I've seen it too when I try to communicate with younger people (i'm in my mid 20's). I use facebook to write messages that I know will hang around for awhile, like "Happy Birthday!" or "congratulations on ________!" When facebook started, that's all you saw.
Now I see stuff like "hey pizza l8r?" or "wanna meet for that group project?" I wanna crack my head on a wall. No one over a certain age lives on facebook, and no one under that age realizes this. Note to the younger generation: if its time sensitive, your *absolute last* place to leave the message is a social networking site.
Although they only checked Windows 2000, they assume that XP and Vista use similar random number generators
That's a hell of an assumption to make. Wherein Win2k probably had a semi reasonable (if apparently crackable) random number generator, Vista probably has a confused gnome inside that's hit on the head and presented with a keyboard when a random number is requested. It then needs to connect to the internet and report my name, hardware configuration, IP, SSN and 3 credit card numbers to the Windows Genuine Disadvantage hive mind in Redmond to ensure that I paid for a version of windows that is authorized to include the Random Gnome (R) (TM), or if I should pay more to upgrade to Random Gnome Ultimate.
Get real guys, there's no way he was fired for using Linux or Google searches. The chip they install in every MS employee's brain disallowes deviance from the collective (more specifically, Gates clicks the "Deny" button that pops up in his head).
IIRC, Fight Night Round 3 sold really well and was well received, especially because it looked really good in the XB360 demo units. Not nearly as well as, say, Madden 0X, but when there were like only 10 games for the 360 it was something to recommend besides waiting for backwards computability patches...
I like how the SlashDot summary frames it as a scandalous tell-all of a former employee, when its actually a current Manager standing up for the company he still works at.
Anyway, as a former GameStop manager myself, I have to say that everything the article says is true, especially the part about choking on old copies of Madden that will never ever ever sell. The fact that they trade in for $1 is actually a relatively new policy (from about the time of the EB-GS merger). Sports games that were over 4 years old commonly traded in for under a dollar; Madden '02 traded in for $.05, which was more than it was worth considering how many copies we ever sold (it resold for $0.99 at the time). What's sadder is that we still had *new* Maddens from that year, with yellowed price stickers, for around $16.99 that no one ever even looked at.
And yes, if you want to get a GameStop employee's undying love, tell him when you come in that you were considering reserving some games but that you're gonna walk around and look first. He'll help you with anything. If its been a slow day, he'd prolly even blow you in the back room. Be sure to ask about pre-order bonus crap, Atlus sometimes has a pre-order soundtrack available for upcoming RPG's that they send out with preorders, and there's usually some random stuffed animal hanging around the pre-order crap drawer or box, and prolly random tshirts. Decks of card were popular around the time I left, I had one for Gun and the last Hitman game. There's always some vaguely cool crap hanging around, especially for games that just came out that no one preordered. Sometimes we get more swag then we ever see copies of the game...
Well, you're actually describing a lot of Phantom Hourglass sailing. Believe it or not, there's pirates you can run into, you can either sink them or outrun them, and they can board you if you get caught and then you need to fight them off of your ship. Also, the ship does have HP as well and takes damage, and one of the "side" quests is to collect ship parts to put them in certain combinations to improve the durability of of your ship.
I actually managed to get all the gold ship pieces by playing & trading online in forums, and to trade you're forced to play the multiplayer mode... which I actually enjoyed when I wasn't playing random dickheads that dropped offline when they were losing.
There have been a lot of posts from people saying that they can tell the difference, and that if you can't, you're an idiot and get what you deserve. I just wanted to clarify that trademark confusion isn't necessarily to protect slashdotters (who I would consider more savvy); its for your average person on the street. You're asking "why should that matter, only people who know what they're doing would buy a Wiimote, right?"
Well, yes and no. The problem will come around Christmas when parents and grandparents, who have seen their kids playing "that newfangled white wand-y game," try to go Christmas shopping. A certain percentage of them will wander through the toy department, notice this, and because of the similarity will think that this is what they were playing with and buy one. The horrified victim/gift recipient will have to act grateful, play with it for 5 minutes, throw it in a box and never play with it again (or if they have the cajones, ask for a gift receipt). A certain percentage of the gift givers that bought it would have found the real thing eventually and bought it, so in a real (if rather small) way it will have stolen sales from Nintendo through imitation and market confusion.
