This 'study' is all about keeping the pressure up on Canada's heritage board, which is currently conducting a review with the aim to 'update' our copyright laws. As mentioned in a previous Slashdot article, they seem to be focussing on some sort of curtailment of our fair use provisions. Civil rights groups have been arguing against this, of course, so this is just another slavo from industry to try and push harder.
I'll be surprised if we have any rights left when they're done with this..
You can really tell when a marketer's been drinking their own kool-aide when they start spouting off about how this is "progress." Just because something is new doesn't necessarily make it better. Yes, it's nicer that we'll be using less of the electromagnetic spectrum with the new HDTV versus the old SDTV, but that's about the only 'progress' statement I think can be reasonably made.
But isn't the added resolution of HDTV worth it? Well in theory, yes. But around here, nearly every damned station runs their signal through one of those sharpening filters which just adds more crap to the image and completely degrades the signal quality. I've got an SDTV digital receiver box here; the images should be a pristine 480i! Instead, the images look muddy and have compression artifacts all over them. I figure they're doing the same to the HDTV signals, so why bloody bother? It'll all look like crap anyways. Why should I pay good money to upgrade all my equipment to HDTV just so that I can get an image that, due to some stupid post process filters and the crap bit rate every bloody station uses, looks only as good as a decent SDTV signal?
This is an entertainment device. Some people, believe it or not, are not going to need the latest and the greatest in order to keep themselves amused. Some people don't even own a TV!
This is actually an example of very good marketing. Others have touched on it, but I can think of a couple of reasons why this is working out better than expected for Sony.
1) They probably wanted to put out all of the consoles with HDMI anyways. As Kutaragi said, they didn't want people to feel like they were paying for something they'd never use. This is a powerful statement, in my mind, because it shows that Sony was willing to put out the PS3, knowing that they would be fragmenting the HD market into two tiers; those with HDMI and those without. (Yes, there will still be people who don't have HDMI-enabled sets, but that's not the point.) With a tiered market, the most widely-available Blu-Ray player would not be guaranteed to have HDMI, which would pose a huge stumbling block to enabling the ICT later on.
Now, they can just tell people to go out and buy HDMI cables when they do. Your Toshiba HDTV doesn't have HDMI inputs? That's too bad, you should've bought a Sony set; all Sony sets come with HDMI.. (If that isn't true today, you can be sure it will be soon.)
2) In effect, they've managed to convince consumers to go out and pick up HDMI-equipped HDTVs, etc., without having to do any 'sway' marketting. There was always the chance, with an HDMI-less PS3, that people would buy so many of them instead of the HDMI-equipped one that media companies would be hard-pressed to use the ICT in any great numbers for fear of a backlash. But if everyone's going to have an HDMI-ready player anyways, suddenly this huge obstacle disappears.
So all I can say is that consumers have done more for getting other consumers to buy into copy protected media than Sony ever could have. This is an amazing coup for Sony's marketing, and I would call it a very shrewd business decision.
I have to chime in hear with a 'me too.' Kate may seem like a pretty low-end text editor, but it's just powerful enough and intuitive enough that it gets the job done without cutting its own legs out from under it.
I've tried using Anjuta and Kdevelop, as well as a few others. Anjuta simply couldn't handle a codebase the size of the one I was working with. It took forever to load, was sluggish beyond belief, and crashed way too often. Kdevelop, on the other hand, was fast and responsive--until you tried to code something in it, and then it locked up hard inside its syntax prediction/completion code. Every single time. And since you CAN'T TURN THAT OFF, I was forced to look elsewhere.
So Kate it is. I do have a couple of beefs with it--the latest version, as shipped with Suse 10.1, got rid of the concept of projects, something I'd been using quite extensively before, but I've learned to adapt. The real ouch is that it likes to crash randomly now whenever an external program touches a file you've got open, which is an absolute nightmare if you're working with source control. (And everyone should be at this point..) But even with that nastiness, it's still better than the alternatives.
Typically 80% of the songs on any given Weird Al album are parodies of someone else's material. You can't just take someone's music, replace the lyrics, and sell it as your own; you're still performing their piece, and someone has to work out the legals. I'd wager that's what Weird Al gets out of this deal; they handle the rights issues, leaving him the time to do what he does best; create.
