If the games suck, Wii will flop and so far I havn't seen much to indicate that this is not the case.
You havn't [sic] seen much to indicate that it IS the case, either.
There already has been a lot of disapointment when people found out that RedSteel didn't have real sword fighting
And Ubisoft has responded by reworking the swordfighting engine to more closely track the user's movement. It's not "real" by any stretch, but gamers don't want "real"; they want to hack and slash.
what happens if you put the controller to the side in a first person shooter, will the character start to spin around like crazy? Or will there be some magic that detects when you are activly playing or be busy with something else?
"Pause button"
But so far most hands-on reporst about the Wii havn't been all that positive
I'm not sure which media you've been reading, but most of the hands-on reports I've seen have been, on the whole, excited about the potential that the Wii control schemes bring. Perhaps there is a selective memory effect at work here?
In the end, though, I agree with you. We will have to wait and see.
By chosing OSS you lock yourself into that path, which is effectively no different from the vendor path.
If I choose Linux as my server platform, I can run it on hardware produced by Dell or HP or IBM or any one of about a hundred other OEMs, in any combination I choose. I can choose Fedora Core, or Ubuntu, or Debian, or any other distro.
If I choose OS X as my server platform, I can run it hardware produced by Apple, or by Apple. I can use either this year's model, or last year's model. If they still offer it.
OSS gives the customer many times the options of integrated/proprietary solutions, beyond just "modify the source and compile it yourself". I do not consider that to be lock-in.
Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do.
I'd like to see that kid in a garage manage to get a band's new single into heavy rotation on Viacom's cable channels and ClearChannel's radio stations.
Promotion is a valuable service to a musical artist, and the record companies are still really the only way for an artist to successfully get promoted. The internet has not yet changed this.
Here is clue #1 for music companies: If it would cost me roughly the same amount of money to buy each track on a CD digitally as to go to the store and buy the actual CD, you're charging too much.
You assume that the music companies WANT you to download those digital tracks.
If you decide a CD is the better value, the record company still gets your money, plus the get to postpone the demise of the physical media distribution business model just a little bit longer.
But in large part you're creating a strawman, by specifying exactly the situation in which it is most difficult to make a profit.
I disagree. The high creative capital + no manufacturing cost + no distibution cost scenario is a real-world one, facing every creative artist in the digital age.
People *want* to spend money on entertainment.
I disagree. People want entertainment, period. They are willing to spend money on it, but it is merely a means to an end. There's a reason why broadcast TV networks have viewerships many times the size of premium cable networks like HBO, and it's mostly because the former is free (as in beer).
Music is cheap to make.
I disagree. Recording costs for music may be down to the point where 72 minutes of audio can be preserved for $5,000, but there's no guarantee that the audio will be Music. Musicians invest a lot of time and often a lot of money developing their craft to the point where you would want to listen to what they create.
accepting that people don't really need millions for doing what they love.
I do not accept that. As a musician, I should have the opportunity to do what I love AND make millions. It is not and should not be a binary choice.
So when the CPU expects to get data from the hard disk, we sometimes get it from memory instead, and when it expects to get data from memory, we sometimes get it from the hard disk instead.
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
You're just delaying the inevitable. Eventually that runaway process is going to eat all yer physical RAM and all yer swap space, and then what happens?
Hey, at four or five rant posts per typo the, "Add random typo to inflame user interest," chapter seems to have been well read as well as put to good use.
Please tell me you misused those commas in the interest of inflaming user interest as well.
On the other hand, all of the hardware in an iMac is contained in a single unit.
On the other other hand, all of the hardware in a Mac Mini is not. Can't claim this point in Apple's favor if there are models in the product line that are at least as difficult to set up the hardware for as a typical Dell or HP desktop box.
you have to realize that all of that is pretty daunting to anybody who's never owned a computer before
A group of potential customers that gets smaller and smaller every year. Is it really in Apple's best interests to be targetting their advertising to this segment?
if they really are concerned with making customers happy, your request does not sound like that big a burden to their system.
It's not a big technical burden, no. The cable boxes they lease out all already have the ability to enable/disable decryption of channels on an individual basis.
The problem is, the cable companies really AREN'T concerned with making subscribers happy. They don't think of us as the customers -- they think of the networks as the customers, and when Viacom tells them that in order to carry MTV they'll have to offer it as part of a package that comes with Nick at Nite, Spike TV, BET, and Noggin, the subscribers aren't going to get the chance to only pay for MTV. It's all or nothing.