On the other hand, while Nintendo would have some legal recourse to sue, it is a borderline case. If there is no mention of the Wii and if the wording is dissimilar enough to convince a judge that it could stand on its own, it might not be worth Nintendos time and lawyaring dollars to pursue it, especially since the segment of gift buyers that might fall for it would be under 25% of potential Wiimote buyers.
"-1 Flamebait" on the article title. If you actually read the article that interviews Rockstar about the confirmed unlocked material, they make a huge point of stating that Hot Coffee was about sexual material that was not submitted for ESRB review, and that the uncensored materials, as well as methods for filtering, were submitted and approved. This is just about hackers removing the blur filters on the kill scenes, which is a bit more like Oblivion being rerated and nothing like the circumstances behind Hot Coffee.
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast will likely disagree with your definition of of "ruins the game." To be more specific, their definition will be "anything that prevents people from buying piles of our cards that we invested lots of money into at Sony's word that it'd be a good move." I'm not saying that people printing copies for use in the game is a bad thing for the reasons stated in the post, but Sony's business model was poorly planned if they didn't take this into account. It hasn't been ruined for the players, its been ruined for Sony and WoC.
On another note, the probability of them being motivated to release limited edition cards they may have developed will be close to nil. What is the value if high-res copies will be online the moment its released? And will they want to put money into creating and releasing infinite expansions that would expand the playability of the game, like Wizards is known to do? Nope. So it might be argued that any future potential this game had via expansions has, in fact, been killed.
Unless you count the Asus EEEPC, which (depending on the model) has either 2, 4 or 8 Gig drives that come with Linux. They don't run Vista, but they do come with instructions & drivers for installing XP.
I'm sure Dell & such would follow suit much sooner if M$ would let them load XP instead of Vista, but Dell isn't afraid of Linux and will even be introducing solid state 32G laptops (I'm assuming running some sort of Windows) soon.
Dude, can i rite yur reveiws for free iPods!? My mom says I can rite real good and I gots lots of opinyuns about thingz! I would put the reveiw on myspace and facebook and all my friends would reed it! Nvidia, wen do i start?!?!!!!!!111111oneone
Ahh, the difference is that in your case you love your President. In our country, the office of President is reserved for the most embarrassing individual we can find to distract the rest of the world while various 3 letter organizations actually do the dirty work. Mr. Colbert would fit the bill perfectly, and as the "Doritos President of the United States" he would lead us into a new era of corporations openly buying political favors, instead of the current methods of indirectly purchasing political favors to technically follow the laws while still getting what they want.
I believe best practices for fair use is about 30 seconds, and going to Amazon and playing the 30 second samples of any album they sell would likely verify this. The YouTube video is about 29 seconds, so it should be pretty easy to argue fair use. (and what red-blooded judge is gonna watch a baby acting cute for 29 seconds and be able to find anything wrong?)
As for artist's sampling, usually either the original artist released the original expressly for the purpose of sampling (which happens a lot in hip-hop or whatever the kids are calling it), or they received permission, or they're paying a chunk to the original artist for the use of it. There's usually no free lunch there.
You're funny! You actually think posted release dates reflect actual release dates! Come on, deep in your heart you know that Brawl is scheduled for at least 1 more infuriating and unexpected delay to push it into a different profit quarter, and that Mario Kart will be pushed back several times until it happens to fall into the 2008 Christmas season so it can help push consoles. Viola! This is Nintendo we're talking about here...
My guess would be that these companies only buy the infringing parts from 3rd party suppliers, they don't make the infringing products (whatever they are) themselves.
It appears to the untrained, novice outside observer that M$ is making the same mistakes with the 360 that they did with Vista (at least, one of the mistakes they made with Vista)... there are so many versions that the average consumer doesn't know what's what. 8 versions of Vista, and now 360 Core, 360 Pro, 360 Elite, 360 Arcade, optional add-on HD-DVD, and coming soon: HD Tuner version!
I certainly hope for M$'s sake that they don't release yet another type of 360. A pile of market confusion is just what Sony needs to... um... wedge in? Have to give Sony credit for finally getting some decent games out, even if the library lack's it's "Halo 3"-esque brand of killer app...
Slashdot Mirror
Props to the carebearstare tag, but why not Rainbow Brite? ....okay, i'm being silly.
I've seen it too when I try to communicate with younger people (i'm in my mid 20's). I use facebook to write messages that I know will hang around for awhile, like "Happy Birthday!" or "congratulations on ________!" When facebook started, that's all you saw.
