Even for the rare ones, you can most likely pick up NES carts on ebay or at a funcoland-like store for a fraction of that price. Without the piss-poor emulation deficiencies that have plagues previous nintendo rereleases (remember the game boy color Nes Series line?)
I've bought these games once, and played them to death. I've downloaded them again when nesticle came out, and played them to death. Who's the target market here? The nostalgia crowd is savvy enough to pirate old nes games, and the younger crowd is likely to be displeased with the different style of gameplay.
Markets tend to find their own level, and I suspect that over time Nintendo will either introduce bands of prices by popularity, or simply decide that they can live with the number of Kid Icarus sales they get at $10. The Long Tail suggests that there will be some people out there so mad keen on Kid Icarus that they'll go for it even though you or I might perceive it as too expensive.
There's a point on the graph where the [financial cost + convenience + warm fuzzy feeling of being legit] outweighs [ free as in beer + ROM-hunting hassle + warez guilt ] or [ cheap cart + old hardware hassle + clutter ]. Where those graphs cross will depend on the person.
Personally, I've got a chipped Xbox loaded with emulators for all the 8 bit and 16 bit consoles -- but I don't have a large library of ROMs, and the convenience and legitimacy of just turning on a Wii, navigating a menu, being debited some small amount of money, then jumping right into the game appeals very much.
I accept your arguments. I just picked the oldest online console game with mouse support I could think of. You know, to be pedantic.
Taking the tangent and running with it though... I'm far from being a FPS connoiseur -- I actively dislike Halo and only really enjoyed Time Splitters 2 and Half Life -- but I thought Q3A seemed to be a very good port within the technical limitations. You're absolutely right about the frame rate and the resolution, but since your opponents would all be on DC too, it was a level playing field. They cleverly limited the deathmatch levels to small, tight maps, knowing that the machine would have trouble with the larger, more open levels, but also knowing that the smaller levels would lead to more frantic, console-like gameplay.
I hated it: it was Quake. But it was a terrific achievement anyway.
1997 called. I wants it's 9 year old video games back.
Times have changed since 1997, both for PCs and consoles.
I might have got my numbering wrong; we're talking Escape from Monkey Island -- which was released in late 2000. Which is still nearly 6 years ago. God I feel old. I believe our PC was underspecced in 2000, so I bought the game 3 years later, when we bought a PC specifically for the purpose of gaming. So this would have been around 2003, using Windows XP.
I'll take some convincing that the stability of PC gaming has improved since then. This was a native Win32 application using DirectX under XP. Only version numbers have changed since then.
But more importantly, the problem is inherent in the way PCs are built. It's entirely possible that no QA department had ever tested these DirectX calls in exactly the same order, on exactly the same combination of motherboard, CPU, graphics card and PSU before. And when it doesn't work, you're basically in a world of finger-pointing where to prove each party's claim means spending more time and money (I became so convinced that my PSU was underpowering my graphics card that I bought a new one -- no dice; and with that money I could have bought a whole console game).
But more to the point, finding out whether things have improved is too damn expensive. If I spent the frankly ludicrous sum they're asking on a PS3, at least I know it'll work. If I spend the same money on a gaming PC, I strongly feel there's a serious risk that -- while perfectly capable of running ordinary desktop applications (just like a PC half the price) -- this thing won't be reliable for gaming.
Honestly, I don't know anyone that's had problems playing games.
Either you're very, very lucky, or you're very new to it. It's probably 3 years or so since I gave up on PC gaming. I'm far more technically adept than most -- and have been gaming since the 8 bit era (when games would "just work") and through the DOS era when you had to build boot floppies of various kinds to allow games to fit in their 640KB -- but I've never owned a PC where gaming was reliable.
I haven't had a game that wouldn't 'just work' on a PC either.
Come on, either you're fabulously rich and constantly ahead of the hardware curve, or you've bought games that are too chuggy to enjoy on your hardware.
NB, I do actually play a few PC games still -- mostly freeware shooters like Warning Forever, that don't tax the hardware very much at all.
OTOH, I miss the "save anywhere" option on most of my PC games.
In most games, at least nowadays, this is a matter of game design not of technical limitation. Anyone who's abused the save state feature in an emulator can tell you how it can remove the challenge (and therefore the longevity) from certain games.
Frequent saving can also break the sense of immersion. I could only progress in Half Life (on PS2!) by saving often, but remembering to do so would always take me out of the moment.
If a game is based on using the mouse or internet, it's currently served best by PCs.
