I knew there was some digitalization at some point, but I think the protocol is still not optomal. As you said, I don't thing POTS goes over ATM, though it probably should.
If this is so, then why, when I buy a book used, is it shipped from some random user's home address, often in a reused padded envelope? Is this some flimsy sham erected by a guilt-ridden Amazon.com?
I should have been more specific. Some amazon.com used book sales are from people who "sign up" to sell their collections. Others are remaindered collections. If you get a "used book" and it's clearly never been read (e.g. pages stick together and smell of binding glue) then you've gotten a remaindered book.
Large used bookstores (e.g. Powell's of Portland or The Strand in NYC) do this as well. They'll have tables and tables of new books at used prices.
This is providing no service whatsoever except a means of sidestepping the billing methods of the telcos.
Any experienced phone phreaks out there correct my if I'm wrong, but I don't think your long distance phone calls (landline anyway) are routed via an ATM network (asynchronous transfer method). Unless I misunderstand, your phone calls are analog all the way. They require a direct connection, via a system of circuts and exchanges, from point to point. In other words, your POTS service does not get routed over the same networks as your TCP/IP service.
Long distance phone networks, even the most advanced, are still somewhat tied to 19th century technologies, especially at the last mile. That's the real hold-up here. This company is doing something valuable in making an effective last-mile solution.
when the people in office have the brains and the cojones to put money into serious R&D and artistic/cultural development.
Word. Before it was governments it was just rich dudes like the Medici family (michelangelo's patron) and the like.
Probably the safest haven for pure research and arts anymore is the university system
The problem with the Academic system is that it tends to become highly self-referential, with little connection to "The common man". But you do have a point.
The question is really what do you do if you're not content to labor in an ivory tower, yet you don't want to sell out? I still have some shreds of hope that the 'net will make self-publication, distribution and sales a reality. Then the crafters, communities of interest and real content creators can ditch the dead weight and we'll all live happily ever after.
First, their assertion that used books hurt the book industry and authors is not correct. We've found that our used books business does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact, the opposite has happened. Offering customers a lower-priced option causes them to visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books while encouraging customers to try authors and genres they may not have otherwise tried. In addition, when a customer sells used books, it gives them a budget to buy more new books.
(Emphasis Mine)
Actually, it sounds like selling used books is good for Amazon.com, not the lit industry. Look, Amazon uses very predatory tactics to get their remainders, which they then sell as "used". These books never made their authors any money via royalties because they were sold as remainders and the publishers took a loss.
No one is arguing against anyone's right to sell used books. It's about treating your business partners nicely. If you're an author with a personal website, or a publisher, you'll want to link to an e-commerce site that will get someone to by your book new and make you a buck. That's only natural.
Actually, this is more of a pissing match between the publishing industry (corpulent, unimagninative and greedy) and amazon (just greedy). Who do you think funds the authors guild? Authors. Please... what authors do you know (megastars aside) who can support a "guild". The author's guild is funded by publishers.
In a perfect world, authors (and other content creators) wouldn't need greedy-stupid publishers and distributors to get their work out there. That's the promise of xlibris, but it's yet to really make an impact, mostly because the people who publish via xlibris couldn't get published anywhere else.
How I long for a day when artists and scientists don't need corporate patrons.
But Star Wars came out in 1977, four years before Reagan became President. Therefore, your claim that Star Wars was a "triumph over avaristic megalomania" doesn't really hold up. But hey, any excuse to bash Reagan and the conservatives, right?
Well, yeah! Duh!
Actually, I was referring to my experience seeing the film as a child in the early 80s.
Besides government stepping in and causing harm to MS, it also labels MS as a crook or criminal--neither of which MS is.
Actually they are. Their practices with OEMs alone is criminal. Anti-trust legistlation exists for a very good reason. Study up on a little history and learn why.
No one wants to see underlying problems--they want to blame the game or the substance instead of the deficiencies in our society. It's sad and alarming, and is getting us nowhere. We need to see the problems in our society and work our best to fix them--not blame that which brings the problems to light.
Excellent comments, man. That's very much what my interview project is about. We try and put all these different things that "bring the problems to light" on stage next to eachother, and thereby show that they all have common root causes.
I'd like to quote some of your comment for something. May I?
I'm conducting online interviews with gaming "addicts" as part of a theater production that will tour college campuses in the fall. Contact me via my website if you want to know more.
i.e. My walking to the store, struggling to find change, paying an exasperated storekeeper and then going home to have a beer could be interpreted as an archetypical myth under Campbell's definitions.