Now I see stuff like "hey pizza l8r?" or "wanna meet for that group project?" I wanna crack my head on a wall. No one over a certain age lives on facebook, and no one under that age realizes this. Note to the younger generation: if its time sensitive, your *absolute last* place to leave the message is a social networking site.
I guess my "flip a coin, take a chance" method wasn't worth the $million. Back to the drawing board...
Although they only checked Windows 2000, they assume that XP and Vista use similar random number generators
That's a hell of an assumption to make. Wherein Win2k probably had a semi reasonable (if apparently crackable) random number generator, Vista probably has a confused gnome inside that's hit on the head and presented with a keyboard when a random number is requested. It then needs to connect to the internet and report my name, hardware configuration, IP, SSN and 3 credit card numbers to the Windows Genuine Disadvantage hive mind in Redmond to ensure that I paid for a version of windows that is authorized to include the Random Gnome (R) (TM), or if I should pay more to upgrade to Random Gnome Ultimate.
Canary Islands and experiments with laser beams? Ahah! There must be sharks there!
...But will it run on Vista?
Get real guys, there's no way he was fired for using Linux or Google searches. The chip they install in every MS employee's brain disallowes deviance from the collective (more specifically, Gates clicks the "Deny" button that pops up in his head).
IIRC, Fight Night Round 3 sold really well and was well received, especially because it looked really good in the XB360 demo units. Not nearly as well as, say, Madden 0X, but when there were like only 10 games for the 360 it was something to recommend besides waiting for backwards computability patches...
I like how the SlashDot summary frames it as a scandalous tell-all of a former employee, when its actually a current Manager standing up for the company he still works at.
Anyway, as a former GameStop manager myself, I have to say that everything the article says is true, especially the part about choking on old copies of Madden that will never ever ever sell. The fact that they trade in for $1 is actually a relatively new policy (from about the time of the EB-GS merger). Sports games that were over 4 years old commonly traded in for under a dollar; Madden '02 traded in for $.05, which was more than it was worth considering how many copies we ever sold (it resold for $0.99 at the time). What's sadder is that we still had *new* Maddens from that year, with yellowed price stickers, for around $16.99 that no one ever even looked at.
And yes, if you want to get a GameStop employee's undying love, tell him when you come in that you were considering reserving some games but that you're gonna walk around and look first. He'll help you with anything. If its been a slow day, he'd prolly even blow you in the back room. Be sure to ask about pre-order bonus crap, Atlus sometimes has a pre-order soundtrack available for upcoming RPG's that they send out with preorders, and there's usually some random stuffed animal hanging around the pre-order crap drawer or box, and prolly random tshirts. Decks of card were popular around the time I left, I had one for Gun and the last Hitman game. There's always some vaguely cool crap hanging around, especially for games that just came out that no one preordered. Sometimes we get more swag then we ever see copies of the game...
Well, you're actually describing a lot of Phantom Hourglass sailing. Believe it or not, there's pirates you can run into, you can either sink them or outrun them, and they can board you if you get caught and then you need to fight them off of your ship. Also, the ship does have HP as well and takes damage, and one of the "side" quests is to collect ship parts to put them in certain combinations to improve the durability of of your ship.
I actually managed to get all the gold ship pieces by playing & trading online in forums, and to trade you're forced to play the multiplayer mode... which I actually enjoyed when I wasn't playing random dickheads that dropped offline when they were losing.
There have been a lot of posts from people saying that they can tell the difference, and that if you can't, you're an idiot and get what you deserve. I just wanted to clarify that trademark confusion isn't necessarily to protect slashdotters (who I would consider more savvy); its for your average person on the street. You're asking "why should that matter, only people who know what they're doing would buy a Wiimote, right?"
Well, yes and no. The problem will come around Christmas when parents and grandparents, who have seen their kids playing "that newfangled white wand-y game," try to go Christmas shopping. A certain percentage of them will wander through the toy department, notice this, and because of the similarity will think that this is what they were playing with and buy one. The horrified victim/gift recipient will have to act grateful, play with it for 5 minutes, throw it in a box and never play with it again (or if they have the cajones, ask for a gift receipt). A certain percentage of the gift givers that bought it would have found the real thing eventually and bought it, so in a real (if rather small) way it will have stolen sales from Nintendo through imitation and market confusion.
On the other hand, while Nintendo would have some legal recourse to sue, it is a borderline case. If there is no mention of the Wii and if the wording is dissimilar enough to convince a judge that it could stand on its own, it might not be worth Nintendos time and lawyaring dollars to pursue it, especially since the segment of gift buyers that might fall for it would be under 25% of potential Wiimote buyers.
