I have no real interest in the DS. If I picked up any new generation portable, it'd be the PSP. I've never had a particular affinity to Nintendo, but I do think the GBA is a terrific device, which is pretty funny, since when I first tried one about 4-5 years ago, I thought it sucked. It took the SP to really sell me on it.
My GBASP is just peachy. I'd have been hosed with the original GBA due to the lighting issue, but the SP is marvelous. Long battery life. HUGE library of games. Ebook reader. JPEG etc... As I posted earlier. It's a bloody awesome device. For $200 Canadian I have:
A GBA SP Headphone adaptor Belt loop carry case 512 megabit flashcart (64 megs in the real world)
Throw in the homebrew goodies I mentioned. Fantastic.
Design the sucker so you have to buy a $40 adapter to use headphones?
What planet are you from? I'm in Canada and picked up a GBA SP recently. I LOVE IT! It's awesome! Get a flashcart and I've got a JPEG viewer, MP3 player, video player etc... Awesome.
My headphone adaptor cost me $10 Canadian, brand new.
Only complaint I have is the shoulder buttons are pretty crap if you have adult sized hands, but then most games don't require the buttons to be hammered repeatedly, so it's not an issue.
If you're going to whine, at least come up with facts instead of bumping figures by 400%.
What does having a job have to do with anything? I can't work for health reasons, yet I have a good number of DVD's here.
That is the problem. The perception. Consumer. Consume. Just because some people aren't satisfying their need to consume by throwing money at a corrupt organisation, doesn't mean they're downloading illegally.
The other problem with your argument is who gets to decide what, exactly, illegal downloading is? Do you think that even if you own everything you download, that you're going to be exempt from this? You're going to be provided some magical legal shield because you genuinely own everything you download? Of course not. Of course, the percentage of folks this applies to is miniscule, but that is beside the point. As far as the law is concerned, downloading a movie or an album off the net is illegal, end of story. There is no "unless the downloader already owns it" clause.
In that regards, yes, fair use rights have died. If you don't have the means to make a backup of your DVD you paid for, and you download an AVI of it to archive, you're still considered a criminal, despite, essentially, doing exactly what you are entitled to do under the law.
You people decrying Slashdot are as guilty as the people you condemn for simply seeing this as a black and white issue, when it is unbeliveably grey.
I'm a writer. I've been plagiarised. No, this isn't hypothetical. This happened to me just recently. An article of mine was taken and reprinted, verbatim, with my credit removed.
I contacted the individual and they were very agreeable and corrected the problem. We came to a compromise. I allowed him to use part of what I wrote, so long as he provided a link to the full piece.
So I granted him fair use. Everyone came out happy.
Had he not agreed, what would I have done? Nothing. I've already been paid for the article in question. I own the copyright of the article in question. I enforced my copyright in a fair and civil manner. Had that not worked, so be it.
Do I agree with copyright protection? To a point. I was upset I had been plagiarised, but it didn't adversely hurt me, so to be honest, it was more a moral than a financial thing. I quite honestly don't mind if someone copies everything I write. My main issue with the article that was copied was that my name was removed from the piece. Had the person left my credit intact, I would probably have not even contacted them. So long as my name is intact, and the person copying the work isn't profiting from it, I have no problem.
That is what irks me with the current spate of legislation. I'm willing to bet 99% of those who download movies, music etc... Do it for themselves. Not to profit from anothers work. THAT is what copyright protections should enforce. They should punish those seeking to profit from anothers work.
They should not be used to criminalise the simple act of downloading.
I love how the whiny little bitches on here who are the type who equate stealing a car with downloading a movie, (despite the many MANY flaws in their argument) always seem to fall oddly silent when a well reasoned argument like yours appears.
Nice one! I have movies on DVD that I've also downloaded, simply so I can watch them on my system that doesn't have a DVD drive. Yet by doing that, I've now broken the law.
Anyone who thinks that is any way that doing that makes me a criminal is an idiot. Or works for the MPAA. Or both.
You can't sit down and play a game for 15-30 minutes anymore because almost every game has 10 minutes of cutscene or exposition before you play a fucking thing.
Metal Gear Solid 3. Now I'm a big MGS fan. I love the games. However, MGS3 just took the piss.
You start out with a long intro... Which then has a FLASHBACK CUTSCENE IN IT. As a friend put it, "AH! Nested cutscenes." I mean it was honestly 25 minutes before I got to play the fucker. Now the opening cutscene from MGS2 was awesome. Stylish. Felt like a movie. MGS3 was just interminable.