And so it does. This is what makes something archetypical: the fact that it is borne out by our every day experience and gives us courage/guidance (or to a cynic: influences us) on a regular basis.
To retell your expedition to the store, one would have to elevate the stakes and heighten the drama, but the *patterns* are what's important from a mythic standpoint (as an earlier post pointed out).
Star Wars started out Mythic, got more pulpy
on
Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Anyway, the point being that of course Star Wars fits his vision -- everything does. It's one of those annoying little self-enclosed bits of ignorance. All pulp science fiction fits it, too. Of course, it's all up to who is doing the interpreting!
And this is exactly what makes mythology so powerful. Look, you can analyze the cannon of every traditional or popular story in the world, and they essentially break down into 7 to 12 types, depending on who you ask and how fine a sieve you run them through. Why do we find adventure stories interesting? Because of a deeply-rooted (I would venture to say pre/sub coscious) affinity for adventure. Same goes for romance, mystery, comedy, etc.
I've seen some amazing foreign language comedy that almost made me piss my pants without understanding a word. There are certain things that speak to people more or less universally.
These basic tropes of culture (not just entertainment... this is where values really do come from) bear out certain commonalities between disparate peoples. The details, the styles, the appearances, these things change from time to time, from civilization to civilization. Of course anyone seeking to observe this will be prejudiced by her/his origin culture, but that doesn't make the investigation invalid. It's just heisenberg's uncertainty principle operating on the social and metaphysical level.
Campbell's system can be made to contain any myth within it; this is due to a flaw in Campbell's system.
You might also argue that this is the strength of Campbell's work.
The great Pulp stories, the great westerns and crime novels, they are the most mythic of all: they just tend to be rush jobs with poor attention to detail and not a lot of staying power. Of course Star Wars draws from the same sources. or at least the first film does... my contention is that Lucas struck gold once and then turned from prospecting to strip-mining in short order.
The difference between Star Wars and Pulp is the level of detail, craft, and emotion that is invested in it. Star Wars (the movie, not the franchise) looks dated today because of the 70s hair cuts, but other than that the story is still iconic in its power.
You must understand that this forum is not the best place to discuss such things. Many people here love Star Wars for the tech-whizbang factor, droids, lightsabers, x-wings... all the things self-respecting geeks are into. That's why they stay fanatical. But what I think you and I are addressing is a much deeper and more substantive issue.
When the first movie broke in '77, the people who freaked out about it were from all walks of life. It touched a chord, not by being above average SF, but by presenting something that people could believe in. This was my experience seeing it as a child, and it's backed up by the stories my mother told me about seeing it in the theaters. Contrary to everyday life in the Regan era, here was a representation of simple, humble values that triumph over avaristic megalomania. Growing up in an agnostic household, I was one of the many who looked to mythic stories such as Star Wars and the work of Tolkien to hand down a basic set of morals and values, and since I think I turned out ok, I have to be greatful to some extent to these authors and filmmakers.
But my gratitude has limits. Since striking gold with the first film, Lucas has been more and more aggressively humping the fantasy for every dollar it's worth. I think the perfect representation of Lucas's change can be found in the Phantom Menace, during an Exchange between Young Obi-Won and the Computer-Generated Flying Junk Salesman. Obi-Won has been trying to use his Jedi Mind Tricks(tm), and the CG character says, "haha, the force doesn't work on me. Only Money."
I tell you. This is a simple fact. If you want to hurt microsoft, force them to release specs to the office file formats
<homie>WORD!</homie>
No pun intended, but props. I don't know why people don't go after this more zealously. If seamless interoperability were possible with other applications (and there's no technical reason why it shouldn't be), M$'s office monopoly would crumble. Without the office monopoly, the server-side monopoly has no basis. The house of cards will crumble.
The only thing it would cripple is their business model. So in a sense they aren't lying.
Exactly! But that's an admission of gult there! Check it: the DOJ has found that their business model is monopolistic and anti-competative. Ergo, any solution that would rectify that situation would by necessity cause them to change the way they do business.
That's why these nine states are holding out, because the current government settlement will not stop microsoft from deploying its monopoly of the desktop in anti-competative ways.
The problem is that with the influence of Sun and AOL/TW, this case is becoming more about giving up market share to existing competitors (cementing the current plutocratic high-tech oligarchy) and not about opening the field to innovation, entrepeneurialism and true competition.
