Re:Buy a gaming company, but not EA
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Apple Eyeing EA?
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· Score: 1
My point being it wouldn't be worth it for Apple to buy the whole company outright essentially for a few core creative people, gaming marketing people, some intellectual property, and a few multiplayer servers. Everything else Apple already has or would need to build from scratch in order to make full-fledged Mac games. I don't think this company, which likes simplicity enough to have a grand total of six computer models, would waste that much money in severance packages or get into the windows game development business simply to buy their way into more Mac games.
Buy a gaming company, but not EA
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Apple Eyeing EA?
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· Score: 1
Or at least not only EA. My reason is simple, EA doesn't make Mac games. They make PC games and then shove them into Transgaming's Cider, which is great for productivity and justifying the cost of delivering a Mac version to the market but not so great for making games which run as fast and as bug-free as they can. If they're going to buy a company outright I'd like to see Apple buy a smaller but established company who specializes at least at some level in making or porting games to the platform and then buy franchises and the talent to go along with those titles from other companies to jump-start their gaming division.
Of course, maybe a better solution to the lack of gaming problem would be to subsidize or incentivize game publishing on the platform, but I pay little attention to the details of these things and have no idea what the best first step would be.
Re:How valuable is gaming to Apple's Ecosystem?
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Apple Eyeing EA?
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· Score: 1
There are only three reasons I hear anymore for someone not purchasing a Mac. Price, specific software (AutoCad anyone?), and games. Only one of those three is both an impediment to the computer's usefulness and can in almost no way be remedied. I'd think that solving the most valid and objective argument one can generally have against buying an Apple computer would be something worth putting some major cash into.
Before anyone says anything I run XP in Boot Camp for gaming and it works wonderfully, but you have to admit it's not as elegant a solution as having the game run in your OS of choice.
Well, yes. But like a great many technological issues the people who make the law have been completely ignorant that the issue even exists, let alone proactive enough to formulate a solution for it.
...and in conclusion I'm hoping Apple doesn't buy Twitter because Twitter's a fad and will be worthless in a few years. Thank you, I'll collect my check at the door.
Well, you wanna get your dom on you gotta put it out there. The reason the law is there is to back up the social contract that should prevent this sort of thing in the first place.
I just meant (in this particular case) improvements to the install process, as in being able to install over XP.
But yes, there aren't too many reasons to switch other than the improved security, and even that's of enough use to counterbalance the pain of upgrading a whole company now that people have learned to deal with XP's security failings.
Is that it took all this time for NASA to figure out they should probably team up and help promote themselves through one of the most popular tv shows on earth once they had become a fixture on that show. It's almost like Colbert said to NASA, "Hey, guys. Here's a gift. Don't screw it up." It looks like they just may not, at that.
The companies are making money from being an ISP but being a large company they invest large amounts of money finding ways to charge more for what they already sell. Their two major obstacles to raising their prices are losing customers to the competition and being regulated because of customer outrage. The customer migration problem is solved both by the average customer's ignorance of what they're being charged for and by eventually having every major company switch to this very profitable pricing model. The legislative part of the problem is solved by using the issues surrounding bandwidth usage (torrents being a major one) to cloud the issues. The major issue being that the prices they're about to start charging, especially in the higher tiers, are absurdly higher than they should be.
Unless I've missed something I think that's the bulk of why Time Warner's method of tiered pricing is unacceptable.
Yes, sadly in this day, forcing someone to shave, to bath, to listen to music they don't like, to watch TV shows making fun of their ideals or image is akin to starvation, braking bones, inserting surgical instruments into the human body or operating with nothing to dull the pain, pulling off fingernails, and threatening someone with death and taking them almost there.
Shaving and bathing, ok, that's not torture, that's promoting good hygiene in a community environment so that the prisoners don't wind up with lice.
Being made to listen to music you don't like isn't so bad, but it is when you're made to listen to the same song over and over at a high volume for days. Making fun of their ideals or making them watch a movie for retribution, infantile and not even close to what I expect from professional soldiers, let alone professional soldiers under my employ.
Now...I know the RIAA will be storming my front door for this, but tonight go torrent any CD published by Disney in the last 10 years and play a random track on repeat as loud as you can, then lay in bed and try your best to sleep. Now imagine being locked in your room for six months (or two thirds of a baby, however you want to think of it) and handing the play button to someone with the mindset of a 10 year old boy poking a dead bird with a stick. Imagine what they could do to you when all you want is a nap. Tell me you wouldn't let someone break your finger to not have that happen. Go ahead, lie to me.