There's also the fact these days that if you put a game down for more than a few days, you'll invariably forget how to play it. Games come with such pitiful manuals these days (in an attempt to sell the crappy overpriced Prima guide.) that in most games, you have to rely on the tutorial. Of course in most games, once you've done the tutorial, that's it. You can't do it again, so you go back to a game you haven't played in a couple of months and have to spend ten minutes fumbling with the controller to try and remember what the hell to do.
Look at Mario. You can not play that for YEARS, and still be able to pick it up and play it.
Let's see folk try that with the current "Ooo! Shiny!" generation in ten years.
Too much crap needs unlocking in Tony Hawk games. Sure, a challenge is fun, but I get sick of having to jump through hoops to unlock stuff in games.
As for fighting games, great pick up and play gameplay there. I still have a Dreamcast that is pretty much dedicated to fighting games. I have Tekken 5 on the PS2, but I have damn near every fighting game made on the DC.
Tetris: Amazing. One of the best games I've ever made. Not good for me for just pick up and play, but I have always been a bit of a Tetris God. My wife picked me up one of those cheap $5 handheld games for Christmas. One of those that claims to have about 1000 games, but only has about 12. Who cares. One of them is Tetris. Bring it on!
The demise of DOS hasn't helped. I mean most DOS games (note I say MOST) worked with Windows 98. Just boot to DOS mode. Some required shenanigans.
Now we've got XP, and you can't run DOS titles without bollocking around for ages.
This is why my old P120 laptop is a godsend. Has sound. Has a gigabyte of storage. (200 megs of which is Debian. 400 of which is a stripped down CD image of "Old Time Baseball".) Has DOS 6.2, and a whole slew of old DOS games on it.
I lament the demise of 2D platformers. I mean I love Sly Cooper etc... But the fact is through ALL these games, I don't get the simple visceral enjoyment I got from Sonic, or hell, even the Monty series, or Jet Set Willy.
One thing I do notice playing 8bit games. CHRIST the games were hard in those days! I mean we bitch about save points now, but back then the games were hardcore! You could spent 45 minutes getting somewhere, only to die and be dumped back to the title screen.
Plus the end games that, in many cases, simply looped the game and made it harder. HAHAH! Sadism at it's best. Fuck CG outros. Fuck credits. Just loop the bastard. Awesome.
In Formula One (the sport that just hilariously shot itself in the face at Indy, and I say that as a fan of 20 years), drivers, on some circuits, experience g-forces that are only experienced in one other arena. Those of test pilots. There's a particular complex of corners at Silverstone in England, where Nigel Mansell, 12 years ago, pulled 7 lateral G. So 7 times the force of gravity sideways.
You have to be incredibly fit to race single seaters, which makes it as much an athletic endeavour as football. I mean nobody would accuse a placekicker of not being an athlete, and he does a shitload less work than most racing drivers.
As for poker being a sport... Nope. Requires no athletic endeavour. However, it is a very good GAME. (One that I got hooked on, in part due to Wil Wheaton.)
The big difference between this and other leaks, is that this is looking like it was leaked by Apple themselves. I forget the guys name, but he's a stooge of Jobs, and everything I've read implies it was him that leaked the story. At least on the WSJ.
How would it be more "ethically remiss" because it's a non-profit charitable group? That's boneheaded hypocrisy and stinks of "Look at me, I care". And the Dumbest Ask Slashdot award of 2005 goes to...
Worry about throwing a decent LAN event. If you say the LAN is off limits, people will just use their CD/DVD burners anyway.
How about being a gracious host rather than a little warez nazi?
Actually I'm paid to blog. However, I do not earn very much from it. Probably because I'm NOT pimping for someone else. I merely news gather and post the news. Simple as that. Pay is a lot less for that sort of gig unfortunately.
Yes, because after all, Lucas didn't rob fans who paid to see Phantom Menace... *shakes head*
The fact is, I've grabbed the copy off the net. It's very good quality. It's the finished product, with two annoying timers on it. I had ABSOLUTELY NO INTENTION of paying to see the movie in the theatre. Not after Menace and Clones. I most likely wouldn't even buy the DVD.
However, having seen it now, courtesy of this leaked version, I will most definitely be buying the DVD. Seeing a movie I would never have paid to see has, ultimately, led me to decide I will most definitely get the DVD.