It's a nice product, with some really nice bright screens. It's my first DS, so I can't really compare it to the original model, but it puts my Palm's screen to shame. Would love it to death if it weren't for the blue stuck pixel in the upper screen. I'll probably send it back to them under warranty in a few weeks, after I've had a chance to mess around with it a little.
I'm really curious what Nintendo has in store for it in combination with the Wii.
I'm surprised there are no distributed computing brute-force hacking attempts on that 2048-bit RSA key. Although I suppose that would be like painting a giant bullseye on themselves.
Maybe they're just waiting until they can get a cluster of PS3s to do the work on instead.
Um, if you actually read the full article, the whole point is that they believe this claim to be false since the board is missing a certain chip required for HDCP. Also, if you read the very bottom of the article, they claim that ATI's website has been changed since to put the info back up.
I have no idea whether or not any of this is true, all I know is that this is what's said in the article.
John Rhys-Davies? Heheh.. I'll always remember him as the guy from Sliders, but heck if I'll never forget his appearances in the Wing Commander games.
Heh. I'll never forget 'cause it was on the box. Not because it was particularly memorable. Sad how I actually went out and bought Wing Commander IV, but then never ended up playing it..
Brimstone.. man.. that show was frigging awesome. Not really what I'd call a nerd show, but it definitely had a lot going for it. Amazing casting for one; the main character and the devil were both absolutely awesome.
I really can't say enough good things about that show. I really wish they'd bring it to DVD.
Interestingly enough, the latest issue of EGM's blurb from the editor talked about this very problem. He stated that he wasn't going to do any of this exclusive front-cover stuff that some of the publishers wanted to push on him.. The Game Rag has a little fun at EGM's expense because of that article..
If I were to recommend a site for reviews right now, I'm not sure what I'd go with. I know that right now, I listen a lot to The DreamStation's podcast, and their website does have some reviews and stuff on it. I'm not sure about the quality, but the podcast is fun to listen to. For a while there they were taking turns taking potshots at Nancy Drew, Secret of the Old Clock until they actually reviewed it and had to admit it was actually kind of fun.:) They're good folks.
Even the guys over at Penny Arcade are pretty shameless these days with their Xbox 360 endorsements. I think you have to take everything said by anyone in the game industry with a grain of salt. With a movie, you only see it one way, but with a game, each player generates their own experience to a degree. It's tough to really cover everything when you're faced with something like that, and sometimes reviewers just get excited about having been giving a certain choice without ever actually having chosen it..
These are my own opinions, not my employer's, etc.:P
According to this interview, "Everything will be alright." In their defence, the timing in that song is this slow, shuffling gait that would be hard for anyone to reproduce.
There are other sites which say up to half of the songs on the album are demo versions, but I'm hard-pressed to find anything authoritative backing up those claims.
Please understand that I'm not trying to pick on The Killers here; they're all really accomplished musicians, and they're constantly improving with all the touring they've done. I only brought them up because I remembered this article.
All too true. But I think there's another paradigm at work here.
If you go back a couple of decades, the radio dial could bring you unprofessional, unpolished stuff along with the produced stuff. You could flip around and hear people performing--horror of horrors--live. It made people actually care about the performers a bit more, to be able to hear their little foibles, agonize with their mistakes, and cheer them on silently from this side of the air waves.
Now the airwaves are full of stuff that's been produced to completely eliminate any evidence of the production process. Synthesizers, vocoders and digital editing suites have become more responsible than the actual artists for the results. The few cases where this isn't true, any and all evidence of the singers themselves being human (breathing, hitting a note just slightly wrong) have been eliminated to bring up production values.
Add in the fact that, no matter where you hear it, be it at the grocery store, the dentist's waiting room, the bowling alley or in your car from your personal copy, it'll always be exactly the same song. You never hear the singer do something different. You never hear an extra interlude somewhere in the middle.
For all you know, the actual song ISN'T reproducible; it was a one-shot thing that the artists are struggling to this day to reproduce even a shadow of.. There's a song on The Killers' album, for instance, that they used their basement-produced tracks of because they couldn't do it as good anymore.