It's a summer blockbuster without any finished CGI (and missing most of the half-finished stuff, too), close to no color grading, and missing a lot of the foley. Since a lot of this was shot in the controlled environment of a sound stage that means you're constantly put off balance by the lack of life in the film because a team of professionals haven't added back in what could have been there in the first place but isn't because it's much...much easier to add effects to it later if there's no surprises.
It's also lacking much of a plot, the characters lack any motivation for what they do and tend to go off on wild unhinged killing sprees simply to give them something to slash or shoot leaving you thinking "Umm, why did that just happen?" most of the time. The best thing I can say about it is that the stunt men are well trained and skilled at what they do.
I'm sure the final cut will have lots of nice explosions, though.
I'm augmenting iluvcapra's previous point here. And although I don't mean to sound like a troll, this might come out sounding that way, but I don't mean to, so don't hate me.
You could have a valid complaint, but I think you're using the word digital and pixel in ways that don't really apply. The little spots on real film are chemicals on a strip of plastic, and you can see them to a certain degree when it's projected large enough. So, what you're probably seeing is the grains of color which have been scanned in and then digitally projected (or faked in the case of movies that were shot on video instead of film but still want to look like they were shot on film). They've been there since film was invented, but the sharper the projection the more you'll see them because any blurryness will blend the little spots together.
Tell that to Lindsay Lohan. I've heard more late night show jokes pertaining to her and drugs than I can shake a stick at, but they still stick her untalented ass in movies and she still has more money than god.
There are plenty of trainwrecks that have no talent and keep on earning. The only people who celebrity their way to the poor house are at the screwup level of a Spears or a...oh...what's the name of that guy from the Batman movie, died cause he was stupid and took too many pills, never made a movie I wanted to watch until the one he died after making (because it was the only one which was a solid film from beginning to end)?
If you've read this thread you've been spoiled already, but out of politeness I'll just say that there's spoilers following)
I've read a lot of posts and articles in which people are debating the validity of the choice to explain everything as being god's work. I never thought that way myself, but because you could make a halfway decent argument for that point of view I've done some thinking into the best way to explain why it's not a copout and I think I've come up with a pretty good one.
Through prophecy and the guidance of the show's God they're led to a ruined earth. Whether or not God intended it to be ruined when they found it or not can be debated right up until the point in the last episode at which point they find Earth2. When it becomes apparent that God intended the whole time for them to end their journey at Earth2 (because Kara's song is what led them there) it makes the discovery of a devastated Earth2 part of the process of getting there. More specifically, it turns Earth1 into a lesson. It makes it a meaningful example on the way to understanding what produced the destruction of their entire civilization this means God has a purpose in leading them on this convoluted path through genocide and oppression and heartache. Even at its most passive the purpose for God's journey must be to teach humanity that lesson.
This purpose gives the God real substance and character and it's this character that takes God from some convenient force that can be used to explain anything and everything and incorporates it into the plot in a legitimate way. This makes the lack of an explanation for what specifically Kara is or what the Head 6 and Head Gaius are ok. It's unimportant to the plot. All the story needs is enough explanation of what they are to show that they really were tools of the character which is God, and that was accomplished. This also legitimizes the spirituality of the story, because that is the story. It's a story of what God put mankind through in order to give them a chance to be better.
Just my two cents, and it reaches just a little bit, but there it is.
But that didn't make sense for them since those two mentioned God's plan more than anyone else in the show
True. But those two characters, especially the Angel 6, have said a lot of things that weren't true but which the characters needed to hear. In terms of a person's willingness to believe, there's a big difference between attributing something to a guiding force and attributing it to the classical christian God.
It may also mean that they recognize that if they distribute high quality files on bittorrent with a lot of bandwidth behind it (and maybe release it before anyone else has a chance to) that they can eventually slide a quick commercial in there and people will choose their file because they'll have been getting it fast, reliably, and looking great.
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My point being it wouldn't be worth it for Apple to buy the whole company outright essentially for a few core creative people, gaming marketing people, some intellectual property, and a few multiplayer servers. Everything else Apple already has or would need to build from scratch in order to make full-fledged Mac games. I don't think this company, which likes simplicity enough to have a grand total of six computer models, would waste that much money in severance packages or get into the windows game development business simply to buy their way into more Mac games.