Factor in that many times cable companies and media networks have the same ownership and therefore push their own brands, and the problem becomes even more difficult.
The United States of America is not an Islamic theocracy. The stated goals of the terrorists is to convert all the nations of the world into Islamic theocracies.
Why didn't the stewardesses call them back and tell them it was an iPod and that a passenger had just reported it missing?
What if it HAD been an explosive device of some sort? The guy who flushed it wouldn't confess that yeah, it was an explosive device and I'm trying to bring this plane down. No. He'd have been all oops, I accidentally flushed an iPod down the loo, don't bother calling the bomb squad.
what good methods for 'shredding' CDs exist? I usually try to flake off enough of the foil in a radial motion before I throw a disc out with personal data on it. But this is messy. I also have slashdot muscles, so breaking large quantities in half isn't really the answer. Any ideas?
A few seconds in a microwave oven will render a CD completely unreadable, and also perfume the air with an ozone-y, possibly toxic aroma.
1) He hasn't had to reverse a linked list in 23 years. Irrelevant, it's a basic problem.
It's a basic problem that already has a solution in just about any framework where the ability to reverse a linked list might be needed.
The correct answer to such an interview question ought to be "I would look in the docs for the linkedList class to find the syntax for the reverse() method. Then I would call it."
Fuck tact. If you need tact to deal with a broken design, that's an early warning sign in and of itself.
No, fuck you. Being tactful when talking to colleagues--and especially POTENTIAL colleagues--is just basic business courtesy. You are not exempt from it just because you have to deal with a "broken" design, or for any other reason.
since the offenses would be so trivial to prove, its free money.
It's trivial to prove the existence of copyrighted content on YouTube.
It is not as trivial to prove that YouTube was aware that sharing a particular piece of content was a violation of copyright, or even if it was that YouTube is liable for damages.
there are already ad companies putting ads on youtube with the intention of going viral.
Currently, those ad companies are able to put their viral video ads up on YouTube for free.
What motivation do they have to pay money to YouTube for the same privilege? And if YouTube starts charging to let users put videos up, how do they distinguish between ad and non-ad content?
"This is because the typical metrics for measuring a company appear to have gone out the window--just like they did during the bubble years of the late 1990s."
Yes. In the late 1990s, the typical metrics for measuring a company did APPEAR to go out the window. In reality, those metrics were still as valid as ever.
It's not a question of DRM-free HD content or DRM-restricted content, it's a question of DRM-restricted content or NO CONTENT AT ALL.
Not quite. It's a choice between: 1. migrating DRM-encrusted HD-DVD and Blue-Ray content 2. staying with the current standard of CSS-encoded DVD content 3. eschewing physical media formats altogether and downloading DRM-free video files encoded at HD resolutions
The media companies think we're all going to choose the first, but I see very few indicators in the market that that's true. The geeks among us are moving in greater numbers toward #3, and for the masses #2 is going to be good enough until sometime next decade.
Microsoft and the Media Cartel are actually creating MORE roadblocks to adoption of their pet formats. Every customer for whom they make their new discs appear to be broken or low-quality (via disabling features or downscaling) is another customer that will seek alternatives.
Well, obviously, the alleged prostitute coudln't understand the concept that you get your bail back if you show up to trial.
Or, she didn't have $1500 available with which to post bail. (Alleged) prostitutes aren't exactly in the best of financial straits, you know.
I guess I don't need to use alleged since she pleaded guilty.
It's clear that she pled guilty out of convenience, not out of recognizance of actual guilt. In the court's eyes she is no longer only an "alleged" prostitute, but I haven't heard enough of her story to know whether or not she actually is one.
But these embryos were alive and their lives were taken because of inefficient IVF procedures. That is, they were murdered for the sake of efficiency of resource usage and science.
I disagree with your definitions of 'alive' and 'murdered'.
Slashdot Mirror
If the games suck, Wii will flop and so far I havn't seen much to indicate that this is not the case.
You havn't [sic] seen much to indicate that it IS the case, either.
There already has been a lot of disapointment when people found out that RedSteel didn't have real sword fighting
And Ubisoft has responded by reworking the swordfighting engine to more closely track the user's movement. It's not "real" by any stretch, but gamers don't want "real"; they want to hack and slash.
what happens if you put the controller to the side in a first person shooter, will the character start to spin around like crazy? Or will there be some magic that detects when you are activly playing or be busy with something else?