Sadly, it's mega-corp vs mega-corp at this point... feels a bit like the last presidential election: you root for the lesser of two evils.
And that's why they released a smaller controller in Japan?
After consumer outcry. The fact that they didn't think of this in advance after even US customers were complaining about the controler ergonomics shows a serious lack of foresight.
If you compare the same game on the PS2 and the Xbox, you can often tell that it looks better on the Xbox due to the Xbox's power.
The difference is slight, and not enough in any of the cases I've seen to really affect the game experience. It's like the difference between the SNES and Sega Genesis. The SNES had more colors and more power, but most games that where available on both systems were functionally the same.
Look, when your in the magnatude area of 10M polygons per second (or whatever ungodly number they're up to now) having 500,000 more or less really doesn't make a difference in terms of what is possible on a system. Sure you could make the environments and backgrounds just a little more real, but that kind of slight graphic edge doesn't open up any new gaming paradigms the way the leap from 16 to 32 bit consoles did.
I think the more salient fronteers in console gaming are online play, immersive storyteling and advanced/interesting AI. The PS2 is on top of all three (everquest, squaresoft, and GTA3, respectively) and as far as I can tell, the X-box is not on top of any of them.
Microsoft made some very big blunders with the Xbox, especially internationally. For instance, they didn't re-think their controller (already large for US hands) before releasing in Japan. The result was that they had a lot of angry small-handed customers for whom the system was almost unplayable. Talk about a rookie mistake.
I actually worked at the Xbox-unleashed launch "party" in NYC, a weekend long game tourny/media happening at a swankish club. Sleeping with enemy, I know, but I needed the cash. It was the most forced/fake hooplah event I've ever been at. Most of the hardcore gamers (who were sleeping in shifts on the corner so as to have the best chance at winning the grand prize) trash talked the system when the M$ reps weren't around.
Mostly they talked about how all the good games were already out for PS2 and about how the controller felt weird. Even though the X-box is supposed to have superior hardware, I havn't seen any remarkable difference between its graphics and the PS2/Gamecube. Unless they find some real innovative ways to exploit the hardware advantages (notably the presence of a Hard Drive) they're dead in the water. When it comes to consoles, to borrow from the Clintion-insider campaign slogan, "it's the games, stupid."
The "industrial revolution," at least in the United States, was fueled primarily from within.
I would disagree. You're correct that in the first stage of the industrial revolution (early 1800s to early 1900s) there was little to no offshore manufacturing. However, vast amounts of resource and labor were extracted from other parts of the world (sometimes in the form of immigrants).
While it's true that there was significantly less government-orchestrated (imperial) colonialism prepetuation on behalf of the US (mostly confined to the carribean, central america, and the east) the basis for many of the great founding corporations of this country has always been import/export.
In essance, we didn't get where we are by existing in a vaccum. This is quite obviously the case in our "global" 21st century, but I might remind you that while the interconnection of economies works faster these days than ever before (thanks to things like the internet), the degree of interconnection is hardly unpreccidented. Historical research has shown that just prior to WWI, the interconnection of national economies (as measured by the value of their imports/exports as a funtion of their GDP) was actually GREATER than today.
Ah crap right back at you. As the previous response noted, formal imperial colonialism was in place until the aftermath of WWII. I would argue that another form of economic colonialism exists now in which less developed countries are kept in a sort of raw-materials-producing indentured servitude by the established economic powers.
I would argue moreover that the massive cultural destabization and systems of corrupt political patronage wrought on nations we call the "3rd World" which I assume are the "real issues" you refer to, are in large part as a result of Colonialism (both imperial and corporate) and not some inherant defect of the peoples of these nations themselves, as is your highly racist inferrence.
Make no mistake, American enginuity got us where we are today: the enginuity to screw over other people and extract resources from them at an advantageous pace for ourselves.
Anyone who thinks that if the west hadn't got rich through the industrial revolution , and science and technology in general then the 3rd world would somehow have inherited that wealth and would all be living in some happy nirvana right now is either a fool or living in some hippy cloud somewhere south of reality.
Now, I don't think we'd have nirvana anywhere if the industrialized nations stayed out of other countries, but to argue that centuries of exploitation have nothing to do with the dire situation in most of these countries is plain blindness.