I could neatly refute that by citing Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast -- quite a good online experience, I imagine, unless you're as useless at Quake as I am, and playable using the Dreamcast mouse and keyboard.
However, since very few people want to play console games sitting at a desk, you're still right about the mouse.
I'm not letting you have the Internet argument any more though. Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube all had online games. Xbox Live is probably the slickest online gaming experience out there (shame about the subscription charges). 360 has an even better XBL. Wii will have online play. So will PS3. Hell, even the DS has online play.
Yep, that's what did it for me too. After spending a lot of money on a new PC specifically with games mind, and having spent countless hours messing around with DirectX settings and driver updates, I'd still be constantly saving in Monkey Island 3 because you never knew when the whole thing would freeze up. Eventually I realised: it's not worth spending time and money on making this work, when a console will just work first time.
But the real decider is whether you prefer to play games sitting up at a desk, or slumped on an armchair. Console controllers aren't ideal in the former position, a keyboard and mouse are impractical in the latter.
In my local Ikea, I noticed that the very top warehouse shelf is stacked not with furniture, but with huge boxes of till rolls. I believe it's a legal requirement to keep till rolls for a certain amount of time (for auditability), but the truth is that it's very unlikely that anyone will ever ask to look at them, so they're stored in an efficient to store, inefficient to retrieve method just in case, and once the archive period is over for the whole box, they're pulped.
It sounds like you've got a similar requirement: you might want to get the disk again, but it's most likely you won't ever touch it again until it's time to bin it. Am I right?
In which case, get as many 100 disk spindles as you need.
As you receive disks, put them on the currently filling spindle.
Number the spindles and keep a record (spreadsheet/db/whatever) of which project's disks are on which spindle. Label the spindles with the project names too, so you can reconstruct your spreadsheet if the worst happens.
Every so often, run a query to find spindles which only contain dead projects' disks, and throw away those disks, freeing the spindles for refilling. This means that you could be keeping some disks longer than strictly necessary, but I'm assuming this doesn't matter too much.
If you need to retrieve a specific disk, it's not going to be all that easy, but we've decided that's not a requirement. What's important is that it's easy to regularly identify large units to be discarded.
You can tune this system to suit your needs. You could work in units of 100 disks (i.e. you throw away 100 disks at a time), or you could put 10 spindles in a box and throw away 1000 disks at a time. The larger the unit, the lower the management, but the more space you'll be devoting to disks that are expired but share a box with non-expired disks. It's a bit like selecting a block size for a filesystem -- space efficiency vs. fragmentation.
Did Lewis really mean for the Chronicles of Narnia to be a parable of chrisianity?
Yes.
Whether he did or didn't is irrelevant, what matters is what the reader chooses to believe.
Nonetheless, that was his intention, and I'd contend that it's not irrelevant. Many works of art and literature require you to consider the context in which they were created, and you're going to understand more about Narnia if you consider the time it was written, Lewis' aims and beliefs, his arguments with Tolkein, etc.
Even minimalist visual art -- designed to be completely unrepresentative so that the viewer can ascribe their own meaning -- is more interesting to me when I'm told about the art culture of the period when the work was created.
When we see Dali's lobster telephone today, we thing "ooh, that's sort of surreal; a lobster telephone; it's like the sort of thing you'd see on a psychedelic album cover". It's instructive to learn about the shock the piece provoked when it was created.
Modern works often come with instructions about how they should be exhibited (in fact some works don't exist except as a concept -- the gallery implements the concept from the artist's "recipe" -- e.g. Sol LeWitt's "Six Geometric Figures.
So if a painter delivers a triptych to a gallery with the instructions "all three panels to be aligned horizontally, positioned 3 feet from the floor, against a white wall, with 2 inches between each panel", how is that different to "I would prefer you to listen to this piece of music in its proper context, alongside the rest of the pieces on the album"?
I'd argue that while the infrequent band will write a full album that creates a cohesive whole, it's not what the majority of mainstream music is and it's not what people are used to expecting anymore (maybe they did back in the 70s, but those days are gone).
But the majority you're talking about is the majority that's not complaining. Britney Spears puts 3 singles on an album and pads it out with filler; you can buy those singles on iTunes. Radiohead makes albums with a beginning, a middle and an end, and would prefer you to hear the whole thing in sequence.
I became a music lover in the 80s, meaning that I missed the "golden age" of the concept album (thank God), but pretty much all my favourite albums, I've always listened to as a unit. "Back in the USSR" leads into "Dear Prudence". If something else kicks in, it jars. Orbital's "Chime" segues into "Belfast". I was once somewhere where they were playing a Smiths best-of album. I loved hearing the songs again, but I cringed every time a song ended and the wrong one followedd it.
