That's bull. The reason you don't see any typewriters is because of computers in general. If MS had lost a certain lawsuit you'd be saying the same thing about ClarisWorks or WordPerfect or something.
PDFs were created with the internet AND printers in mind. The whole point is that you know your format won't change no matter what computer/printer you change. I can make document in Word on a PC, export it as PDF, then send it to a Mac with no word processor and I know it will look exactly how it did on the PC. I get sent a lot of.doc files created on PCs and when I open them in OOo on my Mac they're sometimes screwed up. Not always, but sometimes. Who knows whether it's because I'm using a different OS, word processor, or both; but the problem can be easily adverted with PDF and that's one of the main reasons Adobe made it other than money. Not to mention that if it weren't for OOo then it would be impossible for me to open a.doc (paying for Word is not an option, and not because I'm broke)
If we were to interpret it that way, what would the uneducated video game journalists rant about? Getting all the facts is boring and leaves no room for conjecture, so shut up!:P
Hopefully they piss GameStop off and hurt XBox in the long run. I think this was a bad idea all around because Microsoft deals in profits way beyond the scope of these brick and mortar stores. If they take off there won't be any excuse to axe them, but they will anger brick and mortar competitors while not significantly adding to revenue. They're just giving other retailers more reasons to support Chrome and Apple. Not to mention the fact that too many OEMs use MS software to include them all in one store, so those who are left out may lean toward Google as well. You are right, XBox will be the store's main attraction and they hope to turn XBox dweebs into MS borg. What MS doesn't realize is that they already are, they just aren't tech savvy and don't want any technology that doesn't digitize combat and war. No, XBox kids don't want your Zune.
That's GUITAR. My drummer learned how to play from Rock Band. Has a full set and can play just about anything now.
The guitar parts do teach you rhythm as well, they just don't teach you chords and scales. It's decent finger exercise for a guitarist, and I think playing Guitar Hero on expert is much more difficult than playing the song on an actual guitar. It may not be challenging in the same way, but the argument that, given the amount of time and energy one puts into Guitar Hero, they should be able to use that time to play guitar instead, still stands.
Playing guitar isn't nearly as hard as you make it out to be. It's not like you have to be Eddie Van Halen to rock out. Just like not everyone can play the most difficult Guitar Hero songs on expert, but most people can play the game. Songs that are unbearably difficult usually suck anyway.
That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Ireland is a Catholic nation whose politicians are all pretty much on the same page concerning religion. There is so much religious diversity in America that defining "blasphemy" from a political standpoint would be impossible without endorsing a single religion. It's not like Christianity is one religion. I'm Lutheran and my church has no problem with abortion or contraceptives. The Catholics find both blasphemous while the Baptists just find abortion to be.
I hope you're not an American because everyone in this country should be aware of our freedoms of speech and religion. Even if congress were to ever pass an anti-blasphemy law all the smaller sects would take it to court and win. The Mormons and Scientologists have more power than you think, also. I couldn't see any Congressman, Republican or Democrat, supporting such a blatantly anti-American law. How do you disguise an anti-blasphemy law as anti-terrorist anyway? "Praise Allah" and "Praise God" mean the same thing and they reference the SAME GOD.
I think you're making a bunch of brouhaha out of nothing. Game companies don't screw you, you screw yourself by getting so emotionally involved in how the game companies try to make money. I disagree with how Microsoft does business so I just don't buy their stuff, even if that game I would like to play is only on their system (thank God Bioshock got ported to PS3!). Companies worry about piracy because it's real. It's no different than people stealing cable, people will take something for nothing if they can get away with it. I don't expect that by being an informed and discriminate consumer that anything will change but I do think that where you draw the line is important.
DRM as a whole is not some conspiracy designed to infringe upon your rights. If the DRM goes too far then the product should be irrelevant, don't buy it. Companies, as a whole, abuse their customers because their customers are willfully uninformed. As far as I'm concerned, people who are willfully uniformed deserve the misfortunes of the stuff they sucker themselves into buying. Like the guys who think Macs are dumb but complain when their unprotected computer is infected with some virus after Googling "anal."
