Why look in the yellow pages for local Jim the plumber, when the Roto-Rooter(tm) commercial is blaring on the radio?
Why look for a carpenter, electrician, etc, when HandymanUSA is there to meet your needs.
I work at a workplace where there's a mailing list to trade recommendations for local carpenters, electrations, etcetc. I've never even heard of HandymanUSA, and people tend to show a lot of loyalty to specific trademen who do an excellent job. It's like asking "Why go to the good restaurant when there's a McDonald's down the street?" The answer is "because the good restaurant is a FAR more enjoyable/rewarding experience."
Does your town have a local mom&pop vegetable market,
I go to a local farmer's market because the produce there is fresh and lasts far longer in my refridgerator than the stuff from the store. And it's cheaper. There are no downsides!
Any mom&pop video stores, I bet not, but I'm sure you have a Blockbuster.
We have a mom and pop video store.. it has a far better selection of movies too and is pretty popular. Until blockbuster was dragged kicking and screaming into the DVD age (only 2 or so years ago too over here) it was the place to get DVDs. I've been going to blockbuster recently because I got their "buy return of the king for $30 and we'll give you 7 free rentals" deal and they're still underwhelming. It makes sense why the local non-chain store is doing better -- better selection, they do customer requests, they try to get widescreen whenever possible (Blockbuster is finally learning to do this), and they don't screw the customer over with late fees (before I decided not to give blockbuster my business, I got dinged with late fees for returning movies due at noon in at 11:50 am. They lost a class-action lawsuit over this). In short, I feel like I'm treated as a valued (gasp!) customer at my local store. And that's why I go.
Just off the top of my head, the LA Times actually hired people to go out and dig dirt on Mel Gibson and talk to his father. Mel Gibson was set to release "Passion of the Christ." They printed several front page articlese about how "anti-semitic" the movie was, how Mel was "risking" his career, and so on.
The LA Times did the same thing during the California recall election, hiring a few people to try to dig up whatever scandels about Arnold Schwarzenegger they could. And when they found such a scandel, they didn't report it immediately, they simply waited until just before the election when it would have the greatest negative impact to the Schwarzenegger campaign. As much as I'm not a fan of Fox News, nothing they've done has been that bad.
There are other things, like the constant reporting of Abu Ghraib even in the face of nothing new to report. Meanwhile, stories like the beheading of Nick Berg and others were reported for a couple of days at most, then it was right back to Abu Ghraib.
No... the beheading of Nick Berg was tragic, but in terms of political importance it is NOTHING compared to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Many conservatives try to underplay the overwhelming impact of it, I guess because it's politically embarassing. But it torpedoed US credibility on the subject of torture (we can no longer say "this is something only those human-rights-abusing countries do") and it's done a great deal of damage to the Muslim/arab world's respect/perspective of the US. But since we've been taking the "my way or the highway" roles of late, maybe perceptions outside of the US aren't considered important anymore.
If you mean booze, the same argument could be made I suppose. Nobody would argue that booze was just some natural harmless thing, and yet people struggle to make porn out to be.
Booze can be a perfectly natural, harmless thing. Millions of people in the US have no problems having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in the evening when they come home from work. It's perfectly fine when used in moderation, and that's the rule to apply to porn as well. Moderation is important. If you get addicted to it like people could get addicted to alcohol, playing video games, gambling, or any number of fun activities, then it becomes a huge problem. But that doesn't reflect negatively on the rest of us who can indulge in the above activities at reasonable levels.
Unfortunately, people are designed to have these feelings with other people - not a monitor or TV. Nature has chosen who gets to hook up with who and how often - porn obviously tricks the brain with this one.
Our bodies are 'designed' to indulge in pleasure whether with another person or not. Don't try to bring the "it's not natural" arguement into this, masturbation is pretty common in nature as well.
The Internet was humming along for a quarter century, then all of sudden, whammo. Early adopters were there from the beginning, but there was something about the mass market that wasn't ready until 1994. What, I'm still not sure.
I would say two factors: 1) The proliferation of modems as a built-in in new computers, and 2) much much more importantly, Winsock. The average person didn't want to connect to a unix prompt and run mail or pine. Being able to run Internet applications on their own windows pcs spurred interest in this whole Internet thing. And AOL sending a bazillion cds to every man woman and child in the US didn't hurt either.
Due to still being in school, it wasn't until 1988 that I had my own home theater. So when DVD/home theater became the rage in 1998, I'm like, OK, so what? The video quality is no better than LaserDisc.
Quality is only one consideration for the average person. Cost is a very important factor. As is convenience. Back then, laserdiscs didn't have either on its side.