If cementing in my mind that, at the appointed time, Lucas will receive $30 from me for the DVD is stealing, then you live in a very, VERY strange world my friend.
To the replies saying "no, wait, we're not like that" -- read Slashdot more. The deterioration from a site where intelligent people shared ideas into a cesspool of nonstop idiocy and foolhardy arguments powered by nothing more than zealotry is astounding.
Couldn't have put it better myself. There was a time when Slashdot was a great site. I could happily spend hours, every day, conversing with folk.
Now I don't even check the site every day. I rarely post. Dvorak's comments are on the nail. You only have to read Slashdot to see that. This thread is a prime example.
The community attitude is one of the reasons I'm no longer an outspoken Linux advocate, and now get paid to write about video games instead.
Dvorak is one of the smartest writers in the industry, and as someone who took a step back a couple of years ago, after being immersed in Linux (and being paid to write about it) for the better part of four years, Dvorak has called it right. (For the record, I was a rampant member of the Amiga community as well.)
The Linux community IS populated by lunatics. Microsoft don't even need to fight Linux. They can just sit back and watch the community built around it fall apart. Torn apart by the childish zealots who created the situation.
Dvorak is merely commenting on it. Those who think he's blowing smoke are the exact problem the community has.
They left out the Guide entry on towels, AND the entry for Earth, which was only the damn title of the fifth book.
As I saw it put elsewhere, "Hey, Peter! I've got a great idea! Let's leave the Balrog out of the movie!"
Fuck Disney. Everyone involved in taking this marvelous quirky story and turning it into a fucking Galaxy Quest clone needs to be skullfucked to death.
Slashdot Mirror
What everyone seems to forget is that Joystiq are full of shit. Always with the vague reporting... The site blows.
Perhaps he meant that listening to Bryan Adams is a hazard...
And River City Ransom is out on the GBA. Port of the original NES version, with a whole bunch of tweakables in the menus. Very nice.
Yes. Because technology doesn't move on and improve in five years.
Good god, how do you people even manage to dress yourselves?
GBA SP: No standard headphone jack. Cannot listen to headphones while charging.
If you buy the Hipgear headphone adaptor, yes you can. (I know. I've got one.)
I have no real interest in the DS. If I picked up any new generation portable, it'd be the PSP. I've never had a particular affinity to Nintendo, but I do think the GBA is a terrific device, which is pretty funny, since when I first tried one about 4-5 years ago, I thought it sucked. It took the SP to really sell me on it.
If I had mod points I'd kiss you with them!:)
My GBASP is just peachy. I'd have been hosed with the original GBA due to the lighting issue, but the SP is marvelous. Long battery life. HUGE library of games. Ebook reader. JPEG etc... As I posted earlier. It's a bloody awesome device. For $200 Canadian I have:
A GBA SP
Headphone adaptor
Belt loop carry case
512 megabit flashcart (64 megs in the real world)
Throw in the homebrew goodies I mentioned. Fantastic.
Design the sucker so you have to buy a $40 adapter to use headphones?
What planet are you from? I'm in Canada and picked up a GBA SP recently. I LOVE IT! It's awesome! Get a flashcart and I've got a JPEG viewer, MP3 player, video player etc... Awesome.
My headphone adaptor cost me $10 Canadian, brand new.
Only complaint I have is the shoulder buttons are pretty crap if you have adult sized hands, but then most games don't require the buttons to be hammered repeatedly, so it's not an issue.
If you're going to whine, at least come up with facts instead of bumping figures by 400%.
That's the exact point I was trying to make.
What makes you think I don't already have it;)
All that's missing is the Gameboy music:)
What does having a job have to do with anything? I can't work for health reasons, yet I have a good number of DVD's here.
That is the problem. The perception. Consumer. Consume. Just because some people aren't satisfying their need to consume by throwing money at a corrupt organisation, doesn't mean they're downloading illegally.
The other problem with your argument is who gets to decide what, exactly, illegal downloading is? Do you think that even if you own everything you download, that you're going to be exempt from this? You're going to be provided some magical legal shield because you genuinely own everything you download? Of course not. Of course, the percentage of folks this applies to is miniscule, but that is beside the point. As far as the law is concerned, downloading a movie or an album off the net is illegal, end of story. There is no "unless the downloader already owns it" clause.
