What are the criterion for fiction Book Reviews?
on
Revelation Space
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, I'm interested. Slashdot seems to throw up a fiction book review periodically, often on a book that's been out for months (or years).
How do you decide that a review on Revelation Space (which is a good read, by the way, although the review might have been more relevant six months ago) is going to be more useful, say, than a review of the new Iain Banks novel?
At the moment, I'll be honest, the fiction reviews seem a little half hearted... either try to make a decent stab at it, or maybe just link to something more comprehensive.
"The author said this "the card was hitting around 50-60 FPS at 1600x1400", which seems most impressive."
In what, Quake 3? Windows desktop? Incoming? Talk about a pointless comment. I've seen benchmarks for Q2 (admittedly at 1024x768) clocking several hundred fps(!) on an old Voodoo 2 SLI rig by completely downgrading the graphics settings.
In short, fps ratings mean nothing unless you know (a) the game in question, and (b) the config being used.
It was cheap enough that I doubt they were making much money off it (5 pounds, which is about 8 dollars). However, it was still certainly a commercial item.
I'm not particularly bothered by compilations of games that are all about fifteen years old, but if major corporations like HMV are prepared to profit from doing this, it seems a little unfair for FAST etc to start chasing private users who are mirroring old games with no intention to make money.
I work in central London, here in the UK. Just yesterday I was in one of our larger record shops (HMV on Oxford Street) and was rather shocked to see a compilation CD for sale offering "over 3,000 ZX Spectrum games, plus emulators!" (I believe the Spectrum was marketed by Timex in the US?).
I seriously doubt that the manufacturer of this compilation had authorisation of the publishers for this collection. There were pretty much all the old classics on there, from numerous different software houses (some now long gone, some still here).
Duplication cost isn't the only factor. An audio CD sells for 18 dollars, but an OEM copy of MS Office without manuals has the same duplication cost but sells for way more (admittedly not to anyone on here.:) )
I think it's interesting that we consider 18 dollars way too expensive for a CD, but don't mind paying stupidly inflated prices for software; in both cases, what you're actually paying for is the content, not the media.
The simple fact is that free music is available to anyone who wants it; on the radio, MTV, piped through your local shopping mall's sound system, and so on. The record companies get a royalty on this sort of thing, but that's not the main reason they're tolerating it.
Bands (and record companies) don't see this as a threat, and in fact go out of their way to seek radio airplay, for the simple reason that exposure creates more record sales. For some reason, though, they don't seem capable of extrapolating this theory to net distribution.
Sure, people will download mp3s and never buy the CDs, but those same people could record MTV (or radio) just as easily before. Whenever MTV run a Metallica Weekend, you can guarantee that the fans will be sitting there with their fingers on the record button, but nobody complains.
Napster and the like make it easier for people to locate tracks by specific bands, but this is a good thing. I've lost count of the number of times I've been vaguely interested in a band after reading a review or having a friend recommend them, but I'm not going to throw cash at them without hearing what they sound like; in my case mp3's have made me buy more CDs, not less, and for every college student with a 40 Gb disk stuffed with mp3s, there's someone like me, who uses mp3 as a sampler to scout out new purchases.
I can fully understand why bands are scared of this new medium, and the instinctive human reaction, when ignorant and scared, is to lash out aggressively. I suspect, though, that within a couple of years mp3 will be another promotion channel just like radio and cable, and new releases will be pimped to www.mp3warez.com by record company publicists as energetically as they currently court MTV executives.
Actually, this could be the technology which actually makes these "back up your data on the net!" companies practical.
As people have pointed out in previous threads, actually backing up modern disk capacities is a nightmare; my current machine has over 50 Gb of storage, and there's no consumer backup media that can realistically cope with that sort of capacity in any reasonable timeframe.
Remote mounting an encrypted partition on a remote server could work quite nicely. In fact, with the sort of bandwidth that's being quoted here, you could quite happily boot off it, although the access times could be a pain.
I'm still sceptical about the claim that this is more bandwidth than we can use, though; internet users have proven themselves to have an almost limitless capacity for pornography, and streaming DVDs would eat a lot of network...:)
One thing that appears pretty constant here is that both of these terms can be considered perjorative. Personally, I wouldn't define myself as either.