Those days may be fading away, but they're not quite gone yet, and should they disappear altogether, I'll miss them.
OTOH, as a recent Paul Morley column I can't be bothered to find and link to said -- the length of both singles and albums has always been dictated by playback technology. The classical symphony's length was dictated by musicians and audiences' stamina. The 3 minute pop song was dictated by what would fit on a 7" single. The 10 minute dance track or remix was dictated by what would fit on the 45RPM 12" single preferred by DJs. Albums used to be approximately 45 minutes long because that's what fitted on 33RPM 12" vinyl. Artists who wanted more time adopted the double album format: you got to use a gatefold sleeve, and often the album would be structured around the four sides; each side being a "chapter". As CDs took over, albums became longer.
Downloads mean a song, or an album, can be as long or as short as the artist, or the consumer, likes. What's going to happen? Are people going to go for short-sharp 1 minute pop songs -- like in the days when punk bands would fit two songs on one side of a 7"? Or will artists start making single tracks 90 minutes long? It's going to be interesting.
Wow.... One Slashdot nerd giving another Slashdot nerd advice about women. What's the world coming to? I'd better finish digging that bunker in my basement...
You won't be needing a bunker. It's a sign that the Rapture is nigh.
the PS2 is capable of MUCH better graphics than THAT. This is simply rockstar re-using that horrid gta3 engine again.
While the PS2/is/ capable of producing prettier moving pictures, it's all about compromise. If you restrict yourself to a small environment, you can have more detail and use more fancy graphics techniques.
The GTA3 engine sacrifices detail in order that it can stream massive environments from DVD with no negligible pauses for loading.
Personally I think the artists have made good use of the engine, working within its restrictions to give the games a distinctive and attractive look. What I saw of Vice City was quite ugly, mind you.
Other posters have pointed out companies other than eMusic who are selling non-DRM MP3 downloads. Another is Bleep. Originally it was far-out electronica from the Warp label, but other labels are on board now, including stuff that's definitely not electronica.
Actually, I think the vast majority of developers out there are far more interested in getting their damn job done
Just like the vast majority of businessmen dealing with South Africa who were far more interested in getting their damn job done than in ending apartheid?
Or those in the cotton industry who were more interested in getting their damn job done than in the injustice of slavery?
I don't want to imply that software freedom is as important as those two examples, but hell, don't criticise people for having ideals and doing something about it.
Although there have been allusions, reading through the comments, I'm not sure most Americans realise that "wee" means "piss" in British English. As in "I'm just going for a wee" or "Oh my god, there's wee all over the floor".
The British games/tech media is having a right laugh.
The Register's headline: "Nintendo splashes Revolution with 'Wii' " Computer and Video Games: "All we've left to say really is that we're looking forward to waving our Wii wands around at this year's E3."... and there are forums full of "I play Wii games with my girlfriend every night!" type comments.
To me -- "no such thing as bad publicity" notwithstanding -- that doesn't sound like the makings of a great brand.
Pretty much every country with water and gradients deals with fluctuating electricity demand using hydroelectric schemes. Here, near Niagara Falls, the USA and Canada have a hydroelectric reservoir each, on their respective sides of the river/border.
Storage heaters -- where heat absorbing bricks are heated using off-peak power then release the heat throughout the day -- are quite common in parts of Britain (I think it depends on the local electicity company).
This sprang from an "Economy 7" tariff whereby electricity was cheaper for 7 nighttime hours, in order to encourage a shift in usage so they could run production more evenly.
However, "Economy 7" was so popular in my parents' area that they were seeing peaks during the supposed off-peak times. My parents were given a more sophisticated meter -- and a more sophisticated timer for their heaters -- such that their off peak times moved around every fortnight.
I see the OP puts Automator in their list of top ten OSX apps.
Now, I like the idea of Automator. It sounds like its a GUI equivalent of UNIX pipes, and chaining UNIX commands with pipes is easy and useful.
However, *every* time I've thought of a task that might be a candidate for automating with Automator, I've got a certain distance then hit a brick wall.
"for each subdirectory in a directory, add the photos within to iPhoto, putting them in an album with a name based on the directory name" (this was before I gave up on iPhoto)
I found that the automator tasks available just didn't have the flexibility; yeah, I could create a new album, but I couldn't name it based on things that happened further up the workflow.
Even writing shell scripts or Applescript for inclusion in the workflow, I found I couldn't get the right information into them, nor pass it on to the next step.