"Pause button"
But so far most hands-on reporst about the Wii havn't been all that positive
I'm not sure which media you've been reading, but most of the hands-on reports I've seen have been, on the whole, excited about the potential that the Wii control schemes bring. Perhaps there is a selective memory effect at work here?
In the end, though, I agree with you. We will have to wait and see.
To be fair, that upper 10% did tinkle down... errr trickle down... on the rest of us.
Did it?
Or does Reaganomics increase the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots more and more whenever it's practiced?
By chosing OSS you lock yourself into that path, which is effectively no different from the vendor path.
If I choose Linux as my server platform, I can run it on hardware produced by Dell or HP or IBM or any one of about a hundred other OEMs, in any combination I choose. I can choose Fedora Core, or Ubuntu, or Debian, or any other distro.
If I choose OS X as my server platform, I can run it hardware produced by Apple, or by Apple. I can use either this year's model, or last year's model. If they still offer it.
OSS gives the customer many times the options of integrated/proprietary solutions, beyond just "modify the source and compile it yourself". I do not consider that to be lock-in.
Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do.
I'd like to see that kid in a garage manage to get a band's new single into heavy rotation on Viacom's cable channels and ClearChannel's radio stations.
Promotion is a valuable service to a musical artist, and the record companies are still really the only way for an artist to successfully get promoted. The internet has not yet changed this.
Here is clue #1 for music companies: If it would cost me roughly the same amount of money to buy each track on a CD digitally as to go to the store and buy the actual CD, you're charging too much.
You assume that the music companies WANT you to download those digital tracks.
If you decide a CD is the better value, the record company still gets your money, plus the get to postpone the demise of the physical media distribution business model just a little bit longer.
But in large part you're creating a strawman, by specifying exactly the situation in which it is most difficult to make a profit.
I disagree. The high creative capital + no manufacturing cost + no distibution cost scenario is a real-world one, facing every creative artist in the digital age.
People *want* to spend money on entertainment.
I disagree. People want entertainment, period. They are willing to spend money on it, but it is merely a means to an end. There's a reason why broadcast TV networks have viewerships many times the size of premium cable networks like HBO, and it's mostly because the former is free (as in beer).
Music is cheap to make.
I disagree. Recording costs for music may be down to the point where 72 minutes of audio can be preserved for $5,000, but there's no guarantee that the audio will be Music. Musicians invest a lot of time and often a lot of money developing their craft to the point where you would want to listen to what they create.
accepting that people don't really need millions for doing what they love.
I do not accept that. As a musician, I should have the opportunity to do what I love AND make millions. It is not and should not be a binary choice.
So when the CPU expects to get data from the hard disk, we sometimes get it from memory instead, and when it expects to get data from memory, we sometimes get it from the hard disk instead.
This does not seem optimal to me.
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
You're just delaying the inevitable. Eventually that runaway process is going to eat all yer physical RAM and all yer swap space, and then what happens?
Hey, at four or five rant posts per typo the, "Add random typo to inflame user interest," chapter seems to have been well read as well as put to good use.
Please tell me you misused those commas in the interest of inflaming user interest as well.
On the other hand, all of the hardware in an iMac is contained in a single unit.
On the other other hand, all of the hardware in a Mac Mini is not. Can't claim this point in Apple's favor if there are models in the product line that are at least as difficult to set up the hardware for as a typical Dell or HP desktop box.
you have to realize that all of that is pretty daunting to anybody who's never owned a computer before
A group of potential customers that gets smaller and smaller every year. Is it really in Apple's best interests to be targetting their advertising to this segment?
if they really are concerned with making customers happy, your request does not sound like that big a burden to their system.
It's not a big technical burden, no. The cable boxes they lease out all already have the ability to enable/disable decryption of channels on an individual basis.
The problem is, the cable companies really AREN'T concerned with making subscribers happy. They don't think of us as the customers -- they think of the networks as the customers, and when Viacom tells them that in order to carry MTV they'll have to offer it as part of a package that comes with Nick at Nite, Spike TV, BET, and Noggin, the subscribers aren't going to get the chance to only pay for MTV. It's all or nothing.
Factor in that many times cable companies and media networks have the same ownership and therefore push their own brands, and the problem becomes even more difficult.
The United States of America is not an Islamic theocracy.
The stated goals of the terrorists is to convert all the nations of the world into Islamic theocracies.
They haven't won.
Now shut the fuck up and keep fighting.