In that regards, yes, fair use rights have died. If you don't have the means to make a backup of your DVD you paid for, and you download an AVI of it to archive, you're still considered a criminal, despite, essentially, doing exactly what you are entitled to do under the law.
You people decrying Slashdot are as guilty as the people you condemn for simply seeing this as a black and white issue, when it is unbeliveably grey.
I'm a writer. I've been plagiarised. No, this isn't hypothetical. This happened to me just recently. An article of mine was taken and reprinted, verbatim, with my credit removed.
I contacted the individual and they were very agreeable and corrected the problem. We came to a compromise. I allowed him to use part of what I wrote, so long as he provided a link to the full piece.
So I granted him fair use. Everyone came out happy.
Had he not agreed, what would I have done? Nothing. I've already been paid for the article in question. I own the copyright of the article in question. I enforced my copyright in a fair and civil manner. Had that not worked, so be it.
Do I agree with copyright protection? To a point. I was upset I had been plagiarised, but it didn't adversely hurt me, so to be honest, it was more a moral than a financial thing. I quite honestly don't mind if someone copies everything I write. My main issue with the article that was copied was that my name was removed from the piece. Had the person left my credit intact, I would probably have not even contacted them. So long as my name is intact, and the person copying the work isn't profiting from it, I have no problem.
That is what irks me with the current spate of legislation. I'm willing to bet 99% of those who download movies, music etc... Do it for themselves. Not to profit from anothers work. THAT is what copyright protections should enforce. They should punish those seeking to profit from anothers work.
They should not be used to criminalise the simple act of downloading.
I love how the whiny little bitches on here who are the type who equate stealing a car with downloading a movie, (despite the many MANY flaws in their argument) always seem to fall oddly silent when a well reasoned argument like yours appears.
Nice one! I have movies on DVD that I've also downloaded, simply so I can watch them on my system that doesn't have a DVD drive. Yet by doing that, I've now broken the law.
Anyone who thinks that is any way that doing that makes me a criminal is an idiot. Or works for the MPAA. Or both.
You can't sit down and play a game for 15-30 minutes anymore because almost every game has 10 minutes of cutscene or exposition before you play a fucking thing.
Metal Gear Solid 3. Now I'm a big MGS fan. I love the games. However, MGS3 just took the piss.
You start out with a long intro... Which then has a FLASHBACK CUTSCENE IN IT. As a friend put it, "AH! Nested cutscenes." I mean it was honestly 25 minutes before I got to play the fucker. Now the opening cutscene from MGS2 was awesome. Stylish. Felt like a movie. MGS3 was just interminable.
There's also the fact these days that if you put a game down for more than a few days, you'll invariably forget how to play it. Games come with such pitiful manuals these days (in an attempt to sell the crappy overpriced Prima guide.) that in most games, you have to rely on the tutorial. Of course in most games, once you've done the tutorial, that's it. You can't do it again, so you go back to a game you haven't played in a couple of months and have to spend ten minutes fumbling with the controller to try and remember what the hell to do.
Look at Mario. You can not play that for YEARS, and still be able to pick it up and play it.
Let's see folk try that with the current "Ooo! Shiny!" generation in ten years.
Too much crap needs unlocking in Tony Hawk games. Sure, a challenge is fun, but I get sick of having to jump through hoops to unlock stuff in games.
As for fighting games, great pick up and play gameplay there. I still have a Dreamcast that is pretty much dedicated to fighting games. I have Tekken 5 on the PS2, but I have damn near every fighting game made on the DC.
Tetris: Amazing. One of the best games I've ever made. Not good for me for just pick up and play, but I have always been a bit of a Tetris God. My wife picked me up one of those cheap $5 handheld games for Christmas. One of those that claims to have about 1000 games, but only has about 12. Who cares. One of them is Tetris. Bring it on!
Mario: So long as it's 2D, it rocks.
The demise of DOS hasn't helped. I mean most DOS games (note I say MOST) worked with Windows 98. Just boot to DOS mode. Some required shenanigans.
Now we've got XP, and you can't run DOS titles without bollocking around for ages.
This is why my old P120 laptop is a godsend. Has sound. Has a gigabyte of storage. (200 megs of which is Debian. 400 of which is a stripped down CD image of "Old Time Baseball".) Has DOS 6.2, and a whole slew of old DOS games on it.
