According to the Financial Times, this direct profit per Wii sold may vary from $13 in Japan to $49 in the United States and $79 in Europe.
This always pisses me off. Assuming these figures are in any way accurate, this effectively means gamers in the US and Europe (especially the UK) are effectively subsidising lower costs in Japan. How the hell is that legal? Or am I missing something?
If you really want to hear music from this mysterious duo, then perhaps search ebay/amazon for second-hand CDs.
When it comes to the original artist, I fail to see much difference between second-hand CDs and just downloading the music for free. Only first-hand sales actually count towards anything, and I'll openly admit that I see my buying CDs as a charity case these days. When it takes a few minutes to find a ten CD torrent and few hours to download that torrent, I'm only buying CDs because I want to support the original artist.
I've also been downloading a fair few anime fansubs recently, but do you know what else I've done? I've bought a total of eight anime DVDs in the last few months. After looking back at my past, I see one invariable constant. More downloads = More purchases*. If the fansubs hadn't given my anime on the brain, I wouldn't have bought any of this. It's the same story with music and the same with games. The assumption that I won't buy anything because I'm downloading stuff is unfounded and often incorrect.
*As a neat piece of irony, one of the anime series I bought after watching was Rozen Maiden. I grabbed the region 1 release (God rest your soul Geneon) after watching the fansubs and played it on my multi-region British DVD player. It never got an English language region 2 release. Now my new fansub obsession is Lucky Star. That recently got a region 1 release too, but I don't have any immediate plans to buy that. Why? Well it just so happens that my new home theatre system is locked to region 2 and seems to be a bitch for changing to multi-region playback. So there's no point in getting Lucky Star until it either gets a English language region 2 release or I unlock my new DVD player. Getting rid of silly restrictions like that would certainly help if you wanted to reduce my level of piracy...
Earlier today I was looking at albums by a certain duo (who will remain anonymous here, it's not relevant to the post) and ended up flabbergasted by the prices. £15-20 each! If I wanted all ten that are available, I'd be talking £150-200, which is easily my entire bank account right now. But within minutes on a torrent search engine, I found all ten in a single torrent with some seeders online. What the hell do you expect me to do?
I want to support them, I really do, and I'll probably buy whichever album ends up being my favourite, but it took me less than two seconds to decide I couldn't square up the price to what I'm getting. I'm looking at a fair stack of anime and manga right now, and I could get the whole fucking lot for £200 with enough change left to get that digital camera I've wanted for a while now. Why is the music so god-damned expensive? They may say it's because of the piracy, but that gets them in a classic catch-22. I'm pirating it because I looked at the price, said "Fuck that" and resorted to BitTorrent where I can get the lot for free! With that kind of competition, there is only one solution: Lower prices.
It's a ridiculous simplification to attribute the presence or lack of economic success to the man in office at the time, because there are policies that take many years to take effect or unwind
This reminds me of something I saw on a forum back in 2002-ish when the US was having some economic troubles. They said that the economic policies of an administration take about five years to have any real effect, so this was clearly Bill Clinton's fault. I remembered that when I saw the credit crunch start to hit. That was in mid-2007, so it was clearly the fault of whoever was in office in mid-2002. Now who was that?
Shouldn't that be "don't fuck with the GNU"? I mean, I know people are hesitant to refer to the Free Software Foundation and use the term "open source" more often than "free software", but not referencing the GNU Project when talking about the GNU General Public License is pretty ridiculous. The penguin may have helped spread free software and all, but this isn't his fight.
Because at the time, 'gigawatt' was more commonly pronounced with a soft 'g', which is still the official NIST pronunciation. It's only since then, with the rise of computers in everyday life, that the hard 'g' pronunciation has become ubiquitous.
But seriously, you have an active Slashdot account! How could you possibly not know basic Back to the Future trivia like this?