Q. Would you have bought the series if you could have watched it for $24 ($1 per ep) using video-on-demand?
Only if I didn't intend to watch it ever again. But since it's an excellent series regardless of whether you knew what was going to happen, there's a good chance I'll want to watch it again, maybe a few years down the road. I bought it the season 1 box set for $40 just a week ago. By your math if I wanted to watch the series even just a second time, I'm already saving money by buying the permanent box set.
How can you help? Simple - get off the horse. Home school your kids - when the government agents come knocking on your door to ask why your kids aren't in school, tell them your home-schooling, don't need your schools, thankyouverymuch and close the door.
Yes! What a great idea! Because everyone can afford to take time off from work to home-school their kids. For that matter, all parents would make great teachers as well!
I don't know.. I'm rather conflicted. I feel it really IS a good thing for kids to socialize with each other and get out of the same house. Not to mention I believe diversity of opinions being taught is a good thing as well.
I don't like the public school system much. But it's better than home-schooling.
Second, there's a sort of "he's our idiot" mentality. It's not his fault things are getting screwed up (even though he wrote the bill), it's the other idiots who are doing the bad things. That's why most people vote for the incumbent without caring. Name recognition helps, too.
Don't forget a lot of conservative mormon asses live in Utah, and they're likely to be quite happy with his performance.
Unfortunately, there is no positive solution to this problem. Terminator gene gets passed on to non-GM crops, depleting the food supply? Oh well! No terminator gene, and you find out the GM crops have infected your cropfields? Prepare to pay lots of $$$ in Monsato lawsuits.
Everytime one of those DVDs is too scratched to resell they lose that money. Now they wont even have to buy as many copies of a DVD: one copy will suffice to make all the rental copies.
What makes you think media companies are going to allow rental stores to make their own copies? Sure, that would be great for the rental stores, yet somehow I doubt that will happen.
while also whining that the industry we are in needs protection (which presumably would be just as "unfair" to those outside the newly protected industry).
I didn't see it as whining so much as saying that the posters saying "Go be a plumber or electrician" weren't pushing forth realistic suggestions.
Said guy could splice stick figure drawings of conservative political figures killing toddlers into TV footage and there'd be cries of "babykillers" the next day. Double points if he used white crayons for the conservatives and brown, black, red, and yellow crayons for the babies.
Sounds like the shitty cartoon history of the NRA that Matt Stone and Trey Parker made for Bowling for Columbine, the one that used falsified data to try to show very strong links between the NRA and KKK, at least when they started out.
The first is that is absolves the people within a company from the responsibility for their actions. Someone spews lethal chemicals from a plant in India, killing hundreds of people, but it is Union Carbide that is responsible, not the negligent perpetrator. Sure people got fired, and Union Carbide stock dropped, but what kind of justice is that? If it wasn't a corporation people would be in jail for manslaughter!
Individuals are still personally responsible for illegal actions. If a corporation hires a hitman to take someone out, that hitman is still responsible for murder. If an executive cooks the books, he can go to jail. We see that rather often these days..
Well, there were some issues with Safedisc. Certain CD and DVD prevented the game from running. AAnother one of our friends also ran into the same problem -- it wasn't an isolated case. After several weeks of him trying to get it to work with official patches I finally suggested he try a no-cd crack.
A friend of mine had a similar problem with Diablo II, except that the problem was the game was working, but when a new patch fixed some game bugs, the updated copy protection that came with it made it incompatible with his cd-rom drive. He had to play with a no-cd patch for a few more versions until Blizzard finally fixed it again. This wasn't a case of "buy the game, find out it's incompatible with your computer, get a refund." This was "buy the game, play it for awhile, then it becomes incompatible!" So you say, he could have just kept playing on the old version? Yeah well, forget playing online with friends then. The no-cd crack, as much as game companies hate them, was the only way he could play.
You might be able to use a VCR now, since they recognize the value of it. But 20 years ago, Valenti was making comparisons of it to the Boston Strangler. If the media companies had had absolute control over the use of the media, the VCR would not have been allowed, or be possible. If these copyright and broadcast descriptions go into place, who knows what possible future innovations would be stifled?
Good example on my system, open up volume mixer and look at how many differnt controls it gives me. There's around fifty, most of which are locked and can't be moved anyway. Half the rest have no actual effect.
I think the biggest problem with this is that almost every feature to control a soundcard has been adapted as a "volume control" slider in the mixer, and that just doesn't work. It's confusing, it doesn't make sense, and it's just a way to get around the work of making another app that controls more advanced features of the card. I need a number of them for my SB Live! (like the analog to digital, output on IEC958 Coaxial, etc), but the mixer is just a pain. It's difficult enough for Linux nerds to understand, just about impossible for ordinary end-users to figure out.