In the end, I started by trying to write the missing functionality as an Applescript, then realised that once you knew enough Applescript to do that, it was easier to just write an Applescript to do the whole thing.
Never mind the features: Picasa is touchy-feely and has what I believe Mac people call "The snappy".
I bought a Mac Mini because I thought it might be a good idea to store my growing photo collection on a machine that belonged to me, rather than my employer. I allowed myself to believe the hype about iPhoto, was curious about OSX so I chose the Mac.
With 1GB RAM, iPhoto 5 takes unacceptably long to start up, stutters while scrolling through the library, freezes for seconds at a time, and generally gets in the way of doing what you want to do. It does work in the foreground (so you have to wait) that should happen in the background ("Saving changes..."). Verbs are frequently where I least expect them to be. The import process is messed up (it expects you to name the "roll" before showing you what's on it. I can't find a way to rename the roll afterwards).
It's possible iPhoto 6 is an improvement, but I'm damned if I'm paying $79 to find out.
On my work Windows laptop, with half the RAM and half the CPU speed of the Mac, Picasa is speedy and fluid. Verbs are where I expect to find them; nothing is fiddly and everything makes sense.
On the bright side, the Mac runs Firefox acceptably, and does a nice job of running Azureus...
To wrench us back onto topic: is it worth dual booting your Mac just to run Picasa? Possibly not -- rebooting is a pain in the arse. But I would seriously recommend any Mac zealot spend an hour or so playing with Picasa, just to remind themselves that it *is* possible that someone other than Apple can do usability. If there was an music library that used the Picasa approach to UI -- "Tucasa"? -- I'd drop iTunes in a heartbeat.
Actually I would LOVE to have started learning to program in an OO language -- not that such a thing existed outside academia at the time.
The paradigm shift from procedural to OO is a massive wrench, which I wouldn't wish upon anyone. In fact, although I've been on several Java courses, I usually fall back on a procedural style in C or Perl, because it remains my comfort zone.
Yeah, what is it with those? Peoplel crow about how useful they are, but what for?
I have *one* useful smart playlist: because my whole collection won't fit on an iPod, I have to choose what goes on. However since *almost* my whole collection fits on, it's easier to maintain a list of stuff to stay off than it is to maintain a list to stay on.
So, I maintain an "off iPod" ordinary playlist, and a smart playlist that's "everything except what's in the 'off iPod' list".
It works, but it feels like an awful hack, and if you mark other playlists to go onto the iPod, those don't take into account the 'off iPod' list (one would have to make a smart playlist corresponding to every normal playlist, and mark those for synching to the iPod. Ugh.)
The query mechanism for smart playlists means that to do anything vaguely sophisticated you have to start nesting lists, and the fact that iTunes only lets you have a linear list of playlists means that you really want to minimise the number of playlists to keep it manageable.
Songbird, please:
- give me hierarchical folders of playlists
- give me a prominent view where playlists, automatic playlists based on queries (let's not call them Smart Playlists to avoid Apple's lawyers), and albums all appear together intermixed (polymorphism, OO fans!)... and I'll be happy.
Saying that the reason people don't switch to open source software is because there is no support available is simply not true. It might have been true two or three years ago but not anymore. Take some time and investigate your options and you'll find there's a lot more available out there than you might think.
It wasn't true two or three years ago either.
It's a distortion of what people really thing, which is "I'm scared of deviating from the mainstream". People choose Oracle for the same reason they choose Madonna -- they've heard of it. Or in the case of all those I'd-choose-open-source-but-my-boss-won't-let-me types, because their bosses have heard of it; the same reason you might play Madonna instead of your own taste in music at a house party.
The point is, if my system breaks because of thier screw-up, I'll want to know heads will roll higher up than R&D.
We're agreeing with each other:)
The key to this is to make an explicit and documented risk assessment, document acceptable downtimes and all that tedious project manager-y type stuff.
That way, if you specify an Open Source component, it breaks, there is downtime but you fix it, you can point at the documentation you produced.
"We documented that there was a small probability that an undiscovered flaw in this component could cause disruption, that the impact would be this, and that we would expect to fix it within n hours. You signed it off and accepted those risks."
Making money is all about evaluating and accepting risks. Of *course* your management may read your risk assessment and decide they'd prefer to mitigate the risk with a commercial support contract. It's all part of the balancing act.
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$10 for kid icarus? You've got to be shitting me.
Even for the rare ones, you can most likely pick up NES carts on ebay or at a funcoland-like store for a fraction of that price. Without the piss-poor emulation deficiencies that have plagues previous nintendo rereleases (remember the game boy color Nes Series line?)