Nobody needs Qt when there is WxWidgets and/or GTK. Qt's point is moot
The ZSNES developers for one prefer how Qt works and R. Belmont (of MAMEdev fame) also stated that the only reason he used GTK+ on the Linux port of Audio Overload was because various portions of the code weren't compatible with the GPL. If they had been, he'd have used Qt instead. I also prefer Qt, hence why I use KDE in preference to anything else and why I view the possibility of Mozilla using Qt with some excitement.
I'd go as far as to say that GTK+'s 'killer feature' these days is the licence. The fact that it uses the LGPL as opposed to the GPL and was open sourced well before Qt is why it's remained so popular. In most other respects, Qt is the better toolkit.
Coke.. okay, maybe. Hoover? I never hear anyone say, "go get the Hoover."
Hoover is very generic in this (English) house. We've never had a Hoover-brand vacuum cleaner, but out vacuum cleaner is still 'the hoover'.
The word 'coke' is more interesting though. At any English pub, 'coke' is recognized as a generic term for both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but things were different on a family holiday in India back in 1995/96 (over the new year). My dad said he asked for a 'coke', but the bartender didn't know what he meant, he then restated that he wanted a 'Coca-Cola', at which point the bartender knew what he wanted. It actually seemed there and then that 'Coca-Cola' was more generic than 'coke', no idea if it's still like that though.
The GUIs of Windows 98/2000 are essentially tweaks of what Windows 95 had. Now I happen to remember Windows 95 was explosively popular, which happened for a reason. It worked. Cloning what works isn't a bad thing at all, what the developers of GTK+ did is a bad thing. I'd take a clone of Windows 2000 over that god-awful mess any day of the week.
However, 10.5.3 may be the end of the road for Hackintosh as I'm sure all the recent noise around this and Psystar will have Apple bringing down the hammer and breaking OS X for non-Apple hardware very soon.
Like the RIAA's going to bring down the hammer and stop all of those illegal copiers very soon?
With a little practice you can read it fast enough to go watch the screen at the same time.
I'm a pretty fast reader, and I've managed to keep up with every subbed anime I've watched, bar one: Lucky Star. That shit moves so fast that I'm struggling to keep up with it. I'd normally watch three or four a day, but Lucky Star manages to wear me out after one because of this. Gives me a reason to buy the dubbed version I suppose...
Ahem, unless there's been another Titanic film of exactly the same length made since, I believe you're referring to the 1997Titanic. Don't feel too bad though, it's only the highest grossing film of all time...
ODF passed without a spec for basic spreadsheet formulas. OOXML has one, albeit flawed in some respects.
In OpenDocument's defence, the OpenDocument committee stated that "A comment was submitted concerning the (inclusion) of a grammar for spreadsheet formulas which conforming implementations should support. While we think that having interoperability on that level would be of great benefit to users, we do not believe [sic] that this is in the scope of the current specification".
I disagree with the above excuse, but OpenFormula is being worked on, and will fix the problem. Approving a totally different and incompatible standard just makes the problem worse.
I'm currently working my head around making an ideal (Linux-based) PC for my various needs. I've found good components for most of these needs, save one. A decent sound card.
The story of my current PC and sound is a real horror story. An integrated RealTek ALC861VD that has never worked properly. For two Ubuntu releases, it didn't work at all. Even now, setting sound output to ALSA gives me no sound at all for some reason. Setting it to OSS gives me sound, but only one application at a time, nothing from Flash player, and with constant errors from TiMidity. I've been trying to work with this situation for months now.
I'm fairly determined to avoid this situation happening twice, but I've absolutely no idea what I should buy to guarantee Linux compatibility. Should it be integrated or not? What manufacturer? I don't have particularly trained ears. All I really want is simple 2 channel sound (possibly with a sub-woofer), from as many applications at a time as I want, at a reasonably low price. In other words, exactly what Windows XP could give me right fucking now. But the situation of sound on Linux seems so bad that no one can give me a straight answer!
