Much like the previous article on changing US bills for the sake of convenience, I think the amount of work it would take to not only convert all the hardware and software out there, but getting people used to it, would outweigh the benefits for far too long.
Besides, Swatch's internet time has been around forever, and few besides the geeky have paid attention to it.
It's exactly the same as if I had a magazine delivered to my house, and hired someone to cut out all the ads and replace them with other ads.
Um... not exactly. A more accurate analogy (at least as far as analogies go anyway) would be if on its way through the postal system, your local postal worker cut out all the ads from the magazines and placed ads which directly benefitted him only, and in such a way that you as the magazine subscriber didn't notice.
Gator doesn't make this practice clear to users of their software other than in a badly worded sub-section of the installer which is easily missed.
Why on earth would you as an end-user actively want the adverts of a website replaced with adverts from Gator?
A user knowingly blocking ads from a site is one thing, but a piece of software trying to go behind both the user and website's back and profit off of both isn't the same.
"Just sounds like stubborn anti-change sentiment to me."
Wait... so what you're saying is that the population of a country is bad for being "anti-change", when the reason given for the change is to stop inconvieniencing a smaller number of tourists who are complaining about the change from the color system of currency of their home country?
Should we also adopt the currency systems (euros, marks, etc) because of the inconvienience to foreign visitors?
While what you say is true of those of us who build, tinker and play with our home-built computers, the vast majority of computer users paid for someone else to build their machines, and then pay for an ISP like AOL to get them online without much work on their part.
Instead, I suspect the main reasons pay sites don't work involve a combination of the simple fact that when people think "internet" they think "place to get free stuff", along with a lack of interest in the particular product and, of course, the lack of income from web advertisers these days.
A significant amount of work has been done on mods to the Quake, Unreal and so forth engines by people who work in their spare time, which goes to show that as long as the base engine is competently done, there are more than enough people to pull off some amazing things.
Of course, many of these mod makers haven't embraced open-source development, keeping their work to themselves mostly in pipe-dream hopes of repeating the success of CounterStrike as much as preventing other mod teams from ripping them off.
Alright, I realise what we're talking about is more personal aesthetic tastes than anything else, but I just couldn't believe someone would describe Internet Explorer as "gorgeous".
Functional, yes. Gorgeous, what?
Regardless, if that's the biggest complaint, try any of the smattering of themes available. Now that 1.0 is out, I imagine they'll start growing in number soon, but at least try out Orbit Moz Theme
... and yet Operation Flashpoint is an order of magnitude more "real" than run-n-gun mods like CounterStrike, yet is loads of fun, and popular enough to warrant several expansions.
By your argument, no one would be playing any flight simulator for entertainment.
Well, being that this is based on top of the Unreal engine, development was neither costly, nor lengthy. I have no doubt that it cost less than any one recruitment commercial on television.
As for training, no they will not be using this particular game for that. In fact, the US Army has been working with the people behind Operation Flashpoint to produce a better training tool than the version of Doom the Marines have used over the years.
The US Army's use of modified off-the-shelf games dates back to the 80's with a version of the original vector graphics game Battlezone modified for use as a battle tank simulator.
I applaud the Army for trying out creative marketting techniques, it's not as if the game will beam subliminal messages into your head, and with it being Unreal based, there's the possibility of it being modified for Linux use as well.
Hell, as long as the game is good, it will be as effective a positive mindshare tool as any saturday morning cartoon is at getting you to buy action figures.
It depends on how you want to interpret any of the gazillion "Origin of Superman" stories. In many of them he didn't start to manifest his powers to anywhere from a toddler to puberty.
So, she could theoretically carry the child to term normally.
Additionally, in many of the DC comics that have taken place in the future, such as the excellent Kingdom Come Lois dies a while back, and Supes ends up conceiving a child with Wonder Woman. The daughter is shown in the Dark Knight 2 that's out now, I believe.
"You have to admit that episode 2 has been anticipated for a much longer time than spiderman."
Yes, but the group that's anticipating it is far smaller than the larger group who was interested in Spider-Man. The mainstream crowd may have had less excitement over the movie (though I saw the opposite in many cases), but their sheer numbers resulted in the large opening figures.