Broken printing. I always feel lucky when printing Just Works. Using it with image viewers and file manager thumbnail collections seem a distant fantacy.
I find CUPS in Fedora Core to be an easier system to print out to than the old way. I don't like screwing around with config files any more, and with cups things "just work" fine for me now. Quite a surprise.
Poor/non-existant GL support. (Even possible given proprietary hardware?)
With NVIDIA's proprietary driver, the GL support is almost (maybe even better in some situations) as good as in Windows. With other manufacturers though, you're pretty much out of luck.
Slow GUI. Linux still feels slower than Windows, regardless if the processor work is twice as efficient.
Seems to depend on the theme and the window manager. I don't have any issues now with the defaults in Fedora Core 1. Used to be dog slow, but it's been getting faster.
Flakey sound support. Like printing, I'm always pleasently surprised when my sound works across applications and levels seem balanced.
You're right on this one, the design of ALSA is absolutely insane, bordering on user-hostile.
Believe my I worked some years in software development for a variety of midsize firms. In all of them we occasionally stole code from here and there. Sometimes from competitors, where some renegade brought a copy of the repository, sometimes example code without actually having a license, or we even integrated GNU-code, nobody ever discovered, how should they ever notice?
We're talking about legality here. Just because you did it or just because it's not uncommon in the industry doesn't make it less of a crime, nor does it mean you won't get the pants sued off of you if you're found out. So yes, certifying code is essential, even if it's often not done in the rather sloppy computer software industry.
You see Diablo II predates final fantasy X by some time
Only by two years! The Diablo II expansion (which had cinematics on par with the original game) was released after Final Fantasy X. Keep in mind though that when it comes to animation, the year doesn't really matter. That's one thing that isn't really helped much by software or hardware, except with motion capture (in limited uses). Animation itself is up to the talent of the animator.
and i can assure you that warcraft III's cinematics put it to shame and (IMHO, though many might argue) are sexier even then the final fantasy X in game cinematics (though this is more of a style preference).
*shrug* I never liked Warcraft though, and I wasn't planning to get the game just for the cinematics.:)
I suspect Disney in this case has repeated the classic IBM blunder with Microsoft -- they outsourced their 3d animation to Pixar in the early days, thus allowing Pixar to fund its own development. Now Pixar has gone off on their own, and Disney is left with a gutted animation department.
As others have pointed out, outsourcing isn't really the right word, especially since Disney continued some 3D work during the time. There have been elements of 3D in nearly (all?) Disney animated films since the Great Mouse Detective, and they even made their own CG film Dinosaur in 2000. Unfortunately they shut down the division that produced Dinosaur, laying off the workers there.. and then reversed course again when they decided to go to CG again. (They need people with CG experience? Too bad they laid off their own employees who had been developing the skills)
Also, Eisner has been in power far too long -- he's probably tapped out for ideas, and greed is skewing his view of the world.
The general theory is that things started slipping with Eisner when Frank Wells died. Wells, Katzenberg.. these are the sort of people Eisner needs around him.
Re:What is with PDI/Dreamworks?
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That's so stupid, it's not even wrong. No one left Pixar to write Antz,
Jeffrey Katzenburg was one of the Disney executives who heard the original "Bugs Life" pitch from John Lasseter. Then he leaves Disney to become the 'K' in Dreamworks SKG. Then Dreamworks starts their own CG ant movie.
Granted they've only ever done 2 minute long CG intros for their games, but Blizzards animation quality is almost unparraleled when it comes to game cinematics.
I haven't seen anything Blizzard has done recently, so my comments are based on the CGI from the Blizzard games I actually like - Starcraft and Diablo II. The effects in the CG are pretty good, especially in Diablo (some nice cloth and lighting effects). But the motion of the humans was like it was in most other video game CG - subpar. The characters do not move naturally, they don't move as if real people would. And the facial expressions were not too great either. I'd say Square has come closer with Final Fantasy X and X-2. (FF7, 8, 9 had ok animation, but often the humans suffered from the same problems as Blizzard's do) It will be interesting to see how the CG work in Starcraft: Ghost looks.
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I work at a workplace where there's a mailing list to trade recommendations for local carpenters, electrations, etcetc. I've never even heard of HandymanUSA, and people tend to show a lot of loyalty to specific trademen who do an excellent job. It's like asking "Why go to the good restaurant when there's a McDonald's down the street?" The answer is "because the good restaurant is a FAR more enjoyable/rewarding experience."