I think that's what the Nazi's said. That's why we have a lot of dead Jews.
"-1 Flamebait" on the article title. If you actually read the article that interviews Rockstar about the confirmed unlocked material, they make a huge point of stating that Hot Coffee was about sexual material that was not submitted for ESRB review, and that the uncensored materials, as well as methods for filtering, were submitted and approved. This is just about hackers removing the blur filters on the kill scenes, which is a bit more like Oblivion being rerated and nothing like the circumstances behind Hot Coffee.
Oh, that's what it meant? I was thinking more along the lines of a logical extension Fantastic Voyage... Man, I loved that movie when I was a kid!
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast will likely disagree with your definition of of "ruins the game." To be more specific, their definition will be "anything that prevents people from buying piles of our cards that we invested lots of money into at Sony's word that it'd be a good move." I'm not saying that people printing copies for use in the game is a bad thing for the reasons stated in the post, but Sony's business model was poorly planned if they didn't take this into account. It hasn't been ruined for the players, its been ruined for Sony and WoC.
On another note, the probability of them being motivated to release limited edition cards they may have developed will be close to nil. What is the value if high-res copies will be online the moment its released? And will they want to put money into creating and releasing infinite expansions that would expand the playability of the game, like Wizards is known to do? Nope. So it might be argued that any future potential this game had via expansions has, in fact, been killed.
Well, you need to pay for years worth of research on density... right?
Unless you count the Asus EEEPC, which (depending on the model) has either 2, 4 or 8 Gig drives that come with Linux. They don't run Vista, but they do come with instructions & drivers for installing XP.
I'm sure Dell & such would follow suit much sooner if M$ would let them load XP instead of Vista, but Dell isn't afraid of Linux and will even be introducing solid state 32G laptops (I'm assuming running some sort of Windows) soon.
Dear Nvidia,
Dude, can i rite yur reveiws for free iPods!? My mom says I can rite real good and I gots lots of opinyuns about thingz! I would put the reveiw on myspace and facebook and all my friends would reed it! Nvidia, wen do i start?!?!!!!!!111111oneone
Luv,
Timmy
3rd grade
Ahh, the difference is that in your case you love your President. In our country, the office of President is reserved for the most embarrassing individual we can find to distract the rest of the world while various 3 letter organizations actually do the dirty work. Mr. Colbert would fit the bill perfectly, and as the "Doritos President of the United States" he would lead us into a new era of corporations openly buying political favors, instead of the current methods of indirectly purchasing political favors to technically follow the laws while still getting what they want.
I believe best practices for fair use is about 30 seconds, and going to Amazon and playing the 30 second samples of any album they sell would likely verify this. The YouTube video is about 29 seconds, so it should be pretty easy to argue fair use. (and what red-blooded judge is gonna watch a baby acting cute for 29 seconds and be able to find anything wrong?)
As for artist's sampling, usually either the original artist released the original expressly for the purpose of sampling (which happens a lot in hip-hop or whatever the kids are calling it), or they received permission, or they're paying a chunk to the original artist for the use of it. There's usually no free lunch there.
You're funny! You actually think posted release dates reflect actual release dates! Come on, deep in your heart you know that Brawl is scheduled for at least 1 more infuriating and unexpected delay to push it into a different profit quarter, and that Mario Kart will be pushed back several times until it happens to fall into the 2008 Christmas season so it can help push consoles. Viola! This is Nintendo we're talking about here...
My guess would be that these companies only buy the infringing parts from 3rd party suppliers, they don't make the infringing products (whatever they are) themselves.
It appears to the untrained, novice outside observer that M$ is making the same mistakes with the 360 that they did with Vista (at least, one of the mistakes they made with Vista)... there are so many versions that the average consumer doesn't know what's what. 8 versions of Vista, and now 360 Core, 360 Pro, 360 Elite, 360 Arcade, optional add-on HD-DVD, and coming soon: HD Tuner version!
I certainly hope for M$'s sake that they don't release yet another type of 360. A pile of market confusion is just what Sony needs to... um... wedge in? Have to give Sony credit for finally getting some decent games out, even if the library lack's it's "Halo 3"-esque brand of killer app...
Actually, beyond that even, I don't think Microsoft's ability to enforce patents in China & India is very high either...
Do you mean this lawsuit? I thought M$ sued to get Novell to join the dark side, not after it had already joined...