Yes, Star Wars still has some damn rabid fans, but they're a smaller group than pre-Phantom Menace, with many of us who used to be fanatics now seeing them as just regular "movies" thanks the eye-opening that Jar Jar and company brought us.
Even when you look at single day records, Spidey beats The Phantom Menace>'s $28.5 million (on the Wednesday it opened) with its $39.3 (Friday) and $43.7 million (Saturday) totals.
According to the records, The Phantom Menace made $64,820,970 during its openning weekend, and that was with all the hype and excitement that was going on at the time, with fans lining up for months ahead of time.
Unless Attack of the Clones can not only get beyond the general bad feeling that TPM left us with, and double its previous film's openning weekend intake, it won't manage it.
ATOC will make a boatload of money, but it's highly unlikely that it will undergo the opening explosion that Spidey is enjoying.
Or more specifically how well ATOC does during its opening compared to TPM did.
Prior to TPM, the hype machine was in full swing and everyone, even the non-geek-fanatics, was interested in not only seeing it, but on opening night.
But I just get the feeling that's no longer true for ATOC, thanks to the letdown that TPM was for the hardened fans, and in many ways, it was the contagious enthusiasm of the fanatics that carried over to the general populace.
Personally, I'll go see AOTC, but I certainly won't wait in a long line for it, and absolutely seeing it openning night isn't the priority that it once was. I don't doubt that ATOC will do well, but it's performance will be rather level over its run, not quite explosive during that opening weekend that the other Star Wars films will be.
And while there are still hardcore fans, their numbers will most likely have been reduced, at least in part.
Just for some numbers, a quick look at Box Office Mojo shows that The Phantom Menace did $64,820,970 in its opening weekend, compared to Spider-Man's $114 million. As it stands, Spidey is already at 1/4 of TPMs $431,088,297 gross to date number.
Will we ever see easy to change CD-Rom drive front covers to match your beige/black computer?
If anything the clash of drive covers with anything other than the "standard" colors has made the move to a rainbow of colors.
Perhaps a non-mono-color design would help, with black as the base color in order to more easily match drives, but with other colors accenting the machine to keep it from being the same dull design as the beige boxes?
I would imagine alot of this has to do with the simple psychology of people in large numbers.
In general it's a combination of decades of getting information and entertainment from a small number corporate sources, as well as the tendancy to gather where others are.
Still, while this paints a picture in which the majority will always go back to a few sources, ignoring the rest, at least in the digital age, those of us who do want to go discover an unheard of musician, writer or artist from remote locations have a much easier time doing so.
I'd say that Amazon is the middle ground, in that they sell new books, and oh yeah, have access to used versions as well.
I'd love to see some hard numbers from Amazon, but even without any hard evidence, I'd bet that their new book sales outnumber the used book sales by a good five to one ratio.
The only real way this hurts the publishing industry is in that hard to prove "people who would have bought a new book, had the used book not been there" catagory.
Seriously, where do they think used books come from? Someone had to buy them new at one time. People who really want a book and can afford to buy it new generally will, and people who want the book, but go for the used book generally wouldn't buy the new book if it was all that was available.
This is just another case of an organization who sees a small percentage of potential (not actual) lost profit and goes off annoying the people reponsible for the larger percentage of their profit, much like the RIAA and MPAA are doing currently.
"In the latest survey by Speakeasy, over 75% of players use broadband..."
Aren't the majority of Speakeasy's business built primarily at targetting "power users", such as gamers who seek broadband? That makes their statistics not exactly a snapshot for who's actually the majority of their players.
One of the main reasons CounterStrike (and therefore Half Life) seem to be still selling well is the number of low end systems, such as those found in "internet cafes", that can comfortably run it, which doesn't point to the majority of the players being broadband enabled.
Regardless, isn't Valve pretty much only about CounterStrike and other Half Life (ie Half Life, but this time you play as one of the Black Mesa janitors) knockoffs these days? At least, Team Fortress II seems to have fallen off all our radars.