Modern web developers could take a lesson from this.
I tried to take the simple route on the design of my own site, with the inspiration mostly coming from a far more famous site. The actual coding behind it (XHTML 1.1, moderately advanced CSS) isn't as simple, but it is valid. It's all written from scratch too, so I understand what everything does.
BSD comes closer, but still required attribution in the past It still does require attribution, the first and second clauses of the current BSD license state exactly that. The only change in the history of the BSD license has been the removal of what rms referred to as the "obnoxious advertising clause", making it GPL-compatible.
Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.
I knew this pretty much from the start. Anyone who thought we'd never hate them was deluding themselves. The point is that it's better to have multiple evil corporations fighting over control of the market rather than one evil corporation enjoying an unchallenged monopoly.
I think the reason for that is quite plain to see. Microsoft want to keep Mac OS X around as the 'official opposition' to Windows, for legal purposes. This means Microsoft can have a corporation that they can understand and compete with by traditional means. If Apple stopped being any sort of competition, Microsoft would inevitably have to deal with Linux as the new 'official opposition', which is not run by any one corporation and doesn't respond to Microsoft's traditional tactics. To ensure that never happens, Mac OS X must keep going, hence Microsoft must give it some level of support.
Like you'd expect from Microsoft, making their own products better is only a small part of their strategy. The bigger part is making sure they don't have to deal with any potentially dangerous competitors.
I think you're confused. Canonical splitting any of their official distros into a limited free version and a fully-functional paid version would violate their own promise that Ubuntu will always be free of charge. Even if they wiggled out of that on a technicality, Ubuntu lives purely on the strength of its community. Canonical know that and would be insane to risk losing them through such a move.
The actual situation is that Kubuntu will be splitting into two versions, both of them free in all senses of the word, for the 8.04 release. One (using KDE 3.5.9) will be officially supported for 18 months (it won't be a Long Term Support release, since KDE 3 likely won't be supported in three years, though it will still support upgrading directly from 6.06) while the other (using KDE 4.0.2) will be community supported. This is probably because (like me) they think that KDE 4 really isn't ready yet as it hasn't had much time to mature and many of the Extragear application (some of which come with Kubuntu) haven't been updated yet, the most notable for me being Amarok.
My understanding is that Kubuntu will only do this split release system for the 8.04 release, with the 8.10 release likely to use KDE 4.0.x officially.
Slashdot Mirror
This always pisses me off. Assuming these figures are in any way accurate, this effectively means gamers in the US and Europe (especially the UK) are effectively subsidising lower costs in Japan. How the hell is that legal? Or am I missing something?
When it comes to the original artist, I fail to see much difference between second-hand CDs and just downloading the music for free. Only first-hand sales actually count towards anything, and I'll openly admit that I see my buying CDs as a charity case these days. When it takes a few minutes to find a ten CD torrent and few hours to download that torrent, I'm only buying CDs because I want to support the original artist.
I've also been downloading a fair few anime fansubs recently, but do you know what else I've done? I've bought a total of eight anime DVDs in the last few months. After looking back at my past, I see one invariable constant. More downloads = More purchases*. If the fansubs hadn't given my anime on the brain, I wouldn't have bought any of this. It's the same story with music and the same with games. The assumption that I won't buy anything because I'm downloading stuff is unfounded and often incorrect.
*As a neat piece of irony, one of the anime series I bought after watching was Rozen Maiden. I grabbed the region 1 release (God rest your soul Geneon) after watching the fansubs and played it on my multi-region British DVD player. It never got an English language region 2 release. Now my new fansub obsession is Lucky Star. That recently got a region 1 release too, but I don't have any immediate plans to buy that. Why? Well it just so happens that my new home theatre system is locked to region 2 and seems to be a bitch for changing to multi-region playback. So there's no point in getting Lucky Star until it either gets a English language region 2 release or I unlock my new DVD player. Getting rid of silly restrictions like that would certainly help if you wanted to reduce my level of piracy...