I've bought these games once, and played them to death. I've downloaded them again when nesticle came out, and played them to death. Who's the target market here? The nostalgia crowd is savvy enough to pirate old nes games, and the younger crowd is likely to be displeased with the different style of gameplay.
Markets tend to find their own level, and I suspect that over time Nintendo will either introduce bands of prices by popularity, or simply decide that they can live with the number of Kid Icarus sales they get at $10. The Long Tail suggests that there will be some people out there so mad keen on Kid Icarus that they'll go for it even though you or I might perceive it as too expensive.
There's a point on the graph where the [financial cost + convenience + warm fuzzy feeling of being legit] outweighs [ free as in beer + ROM-hunting hassle + warez guilt ] or [ cheap cart + old hardware hassle + clutter ]. Where those graphs cross will depend on the person.
Personally, I've got a chipped Xbox loaded with emulators for all the 8 bit and 16 bit consoles -- but I don't have a large library of ROMs, and the convenience and legitimacy of just turning on a Wii, navigating a menu, being debited some small amount of money, then jumping right into the game appeals very much.
However, Quake 3 for dreamcast sucked.
I accept your arguments. I just picked the oldest online console game with mouse support I could think of. You know, to be pedantic.
Taking the tangent and running with it though... I'm far from being a FPS connoiseur -- I actively dislike Halo and only really enjoyed Time Splitters 2 and Half Life -- but I thought Q3A seemed to be a very good port within the technical limitations. You're absolutely right about the frame rate and the resolution, but since your opponents would all be on DC too, it was a level playing field. They cleverly limited the deathmatch levels to small, tight maps, knowing that the machine would have trouble with the larger, more open levels, but also knowing that the smaller levels would lead to more frantic, console-like gameplay.
I hated it: it was Quake. But it was a terrific achievement anyway.
1997 called. I wants it's 9 year old video games back.
Times have changed since 1997, both for PCs and consoles.
I might have got my numbering wrong; we're talking Escape from Monkey Island -- which was released in late 2000. Which is still nearly 6 years ago. God I feel old. I believe our PC was underspecced in 2000, so I bought the game 3 years later, when we bought a PC specifically for the purpose of gaming. So this would have been around 2003, using Windows XP.
I'll take some convincing that the stability of PC gaming has improved since then. This was a native Win32 application using DirectX under XP. Only version numbers have changed since then.
But more importantly, the problem is inherent in the way PCs are built. It's entirely possible that no QA department had ever tested these DirectX calls in exactly the same order, on exactly the same combination of motherboard, CPU, graphics card and PSU before. And when it doesn't work, you're basically in a world of finger-pointing where to prove each party's claim means spending more time and money (I became so convinced that my PSU was underpowering my graphics card that I bought a new one -- no dice; and with that money I could have bought a whole console game).
But more to the point, finding out whether things have improved is too damn expensive. If I spent the frankly ludicrous sum they're asking on a PS3, at least I know it'll work. If I spend the same money on a gaming PC, I strongly feel there's a serious risk that -- while perfectly capable of running ordinary desktop applications (just like a PC half the price) -- this thing won't be reliable for gaming.
Honestly, I don't know anyone that's had problems playing games.
Either you're very, very lucky, or you're very new to it. It's probably 3 years or so since I gave up on PC gaming. I'm far more technically adept than most -- and have been gaming since the 8 bit era (when games would "just work") and through the DOS era when you had to build boot floppies of various kinds to allow games to fit in their 640KB -- but I've never owned a PC where gaming was reliable.
I haven't had a game that wouldn't 'just work' on a PC either.
Come on, either you're fabulously rich and constantly ahead of the hardware curve, or you've bought games that are too chuggy to enjoy on your hardware.
NB, I do actually play a few PC games still -- mostly freeware shooters like Warning Forever, that don't tax the hardware very much at all.
OTOH, I miss the "save anywhere" option on most of my PC games.
In most games, at least nowadays, this is a matter of game design not of technical limitation. Anyone who's abused the save state feature in an emulator can tell you how it can remove the challenge (and therefore the longevity) from certain games.
Frequent saving can also break the sense of immersion. I could only progress in Half Life (on PS2!) by saving often, but remembering to do so would always take me out of the moment.
If a game is based on using the mouse or internet, it's currently served best by PCs.
I could neatly refute that by citing Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast -- quite a good online experience, I imagine, unless you're as useless at Quake as I am, and playable using the Dreamcast mouse and keyboard.