The first time I really found a description I could identify with was in the "Portrait of J Random Hacker" in the Jargon File. Hence, if I'm forced to pigeonhole myself, that's the term I tend to use.
Besides, "norms" tend to look down on both geeks and nerds, whereas the mass media has whipped up a nice amount of fear around the word "hacker", even if they don't have a clue what the original definition was. I'd rather people were nervous than condescending any day.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you decide that a review on Revelation Space (which is a good read, by the way, although the review might have been more relevant six months ago) is going to be more useful, say, than a review of the new Iain Banks novel?
At the moment, I'll be honest, the fiction reviews seem a little half hearted... either try to make a decent stab at it, or maybe just link to something more comprehensive.
In what, Quake 3? Windows desktop? Incoming? Talk about a pointless comment. I've seen benchmarks for Q2 (admittedly at 1024x768) clocking several hundred fps(!) on an old Voodoo 2 SLI rig by completely downgrading the graphics settings.
In short, fps ratings mean nothing unless you know (a) the game in question, and (b) the config being used.
It was cheap enough that I doubt they were making much money off it (5 pounds, which is about 8 dollars). However, it was still certainly a commercial item.
I'm not particularly bothered by compilations of games that are all about fifteen years old, but if major corporations like HMV are prepared to profit from doing this, it seems a little unfair for FAST etc to start chasing private users who are mirroring old games with no intention to make money.
I work in central London, here in the UK. Just yesterday I was in one of our larger record shops (HMV on Oxford Street) and was rather shocked to see a compilation CD for sale offering "over 3,000 ZX Spectrum games, plus emulators!" (I believe the Spectrum was marketed by Timex in the US?).
I seriously doubt that the manufacturer of this compilation had authorisation of the publishers for this collection. There were pretty much all the old classics on there, from numerous different software houses (some now long gone, some still here).
Naughty music retailer. :)
Duplication cost isn't the only factor. An audio CD sells for 18 dollars, but an OEM copy of MS Office without manuals has the same duplication cost but sells for way more (admittedly not to anyone on here. :) )
I think it's interesting that we consider 18 dollars way too expensive for a CD, but don't mind paying stupidly inflated prices for software; in both cases, what you're actually paying for is the content, not the media.
Contact.
Bands (and record companies) don't see this as a threat, and in fact go out of their way to seek radio airplay, for the simple reason that exposure creates more record sales. For some reason, though, they don't seem capable of extrapolating this theory to net distribution.
Sure, people will download mp3s and never buy the CDs, but those same people could record MTV (or radio) just as easily before. Whenever MTV run a Metallica Weekend, you can guarantee that the fans will be sitting there with their fingers on the record button, but nobody complains.
Napster and the like make it easier for people to locate tracks by specific bands, but this is a good thing. I've lost count of the number of times I've been vaguely interested in a band after reading a review or having a friend recommend them, but I'm not going to throw cash at them without hearing what they sound like; in my case mp3's have made me buy more CDs, not less, and for every college student with a 40 Gb disk stuffed with mp3s, there's someone like me, who uses mp3 as a sampler to scout out new purchases.
I can fully understand why bands are scared of this new medium, and the instinctive human reaction, when ignorant and scared, is to lash out aggressively. I suspect, though, that within a couple of years mp3 will be another promotion channel just like radio and cable, and new releases will be pimped to www.mp3warez.com by record company publicists as energetically as they currently court MTV executives.
Contact.
As people have pointed out in previous threads, actually backing up modern disk capacities is a nightmare; my current machine has over 50 Gb of storage, and there's no consumer backup media that can realistically cope with that sort of capacity in any reasonable timeframe.
Remote mounting an encrypted partition on a remote server could work quite nicely. In fact, with the sort of bandwidth that's being quoted here, you could quite happily boot off it, although the access times could be a pain.
I'm still sceptical about the claim that this is more bandwidth than we can use, though; internet users have proven themselves to have an almost limitless capacity for pornography, and streaming DVDs would eat a lot of network... :)
The first time I really found a description I could identify with was in the "Portrait of J Random Hacker" in the Jargon File. Hence, if I'm forced to pigeonhole myself, that's the term I tend to use.
Besides, "norms" tend to look down on both geeks and nerds, whereas the mass media has whipped up a nice amount of fear around the word "hacker", even if they don't have a clue what the original definition was. I'd rather people were nervous than condescending any day.
Tim.