Earlier today I was looking at albums by a certain duo (who will remain anonymous here, it's not relevant to the post) and ended up flabbergasted by the prices. £15-20 each! If I wanted all ten that are available, I'd be talking £150-200, which is easily my entire bank account right now. But within minutes on a torrent search engine, I found all ten in a single torrent with some seeders online. What the hell do you expect me to do?
I want to support them, I really do, and I'll probably buy whichever album ends up being my favourite, but it took me less than two seconds to decide I couldn't square up the price to what I'm getting. I'm looking at a fair stack of anime and manga right now, and I could get the whole fucking lot for £200 with enough change left to get that digital camera I've wanted for a while now. Why is the music so god-damned expensive? They may say it's because of the piracy, but that gets them in a classic catch-22. I'm pirating it because I looked at the price, said "Fuck that" and resorted to BitTorrent where I can get the lot for free! With that kind of competition, there is only one solution: Lower prices.
This reminds me of something I saw on a forum back in 2002-ish when the US was having some economic troubles. They said that the economic policies of an administration take about five years to have any real effect, so this was clearly Bill Clinton's fault. I remembered that when I saw the credit crunch start to hit. That was in mid-2007, so it was clearly the fault of whoever was in office in mid-2002. Now who was that?
Shouldn't that be "don't fuck with the GNU"? I mean, I know people are hesitant to refer to the Free Software Foundation and use the term "open source" more often than "free software", but not referencing the GNU Project when talking about the GNU General Public License is pretty ridiculous. The penguin may have helped spread free software and all, but this isn't his fight.
Because at the time, 'gigawatt' was more commonly pronounced with a soft 'g', which is still the official NIST pronunciation. It's only since then, with the rise of computers in everyday life, that the hard 'g' pronunciation has become ubiquitous.
But seriously, you have an active Slashdot account! How could you possibly not know basic Back to the Future trivia like this?
The ZSNES developers for one prefer how Qt works and R. Belmont (of MAMEdev fame) also stated that the only reason he used GTK+ on the Linux port of Audio Overload was because various portions of the code weren't compatible with the GPL. If they had been, he'd have used Qt instead. I also prefer Qt, hence why I use KDE in preference to anything else and why I view the possibility of Mozilla using Qt with some excitement.
I'd go as far as to say that GTK+'s 'killer feature' these days is the licence. The fact that it uses the LGPL as opposed to the GPL and was open sourced well before Qt is why it's remained so popular. In most other respects, Qt is the better toolkit.
Hoover is very generic in this (English) house. We've never had a Hoover-brand vacuum cleaner, but out vacuum cleaner is still 'the hoover'.
The word 'coke' is more interesting though. At any English pub, 'coke' is recognized as a generic term for both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but things were different on a family holiday in India back in 1995/96 (over the new year). My dad said he asked for a 'coke', but the bartender didn't know what he meant, he then restated that he wanted a 'Coca-Cola', at which point the bartender knew what he wanted. It actually seemed there and then that 'Coca-Cola' was more generic than 'coke', no idea if it's still like that though.
The GUIs of Windows 98/2000 are essentially tweaks of what Windows 95 had. Now I happen to remember Windows 95 was explosively popular, which happened for a reason. It worked. Cloning what works isn't a bad thing at all, what the developers of GTK+ did is a bad thing. I'd take a clone of Windows 2000 over that god-awful mess any day of the week.
If all else fails, you could just specify alt="", which will satisfy the validator. Not every image needs alternate text.
Like the RIAA's going to bring down the hammer and stop all of those illegal copiers very soon?
Too much what? You do realize you're on Slashdot, right?
I'm a pretty fast reader, and I've managed to keep up with every subbed anime I've watched, bar one: Lucky Star. That shit moves so fast that I'm struggling to keep up with it. I'd normally watch three or four a day, but Lucky Star manages to wear me out after one because of this. Gives me a reason to buy the dubbed version I suppose...