Or at least not only EA. My reason is simple, EA doesn't make Mac games. They make PC games and then shove them into Transgaming's Cider, which is great for productivity and justifying the cost of delivering a Mac version to the market but not so great for making games which run as fast and as bug-free as they can. If they're going to buy a company outright I'd like to see Apple buy a smaller but established company who specializes at least at some level in making or porting games to the platform and then buy franchises and the talent to go along with those titles from other companies to jump-start their gaming division.
Of course, maybe a better solution to the lack of gaming problem would be to subsidize or incentivize game publishing on the platform, but I pay little attention to the details of these things and have no idea what the best first step would be.
There are only three reasons I hear anymore for someone not purchasing a Mac. Price, specific software (AutoCad anyone?), and games. Only one of those three is both an impediment to the computer's usefulness and can in almost no way be remedied. I'd think that solving the most valid and objective argument one can generally have against buying an Apple computer would be something worth putting some major cash into.
Before anyone says anything I run XP in Boot Camp for gaming and it works wonderfully, but you have to admit it's not as elegant a solution as having the game run in your OS of choice.
This should have been done at least 10 years ago.
Well, yes. But like a great many technological issues the people who make the law have been completely ignorant that the issue even exists, let alone proactive enough to formulate a solution for it.
...and in conclusion I'm hoping Apple doesn't buy Twitter because Twitter's a fad and will be worthless in a few years. Thank you, I'll collect my check at the door.
It's a lot of money, and a lot of submissions. It takes a long time to judge based on how much "good" the proposal can accomplish.
Well, you wanna get your dom on you gotta put it out there. The reason the law is there is to back up the social contract that should prevent this sort of thing in the first place.
Cause I was just about to watch Colbert
Double :(
I just meant (in this particular case) improvements to the install process, as in being able to install over XP.
But yes, there aren't too many reasons to switch other than the improved security, and even that's of enough use to counterbalance the pain of upgrading a whole company now that people have learned to deal with XP's security failings.
Is that it took all this time for NASA to figure out they should probably team up and help promote themselves through one of the most popular tv shows on earth once they had become a fixture on that show. It's almost like Colbert said to NASA, "Hey, guys. Here's a gift. Don't screw it up." It looks like they just may not, at that.
...MS hasn't often demonstrated an ability to make major functioning software improvements at the last minute. I suppose we'll see, though.
The companies are making money from being an ISP but being a large company they invest large amounts of money finding ways to charge more for what they already sell. Their two major obstacles to raising their prices are losing customers to the competition and being regulated because of customer outrage. The customer migration problem is solved both by the average customer's ignorance of what they're being charged for and by eventually having every major company switch to this very profitable pricing model. The legislative part of the problem is solved by using the issues surrounding bandwidth usage (torrents being a major one) to cloud the issues. The major issue being that the prices they're about to start charging, especially in the higher tiers, are absurdly higher than they should be.
Unless I've missed something I think that's the bulk of why Time Warner's method of tiered pricing is unacceptable.
Yes, sadly in this day, forcing someone to shave, to bath, to listen to music they don't like, to watch TV shows making fun of their ideals or image is akin to starvation, braking bones, inserting surgical instruments into the human body or operating with nothing to dull the pain, pulling off fingernails, and threatening someone with death and taking them almost there.
Shaving and bathing, ok, that's not torture, that's promoting good hygiene in a community environment so that the prisoners don't wind up with lice.
Being made to listen to music you don't like isn't so bad, but it is when you're made to listen to the same song over and over at a high volume for days. Making fun of their ideals or making them watch a movie for retribution, infantile and not even close to what I expect from professional soldiers, let alone professional soldiers under my employ.
Now...I know the RIAA will be storming my front door for this, but tonight go torrent any CD published by Disney in the last 10 years and play a random track on repeat as loud as you can, then lay in bed and try your best to sleep. Now imagine being locked in your room for six months (or two thirds of a baby, however you want to think of it) and handing the play button to someone with the mindset of a 10 year old boy poking a dead bird with a stick. Imagine what they could do to you when all you want is a nap. Tell me you wouldn't let someone break your finger to not have that happen. Go ahead, lie to me.
I hope this is a legitimate claim, or I'll have to start hating you, too.