Don't get pissed at anyone but yourself when you get burned with a product because with the internet you can find out anything you need. Furthermore, you're talking about PC gaming, so Microsoft is already shitting on you, aren't you used to it by now? (sorry, had to) Anyway, my philosophy is let the shisty assholes be shisty assholes, I'm just not helping them out.
Seriously, Futurama has been rerun more than anything except for Family Guy in recent history. Then account for DVD sales, 360/PS3 sales, and licensed junk you find at Spencer's. Then consider how much the show would suck if they replaced the voices. They would loose all of that money. So the way I see it, the voice actors deserve to get paid a premium. Hell, Seinfeld is like a gazillionare and you don't see NBC or ABC or whoever originally ran it complaining. They offered him more to continue!
with products such as Open XML." That was enough to convince me this article was full of shit. It also reminded me how those asshole haven't changed a bit.
Unfortunately Michael Bay films sell just like Gears of War sells. Some people want stupid, stereotyped characters doing predictable things without providing any insight. People always say that "gameplay" is what makes a game but I think gameplay and graphics are intertwined enough to be one in the same just as special effects and choreography. Sure, you can succeed in one and fail in the other, but failing in just one category makes the game unplayable or the movie unwatchable. Even when the technology is available for all games to have stellar graphics and gameplay games like Halo, which follow the Michael Bay movie formula (faux epics with no aesthetic value - testosterone orgies which focus on the next big explosion) will outsell games like Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colossus, or Killer 7 (which is violent in a Natural Born Killers way - i.e. there's a point at the end).
Anyway, I agree that it takes more than graphics to make a decent game, but for most graphics will do. Just look at what's #1 in the box office: Transformers.
Fortunately the open nature of this OS will lead to custom GUIs because using traditional Google primary colors for an OS is just butt-ugly. It reminds me of how cheesy Windows XP looks. Maybe I'm just spoiled with the suave look of OS X. I won't use Chrome as a main OS, but I'm going to familiarize myself with it so I can push it on all my anti-Mac friends. It's funny, they use Windows because they don't like Apple (price) but they all use Google for something. I doubt the ugly GUI would bother them, they use Windows;)
I think so. People believe in Google, most who have used the web have also used some sort of Google product. It's not like Red Hat or Ubuntu or something that Joe Shmoe will disregard because he's never heard of it. And it will be CHEAP (which probably means on sale at Wal-Mart).
I bet they'll profit by licensing it to hardware vendors. Basically the license will say that you have to pay up if you sell hardware but for personal use you can download for free.
That's one of the reasons human cloning is illegal;) It would be worse than that, however. Think about professional sports and all the potential corruption there. The records would become as meaningless as the MLB's over the last twenty years.
Personally, I think this research is good because it will probably be used to clone organs rather than entire individuals. I can't wait until I don't have to feel guilty for smoking:D
The amount of time invested in a MMO is all that matters (assuming that time is actually spent doing things which benefit your character). You pay for game time so the company rewards you for buying more time than others. That's why I quit WoW and why I'm afraid of Diablo 3 (damn you D1 $ 2 for all those hours you stole from me!). I don't feel so bad about being addicted to Starcraft because that's all strategy, reflexes, and control. Realtime chess:) But yeah, MMO's are pretty much a contest of who's got the most time to blow.
I doubt it. I think most opponents of stem cell research have no idea what type of potential this research has in store. They're either doubters, cynics, or they just don't think it will matter within their lifetime (like those who don't care about the environment b/c they see it as the next generation's problem). The Obama administration will fund this research and once people see what can be accomplished they'll demand it. I doubt there are many people who are seriously offended by the research in the first place. It's just in America, with only two political parties, everything gets polarized into two camps.