Where pray tell did the vast majority of raw materials and cheap (e.g. slave) labor that powered the industreal revolution come from? Hmmm... the third wold. So, if the industrealized nations colonized (directly or by economic corporate proxy) other countries, dismantled their subsistance-based economy and set them up to export their natural resources to be refined and used by industreal nations, it's their own fault?
Povery is caused by a combination of degradation of the enviroment, despot dictators, poor economic management, religious zealotry and plain old overpopulation.
All of which are direct results of colonialism. I mean, really, you think we didn't step on a few hands while "dragging ourselves out of the stone age?"
Interviewer: So, tell us about your online gaming plans. Nintendo: Online gaming? We want to make fun games. We'll include online gaming if we need it. Sony: We have a deal with AOL, and we're going to crush everybody online! Bwahahahaha! Xbox: We have a built in Ethernet port into the Xbox, so we'll be online out of the box instead of having to buy expensive peripherals, and we'll crush everybody online! Bwahahahaha!
I'm sorry, man, but this is nothing new. Online console gaming has got to be one of the more vaporwared feature in tech history.
Case in point: I remember one of the things that sold me originally on the 16-bit Sega Genesis (when it first came out, like 10 years ago) was the proposed "teleGenesis" modem option. It sounded so sweet! You could play two players game against your buddies across town, and it included a keyboard and additional RAM to power-up your Genesis gaming experience. They even had a picture of it on the back of the box and claimed that special games would come out specifically to support it.
Did that ever happen? Not on your life. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing occurs with one or more of the current consoles: a lot of talk and even some "demonstrations" to keep you interested in the platform and buying software, and then nothing, nada, zilch.
This opens a whole other can of worms too. Now you have "Content Monitors" and you can be sure the regular librarians don't want to have any extra duties. So you have to hire more staff
Nah, I'm thinking you put the machines where some of the regular staff can just glance over and make sure nothing shady is going on. In my old hometown library they had the two computers next to the reference desk, so the reference person could just glance over in his/her spare moments and see what was going on.
Of course, in really large libraries with big computer banks (e.g. NY Public Library main branch) you'd need someone to handle it (they have 60 or so machines). But they already have someone there who does Q&A for people, so that person can just be the friendly monitor.
It's a community model, not a policing model. Eventually you just want to make it the normal thing to do for the library populace to keep tabs on itself: e.g. other patrons report abuses or even tell the person they're in violation. I know it sounds odd that people might actually take care of each other and (gasp!) speak to strangers, but that's exactly the sort of behavior a public institution such as a library is supposed to foster. It's a community space.
Sadly, all that I can think of is good old fashioned human supervision.
Exactly!
That's what it should be. Look, the problem of displaying purient material to minors is not a technological one, it's a social one. It would naturally follow that it has a social solution.
So you make a rule sheet and stick it next to all the terminals in the library: "You should not display material of a pornographic nature on this machine." Put the computers somewhere were an attendant can glance around and see the screens. If there's a gang of 14-year-olds (or a 20-something perv) looking up playboy (or goatse), you kick them off.
Content filters are not a solution. I mean, if you remove all the "mature content" what's left but "immature content"?
A ruling that makes sense from the judiciary! Pop the champaigne! With all the legislation that's been introduced (CBDTPA) and passed (DMCA), I'm starting to loose a little faith in the legislative process. Whoop whoop: checks and balances.
Seriously, I've not read about anyone looking to challange the DMCA in court. I've heard about defences being mounted against it, but no one has (to my knowledge) challanged the law, even though it seems that there could be a constitutional claim against it, if only under the area of copyright. I assume the EFF, ACLU, etc have looked into this? Is anyone planning on mounting a challange in the courts? If not, does anyone have any pointers to reasons why?
To borrow from some post I read yesterday: if we're serious about Online Rights, we need to start taking up the political tactics of other more successful movements (e.g. the gun lobby), and cast the debate in our terms. For instance, we're not technology advocates or content pirates, we're Pro-Information Liberty, or some such thing. The Online Rights movement needs some better branding.
We also need to be more active (e.g. on the offensive) in the judiciary realm of the government so as to get more rulings like this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, and c'mere a sec (whisper: it's "anonymity", dude!)
Ha! Thanks for the tip! I learned to read at 3, but 20 years later I still can't spell worth shit. Go figure.
Thanks for the correction.
I knew there was some digitalization at some point, but I think the protocol is still not optomal. As you said, I don't thing POTS goes over ATM, though it probably should.