While the core argument of sticking with pure text content for a website is a good one for many "overdone" websites, there are a number of cases in which these plugins do make perfect sense.
For example, as a gamer, I like being able to see video previews of works in progress, or catch a short film from any of those online film sites, or see a televised news report streamed to me about important events when I'm nowhere near a television.
It's a fine balance that needs to be struck between content and usability, sure, but going luddite on any site that dares use an animated gif is no better than those sites that have a non-skippable fifteen minute flash intro's.
Besides the question of how quickly and accurately this device can detect your "key taps", there's also the question of the lack of tactile feedback from a physical key press slowing you down.
Sure it's psychological, but I can remember just how painfully slow typing on my Timex Sinclair's membrane keyboard was.
Add to that the normal lag of a character appearing on the screen, and I'll hazard a guess that using the built in hand recognisition will be the way to go.
The CoS isn't the only ones who try to use this technique in order to make their sites rise in search engine ratings.
There are a number of those "Get More Hits For Your Website Cheap!" sites which try to do so by getting member sites to download an html file which contains links to most of their members, and then have you link this from your own site.
Much like a pyramid scheme, as new members join the get the same file with links to your site, thereby increasing the number of sites with links to you and possibly raising your position in search engines.
When I was a CS student back at college, I found that within the major, there was a small subset for which computers and programming were more than just a way to make money, and that these individuals were more knowledgeable of what was actually going on in the forefront of technology, not to mention the politics, news and "in" things of the computer field.
Whether or not they agreed with Microsoft, they at least were pretty up on the state of the industry.
The majority of students there, however, were only there because they'd heard that programming was a quick way to get a good paying job, and really were only "9 to 5" students in the field. They didn't care who or what license anything was written in, couldn't care less about what loss of rights were being discussed on Slashdot, nor even with anything other than getting drunk, and that fat paycheck they figured on when they got out.
Add to this the fact that, while expensive software on the outside world, Microsoft will give you their operating system, programming tools and office products for close to a song if you're a college student, and I'd say that the vast majority of the "average" CS student isn't any more clued in than the average home computer user.
It was a pretty common punishment for college students back when I went to Ohio State University, especially for offenses which were handled locally, that is, on the dorm level, such as for alchohol based infractions of the rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Much like the previous article on changing US bills for the sake of convenience, I think the amount of work it would take to not only convert all the hardware and software out there, but getting people used to it, would outweigh the benefits for far too long.
Besides, Swatch's internet time has been around forever, and few besides the geeky have paid attention to it.
Um
Gator doesn't make this practice clear to users of their software other than in a badly worded sub-section of the installer which is easily missed.
Why on earth would you as an end-user actively want the adverts of a website replaced with adverts from Gator?
A user knowingly blocking ads from a site is one thing, but a piece of software trying to go behind both the user and website's back and profit off of both isn't the same.
Wait
Should we also adopt the currency systems (euros, marks, etc) because of the inconvienience to foreign visitors?
While what you say is true of those of us who build, tinker and play with our home-built computers, the vast majority of computer users paid for someone else to build their machines, and then pay for an ISP like AOL to get them online without much work on their part.
Instead, I suspect the main reasons pay sites don't work involve a combination of the simple fact that when people think "internet" they think "place to get free stuff", along with a lack of interest in the particular product and, of course, the lack of income from web advertisers these days.
A significant amount of work has been done on mods to the Quake, Unreal and so forth engines by people who work in their spare time, which goes to show that as long as the base engine is competently done, there are more than enough people to pull off some amazing things.
Of course, many of these mod makers haven't embraced open-source development, keeping their work to themselves mostly in pipe-dream hopes of repeating the success of CounterStrike as much as preventing other mod teams from ripping them off.
Alright, I realise what we're talking about is more personal aesthetic tastes than anything else, but I just couldn't believe someone would describe Internet Explorer as "gorgeous".
Functional, yes. Gorgeous, what?
Regardless, if that's the biggest complaint, try any of the smattering of themes available. Now that 1.0 is out, I imagine they'll start growing in number soon, but at least try out Orbit Moz Theme
... and yet Operation Flashpoint is an order of magnitude more "real" than run-n-gun mods like CounterStrike, yet is loads of fun, and popular enough to warrant several expansions.