However, since very few people want to play console games sitting at a desk, you're still right about the mouse.
I'm not letting you have the Internet argument any more though. Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube all had online games. Xbox Live is probably the slickest online gaming experience out there (shame about the subscription charges). 360 has an even better XBL. Wii will have online play. So will PS3. Hell, even the DS has online play.
I just got tired of games crashing my computer.
Yep, that's what did it for me too. After spending a lot of money on a new PC specifically with games mind, and having spent countless hours messing around with DirectX settings and driver updates, I'd still be constantly saving in Monkey Island 3 because you never knew when the whole thing would freeze up. Eventually I realised: it's not worth spending time and money on making this work, when a console will just work first time.
But the real decider is whether you prefer to play games sitting up at a desk, or slumped on an armchair. Console controllers aren't ideal in the former position, a keyboard and mouse are impractical in the latter.
In my local Ikea, I noticed that the very top warehouse shelf is stacked not with furniture, but with huge boxes of till rolls. I believe it's a legal requirement to keep till rolls for a certain amount of time (for auditability), but the truth is that it's very unlikely that anyone will ever ask to look at them, so they're stored in an efficient to store, inefficient to retrieve method just in case, and once the archive period is over for the whole box, they're pulped.
It sounds like you've got a similar requirement: you might want to get the disk again, but it's most likely you won't ever touch it again until it's time to bin it. Am I right?
In which case, get as many 100 disk spindles as you need.
As you receive disks, put them on the currently filling spindle.
Number the spindles and keep a record (spreadsheet/db/whatever) of which project's disks are on which spindle. Label the spindles with the project names too, so you can reconstruct your spreadsheet if the worst happens.
Every so often, run a query to find spindles which only contain dead projects' disks, and throw away those disks, freeing the spindles for refilling. This means that you could be keeping some disks longer than strictly necessary, but I'm assuming this doesn't matter too much.
If you need to retrieve a specific disk, it's not going to be all that easy, but we've decided that's not a requirement. What's important is that it's easy to regularly identify large units to be discarded.
You can tune this system to suit your needs. You could work in units of 100 disks (i.e. you throw away 100 disks at a time), or you could put 10 spindles in a box and throw away 1000 disks at a time. The larger the unit, the lower the management, but the more space you'll be devoting to disks that are expired but share a box with non-expired disks. It's a bit like selecting a block size for a filesystem -- space efficiency vs. fragmentation.
Did Lewis really mean for the Chronicles of Narnia to be a parable of chrisianity?
Yes.
Whether he did or didn't is irrelevant, what matters is what the reader chooses to believe.
Nonetheless, that was his intention, and I'd contend that it's not irrelevant. Many works of art and literature require you to consider the context in which they were created, and you're going to understand more about Narnia if you consider the time it was written, Lewis' aims and beliefs, his arguments with Tolkein, etc.
Even minimalist visual art -- designed to be completely unrepresentative so that the viewer can ascribe their own meaning -- is more interesting to me when I'm told about the art culture of the period when the work was created.
When we see Dali's lobster telephone today, we thing "ooh, that's sort of surreal; a lobster telephone; it's like the sort of thing you'd see on a psychedelic album cover". It's instructive to learn about the shock the piece provoked when it was created.
Modern works often come with instructions about how they should be exhibited (in fact some works don't exist except as a concept -- the gallery implements the concept from the artist's "recipe" -- e.g. Sol LeWitt's "Six Geometric Figures.
So if a painter delivers a triptych to a gallery with the instructions "all three panels to be aligned horizontally, positioned 3 feet from the floor, against a white wall, with 2 inches between each panel", how is that different to "I would prefer you to listen to this piece of music in its proper context, alongside the rest of the pieces on the album"?
I'd argue that while the infrequent band will write a full album that creates a cohesive whole, it's not what the majority of mainstream music is and it's not what people are used to expecting anymore (maybe they did back in the 70s, but those days are gone).
But the majority you're talking about is the majority that's not complaining. Britney Spears puts 3 singles on an album and pads it out with filler; you can buy those singles on iTunes. Radiohead makes albums with a beginning, a middle and an end, and would prefer you to hear the whole thing in sequence.
I became a music lover in the 80s, meaning that I missed the "golden age" of the concept album (thank God), but pretty much all my favourite albums, I've always listened to as a unit. "Back in the USSR" leads into "Dear Prudence". If something else kicks in, it jars. Orbital's "Chime" segues into "Belfast". I was once somewhere where they were playing a Smiths best-of album. I loved hearing the songs again, but I cringed every time a song ended and the wrong one followedd it.