If this is so, then why, when I buy a book used, is it shipped from some random user's home address, often in a reused padded envelope? Is this some flimsy sham erected by a guilt-ridden Amazon.com?
I should have been more specific. Some amazon.com used book sales are from people who "sign up" to sell their collections. Others are remaindered collections. If you get a "used book" and it's clearly never been read (e.g. pages stick together and smell of binding glue) then you've gotten a remaindered book.
Large used bookstores (e.g. Powell's of Portland or The Strand in NYC) do this as well. They'll have tables and tables of new books at used prices.
This is providing no service whatsoever except a means of sidestepping the billing methods of the telcos.
Any experienced phone phreaks out there correct my if I'm wrong, but I don't think your long distance phone calls (landline anyway) are routed via an ATM network (asynchronous transfer method). Unless I misunderstand, your phone calls are analog all the way. They require a direct connection, via a system of circuts and exchanges, from point to point. In other words, your POTS service does not get routed over the same networks as your TCP/IP service.
Long distance phone networks, even the most advanced, are still somewhat tied to 19th century technologies, especially at the last mile. That's the real hold-up here. This company is doing something valuable in making an effective last-mile solution.
when the people in office have the brains and the cojones to put money into serious R&D and artistic/cultural development.
Word. Before it was governments it was just rich dudes like the Medici family (michelangelo's patron) and the like.
Probably the safest haven for pure research and arts anymore is the university system
The problem with the Academic system is that it tends to become highly self-referential, with little connection to "The common man". But you do have a point.
The question is really what do you do if you're not content to labor in an ivory tower, yet you don't want to sell out? I still have some shreds of hope that the 'net will make self-publication, distribution and sales a reality. Then the crafters, communities of interest and real content creators can ditch the dead weight and we'll all live happily ever after.
First, their assertion that used books hurt the book industry and
authors is not correct. We've found that our used books business
does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact,
the opposite has happened. Offering customers a lower-priced option
causes them to visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads
to higher sales of new books while encouraging customers to try
authors and genres they may not have otherwise tried. In addition,
when a customer sells used books, it gives them a budget to buy more
new books.
(Emphasis Mine)
Actually, it sounds like selling used books is good for Amazon.com, not the lit industry. Look, Amazon uses very predatory tactics to get their remainders, which they then sell as "used". These books never made their authors any money via royalties because they were sold as remainders and the publishers took a loss.
No one is arguing against anyone's right to sell used books. It's about treating your business partners nicely. If you're an author with a personal website, or a publisher, you'll want to link to an e-commerce site that will get someone to by your book new and make you a buck. That's only natural.
Actually, this is more of a pissing match between the publishing industry (corpulent, unimagninative and greedy) and amazon (just greedy). Who do you think funds the authors guild? Authors. Please... what authors do you know (megastars aside) who can support a "guild". The author's guild is funded by publishers.
In a perfect world, authors (and other content creators) wouldn't need greedy-stupid publishers and distributors to get their work out there. That's the promise of xlibris, but it's yet to really make an impact, mostly because the people who publish via xlibris couldn't get published anywhere else.
How I long for a day when artists and scientists don't need corporate patrons.
I'm game... you can contact me via my homepage or at joshk@thequickfix.com.
But Star Wars came out in 1977, four years before Reagan became President. Therefore, your claim that Star Wars was a "triumph over avaristic megalomania" doesn't really hold up. But hey, any excuse to bash Reagan and the conservatives, right?
Well, yeah! Duh!
Actually, I was referring to my experience seeing the film as a child in the early 80s.
Besides government stepping in and causing harm to MS, it also labels MS as a crook or criminal--neither of which MS is.
Actually they are. Their practices with OEMs alone is criminal. Anti-trust legistlation exists for a very good reason. Study up on a little history and learn why.
No one wants to see underlying problems--they want to blame the game or the substance instead of the deficiencies in our society. It's sad and alarming, and is getting us nowhere. We need to see the problems in our society and work our best to fix them--not blame that which brings the problems to light.
Excellent comments, man. That's very much what my interview project is about. We try and put all these different things that "bring the problems to light" on stage next to eachother, and thereby show that they all have common root causes.
I'd like to quote some of your comment for something. May I?
I'm conducting online interviews with gaming "addicts" as part of a theater production that will tour college campuses in the fall. Contact me via my website if you want to know more.