Does your town have a local mom&pop vegetable market,
I go to a local farmer's market because the produce there is fresh and lasts far longer in my refridgerator than the stuff from the store. And it's cheaper. There are no downsides!
Any mom&pop video stores, I bet not, but I'm sure you have a Blockbuster.
We have a mom and pop video store.. it has a far better selection of movies too and is pretty popular. Until blockbuster was dragged kicking and screaming into the DVD age (only 2 or so years ago too over here) it was the place to get DVDs. I've been going to blockbuster recently because I got their "buy return of the king for $30 and we'll give you 7 free rentals" deal and they're still underwhelming. It makes sense why the local non-chain store is doing better -- better selection, they do customer requests, they try to get widescreen whenever possible (Blockbuster is finally learning to do this), and they don't screw the customer over with late fees (before I decided not to give blockbuster my business, I got dinged with late fees for returning movies due at noon in at 11:50 am. They lost a class-action lawsuit over this). In short, I feel like I'm treated as a valued (gasp!) customer at my local store. And that's why I go.
The LA Times did the same thing during the California recall election, hiring a few people to try to dig up whatever scandels about Arnold Schwarzenegger they could. And when they found such a scandel, they didn't report it immediately, they simply waited until just before the election when it would have the greatest negative impact to the Schwarzenegger campaign. As much as I'm not a fan of Fox News, nothing they've done has been that bad.
There are other things, like the constant reporting of Abu Ghraib even in the face of nothing new to report. Meanwhile, stories like the beheading of Nick Berg and others were reported for a couple of days at most, then it was right back to Abu Ghraib.
No... the beheading of Nick Berg was tragic, but in terms of political importance it is NOTHING compared to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Many conservatives try to underplay the overwhelming impact of it, I guess because it's politically embarassing. But it torpedoed US credibility on the subject of torture (we can no longer say "this is something only those human-rights-abusing countries do") and it's done a great deal of damage to the Muslim/arab world's respect/perspective of the US. But since we've been taking the "my way or the highway" roles of late, maybe perceptions outside of the US aren't considered important anymore.
Which protocol are you talking about? The open AAC protocol or the unambiguous firewire/usb drive setup it uses?
Booze can be a perfectly natural, harmless thing. Millions of people in the US have no problems having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in the evening when they come home from work. It's perfectly fine when used in moderation, and that's the rule to apply to porn as well. Moderation is important. If you get addicted to it like people could get addicted to alcohol, playing video games, gambling, or any number of fun activities, then it becomes a huge problem. But that doesn't reflect negatively on the rest of us who can indulge in the above activities at reasonable levels.
Unfortunately, people are designed to have these feelings with other people - not a monitor or TV. Nature has chosen who gets to hook up with who and how often - porn obviously tricks the brain with this one.
Our bodies are 'designed' to indulge in pleasure whether with another person or not. Don't try to bring the "it's not natural" arguement into this, masturbation is pretty common in nature as well.
I would say two factors: 1) The proliferation of modems as a built-in in new computers, and 2) much much more importantly, Winsock. The average person didn't want to connect to a unix prompt and run mail or pine. Being able to run Internet applications on their own windows pcs spurred interest in this whole Internet thing. And AOL sending a bazillion cds to every man woman and child in the US didn't hurt either.
Due to still being in school, it wasn't until 1988 that I had my own home theater. So when DVD/home theater became the rage in 1998, I'm like, OK, so what? The video quality is no better than LaserDisc.
Quality is only one consideration for the average person. Cost is a very important factor. As is convenience. Back then, laserdiscs didn't have either on its side.
Only if I didn't intend to watch it ever again. But since it's an excellent series regardless of whether you knew what was going to happen, there's a good chance I'll want to watch it again, maybe a few years down the road. I bought it the season 1 box set for $40 just a week ago. By your math if I wanted to watch the series even just a second time, I'm already saving money by buying the permanent box set.
Yes! What a great idea! Because everyone can afford to take time off from work to home-school their kids. For that matter, all parents would make great teachers as well!
I don't know.. I'm rather conflicted. I feel it really IS a good thing for kids to socialize with each other and get out of the same house. Not to mention I believe diversity of opinions being taught is a good thing as well.
I don't like the public school system much. But it's better than home-schooling.
Don't forget a lot of conservative mormon asses live in Utah, and they're likely to be quite happy with his performance.
What makes you think media companies are going to allow rental stores to make their own copies? Sure, that would be great for the rental stores, yet somehow I doubt that will happen.
Hasn't this same strategy been tried for DVDs and been an absolute failure?
I didn't see it as whining so much as saying that the posters saying "Go be a plumber or electrician" weren't pushing forth realistic suggestions.