Those days may be fading away, but they're not quite gone yet, and should they disappear altogether, I'll miss them.
OTOH, as a recent Paul Morley column I can't be bothered to find and link to said -- the length of both singles and albums has always been dictated by playback technology. The classical symphony's length was dictated by musicians and audiences' stamina. The 3 minute pop song was dictated by what would fit on a 7" single. The 10 minute dance track or remix was dictated by what would fit on the 45RPM 12" single preferred by DJs. Albums used to be approximately 45 minutes long because that's what fitted on 33RPM 12" vinyl. Artists who wanted more time adopted the double album format: you got to use a gatefold sleeve, and often the album would be structured around the four sides; each side being a "chapter". As CDs took over, albums became longer.
Downloads mean a song, or an album, can be as long or as short as the artist, or the consumer, likes. What's going to happen? Are people going to go for short-sharp 1 minute pop songs -- like in the days when punk bands would fit two songs on one side of a 7"? Or will artists start making single tracks 90 minutes long? It's going to be interesting.
Wow.... One Slashdot nerd giving another Slashdot nerd advice about women. What's the world coming to? I'd better finish digging that bunker in my basement...
You won't be needing a bunker. It's a sign that the Rapture is nigh.
the PS2 is capable of MUCH better graphics than THAT. This is simply rockstar re-using that horrid gta3 engine again.
/is/ capable of producing prettier moving pictures, it's all about compromise. If you restrict yourself to a small environment, you can have more detail and use more fancy graphics techniques.
While the PS2
The GTA3 engine sacrifices detail in order that it can stream massive environments from DVD with no negligible pauses for loading.
Personally I think the artists have made good use of the engine, working within its restrictions to give the games a distinctive and attractive look. What I saw of Vice City was quite ugly, mind you.
Other posters have pointed out companies other than eMusic who are selling non-DRM MP3 downloads. Another is Bleep. Originally it was far-out electronica from the Warp label, but other labels are on board now, including stuff that's definitely not electronica.
Actually, I think the vast majority of developers out there are far more interested in getting their damn job done
Just like the vast majority of businessmen dealing with South Africa who were far more interested in getting their damn job done than in ending apartheid?
Or those in the cotton industry who were more interested in getting their damn job done than in the injustice of slavery?
I don't want to imply that software freedom is as important as those two examples, but hell, don't criticise people for having ideals and doing something about it.
Although there have been allusions, reading through the comments, I'm not sure most Americans realise that "wee" means "piss" in British English. As in "I'm just going for a wee" or "Oh my god, there's wee all over the floor".
... and there are forums full of "I play Wii games with my girlfriend every night!" type comments.
The British games/tech media is having a right laugh.
The Register's headline: "Nintendo splashes Revolution with 'Wii' "
Computer and Video Games: "All we've left to say really is that we're looking forward to waving our Wii wands around at this year's E3."
To me -- "no such thing as bad publicity" notwithstanding -- that doesn't sound like the makings of a great brand.
Pretty much every country with water and gradients deals with fluctuating electricity demand using hydroelectric schemes. Here, near Niagara Falls, the USA and Canada have a hydroelectric reservoir each, on their respective sides of the river/border.
Storage heaters -- where heat absorbing bricks are heated using off-peak power then release the heat throughout the day -- are quite common in parts of Britain (I think it depends on the local electicity company).
This sprang from an "Economy 7" tariff whereby electricity was cheaper for 7 nighttime hours, in order to encourage a shift in usage so they could run production more evenly.
However, "Economy 7" was so popular in my parents' area that they were seeing peaks during the supposed off-peak times. My parents were given a more sophisticated meter -- and a more sophisticated timer for their heaters -- such that their off peak times moved around every fortnight.
I see the OP puts Automator in their list of top ten OSX apps.
Now, I like the idea of Automator. It sounds like its a GUI equivalent of UNIX pipes, and chaining UNIX commands with pipes is easy and useful.
However, *every* time I've thought of a task that might be a candidate for automating with Automator, I've got a certain distance then hit a brick wall.
"for each subdirectory in a directory, add the photos within to iPhoto, putting them in an album with a name based on the directory name" (this was before I gave up on iPhoto)
I found that the automator tasks available just didn't have the flexibility; yeah, I could create a new album, but I couldn't name it based on things that happened further up the workflow.
Even writing shell scripts or Applescript for inclusion in the workflow, I found I couldn't get the right information into them, nor pass it on to the next step.