This came to me over the opirc (where I do some of my tellecommuting work) network just a bit ago:
/. article....unfortunately, probably no one :)l d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=flat&pid=3324348
!lilo:*! Reply to a comment on a
will see it since I can't sign onto my account from work
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30906&thresho
It's the real deal: Mod It Up!
i.e. My walking to the store, struggling to find change, paying an exasperated storekeeper and then going home to have a beer could be interpreted as an archetypical myth under Campbell's definitions.
And so it does. This is what makes something archetypical: the fact that it is borne out by our every day experience and gives us courage/guidance (or to a cynic: influences us) on a regular basis.
To retell your expedition to the store, one would have to elevate the stakes and heighten the drama, but the *patterns* are what's important from a mythic standpoint (as an earlier post pointed out).
Anyway, the point being that of course Star Wars fits his vision -- everything does. It's one of those annoying little self-enclosed bits of ignorance. All pulp science fiction fits it, too. Of course, it's all up to who is doing the interpreting!
And this is exactly what makes mythology so powerful. Look, you can analyze the cannon of every traditional or popular story in the world, and they essentially break down into 7 to 12 types, depending on who you ask and how fine a sieve you run them through. Why do we find adventure stories interesting? Because of a deeply-rooted (I would venture to say pre/sub coscious) affinity for adventure. Same goes for romance, mystery, comedy, etc.
I've seen some amazing foreign language comedy that almost made me piss my pants without understanding a word. There are certain things that speak to people more or less universally.
These basic tropes of culture (not just entertainment... this is where values really do come from) bear out certain commonalities between disparate peoples. The details, the styles, the appearances, these things change from time to time, from civilization to civilization. Of course anyone seeking to observe this will be prejudiced by her/his origin culture, but that doesn't make the investigation invalid. It's just heisenberg's uncertainty principle operating on the social and metaphysical level.
Campbell's system can be made to contain any myth within it; this is due to a flaw in Campbell's system.
You might also argue that this is the strength of Campbell's work.
The great Pulp stories, the great westerns and crime novels, they are the most mythic of all: they just tend to be rush jobs with poor attention to detail and not a lot of staying power. Of course Star Wars draws from the same sources. or at least the first film does... my contention is that Lucas struck gold once and then turned from prospecting to strip-mining in short order.
The difference between Star Wars and Pulp is the level of detail, craft, and emotion that is invested in it. Star Wars (the movie, not the franchise) looks dated today because of the 70s hair cuts, but other than that the story is still iconic in its power.
You must understand that this forum is not the best place to discuss such things. Many people here love Star Wars for the tech-whizbang factor, droids, lightsabers, x-wings... all the things self-respecting geeks are into. That's why they stay fanatical. But what I think you and I are addressing is a much deeper and more substantive issue.
When the first movie broke in '77, the people who freaked out about it were from all walks of life. It touched a chord, not by being above average SF, but by presenting something that people could believe in. This was my experience seeing it as a child, and it's backed up by the stories my mother told me about seeing it in the theaters. Contrary to everyday life in the Regan era, here was a representation of simple, humble values that triumph over avaristic megalomania. Growing up in an agnostic household, I was one of the many who looked to mythic stories such as Star Wars and the work of Tolkien to hand down a basic set of morals and values, and since I think I turned out ok, I have to be greatful to some extent to these authors and filmmakers.
But my gratitude has limits. Since striking gold with the first film, Lucas has been more and more aggressively humping the fantasy for every dollar it's worth. I think the perfect representation of Lucas's change can be found in the Phantom Menace, during an Exchange between Young Obi-Won and the Computer-Generated Flying Junk Salesman. Obi-Won has been trying to use his Jedi Mind Tricks(tm), and the CG character says, "haha, the force doesn't work on me. Only Money."
That about says it all.
I tell you. This is a simple fact. If you want to hurt microsoft, force them to release specs to the office file formats
<homie>WORD!</homie>
No pun intended, but props. I don't know why people don't go after this more zealously. If seamless interoperability were possible with other applications (and there's no technical reason why it shouldn't be), M$'s office monopoly would crumble. Without the office monopoly, the server-side monopoly has no basis. The house of cards will crumble.
The only thing it would cripple is their business model. So in a sense they aren't lying.
Exactly! But that's an admission of gult there! Check it: the DOJ has found that their business model is monopolistic and anti-competative. Ergo, any solution that would rectify that situation would by necessity cause them to change the way they do business.
