with reasonably-priced "budget" or "entry-level" editions.
So, although it's easy to blame the bookstore, in most cases the professor is the one making choices as to what book is used in their classes (at least, one should hope so). You are admittedly guilty of requiring your students to get the $180 package when they only need a small part of that book and even though you have the means to acquire a better deal for them, you don't. Maybe because you didn't know about the option, maybe because your higher ed book rep is a snake, maybe because you don't care.I guess I should clarify that I am but a lowly adjunct/lecturer who has little say in what classes I am assigned, let alone what shiny new book the chemistry faculty decides to use. I won't take the you in "you don't care" personally though :)
Again, I can only speak for my store, but I know our average margin on both new and used books, and we're a fairly large school -- over 30,000 undergrads -- I'm not eating steak. The clothing and gifts people, thoughWhere have I heard this argument from before . . . Oh yes! The music and film industries. Its amazing how nobody's really making money off the $200 9th editions of Ten Pounds of Calculus which added a table of figures to chapter 18 and some missing commas in the photo credits.
Hyperbole and griping aside, textbook prices are really getting out of control. Considering the growing number of college students and the accompanying increase in demand for these books, I can't see why the prices continue to go up. We know its not the bookstore's fault, they're just following the MSRP. You can't blame the professors because half of them don't make the decisions on books and the other half are funding research and paying rent by writing these books. The publishers need to step up and make some changes in their business practices. Offer more decent textbooks on CD. The publishers overhead and production costs will go down and they can pass at least some of the savings on to the students.
So, now book sellers don't want you to do price comparisons? College textbooks are so ridiculously overpriced, its a tragedy. I've been lecturing at a community college for over three years now. One class I do is a non-credit pre-Chemistry class. Because its a prereq for General Chem. 1 and 2, we use the first three chapters of the textbook for that course. The $180 textbook. Many of my students aren't even planning on taking General Chem at my school or at all. But, if they want to be able to keep up with the homework, they have to get the book.
And its the same for all my classes. Books are $100 to $200 new, the bookstores almost never have used books, and if they do you know they bought them back from the previous owner for pennies on the dollar. I start each of my classes every semester by showing the students the "required text" and then explaining how they can get by with an older edition or with some internet research.
Lately students have been finding the wholesale-priced "international editions" online which saves them money without sacrificing quality. But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?
You know what might help? Some pictures taken by the later Russian missions or from a telescope showing the Apollo sites . . . like I originally posted about.
Do such pictures exist and can someone maybe direct me/us to them? Thanks!
How do you figure? In order for a seismometer to function, it must be anchored to the ground properly, be placed on level ground, and calibrated. You can't just drop one from an orbiter. Same goes for a mirror array.
Now, yes, the Mars rovers were dropped from the sky and functioning on their own within a few days. But (1) That was 2004, not the late 60's or early 70's. And (2) to my knowledge the Mars rovers aren't carrying equipment as sensitive as a seismometer. There really are limits on the kinds of equipment that can be set up or operated by remote/robot. Its why people like this (http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/frequent_questions/grp13/question1188.html) still have jobs.
We get telemetry back from the Moon. There's a mirror array up there so that we can bounce a laser off the moon and measure its distance. There's also a seismometer that beams back earthquake data.
Are there any Russian or telescope pictures of the Apollo sites online? I get students who ask me about this occasionally and some long-distance pictures of the junk we left on the moon would satisfy most doubters.
A good game demo or the opening tutorial section of a game can give you a good idea of what's in the game and how it feels to play. An RPG where your character is shooting a gun and an FPS may look the same as screenshots or a demo trailer. But, the two kinds of games play and feel very different.
Playing the game would allow a ratings board to get a sense of context, as the article states. It would also give someone an idea of the kinds of choices the player has. In God of War you can can choose to kill a medusa by stabbing it repeatedly or by twisting its head off. All choices made by the player are bloody violent. In BioShock you can choose to rescue the Little Sisters or exploit them - a choice with positive and negative moral significance. A person may rate the violence and mature content in a game differently if they knew that those negative actions weren't obligatory.
Also, maybe if the people who claim that violence in video games causes players to become more violent in real life actually played some of these games, they'd understand how ridiculous such statements are.
The same argument can be made for Mac users running Windows via Boot Camp. But, native software has a tendency to be more stable and be optimized for the hardware.
Are you kidding? These rovers are functioning way beyond their mission parameters. They've collected more data than anyone expected. We've gone from "What if there's water on Mars" to "How much water is there on Mars?". The rovers survived a Martian dust storm! Martian dust storms have been known to cover the entire planet.
Let's put it this way. If your car was as well-designed and resilient as these rovers it would run on empty for 100 miles, drive up mountains, and review your tax returns.
If you want your obscure research paper to receive mainstream media coverage and net you loads of grant money, be sure to link your work to one or more of the following "hot topics":
meteor impact
dinosaurs
mass extinction
global warming
DNA
obesity
energy efficient cars
OK, fine. There's a gap in the asteroid belt indicating that several large objects were knocked loose some time in the past few million years. And, yes, those objects will be most likely to fall towards the Sun and insect the orbits of the inner planets. That doesn't mean you've found where the infamous dinosaur-killing meteor came from. That's pure speculation! That gap could just as easily been left by the meteor that caused the P/Tr extinction or by a meteor that hit Venus.
Sure. Mac gamers have been mourning the loss of Bungie as a Mac developer since Halo disappeared from the G4 and reappeared on the XBox. But even worse, it must suck a little over at Bungie. ALL they do is Halo and they must be getting tired of it from a creative perspective. Taking a dip in your Master Chief-built money bin can only go so far to relieve creative frustration.
No, Bungie makes good games. Like Marathon and Myth.
Its interesting how everyone seems a lot more concerned with the language used to report this bit of science rather than the discovery itself. The comments on the original blog entry are quite interesting. Several people complain about the "southern slang" or "aww-shucks" style of writing. I looked at it and thought "hip-hop lyric" myself.
We're all getting at something, aren't we? I also wonder if people complained this much when science journals began switching from Latin and German to English.
I'm looking forward to switching to iWork now that Apple's got a spreadsheet module in there. But they still haven't replaced the Drawing/Painting modules! I use Appleworks Paint to remove extraneous arrows or labeling from graphics I put in slideshows or to knit photos together for small panoramics. Its amazing how useful that Magic Lasso tool is! There are a lot of simple things that I just can't figure out how to do in Photoshop.