If Oracle doesn't want to come off looking bad in these types of cost comparisons, they should stop telling people that their product costs $40K/CPU. Who else can be blamed for the perception that Oracle costs that much -- besides Oracle themselves?
If by "advanced", you mean "nonstandard and proprietary". I'll admit, I do like Oracle's START WITH/CONNECT BY extensions for navigating a results set as a tree, but woe to the developer who later has to port an application that relies on them to another RDBMS that only implements the SQL92 standard dialect.
Re:Now it's time to kill The Simpsons
on
Futurama Returns
·
· Score: 1
PLEASE kill The Simpsons already. The longer it goes on, the darker the future is for all of us.
If you don't think it's worth watching anymore, just don't watch it.
Shouldn't any machine capable of playing the FPS games also be capable of playing the "family" games?
It should, but the reverse isn't necessarily true: a machine capable of playing the "family" games may not be capable of playing the high-performance FPS/driving/simulation games.
So it makes sense that a company like Nintendo, who has always had a focus on gameplay over glitter, would distance themselves from the textured-polygon arms race -- but I don't understand why Sony and Microsoft, and their developers, seem so hesitant to wade into the "family" waters. Have they forfeited that market to Nintendo already? Is there just a lack of developer creativity?
You are free to openly disagree with the President and his policies with NO WORRY of retribution.
This is more or less incorrect.
First Amendment protections only guarantee you that you have no worry of retribution FROM THE GOVERNMENT for openly disagreeing with the President. Your employer can still fire you. Private citizens may attempt to dig up dirt on you and discredit you.
The QuickTime architecture seems solid and elegantly designed, and I like that it avoids the morass of codec problems that so often plagues Windows Media Player.
Despite all this, I still can't bring myself to use it any more often than absolutely necessary, because the user interface is frankly awful. This is especially true on Windows, where QT Player retains a Mac OS brushed-metal design, instead of looking like any other Windows app. It's jarring.
Should I ever want to discuss something illegal I would either use GPG through email or encrypted IM anyway.
What it you want to discuss something entirely legal, but private? Like talking to your lawyer about a case brought against you? Or discussing your child's medical condition with your spouse?
Are you really okay with Google keeping a record of such conversations?
I'm not, which is why I wouldn't use Google's services for anything which needs to stay confidential.
Looks like they're going to have to reengineer their solution:o(
I'm surprised they were using fluorescent lighing for this in the first place. I would have thought a couple banks of inexpensive LEDs would provide the effect quite nicely.
to say there haven't been single player games ignores every kid that's kicked a ball against a wall, driven toy cars or flown toy planes around, flown a kite, used a hulahoop, jumped rope, played with a yo-yo, had a dolls tea party, built a cardboard and tinfoil spaceship for a trip to the moon, or kept a hoop rolling with a stick.
But are those "games", or are they toys?
And is there any reason why "video toys" like the ones people have been enjoying by themselves for the past 21 (???) years couldn't continue to flourish?
if they keep 70% of the ps2 user base - they still have enough revenue to ride well into the next decade.
Nintendo has a reputation for strong consumer loyalty. Let's see how their userbase retention has fared over the years.
NES - 62 million consoles sold worldwide SNES - 49 million - 79% retention N64 - 33 million - 67% retention GC - 20 million - 61% retention
So a 70% retention rate for Sony isn't too inconceivable -- provided that the new console costs about as much as the previous one did, as Nintendo's have. If the PS3 has an MSRP of $600, you're not going to see many casual PS2-owning gamers making the upgrade.
[Xbox 360] damn near does everything except make dinner.
Or play games that aren't combat or sports simulations. Okay, there are some, but there's really nothing on the 360 to woo (for example) RPG fans.
they haven't sold non-gamers enough to make it a good value home entertainment center
Because it isn't one. To do much of anything home-entertainmenty with it besides playing games or watching DVDs, you need a $1500 Media Center PC for the 360 to stream content from.
i could go to toys r us and buy toys more powerful and less costly than these wind up devices.