That's why these nine states are holding out, because the current government settlement will not stop microsoft from deploying its monopoly of the desktop in anti-competative ways.
The problem is that with the influence of Sun and AOL/TW, this case is becoming more about giving up market share to existing competitors (cementing the current plutocratic high-tech oligarchy) and not about opening the field to innovation, entrepeneurialism and true competition.
Sadly, it's mega-corp vs mega-corp at this point... feels a bit like the last presidential election: you root for the lesser of two evils.
And that's why they released a smaller controller in Japan?
After consumer outcry. The fact that they didn't think of this in advance after even US customers were complaining about the controler ergonomics shows a serious lack of foresight.
If you compare the same game on the PS2 and the Xbox, you can often tell that it looks better on the Xbox due to the Xbox's power.
The difference is slight, and not enough in any of the cases I've seen to really affect the game experience. It's like the difference between the SNES and Sega Genesis. The SNES had more colors and more power, but most games that where available on both systems were functionally the same.
Look, when your in the magnatude area of 10M polygons per second (or whatever ungodly number they're up to now) having 500,000 more or less really doesn't make a difference in terms of what is possible on a system. Sure you could make the environments and backgrounds just a little more real, but that kind of slight graphic edge doesn't open up any new gaming paradigms the way the leap from 16 to 32 bit consoles did.
I think the more salient fronteers in console gaming are online play, immersive storyteling and advanced/interesting AI. The PS2 is on top of all three (everquest, squaresoft, and GTA3, respectively) and as far as I can tell, the X-box is not on top of any of them.
Microsoft made some very big blunders with the Xbox, especially internationally. For instance, they didn't re-think their controller (already large for US hands) before releasing in Japan. The result was that they had a lot of angry small-handed customers for whom the system was almost unplayable. Talk about a rookie mistake.
I actually worked at the Xbox-unleashed launch "party" in NYC, a weekend long game tourny/media happening at a swankish club. Sleeping with enemy, I know, but I needed the cash. It was the most forced/fake hooplah event I've ever been at. Most of the hardcore gamers (who were sleeping in shifts on the corner so as to have the best chance at winning the grand prize) trash talked the system when the M$ reps weren't around.
Mostly they talked about how all the good games were already out for PS2 and about how the controller felt weird. Even though the X-box is supposed to have superior hardware, I havn't seen any remarkable difference between its graphics and the PS2/Gamecube. Unless they find some real innovative ways to exploit the hardware advantages (notably the presence of a Hard Drive) they're dead in the water. When it comes to consoles, to borrow from the Clintion-insider campaign slogan, "it's the games, stupid."
The "industrial revolution," at least in the United States, was fueled primarily from within.
I would disagree. You're correct that in the first stage of the industrial revolution (early 1800s to early 1900s) there was little to no offshore manufacturing. However, vast amounts of resource and labor were extracted from other parts of the world (sometimes in the form of immigrants).
While it's true that there was significantly less government-orchestrated (imperial) colonialism prepetuation on behalf of the US (mostly confined to the carribean, central america, and the east) the basis for many of the great founding corporations of this country has always been import/export.
In essance, we didn't get where we are by existing in a vaccum. This is quite obviously the case in our "global" 21st century, but I might remind you that while the interconnection of economies works faster these days than ever before (thanks to things like the internet), the degree of interconnection is hardly unpreccidented. Historical research has shown that just prior to WWI, the interconnection of national economies (as measured by the value of their imports/exports as a funtion of their GDP) was actually GREATER than today.
Ah crap. Colonialism ended a hundred years ago.
Ah crap right back at you. As the previous response noted, formal imperial colonialism was in place until the aftermath of WWII. I would argue that another form of economic colonialism exists now in which less developed countries are kept in a sort of raw-materials-producing indentured servitude by the established economic powers.
I would argue moreover that the massive cultural destabization and systems of corrupt political patronage wrought on nations we call the "3rd World" which I assume are the "real issues" you refer to, are in large part as a result of Colonialism (both imperial and corporate) and not some inherant defect of the peoples of these nations themselves, as is your highly racist inferrence.
Make no mistake, American enginuity got us where we are today: the enginuity to screw over other people and extract resources from them at an advantageous pace for ourselves.
Anyone who thinks that if the west hadn't got rich through the industrial revolution , and
science and technology in general then the 3rd world would somehow have inherited that wealth
and would all be living in some happy nirvana right now is either a fool or living in some hippy
cloud somewhere south of reality.