By your argument, no one would be playing any flight simulator for entertainment.
Well, being that this is based on top of the Unreal engine, development was neither costly, nor lengthy. I have no doubt that it cost less than any one recruitment commercial on television.
As for training, no they will not be using this particular game for that. In fact, the US Army has been working with the people behind Operation Flashpoint to produce a better training tool than the version of Doom the Marines have used over the years.
The US Army's use of modified off-the-shelf games dates back to the 80's with a version of the original vector graphics game Battlezone modified for use as a battle tank simulator.
I applaud the Army for trying out creative marketting techniques, it's not as if the game will beam subliminal messages into your head, and with it being Unreal based, there's the possibility of it being modified for Linux use as well.
Hell, as long as the game is good, it will be as effective a positive mindshare tool as any saturday morning cartoon is at getting you to buy action figures.
TOTAL GEEK MODE ON:
It depends on how you want to interpret any of the gazillion "Origin of Superman" stories. In many of them he didn't start to manifest his powers to anywhere from a toddler to puberty.
So, she could theoretically carry the child to term normally.
Additionally, in many of the DC comics that have taken place in the future, such as the excellent Kingdom Come Lois dies a while back, and Supes ends up conceiving a child with Wonder Woman. The daughter is shown in the Dark Knight 2 that's out now, I believe.
Yes, but the group that's anticipating it is far smaller than the larger group who was interested in Spider-Man. The mainstream crowd may have had less excitement over the movie (though I saw the opposite in many cases), but their sheer numbers resulted in the large opening figures.
Yes, Star Wars still has some damn rabid fans, but they're a smaller group than pre-Phantom Menace, with many of us who used to be fanatics now seeing them as just regular "movies" thanks the eye-opening that Jar Jar and company brought us.
Even when you look at single day records, Spidey beats The Phantom Menace>'s $28.5 million (on the Wednesday it opened) with its $39.3 (Friday) and $43.7 million (Saturday) totals.
According to the records, The Phantom Menace made $64,820,970 during its openning weekend, and that was with all the hype and excitement that was going on at the time, with fans lining up for months ahead of time.
Unless Attack of the Clones can not only get beyond the general bad feeling that TPM left us with, and double its previous film's openning weekend intake, it won't manage it.
ATOC will make a boatload of money, but it's highly unlikely that it will undergo the opening explosion that Spidey is enjoying.
Or more specifically how well ATOC does during its opening compared to TPM did.
Prior to TPM, the hype machine was in full swing and everyone, even the non-geek-fanatics, was interested in not only seeing it, but on opening night.
But I just get the feeling that's no longer true for ATOC, thanks to the letdown that TPM was for the hardened fans, and in many ways, it was the contagious enthusiasm of the fanatics that carried over to the general populace.
Personally, I'll go see AOTC, but I certainly won't wait in a long line for it, and absolutely seeing it openning night isn't the priority that it once was. I don't doubt that ATOC will do well, but it's performance will be rather level over its run, not quite explosive during that opening weekend that the other Star Wars films will be.
And while there are still hardcore fans, their numbers will most likely have been reduced, at least in part.
Just for some numbers, a quick look at Box Office Mojo shows that The Phantom Menace did $64,820,970 in its opening weekend, compared to Spider-Man's $114 million. As it stands, Spidey is already at 1/4 of TPMs $431,088,297 gross to date number.
Will we ever see easy to change CD-Rom drive front covers to match your beige/black computer?
If anything the clash of drive covers with anything other than the "standard" colors has made the move to a rainbow of colors.
Perhaps a non-mono-color design would help, with black as the base color in order to more easily match drives, but with other colors accenting the machine to keep it from being the same dull design as the beige boxes?
I would imagine alot of this has to do with the simple psychology of people in large numbers.
In general it's a combination of decades of getting information and entertainment from a small number corporate sources, as well as the tendancy to gather where others are.