This is what we're fighting for, really. We need artists who ARE artists, who can step up to a mic, and/or sit down with their instrument, and step up to the challenge of actually honing their craft, improving themselves, striving to give us something new and better with every performance. What you record should just be a sample of what you've got; not the sum total of your repetoire.
If you look at the classic rock legends, you'll see this holds true. Likewise country music stars like Garth Brooks. Tons of material, they were always working to improve themselves. We remember them, not the one-hit-wonders like Men Without Hats or Right Said Fred. (Yeah, I grew up in the 80s) The key is that the music industry has been rewarding one-hit-wonders for too long, trying to get as much mileage out of them as possible without banking on people who would rather go the distance.
To make a comparison, it's like today's music industry is trying to make several furbies, tickle-me-elmos and cabbage patch dolls every year, and then scratching their heads wondering why people aren't lapping it up. We need those building blocks, legos and playing cards of the music world. Otherwise everything just looks the same.
Stats can be faked. There's really only one way to check whether or not an LCD is good enough for you; scroll down a few webpages.
I have a friend whose monitor can't handle scrolling slashdot. When you scroll down the page, all the dark green boxes become a bluish light green temporarily. It's very distracting.
Oh yeah.. and if you're going to be playing games on it too, make sure and give one or two of them a spin. Especially if it's something really murky like Doom III; you want to know for sure that the monitor can handle those really low grey levels, even when it's tossing out a good 6 bits on ya for some dithering algorithm..
This is a very good point, but I would go even further by saying that math itself is not even a requirement to solve the space-travel problem.
If you give it enough trial and error, and have a highly evolved-enough learning system in place, the flight angle problems pretty much work themselves out. (If you do a little research into neural networks, you'll find that this is the case.) It is entirely theoretically possible for a spacefaring race to get to our planet simply through perseverence and pigheadedness.
Actually building the spaceships they'd need, though.. well.. they'd probably have to evolve them too, since I don't see any civilization being able to build a spaceship without basic mathematics. Likewise the question of being able to stock the ship with enough fuel, food and water..
This is not entirely true. Some of the GameCube games, like Mario Sunshine for instance, use post-processing effects to provide distance 'haze' and other such effects. If you tried to render the final geometry to the screen on a higher resolution, you'd at best get pretty much the same thing, only a little blurrier. At worst, you could end up seeing distracting artifacts of algorithms that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, like warping geometry that makes the horizon look like a dancing curtain.
To get better cleaned-up visuals, you'd need to render everything in a higher resolution--including the in-between steps. This could possibly destroy some post-processing algorithms, especially if there is a CPU-based processing step involved.
So my question is, why is 40% the largest number of women to work on a game in history? And why is that attributed to The Sims Online? Didn't most of that team end up on Sims 2 afterwards?
Perhaps the lesson we should learn is that most women are smart enough not to get into an industry known for its long crunch times and poor working conditions. Or at the very least, after putting in tons of effort and finally pushing out a lukewarm title, which seems to be the average experience for people in this industry, they were smart enough to look for a job elsewhere?
Or is this an industry-wide problem that needs to be fixed? Is the industry's reliance on long crunch times and inflexibility when it comes to letting people spend time with their kids a built-in bias against women? Should people be taking industry members to court for discrimination?
(I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, so if I'm not talking sense, someone please enlighten me. It's hard to be PC around this topic.)
They don't need to rerelease; they could just deliver versions recompiled for easier emulation over the Live connection, when someone slaps in an old disc. Or the system might ship with copies of all the executables that need to be changed.
Newer titles could be handled more easily by just including 'easier' versions in a special directory on the disc.
That having been said, this is all highly unlikely; the amount of effort required to track down all of those titles and modify them as necessary would not only be prohibitive--it would probably be impossible. I mean really, what game company is going to want to hand its source code over to Microsoft? They're not going to want that.. and they're not going to be doing it themselves, either.
Slashdot Mirror
This 'study' is all about keeping the pressure up on Canada's heritage board, which is currently conducting a review with the aim to 'update' our copyright laws. As mentioned in a previous Slashdot article, they seem to be focussing on some sort of curtailment of our fair use provisions. Civil rights groups have been arguing against this, of course, so this is just another slavo from industry to try and push harder.
I'll be surprised if we have any rights left when they're done with this..