Sounds like the shitty cartoon history of the NRA that Matt Stone and Trey Parker made for Bowling for Columbine, the one that used falsified data to try to show very strong links between the NRA and KKK, at least when they started out.
Individuals are still personally responsible for illegal actions. If a corporation hires a hitman to take someone out, that hitman is still responsible for murder. If an executive cooks the books, he can go to jail. We see that rather often these days..
A friend of mine had a similar problem with Diablo II, except that the problem was the game was working, but when a new patch fixed some game bugs, the updated copy protection that came with it made it incompatible with his cd-rom drive. He had to play with a no-cd patch for a few more versions until Blizzard finally fixed it again. This wasn't a case of "buy the game, find out it's incompatible with your computer, get a refund." This was "buy the game, play it for awhile, then it becomes incompatible!" So you say, he could have just kept playing on the old version? Yeah well, forget playing online with friends then. The no-cd crack, as much as game companies hate them, was the only way he could play.
I think the biggest problem with this is that almost every feature to control a soundcard has been adapted as a "volume control" slider in the mixer, and that just doesn't work. It's confusing, it doesn't make sense, and it's just a way to get around the work of making another app that controls more advanced features of the card. I need a number of them for my SB Live! (like the analog to digital, output on IEC958 Coaxial, etc), but the mixer is just a pain. It's difficult enough for Linux nerds to understand, just about impossible for ordinary end-users to figure out.
I find CUPS in Fedora Core to be an easier system to print out to than the old way. I don't like screwing around with config files any more, and with cups things "just work" fine for me now. Quite a surprise.
Poor/non-existant GL support. (Even possible given proprietary hardware?)
With NVIDIA's proprietary driver, the GL support is almost (maybe even better in some situations) as good as in Windows. With other manufacturers though, you're pretty much out of luck.
Slow GUI. Linux still feels slower than Windows, regardless if the processor work is twice as efficient.
Seems to depend on the theme and the window manager. I don't have any issues now with the defaults in Fedora Core 1. Used to be dog slow, but it's been getting faster.
Flakey sound support. Like printing, I'm always pleasently surprised when my sound works across applications and levels seem balanced.
You're right on this one, the design of ALSA is absolutely insane, bordering on user-hostile.
We're talking about legality here. Just because you did it or just because it's not uncommon in the industry doesn't make it less of a crime, nor does it mean you won't get the pants sued off of you if you're found out. So yes, certifying code is essential, even if it's often not done in the rather sloppy computer software industry.
Features that Redhat has had for a couple of years now too. It's nothing new.
Only by two years! The Diablo II expansion (which had cinematics on par with the original game) was released after Final Fantasy X. Keep in mind though that when it comes to animation, the year doesn't really matter. That's one thing that isn't really helped much by software or hardware, except with motion capture (in limited uses). Animation itself is up to the talent of the animator.
and i can assure you that warcraft III's cinematics put it to shame and (IMHO, though many might argue) are sexier even then the final fantasy X in game cinematics (though this is more of a style preference).
*shrug* I never liked Warcraft though, and I wasn't planning to get the game just for the cinematics. :)
As others have pointed out, outsourcing isn't really the right word, especially since Disney continued some 3D work during the time. There have been elements of 3D in nearly (all?) Disney animated films since the Great Mouse Detective, and they even made their own CG film Dinosaur in 2000. Unfortunately they shut down the division that produced Dinosaur, laying off the workers there.. and then reversed course again when they decided to go to CG again. (They need people with CG experience? Too bad they laid off their own employees who had been developing the skills)
Also, Eisner has been in power far too long -- he's probably tapped out for ideas, and greed is skewing his view of the world.
The general theory is that things started slipping with Eisner when Frank Wells died. Wells, Katzenberg.. these are the sort of people Eisner needs around him.
Jeffrey Katzenburg was one of the Disney executives who heard the original "Bugs Life" pitch from John Lasseter. Then he leaves Disney to become the 'K' in Dreamworks SKG. Then Dreamworks starts their own CG ant movie.
I haven't seen anything Blizzard has done recently, so my comments are based on the CGI from the Blizzard games I actually like - Starcraft and Diablo II. The effects in the CG are pretty good, especially in Diablo (some nice cloth and lighting effects). But the motion of the humans was like it was in most other video game CG - subpar. The characters do not move naturally, they don't move as if real people would. And the facial expressions were not too great either. I'd say Square has come closer with Final Fantasy X and X-2. (FF7, 8, 9 had ok animation, but often the humans suffered from the same problems as Blizzard's do) It will be interesting to see how the CG work in Starcraft: Ghost looks.