I agree child porn is immoral and should be illegal, but the main reason I think it should be illegal is so the girl isn't subjected to the photo shoot. A Photoshop job like this, despite being offensive, seems to be a protected right of Americans. South Park, for example, is composed of many offensive collages but I couldn't imagine condoning censorship of the show. I'd have to take the defendant's side on this issue, even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit. It's America, you take the good with the bad.
I really don't know what to think. Everyone is focussed on this unfortunate professor's situation while I'm more concerned about the idea of fighting wars with robots. It's not like any of the information really matters, the Chinese will always be able to make a badassthingamajig just as big or bigger than ours. We fight wars with primitive countries because a war between any two of the permanent U.N. security council members would be armageddon. If we start monitoring and fighting these countries which are unfortunate enough to be our enemy with robots then they'll get super pissed off. What I gathered from the article the technology he shared helped these drones fly better. If that's the case we should be sharing this information with other countries, namely the French, so their planes will stop dropping into the ocean.
One of the last bosses in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the Sorrow, who you cannot shoot or blow up or stab or do anything to. You have to walk down a river which is populated by the ghosts of all the guards you've killed throughout the game - and in MGS killing guards is optional, only bosses are sometimes necessary to kill - and each time their ghost passes through your body, you lose health. The guards are scared, screaming, and suffering from their fatal wounds. How many guards you kill determines how far you have to slowly trench upstream. I almost didn't make it - I died about fifteen times because there were so many ghosts that I just couldn't avoid them. That's what this article is talking about. Why do people go into stores and ask for the goriest game available?
Sony and Microsoft both built off of the EyeToy but they seemed to have gone in different directions. Looks to me like the Microsoft engineers have been watching too much Minority Report. Sony's, on the other hand, appear to have been playing too much Wii:)
I think that one thing that is being overlooked is out gigantic the guitar industry is. A lot of people play guitar and a lot of them are extremely good at it. In fact, there are so many people who can rock axe that being a "rock star" has been reduced to cheap commodity status. So those guys, instead of signing multi-million dollar contracts like they would with their talent had they been around with it twenty years ago, are now recording themselves with Logic or Pro Tools or whatever. Go to a bar and you'll find better music than you will on the radio. On top of that one has to consider how easy pop music is to make with programs like Logic. Music just isn't a multimillion dollar industry anymore. It's been reaching this point for a while - the whole rock star concept is selling a personality before music. Blame Elvis:P
Anyway, I don't know why everyone finds it so peculiar, as a musician I find it bizarre that people think that their ability to do what the guy in the Free Credit Report commercials does is somehow awe-inspiring. The only reason music was a multimillion dollar industry was because recording technology was expensive and distribution methods were cumbersome. Now with Garage Band and the internet any dimwit can create a song that would have made him famous in the eighties and go to one of the many websites in which amateur musicians swap songs. I predict the music industry will continue to suffer because not even the personalities are selling anymore (unless they have a t.v. show or license their music to a video game). With the internet - YouTube, MySpace, ect. - an advertising firm or movie studio or whatever can find the song they need without the middleman recording industry.
As a guitarist, I don't buy music often, but when I do it's off iTunes (what do I need a disc for?). I don't have a radio in my car so I have no idea what's out there but I don't care. I'm not a kid anymore, I don't idolize rock stars. I'd rather play a gig at a bar and enjoy myself than deal with the stress and pandemonium of a sold out arena.
Hell - the Jonas Brother's and Hannah Montana are the most successful acts out there - doesn't that tell ya something?
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That's bull. The reason you don't see any typewriters is because of computers in general. If MS had lost a certain lawsuit you'd be saying the same thing about ClarisWorks or WordPerfect or something.
PDFs were created with the internet AND printers in mind. The whole point is that you know your format won't change no matter what computer/printer you change. I can make document in Word on a PC, export it as PDF, then send it to a Mac with no word processor and I know it will look exactly how it did on the PC. I get sent a lot of .doc files created on PCs and when I open them in OOo on my Mac they're sometimes screwed up. Not always, but sometimes. Who knows whether it's because I'm using a different OS, word processor, or both; but the problem can be easily adverted with PDF and that's one of the main reasons Adobe made it other than money. Not to mention that if it weren't for OOo then it would be impossible for me to open a .doc (paying for Word is not an option, and not because I'm broke)
You're in error: don't confuse "the Republican party" with libertarians, who don't have an influential American political party and never will.