I lament the demise of 2D platformers. I mean I love Sly Cooper etc... But the fact is through ALL these games, I don't get the simple visceral enjoyment I got from Sonic, or hell, even the Monty series, or Jet Set Willy.
One thing I do notice playing 8bit games. CHRIST the games were hard in those days! I mean we bitch about save points now, but back then the games were hardcore! You could spent 45 minutes getting somewhere, only to die and be dumped back to the title screen.
Plus the end games that, in many cases, simply looped the game and made it harder. HAHAH! Sadism at it's best. Fuck CG outros. Fuck credits. Just loop the bastard. Awesome.
Ah, those were the days.
It should be! I used to run that game just fine on my P166 with 32 megs ram and a 4 meg Voodoo 1 card!
In Formula One (the sport that just hilariously shot itself in the face at Indy, and I say that as a fan of 20 years), drivers, on some circuits, experience g-forces that are only experienced in one other arena. Those of test pilots. There's a particular complex of corners at Silverstone in England, where Nigel Mansell, 12 years ago, pulled 7 lateral G. So 7 times the force of gravity sideways.
You have to be incredibly fit to race single seaters, which makes it as much an athletic endeavour as football. I mean nobody would accuse a placekicker of not being an athlete, and he does a shitload less work than most racing drivers.
As for poker being a sport... Nope. Requires no athletic endeavour. However, it is a very good GAME. (One that I got hooked on, in part due to Wil Wheaton.)
The big difference between this and other leaks, is that this is looking like it was leaked by Apple themselves. I forget the guys name, but he's a stooge of Jobs, and everything I've read implies it was him that leaked the story. At least on the WSJ.
How would it be more "ethically remiss" because it's a non-profit charitable group? That's boneheaded hypocrisy and stinks of "Look at me, I care". And the Dumbest Ask Slashdot award of 2005 goes to...
Worry about throwing a decent LAN event. If you say the LAN is off limits, people will just use their CD/DVD burners anyway.
How about being a gracious host rather than a little warez nazi?
Actually I'm paid to blog. However, I do not earn very much from it. Probably because I'm NOT pimping for someone else. I merely news gather and post the news. Simple as that. Pay is a lot less for that sort of gig unfortunately.
Yes, because after all, Lucas didn't rob fans who paid to see Phantom Menace... *shakes head*
The fact is, I've grabbed the copy off the net. It's very good quality. It's the finished product, with two annoying timers on it. I had ABSOLUTELY NO INTENTION of paying to see the movie in the theatre. Not after Menace and Clones. I most likely wouldn't even buy the DVD.
However, having seen it now, courtesy of this leaked version, I will most definitely be buying the DVD. Seeing a movie I would never have paid to see has, ultimately, led me to decide I will most definitely get the DVD.
If cementing in my mind that, at the appointed time, Lucas will receive $30 from me for the DVD is stealing, then you live in a very, VERY strange world my friend.
Then you're a fool who will never get to see a DVD on the highest quality screen in your house. You're loss, mate...
To the replies saying "no, wait, we're not like that" -- read Slashdot more. The deterioration from a site where intelligent people shared ideas into a cesspool of nonstop idiocy and foolhardy arguments powered by nothing more than zealotry is astounding.
Couldn't have put it better myself. There was a time when Slashdot was a great site. I could happily spend hours, every day, conversing with folk.
Now I don't even check the site every day. I rarely post. Dvorak's comments are on the nail. You only have to read Slashdot to see that. This thread is a prime example.
The community attitude is one of the reasons I'm no longer an outspoken Linux advocate, and now get paid to write about video games instead.
Dvorak is one of the smartest writers in the industry, and as someone who took a step back a couple of years ago, after being immersed in Linux (and being paid to write about it) for the better part of four years, Dvorak has called it right. (For the record, I was a rampant member of the Amiga community as well.)
The Linux community IS populated by lunatics. Microsoft don't even need to fight Linux. They can just sit back and watch the community built around it fall apart. Torn apart by the childish zealots who created the situation.
Dvorak is merely commenting on it. Those who think he's blowing smoke are the exact problem the community has.
They left out the Guide entry on towels, AND the entry for Earth, which was only the damn title of the fifth book.
As I saw it put elsewhere, "Hey, Peter! I've got a great idea! Let's leave the Balrog out of the movie!"
Fuck Disney. Everyone involved in taking this marvelous quirky story and turning it into a fucking Galaxy Quest clone needs to be skullfucked to death.