In the end, I started by trying to write the missing functionality as an Applescript, then realised that once you knew enough Applescript to do that, it was easier to just write an Applescript to do the whole thing.
Never mind the features: Picasa is touchy-feely and has what I believe Mac people call "The snappy".
I bought a Mac Mini because I thought it might be a good idea to store my growing photo collection on a machine that belonged to me, rather than my employer. I allowed myself to believe the hype about iPhoto, was curious about OSX so I chose the Mac.
With 1GB RAM, iPhoto 5 takes unacceptably long to start up, stutters while scrolling through the library, freezes for seconds at a time, and generally gets in the way of doing what you want to do. It does work in the foreground (so you have to wait) that should happen in the background ("Saving changes..."). Verbs are frequently where I least expect them to be. The import process is messed up (it expects you to name the "roll" before showing you what's on it. I can't find a way to rename the roll afterwards).
It's possible iPhoto 6 is an improvement, but I'm damned if I'm paying $79 to find out.
On my work Windows laptop, with half the RAM and half the CPU speed of the Mac, Picasa is speedy and fluid. Verbs are where I expect to find them; nothing is fiddly and everything makes sense.
On the bright side, the Mac runs Firefox acceptably, and does a nice job of running Azureus...
To wrench us back onto topic: is it worth dual booting your Mac just to run Picasa? Possibly not -- rebooting is a pain in the arse. But I would seriously recommend any Mac zealot spend an hour or so playing with Picasa, just to remind themselves that it *is* possible that someone other than Apple can do usability. If there was an music library that used the Picasa approach to UI -- "Tucasa"? -- I'd drop iTunes in a heartbeat.
OO is a bad paradigm to first learn to program in
Actually I would LOVE to have started learning to program in an OO language -- not that such a thing existed outside academia at the time.
The paradigm shift from procedural to OO is a massive wrench, which I wouldn't wish upon anyone. In fact, although I've been on several Java courses, I usually fall back on a procedural style in C or Perl, because it remains my comfort zone.
Suppose I want to screw with the file in another application without closing Songbird?
... ... ah .. Windows.
What's to stop you?
OK.
On non-physical media, what's the difference?
iTunes doesn't have a stop button either.
I've never understood much hyped smart playlists
... and I'll be happy.
Yeah, what is it with those? Peoplel crow about how useful they are, but what for?
I have *one* useful smart playlist: because my whole collection won't fit on an iPod, I have to choose what goes on. However since *almost* my whole collection fits on, it's easier to maintain a list of stuff to stay off than it is to maintain a list to stay on.
So, I maintain an "off iPod" ordinary playlist, and a smart playlist that's "everything except what's in the 'off iPod' list".
It works, but it feels like an awful hack, and if you mark other playlists to go onto the iPod, those don't take into account the 'off iPod' list (one would have to make a smart playlist corresponding to every normal playlist, and mark those for synching to the iPod. Ugh.)
The query mechanism for smart playlists means that to do anything vaguely sophisticated you have to start nesting lists, and the fact that iTunes only lets you have a linear list of playlists means that you really want to minimise the number of playlists to keep it manageable.
Songbird, please:
- give me hierarchical folders of playlists
- give me a prominent view where playlists, automatic playlists based on queries (let's not call them Smart Playlists to avoid Apple's lawyers), and albums all appear together intermixed (polymorphism, OO fans!)
Saying that the reason people don't switch to open source software is because there is no support available is simply not true. It might have been true two or three years ago but not anymore. Take some time and investigate your options and you'll find there's a lot more available out there than you might think.
It wasn't true two or three years ago either.
It's a distortion of what people really thing, which is "I'm scared of deviating from the mainstream". People choose Oracle for the same reason they choose Madonna -- they've heard of it. Or in the case of all those I'd-choose-open-source-but-my-boss-won't-let-me types, because their bosses have heard of it; the same reason you might play Madonna instead of your own taste in music at a house party.
The point is, if my system breaks because of thier screw-up, I'll want to know heads will roll higher up than R&D.
:)
We're agreeing with each other
The key to this is to make an explicit and documented risk assessment, document acceptable downtimes and all that tedious project manager-y type stuff.
That way, if you specify an Open Source component, it breaks, there is downtime but you fix it, you can point at the documentation you produced.
"We documented that there was a small probability that an undiscovered flaw in this component could cause disruption, that the impact would be this, and that we would expect to fix it within n hours. You signed it off and accepted those risks."
Making money is all about evaluating and accepting risks. Of *course* your management may read your risk assessment and decide they'd prefer to mitigate the risk with a commercial support contract. It's all part of the balancing act.