Why didn't the stewardesses call them back and tell them it was an iPod and that a passenger had just reported it missing?
What if it HAD been an explosive device of some sort? The guy who flushed it wouldn't confess that yeah, it was an explosive device and I'm trying to bring this plane down. No. He'd have been all oops, I accidentally flushed an iPod down the loo, don't bother calling the bomb squad.
Better safe than sorry.
what good methods for 'shredding' CDs exist? I usually try to flake off enough of the foil in a radial motion before I throw a disc out with personal data on it. But this is messy. I also have slashdot muscles, so breaking large quantities in half isn't really the answer. Any ideas?
A few seconds in a microwave oven will render a CD completely unreadable, and also perfume the air with an ozone-y, possibly toxic aroma.
1) He hasn't had to reverse a linked list in 23 years.
Irrelevant, it's a basic problem.
It's a basic problem that already has a solution in just about any framework where the ability to reverse a linked list might be needed.
The correct answer to such an interview question ought to be "I would look in the docs for the linkedList class to find the syntax for the reverse() method. Then I would call it."
Fuck tact. If you need tact to deal with a broken design, that's an early warning sign in and of itself.
No, fuck you. Being tactful when talking to colleagues--and especially POTENTIAL colleagues--is just basic business courtesy. You are not exempt from it just because you have to deal with a "broken" design, or for any other reason.
since the offenses would be so trivial to prove, its free money.
It's trivial to prove the existence of copyrighted content on YouTube.
It is not as trivial to prove that YouTube was aware that sharing a particular piece of content was a violation of copyright, or even if it was that YouTube is liable for damages.
there are already ad companies putting ads on youtube with the intention of going viral.
Currently, those ad companies are able to put their viral video ads up on YouTube for free.
What motivation do they have to pay money to YouTube for the same privilege? And if YouTube starts charging to let users put videos up, how do they distinguish between ad and non-ad content?
So all you have to do is build a search engine that will search YouTube, Google Video, Vobbo, Xflks, Uapoql, and all the other video search engines.
Yeah. That's how Dogpile unseated Google as King Of Search Engines, after all.
"This is because the typical metrics for measuring a company appear to have gone out the window--just like they did during the bubble years of the late 1990s."
Yes. In the late 1990s, the typical metrics for measuring a company did APPEAR to go out the window. In reality, those metrics were still as valid as ever.
It's not a question of DRM-free HD content or DRM-restricted content, it's a question of DRM-restricted content or NO CONTENT AT ALL.
Not quite. It's a choice between:
1. migrating DRM-encrusted HD-DVD and Blue-Ray content
2. staying with the current standard of CSS-encoded DVD content
3. eschewing physical media formats altogether and downloading DRM-free video files encoded at HD resolutions
The media companies think we're all going to choose the first, but I see very few indicators in the market that that's true. The geeks among us are moving in greater numbers toward #3, and for the masses #2 is going to be good enough until sometime next decade.
Microsoft and the Media Cartel are actually creating MORE roadblocks to adoption of their pet formats. Every customer for whom they make their new discs appear to be broken or low-quality (via disabling features or downscaling) is another customer that will seek alternatives.
Well, obviously, the alleged prostitute coudln't understand the concept that you get your bail back if you show up to trial.
Or, she didn't have $1500 available with which to post bail. (Alleged) prostitutes aren't exactly in the best of financial straits, you know.
I guess I don't need to use alleged since she pleaded guilty.
It's clear that she pled guilty out of convenience, not out of recognizance of actual guilt. In the court's eyes she is no longer only an "alleged" prostitute, but I haven't heard enough of her story to know whether or not she actually is one.
But these embryos were alive and their lives were taken because of inefficient IVF procedures. That is, they were murdered for the sake of efficiency of resource usage and science.
I disagree with your definitions of 'alive' and 'murdered'.
the "limitation" (that stops no one from doing their own privately-funded research)
Who would fund a private stem cell research lab?
Research universities are out, because they would lose their federal funding for other types of research if they did that.
Pharmaceutical companies are out, because the profit-making potential of stem cells is still too far in the future to be quantified.
Who's left? Maybe the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Can't think of anyone else who might have both the capital and philanthropic bent to even try.
The "gotchas" on federal funding attached to the stem cell research limitations effect a de facto ban on unrestricted stem cell research.
Bush is like a broken path in the Internet. Science will route around him.
Yes, but Science will suffer from much greater lag than if the broken path hadn't been broken in the first place.