Now, I don't think we'd have nirvana anywhere if the industrialized nations stayed out of other countries, but to argue that centuries of exploitation have nothing to do with the dire situation in most of these countries is plain blindness.
Where pray tell did the vast majority of raw materials and cheap (e.g. slave) labor that powered the industreal revolution come from? Hmmm... the third wold. So, if the industrealized nations colonized (directly or by economic corporate proxy) other countries, dismantled their subsistance-based economy and set them up to export their natural resources to be refined and used by industreal nations, it's their own fault?
Povery is caused by a combination of degradation of the enviroment, despot dictators, poor economic management, religious zealotry and plain old overpopulation.
All of which are direct results of colonialism. I mean, really, you think we didn't step on a few hands while "dragging ourselves out of the stone age?"
Interviewer: So, tell us about your online gaming plans.
Nintendo: Online gaming? We want to make fun games. We'll include online gaming if we need it.
Sony: We have a deal with AOL, and we're going to crush everybody online! Bwahahahaha!
Xbox: We have a built in Ethernet port into the Xbox, so we'll be online out of the box instead of having to buy expensive peripherals, and we'll crush everybody online! Bwahahahaha!
I'm sorry, man, but this is nothing new. Online console gaming has got to be one of the more vaporwared feature in tech history.
Case in point: I remember one of the things that sold me originally on the 16-bit Sega Genesis (when it first came out, like 10 years ago) was the proposed "teleGenesis" modem option. It sounded so sweet! You could play two players game against your buddies across town, and it included a keyboard and additional RAM to power-up your Genesis gaming experience. They even had a picture of it on the back of the box and claimed that special games would come out specifically to support it.
Did that ever happen? Not on your life. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing occurs with one or more of the current consoles: a lot of talk and even some "demonstrations" to keep you interested in the platform and buying software, and then nothing, nada, zilch.
Like mom said, life just ain't fair.
This opens a whole other can of worms too. Now you have "Content Monitors" and you can be sure the regular librarians don't want to have any extra duties. So you have to hire more staff
Nah, I'm thinking you put the machines where some of the regular staff can just glance over and make sure nothing shady is going on. In my old hometown library they had the two computers next to the reference desk, so the reference person could just glance over in his/her spare moments and see what was going on.
Of course, in really large libraries with big computer banks (e.g. NY Public Library main branch) you'd need someone to handle it (they have 60 or so machines). But they already have someone there who does Q&A for people, so that person can just be the friendly monitor.
It's a community model, not a policing model. Eventually you just want to make it the normal thing to do for the library populace to keep tabs on itself: e.g. other patrons report abuses or even tell the person they're in violation. I know it sounds odd that people might actually take care of each other and (gasp!) speak to strangers, but that's exactly the sort of behavior a public institution such as a library is supposed to foster. It's a community space.
Sadly, all that I can think of is good old fashioned human supervision.
Exactly!
That's what it should be. Look, the problem of displaying purient material to minors is not a technological one, it's a social one. It would naturally follow that it has a social solution.
So you make a rule sheet and stick it next to all the terminals in the library: "You should not display material of a pornographic nature on this machine." Put the computers somewhere were an attendant can glance around and see the screens. If there's a gang of 14-year-olds (or a 20-something perv) looking up playboy (or goatse), you kick them off.
Content filters are not a solution. I mean, if you remove all the "mature content" what's left but "immature content"?
A ruling that makes sense from the judiciary! Pop the champaigne! With all the legislation that's been introduced (CBDTPA) and passed (DMCA), I'm starting to loose a little faith in the legislative process. Whoop whoop: checks and balances.
Seriously, I've not read about anyone looking to challange the DMCA in court. I've heard about defences being mounted against it, but no one has (to my knowledge) challanged the law, even though it seems that there could be a constitutional claim against it, if only under the area of copyright. I assume the EFF, ACLU, etc have looked into this? Is anyone planning on mounting a challange in the courts? If not, does anyone have any pointers to reasons why?
To borrow from some post I read yesterday: if we're serious about Online Rights, we need to start taking up the political tactics of other more successful movements (e.g. the gun lobby), and cast the debate in our terms. For instance, we're not technology advocates or content pirates, we're Pro-Information Liberty, or some such thing. The Online Rights movement needs some better branding.
We also need to be more active (e.g. on the offensive) in the judiciary realm of the government so as to get more rulings like this one.