If we were to interpret it that way, what would the uneducated video game journalists rant about? Getting all the facts is boring and leaves no room for conjecture, so shut up! :P
Hopefully they piss GameStop off and hurt XBox in the long run. I think this was a bad idea all around because Microsoft deals in profits way beyond the scope of these brick and mortar stores. If they take off there won't be any excuse to axe them, but they will anger brick and mortar competitors while not significantly adding to revenue. They're just giving other retailers more reasons to support Chrome and Apple. Not to mention the fact that too many OEMs use MS software to include them all in one store, so those who are left out may lean toward Google as well. You are right, XBox will be the store's main attraction and they hope to turn XBox dweebs into MS borg. What MS doesn't realize is that they already are, they just aren't tech savvy and don't want any technology that doesn't digitize combat and war. No, XBox kids don't want your Zune.
. . .supposed to be fun?
That's GUITAR. My drummer learned how to play from Rock Band. Has a full set and can play just about anything now.
The guitar parts do teach you rhythm as well, they just don't teach you chords and scales. It's decent finger exercise for a guitarist, and I think playing Guitar Hero on expert is much more difficult than playing the song on an actual guitar. It may not be challenging in the same way, but the argument that, given the amount of time and energy one puts into Guitar Hero, they should be able to use that time to play guitar instead, still stands.
Playing guitar isn't nearly as hard as you make it out to be. It's not like you have to be Eddie Van Halen to rock out. Just like not everyone can play the most difficult Guitar Hero songs on expert, but most people can play the game. Songs that are unbearably difficult usually suck anyway.
Who marked this interesting? Are you serious?
That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Ireland is a Catholic nation whose politicians are all pretty much on the same page concerning religion. There is so much religious diversity in America that defining "blasphemy" from a political standpoint would be impossible without endorsing a single religion. It's not like Christianity is one religion. I'm Lutheran and my church has no problem with abortion or contraceptives. The Catholics find both blasphemous while the Baptists just find abortion to be.
I hope you're not an American because everyone in this country should be aware of our freedoms of speech and religion. Even if congress were to ever pass an anti-blasphemy law all the smaller sects would take it to court and win. The Mormons and Scientologists have more power than you think, also. I couldn't see any Congressman, Republican or Democrat, supporting such a blatantly anti-American law. How do you disguise an anti-blasphemy law as anti-terrorist anyway? "Praise Allah" and "Praise God" mean the same thing and they reference the SAME GOD.
I think you're making a bunch of brouhaha out of nothing. Game companies don't screw you, you screw yourself by getting so emotionally involved in how the game companies try to make money. I disagree with how Microsoft does business so I just don't buy their stuff, even if that game I would like to play is only on their system (thank God Bioshock got ported to PS3!). Companies worry about piracy because it's real. It's no different than people stealing cable, people will take something for nothing if they can get away with it. I don't expect that by being an informed and discriminate consumer that anything will change but I do think that where you draw the line is important.
DRM as a whole is not some conspiracy designed to infringe upon your rights. If the DRM goes too far then the product should be irrelevant, don't buy it. Companies, as a whole, abuse their customers because their customers are willfully uninformed. As far as I'm concerned, people who are willfully uniformed deserve the misfortunes of the stuff they sucker themselves into buying. Like the guys who think Macs are dumb but complain when their unprotected computer is infected with some virus after Googling "anal."
Don't get pissed at anyone but yourself when you get burned with a product because with the internet you can find out anything you need. Furthermore, you're talking about PC gaming, so Microsoft is already shitting on you, aren't you used to it by now? (sorry, had to) Anyway, my philosophy is let the shisty assholes be shisty assholes, I'm just not helping them out.
I have hundreds, most of which are classics.