Still, while this paints a picture in which the majority will always go back to a few sources, ignoring the rest, at least in the digital age, those of us who do want to go discover an unheard of musician, writer or artist from remote locations have a much easier time doing so.
I'd say that Amazon is the middle ground, in that they sell new books, and oh yeah, have access to used versions as well.
I'd love to see some hard numbers from Amazon, but even without any hard evidence, I'd bet that their new book sales outnumber the used book sales by a good five to one ratio.
The only real way this hurts the publishing industry is in that hard to prove "people who would have bought a new book, had the used book not been there" catagory.
Seriously, where do they think used books come from? Someone had to buy them new at one time. People who really want a book and can afford to buy it new generally will, and people who want the book, but go for the used book generally wouldn't buy the new book if it was all that was available.
This is just another case of an organization who sees a small percentage of potential (not actual) lost profit and goes off annoying the people reponsible for the larger percentage of their profit, much like the RIAA and MPAA are doing currently.
:shrug:
Sure, for the ten minutes that the article mentions that the pump runs before overheating.
Anyone looking forward to The Sims: Wage Slaves expansion, apparently.
"In the latest survey by Speakeasy, over 75% of players use broadband..."
Aren't the majority of Speakeasy's business built primarily at targetting "power users", such as gamers who seek broadband? That makes their statistics not exactly a snapshot for who's actually the majority of their players.
One of the main reasons CounterStrike (and therefore Half Life) seem to be still selling well is the number of low end systems, such as those found in "internet cafes", that can comfortably run it, which doesn't point to the majority of the players being broadband enabled.
Regardless, isn't Valve pretty much only about CounterStrike and other Half Life (ie Half Life, but this time you play as one of the Black Mesa janitors) knockoffs these days? At least, Team Fortress II seems to have fallen off all our radars.
While the core argument of sticking with pure text content for a website is a good one for many "overdone" websites, there are a number of cases in which these plugins do make perfect sense.
For example, as a gamer, I like being able to see video previews of works in progress, or catch a short film from any of those online film sites, or see a televised news report streamed to me about important events when I'm nowhere near a television.
It's a fine balance that needs to be struck between content and usability, sure, but going luddite on any site that dares use an animated gif is no better than those sites that have a non-skippable fifteen minute flash intro's.
Besides the question of how quickly and accurately this device can detect your "key taps", there's also the question of the lack of tactile feedback from a physical key press slowing you down.
Sure it's psychological, but I can remember just how painfully slow typing on my Timex Sinclair's membrane keyboard was.
Add to that the normal lag of a character appearing on the screen, and I'll hazard a guess that using the built in hand recognisition will be the way to go.
The CoS isn't the only ones who try to use this technique in order to make their sites rise in search engine ratings.
There are a number of those "Get More Hits For Your Website Cheap!" sites which try to do so by getting member sites to download an html file which contains links to most of their members, and then have you link this from your own site.
Much like a pyramid scheme, as new members join the get the same file with links to your site, thereby increasing the number of sites with links to you and possibly raising your position in search engines.
When I was a CS student back at college, I found that within the major, there was a small subset for which computers and programming were more than just a way to make money, and that these individuals were more knowledgeable of what was actually going on in the forefront of technology, not to mention the politics, news and "in" things of the computer field.
Whether or not they agreed with Microsoft, they at least were pretty up on the state of the industry.
The majority of students there, however, were only there because they'd heard that programming was a quick way to get a good paying job, and really were only "9 to 5" students in the field. They didn't care who or what license anything was written in, couldn't care less about what loss of rights were being discussed on Slashdot, nor even with anything other than getting drunk, and that fat paycheck they figured on when they got out.
Add to this the fact that, while expensive software on the outside world, Microsoft will give you their operating system, programming tools and office products for close to a song if you're a college student, and I'd say that the vast majority of the "average" CS student isn't any more clued in than the average home computer user.
Everything from email to any kind of server (IRC, streaming audio or video, etc, etc).
It was a pretty common punishment for college students back when I went to Ohio State University, especially for offenses which were handled locally, that is, on the dorm level, such as for alchohol based infractions of the rules.