Ahem, unless there's been another Titanic film of exactly the same length made since, I believe you're referring to the 1997 Titanic. Don't feel too bad though, it's only the highest grossing film of all time...
In OpenDocument's defence, the OpenDocument committee stated that "A comment was submitted concerning the (inclusion) of a grammar for spreadsheet formulas which conforming implementations should support. While we think that having interoperability on that level would be of great benefit to users, we do not believe [sic] that this is in the scope of the current specification".
I disagree with the above excuse, but OpenFormula is being worked on, and will fix the problem. Approving a totally different and incompatible standard just makes the problem worse.
I'm currently working my head around making an ideal (Linux-based) PC for my various needs. I've found good components for most of these needs, save one. A decent sound card.
The story of my current PC and sound is a real horror story. An integrated RealTek ALC861VD that has never worked properly. For two Ubuntu releases, it didn't work at all. Even now, setting sound output to ALSA gives me no sound at all for some reason. Setting it to OSS gives me sound, but only one application at a time, nothing from Flash player, and with constant errors from TiMidity. I've been trying to work with this situation for months now.
I'm fairly determined to avoid this situation happening twice, but I've absolutely no idea what I should buy to guarantee Linux compatibility. Should it be integrated or not? What manufacturer? I don't have particularly trained ears. All I really want is simple 2 channel sound (possibly with a sub-woofer), from as many applications at a time as I want, at a reasonably low price. In other words, exactly what Windows XP could give me right fucking now. But the situation of sound on Linux seems so bad that no one can give me a straight answer!
Reminds me of the old joke that Microsoft were merging their handheld, home, and business OSes into one universal OS.
Windows CEMENT. Heavy as a rock, and dumb as a brick.
I tried to take the simple route on the design of my own site, with the inspiration mostly coming from a far more famous site. The actual coding behind it (XHTML 1.1, moderately advanced CSS) isn't as simple, but it is valid. It's all written from scratch too, so I understand what everything does.
That's ITV you dolt.
I knew this pretty much from the start. Anyone who thought we'd never hate them was deluding themselves. The point is that it's better to have multiple evil corporations fighting over control of the market rather than one evil corporation enjoying an unchallenged monopoly.
I think the reason for that is quite plain to see. Microsoft want to keep Mac OS X around as the 'official opposition' to Windows, for legal purposes. This means Microsoft can have a corporation that they can understand and compete with by traditional means. If Apple stopped being any sort of competition, Microsoft would inevitably have to deal with Linux as the new 'official opposition', which is not run by any one corporation and doesn't respond to Microsoft's traditional tactics. To ensure that never happens, Mac OS X must keep going, hence Microsoft must give it some level of support.
Like you'd expect from Microsoft, making their own products better is only a small part of their strategy. The bigger part is making sure they don't have to deal with any potentially dangerous competitors.
I think you're confused. Canonical splitting any of their official distros into a limited free version and a fully-functional paid version would violate their own promise that Ubuntu will always be free of charge. Even if they wiggled out of that on a technicality, Ubuntu lives purely on the strength of its community. Canonical know that and would be insane to risk losing them through such a move.
The actual situation is that Kubuntu will be splitting into two versions, both of them free in all senses of the word, for the 8.04 release. One (using KDE 3.5.9) will be officially supported for 18 months (it won't be a Long Term Support release, since KDE 3 likely won't be supported in three years, though it will still support upgrading directly from 6.06) while the other (using KDE 4.0.2) will be community supported. This is probably because (like me) they think that KDE 4 really isn't ready yet as it hasn't had much time to mature and many of the Extragear application (some of which come with Kubuntu) haven't been updated yet, the most notable for me being Amarok.
My understanding is that Kubuntu will only do this split release system for the 8.04 release, with the 8.10 release likely to use KDE 4.0.x officially.