Imagine in just ten or twenty years the games you pay $60 a piece for will be bought by someone like me at Goodwill for $1.
Seriously, Futurama has been rerun more than anything except for Family Guy in recent history. Then account for DVD sales, 360/PS3 sales, and licensed junk you find at Spencer's. Then consider how much the show would suck if they replaced the voices. They would loose all of that money. So the way I see it, the voice actors deserve to get paid a premium. Hell, Seinfeld is like a gazillionare and you don't see NBC or ABC or whoever originally ran it complaining. They offered him more to continue!
with products such as Open XML." That was enough to convince me this article was full of shit. It also reminded me how those asshole haven't changed a bit.
I disagree. Immersion can be dependent on many things. I know people who are obsessed with Mafia Wars or Mob Wars or whatever that MySpace game is called and it's "graphics" only consist of a couple .jpgs. Then look at Pokémon. Graphics may help a game sell and they may impress people, but that's different from immersion. No video game has ever had me as immersed as a good game of chess.
Unfortunately Michael Bay films sell just like Gears of War sells. Some people want stupid, stereotyped characters doing predictable things without providing any insight. People always say that "gameplay" is what makes a game but I think gameplay and graphics are intertwined enough to be one in the same just as special effects and choreography. Sure, you can succeed in one and fail in the other, but failing in just one category makes the game unplayable or the movie unwatchable. Even when the technology is available for all games to have stellar graphics and gameplay games like Halo, which follow the Michael Bay movie formula (faux epics with no aesthetic value - testosterone orgies which focus on the next big explosion) will outsell games like Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colossus, or Killer 7 (which is violent in a Natural Born Killers way - i.e. there's a point at the end).
Anyway, I agree that it takes more than graphics to make a decent game, but for most graphics will do. Just look at what's #1 in the box office: Transformers.
Fortunately the open nature of this OS will lead to custom GUIs because using traditional Google primary colors for an OS is just butt-ugly. It reminds me of how cheesy Windows XP looks. Maybe I'm just spoiled with the suave look of OS X. I won't use Chrome as a main OS, but I'm going to familiarize myself with it so I can push it on all my anti-Mac friends. It's funny, they use Windows because they don't like Apple (price) but they all use Google for something. I doubt the ugly GUI would bother them, they use Windows ;)
Heh, hopefully like most Google apps it will stay beta nearly forever. That way the news reports will say "Google's beta OS trouncing gold Windows 7."
I think so. People believe in Google, most who have used the web have also used some sort of Google product. It's not like Red Hat or Ubuntu or something that Joe Shmoe will disregard because he's never heard of it. And it will be CHEAP (which probably means on sale at Wal-Mart).
I bet they'll profit by licensing it to hardware vendors. Basically the license will say that you have to pay up if you sell hardware but for personal use you can download for free.
I hate to be a cliché Microsoft-basher but this really put a smile on my face, I've been waiting for Google to do this for years. It's companies like Microsoft that fuel all my socialist sentiments but fortunately their competitors - Google, Apple, Nintendo, and IBM (yeah, I said it) - they remind me of the merits of capitalism. Non-evil cunning can win :D The sad part is that Google is the only one of those companies I mentioned which hasn't been corrupted by power. The other three did the right thing because their backs were against the wall.
That's one of the reasons human cloning is illegal ;) It would be worse than that, however. Think about professional sports and all the potential corruption there. The records would become as meaningless as the MLB's over the last twenty years.
Personally, I think this research is good because it will probably be used to clone organs rather than entire individuals. I can't wait until I don't have to feel guilty for smoking :D
The amount of time invested in a MMO is all that matters (assuming that time is actually spent doing things which benefit your character). You pay for game time so the company rewards you for buying more time than others. That's why I quit WoW and why I'm afraid of Diablo 3 (damn you D1 $ 2 for all those hours you stole from me!). I don't feel so bad about being addicted to Starcraft because that's all strategy, reflexes, and control. Realtime chess :) But yeah, MMO's are pretty much a contest of who's got the most time to blow.