Hello Wii homebrew..
All good points.
You can really tell when a marketer's been drinking their own kool-aide when they start spouting off about how this is "progress." Just because something is new doesn't necessarily make it better. Yes, it's nicer that we'll be using less of the electromagnetic spectrum with the new HDTV versus the old SDTV, but that's about the only 'progress' statement I think can be reasonably made.
But isn't the added resolution of HDTV worth it? Well in theory, yes. But around here, nearly every damned station runs their signal through one of those sharpening filters which just adds more crap to the image and completely degrades the signal quality. I've got an SDTV digital receiver box here; the images should be a pristine 480i! Instead, the images look muddy and have compression artifacts all over them. I figure they're doing the same to the HDTV signals, so why bloody bother? It'll all look like crap anyways. Why should I pay good money to upgrade all my equipment to HDTV just so that I can get an image that, due to some stupid post process filters and the crap bit rate every bloody station uses, looks only as good as a decent SDTV signal?
This is an entertainment device. Some people, believe it or not, are not going to need the latest and the greatest in order to keep themselves amused. Some people don't even own a TV!
This is actually an example of very good marketing. Others have touched on it, but I can think of a couple of reasons why this is working out better than expected for Sony.
1) They probably wanted to put out all of the consoles with HDMI anyways. As Kutaragi said, they didn't want people to feel like they were paying for something they'd never use. This is a powerful statement, in my mind, because it shows that Sony was willing to put out the PS3, knowing that they would be fragmenting the HD market into two tiers; those with HDMI and those without. (Yes, there will still be people who don't have HDMI-enabled sets, but that's not the point.) With a tiered market, the most widely-available Blu-Ray player would not be guaranteed to have HDMI, which would pose a huge stumbling block to enabling the ICT later on.
Now, they can just tell people to go out and buy HDMI cables when they do. Your Toshiba HDTV doesn't have HDMI inputs? That's too bad, you should've bought a Sony set; all Sony sets come with HDMI.. (If that isn't true today, you can be sure it will be soon.)
2) In effect, they've managed to convince consumers to go out and pick up HDMI-equipped HDTVs, etc., without having to do any 'sway' marketting. There was always the chance, with an HDMI-less PS3, that people would buy so many of them instead of the HDMI-equipped one that media companies would be hard-pressed to use the ICT in any great numbers for fear of a backlash. But if everyone's going to have an HDMI-ready player anyways, suddenly this huge obstacle disappears.
So all I can say is that consumers have done more for getting other consumers to buy into copy protected media than Sony ever could have. This is an amazing coup for Sony's marketing, and I would call it a very shrewd business decision.
In short, this is a huge win for Sony.
I have to chime in hear with a 'me too.' Kate may seem like a pretty low-end text editor, but it's just powerful enough and intuitive enough that it gets the job done without cutting its own legs out from under it.
I've tried using Anjuta and Kdevelop, as well as a few others. Anjuta simply couldn't handle a codebase the size of the one I was working with. It took forever to load, was sluggish beyond belief, and crashed way too often. Kdevelop, on the other hand, was fast and responsive--until you tried to code something in it, and then it locked up hard inside its syntax prediction/completion code. Every single time. And since you CAN'T TURN THAT OFF, I was forced to look elsewhere.
So Kate it is. I do have a couple of beefs with it--the latest version, as shipped with Suse 10.1, got rid of the concept of projects, something I'd been using quite extensively before, but I've learned to adapt. The real ouch is that it likes to crash randomly now whenever an external program touches a file you've got open, which is an absolute nightmare if you're working with source control. (And everyone should be at this point..) But even with that nastiness, it's still better than the alternatives.
I doubt he has a choice.
Typically 80% of the songs on any given Weird Al album are parodies of someone else's material. You can't just take someone's music, replace the lyrics, and sell it as your own; you're still performing their piece, and someone has to work out the legals. I'd wager that's what Weird Al gets out of this deal; they handle the rights issues, leaving him the time to do what he does best; create.
It's a nice product, with some really nice bright screens. It's my first DS, so I can't really compare it to the original model, but it puts my Palm's screen to shame. Would love it to death if it weren't for the blue stuck pixel in the upper screen. I'll probably send it back to them under warranty in a few weeks, after I've had a chance to mess around with it a little.