Perhaps not, but tell that to people who lost loved ones in the earthquake.
Unfortunately the inherent value of your life as an individual is one of the things you trade for living amidst a lot of people.
It's a summer blockbuster without any finished CGI (and missing most of the half-finished stuff, too), close to no color grading, and missing a lot of the foley. Since a lot of this was shot in the controlled environment of a sound stage that means you're constantly put off balance by the lack of life in the film because a team of professionals haven't added back in what could have been there in the first place but isn't because it's much...much easier to add effects to it later if there's no surprises.
It's also lacking much of a plot, the characters lack any motivation for what they do and tend to go off on wild unhinged killing sprees simply to give them something to slash or shoot leaving you thinking "Umm, why did that just happen?" most of the time. The best thing I can say about it is that the stunt men are well trained and skilled at what they do.
I'm sure the final cut will have lots of nice explosions, though.
I'm augmenting iluvcapra's previous point here. And although I don't mean to sound like a troll, this might come out sounding that way, but I don't mean to, so don't hate me.
You could have a valid complaint, but I think you're using the word digital and pixel in ways that don't really apply. The little spots on real film are chemicals on a strip of plastic, and you can see them to a certain degree when it's projected large enough. So, what you're probably seeing is the grains of color which have been scanned in and then digitally projected (or faked in the case of movies that were shot on video instead of film but still want to look like they were shot on film). They've been there since film was invented, but the sharper the projection the more you'll see them because any blurryness will blend the little spots together.
Tell that to Lindsay Lohan. I've heard more late night show jokes pertaining to her and drugs than I can shake a stick at, but they still stick her untalented ass in movies and she still has more money than god.
There are plenty of trainwrecks that have no talent and keep on earning. The only people who celebrity their way to the poor house are at the screwup level of a Spears or a...oh...what's the name of that guy from the Batman movie, died cause he was stupid and took too many pills, never made a movie I wanted to watch until the one he died after making (because it was the only one which was a solid film from beginning to end)?
...and had forgotten the next day was April 1. Everything in my insides clenched for just a moment.
That would be a shock and a disaster.
No such thing as accessory after the fact to copyright violation, yet.
If you've read this thread you've been spoiled already, but out of politeness I'll just say that there's spoilers following)
I've read a lot of posts and articles in which people are debating the validity of the choice to explain everything as being god's work. I never thought that way myself, but because you could make a halfway decent argument for that point of view I've done some thinking into the best way to explain why it's not a copout and I think I've come up with a pretty good one.
Through prophecy and the guidance of the show's God they're led to a ruined earth. Whether or not God intended it to be ruined when they found it or not can be debated right up until the point in the last episode at which point they find Earth2. When it becomes apparent that God intended the whole time for them to end their journey at Earth2 (because Kara's song is what led them there) it makes the discovery of a devastated Earth2 part of the process of getting there. More specifically, it turns Earth1 into a lesson. It makes it a meaningful example on the way to understanding what produced the destruction of their entire civilization this means God has a purpose in leading them on this convoluted path through genocide and oppression and heartache. Even at its most passive the purpose for God's journey must be to teach humanity that lesson.
This purpose gives the God real substance and character and it's this character that takes God from some convenient force that can be used to explain anything and everything and incorporates it into the plot in a legitimate way. This makes the lack of an explanation for what specifically Kara is or what the Head 6 and Head Gaius are ok. It's unimportant to the plot. All the story needs is enough explanation of what they are to show that they really were tools of the character which is God, and that was accomplished. This also legitimizes the spirituality of the story, because that is the story. It's a story of what God put mankind through in order to give them a chance to be better.
Just my two cents, and it reaches just a little bit, but there it is.
But that didn't make sense for them since those two mentioned God's plan more than anyone else in the show
True. But those two characters, especially the Angel 6, have said a lot of things that weren't true but which the characters needed to hear. In terms of a person's willingness to believe, there's a big difference between attributing something to a guiding force and attributing it to the classical christian God.
Ahh, it's like american PBS, except completely without commercials instead of having a few commercials between programs?
It may also mean that they recognize that if they distribute high quality files on bittorrent with a lot of bandwidth behind it (and maybe release it before anyone else has a chance to) that they can eventually slide a quick commercial in there and people will choose their file because they'll have been getting it fast, reliably, and looking great.
...the f#*$.