I doubt it. I think most opponents of stem cell research have no idea what type of potential this research has in store. They're either doubters, cynics, or they just don't think it will matter within their lifetime (like those who don't care about the environment b/c they see it as the next generation's problem). The Obama administration will fund this research and once people see what can be accomplished they'll demand it. I doubt there are many people who are seriously offended by the research in the first place. It's just in America, with only two political parties, everything gets polarized into two camps.
I agree child porn is immoral and should be illegal, but the main reason I think it should be illegal is so the girl isn't subjected to the photo shoot. A Photoshop job like this, despite being offensive, seems to be a protected right of Americans. South Park, for example, is composed of many offensive collages but I couldn't imagine condoning censorship of the show. I'd have to take the defendant's side on this issue, even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit. It's America, you take the good with the bad.
I really don't know what to think. Everyone is focussed on this unfortunate professor's situation while I'm more concerned about the idea of fighting wars with robots. It's not like any of the information really matters, the Chinese will always be able to make a badassthingamajig just as big or bigger than ours. We fight wars with primitive countries because a war between any two of the permanent U.N. security council members would be armageddon. If we start monitoring and fighting these countries which are unfortunate enough to be our enemy with robots then they'll get super pissed off. What I gathered from the article the technology he shared helped these drones fly better. If that's the case we should be sharing this information with other countries, namely the French, so their planes will stop dropping into the ocean.
One of the last bosses in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the Sorrow, who you cannot shoot or blow up or stab or do anything to. You have to walk down a river which is populated by the ghosts of all the guards you've killed throughout the game - and in MGS killing guards is optional, only bosses are sometimes necessary to kill - and each time their ghost passes through your body, you lose health. The guards are scared, screaming, and suffering from their fatal wounds. How many guards you kill determines how far you have to slowly trench upstream. I almost didn't make it - I died about fifteen times because there were so many ghosts that I just couldn't avoid them. That's what this article is talking about. Why do people go into stores and ask for the goriest game available?
Sony and Microsoft both built off of the EyeToy but they seemed to have gone in different directions. Looks to me like the Microsoft engineers have been watching too much Minority Report. Sony's, on the other hand, appear to have been playing too much Wii :)
I think that one thing that is being overlooked is out gigantic the guitar industry is. A lot of people play guitar and a lot of them are extremely good at it. In fact, there are so many people who can rock axe that being a "rock star" has been reduced to cheap commodity status. So those guys, instead of signing multi-million dollar contracts like they would with their talent had they been around with it twenty years ago, are now recording themselves with Logic or Pro Tools or whatever. Go to a bar and you'll find better music than you will on the radio. On top of that one has to consider how easy pop music is to make with programs like Logic. Music just isn't a multimillion dollar industry anymore. It's been reaching this point for a while - the whole rock star concept is selling a personality before music. Blame Elvis :P
Anyway, I don't know why everyone finds it so peculiar, as a musician I find it bizarre that people think that their ability to do what the guy in the Free Credit Report commercials does is somehow awe-inspiring. The only reason music was a multimillion dollar industry was because recording technology was expensive and distribution methods were cumbersome. Now with Garage Band and the internet any dimwit can create a song that would have made him famous in the eighties and go to one of the many websites in which amateur musicians swap songs. I predict the music industry will continue to suffer because not even the personalities are selling anymore (unless they have a t.v. show or license their music to a video game). With the internet - YouTube, MySpace, ect. - an advertising firm or movie studio or whatever can find the song they need without the middleman recording industry.
As a guitarist, I don't buy music often, but when I do it's off iTunes (what do I need a disc for?). I don't have a radio in my car so I have no idea what's out there but I don't care. I'm not a kid anymore, I don't idolize rock stars. I'd rather play a gig at a bar and enjoy myself than deal with the stress and pandemonium of a sold out arena.
Hell - the Jonas Brother's and Hannah Montana are the most successful acts out there - doesn't that tell ya something?