I'm really curious what Nintendo has in store for it in combination with the Wii.
I'm surprised there are no distributed computing brute-force hacking attempts on that 2048-bit RSA key. Although I suppose that would be like painting a giant bullseye on themselves.
Maybe they're just waiting until they can get a cluster of PS3s to do the work on instead.
Um, if you actually read the full article, the whole point is that they believe this claim to be false since the board is missing a certain chip required for HDCP. Also, if you read the very bottom of the article, they claim that ATI's website has been changed since to put the info back up.
I have no idea whether or not any of this is true, all I know is that this is what's said in the article.
John Rhys-Davies? Heheh.. I'll always remember him as the guy from Sliders, but heck if I'll never forget his appearances in the Wing Commander games.
Heh. I'll never forget 'cause it was on the box. Not because it was particularly memorable. Sad how I actually went out and bought Wing Commander IV, but then never ended up playing it..
Brimstone.. man.. that show was frigging awesome. Not really what I'd call a nerd show, but it definitely had a lot going for it. Amazing casting for one; the main character and the devil were both absolutely awesome.
I really can't say enough good things about that show. I really wish they'd bring it to DVD.
[Whoop whoop, not for kids..]
Interestingly enough, the latest issue of EGM's blurb from the editor talked about this very problem. He stated that he wasn't going to do any of this exclusive front-cover stuff that some of the publishers wanted to push on him.. The Game Rag has a little fun at EGM's expense because of that article..
:) They're good folks.
:P
If I were to recommend a site for reviews right now, I'm not sure what I'd go with. I know that right now, I listen a lot to The DreamStation's podcast, and their website does have some reviews and stuff on it. I'm not sure about the quality, but the podcast is fun to listen to. For a while there they were taking turns taking potshots at Nancy Drew, Secret of the Old Clock until they actually reviewed it and had to admit it was actually kind of fun.
Even the guys over at Penny Arcade are pretty shameless these days with their Xbox 360 endorsements. I think you have to take everything said by anyone in the game industry with a grain of salt. With a movie, you only see it one way, but with a game, each player generates their own experience to a degree. It's tough to really cover everything when you're faced with something like that, and sometimes reviewers just get excited about having been giving a certain choice without ever actually having chosen it..
These are my own opinions, not my employer's, etc.
Not quite; they don't exactly give a rave review of PoPoLoCrois, just that it's the only game in town on the PSP..
Personally, I think you'd be better off transcoding some video to take with you if you've got a PSP.
According to this interview, "Everything will be alright." In their defence, the timing in that song is this slow, shuffling gait that would be hard for anyone to reproduce.
There are other sites which say up to half of the songs on the album are demo versions, but I'm hard-pressed to find anything authoritative backing up those claims.
Please understand that I'm not trying to pick on The Killers here; they're all really accomplished musicians, and they're constantly improving with all the touring they've done. I only brought them up because I remembered this article.
All too true. But I think there's another paradigm at work here.
If you go back a couple of decades, the radio dial could bring you unprofessional, unpolished stuff along with the produced stuff. You could flip around and hear people performing--horror of horrors--live. It made people actually care about the performers a bit more, to be able to hear their little foibles, agonize with their mistakes, and cheer them on silently from this side of the air waves.
Now the airwaves are full of stuff that's been produced to completely eliminate any evidence of the production process. Synthesizers, vocoders and digital editing suites have become more responsible than the actual artists for the results. The few cases where this isn't true, any and all evidence of the singers themselves being human (breathing, hitting a note just slightly wrong) have been eliminated to bring up production values.
Add in the fact that, no matter where you hear it, be it at the grocery store, the dentist's waiting room, the bowling alley or in your car from your personal copy, it'll always be exactly the same song. You never hear the singer do something different. You never hear an extra interlude somewhere in the middle.
For all you know, the actual song ISN'T reproducible; it was a one-shot thing that the artists are struggling to this day to reproduce even a shadow of.. There's a song on The Killers' album, for instance, that they used their basement-produced tracks of because they couldn't do it as good anymore.
This is what we're fighting for, really. We need artists who ARE artists, who can step up to a mic, and/or sit down with their instrument, and step up to the challenge of actually honing their craft, improving themselves, striving to give us something new and better with every performance. What you record should just be a sample of what you've got; not the sum total of your repetoire.
If you look at the classic rock legends, you'll see this holds true. Likewise country music stars like Garth Brooks. Tons of material, they were always working to improve themselves. We remember them, not the one-hit-wonders like Men Without Hats or Right Said Fred. (Yeah, I grew up in the 80s) The key is that the music industry has been rewarding one-hit-wonders for too long, trying to get as much mileage out of them as possible without banking on people who would rather go the distance.
To make a comparison, it's like today's music industry is trying to make several furbies, tickle-me-elmos and cabbage patch dolls every year, and then scratching their heads wondering why people aren't lapping it up. We need those building blocks, legos and playing cards of the music world. Otherwise everything just looks the same.
Today's pop music is the new grey.
I wouldn't even then.
Why doesn't this article have the foot icon beside it?
Where do these people get such cool names?
From their mothers?
One out of three ain't bad.
Stats can be faked. There's really only one way to check whether or not an LCD is good enough for you; scroll down a few webpages.
I have a friend whose monitor can't handle scrolling slashdot. When you scroll down the page, all the dark green boxes become a bluish light green temporarily. It's very distracting.
Oh yeah.. and if you're going to be playing games on it too, make sure and give one or two of them a spin. Especially if it's something really murky like Doom III; you want to know for sure that the monitor can handle those really low grey levels, even when it's tossing out a good 6 bits on ya for some dithering algorithm..
It's finally happened, just as we all feared; the USA is exporting lawyers.
They've been sitting on that stockpile for years. It was only a matter of time before they used them.
Damn you, UN!
Psycho anyone?
This is a very good point, but I would go even further by saying that math itself is not even a requirement to solve the space-travel problem.
If you give it enough trial and error, and have a highly evolved-enough learning system in place, the flight angle problems pretty much work themselves out. (If you do a little research into neural networks, you'll find that this is the case.) It is entirely theoretically possible for a spacefaring race to get to our planet simply through perseverence and pigheadedness.
Actually building the spaceships they'd need, though.. well.. they'd probably have to evolve them too, since I don't see any civilization being able to build a spaceship without basic mathematics. Likewise the question of being able to stock the ship with enough fuel, food and water..
You mean.. Brimstone wasn't a documentary?
This is not entirely true. Some of the GameCube games, like Mario Sunshine for instance, use post-processing effects to provide distance 'haze' and other such effects. If you tried to render the final geometry to the screen on a higher resolution, you'd at best get pretty much the same thing, only a little blurrier. At worst, you could end up seeing distracting artifacts of algorithms that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, like warping geometry that makes the horizon look like a dancing curtain.
To get better cleaned-up visuals, you'd need to render everything in a higher resolution--including the in-between steps. This could possibly destroy some post-processing algorithms, especially if there is a CPU-based processing step involved.
So my question is, why is 40% the largest number of women to work on a game in history? And why is that attributed to The Sims Online? Didn't most of that team end up on Sims 2 afterwards?
Perhaps the lesson we should learn is that most women are smart enough not to get into an industry known for its long crunch times and poor working conditions. Or at the very least, after putting in tons of effort and finally pushing out a lukewarm title, which seems to be the average experience for people in this industry, they were smart enough to look for a job elsewhere?
Or is this an industry-wide problem that needs to be fixed? Is the industry's reliance on long crunch times and inflexibility when it comes to letting people spend time with their kids a built-in bias against women? Should people be taking industry members to court for discrimination?
(I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, so if I'm not talking sense, someone please enlighten me. It's hard to be PC around this topic.)
They don't need to rerelease; they could just deliver versions recompiled for easier emulation over the Live connection, when someone slaps in an old disc. Or the system might ship with copies of all the executables that need to be changed.
Newer titles could be handled more easily by just including 'easier' versions in a special directory on the disc.
That having been said, this is all highly unlikely; the amount of effort required to track down all of those titles and modify them as necessary would not only be prohibitive--it would probably be impossible. I mean really, what game company is going to want to hand its source code over to Microsoft? They're not going to want that.. and they're not going to be doing it themselves, either.