Then why haven't you done it already?
You seem to have all the answers about how to foster a technical renaissance in the third world; gonna do anything to make it happen, or just sit here on Slashdot showing us how great you are?
What you don't seem to recognize is that the introduction of an information economy works better if it's done gradually. You didn't study calculus in first grade, did you? No. Even if you were smart for your age, we all started with counting, then worked our way up to addition and subtraction, and on from there. Information technology is no different.
Until those problems in technology are solved, I'm sorry Rupert, newspapers will not die.
The broadsheet newspaper is one of the all-time greats of distribution formats, sure. But don't forget that the ultimate goal of a newspaper is not to benefit the reader; it is to benefit their ADVERTISERS. And many traditional newspaper advertisers are starting to realize that they can get a better product, and a better ROI, if they move to Internet advertising.
If I'm a car dealership, I shouldn't be spending my advertising budget on a quarter-page ad every day and a full-page on Sunday, listing brief details about one-third of my available inventory in glorious 4-tone dithered color. Not when I could use the money to build a website where potential customers can find my FULL inventory, with FULL descriptions of each car, and a half dozen photos of each car in FULL 24-bit color.
Voice actors are also not cheap. They can be one of the biggest expenses in an animated show. Simpsons actors make several hundred thousand per episode. Multiply that by six actors and you're topping a million per episode just for the talent.
Sure, the voice talent on The Simpsons make top dollar -- the show couldn't exist without them. Same is true for a lot of the big names in cartoon voices: Maurice LaMarche, Frank Welker, Tress MacNeille.
I'm not so sure Family Guy would fall into the same category of expensive-but-worth-it voice talent expenses. Most of the voice are done by creator Seth McFarlane himself (note I didn't say plural "voices", as they're all pretty much that same), and the other voices are more or less replaceable. As they already did when Mila Kunis replaced Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg.
Ideally, a judge would, like the article's author, take one look at the charges and say, "whaaaaat?" just before throwing the whole silly thing out. Now three loops have decided returning the drive clean is a crime, unanimously.
I urge you to consider the possibility that all the judges who have thus far ruled that it can be a criminal act to destroy information that does not belong to you may, in fact, not be "out of their league" regarding workplaces and technology, and even may understand the issues better than either you or Mr. McCullagh.
I wonder how long it will take for Nintendo to announce the ability to play the classic games downloaded by the Revo to also be able to be played on the DS.... that would be a great announcement.
And, to some extent, impractical.
The DS hardware is not powerful enough to emulate GameCube or N64, though ports of games for those systems to native DS programs can be done (vis Super Mario 64 DS et al).
The DS should be able to emulate most if not all NES and SNES titles, but the problem is that those consoles run at higher resolutions than one DS display can handle. There's several potential solutions to the problem (dropping scanlines, pan-and-scan, splitting the screen onto both of the DS's displays), but none are optimal.
Gameboy and Gameboy Color emulation are no problem; emulators exist for those platforms on the GBA already, and the DS can run GBA code natively.
So MAYBE Nintendo could devise a way to make earlier Gameboy games available on the DS, perhaps even get their multiplayer modes working via Nintendo WiFi. But I wouldn't ask for much more than that as far as classic gaming officially supported on the DS.
Please, Senator Lieberman. You're one of the only active Democrats in power which I don't desperately want to punch in the throat.
Really? I would have thought that someone even remotely familiar with Lieberman's record in office would not be surprised by this. He's always been of fan of this kind of big-government nanny program.
Very little is widely known about the two games that were going to be made from the movie A.I., except that they were both supposed to be launch titles for the original X-BOX.
I think they were cancelled when playtesters expressed confusion over why David always falls down that goddam hole, and why his neck stretches as he levitates out of it -- ONLY TO FALL RIGHT BACK DOWN THAT FUCKING HOLE AGAIN!!!
Even better yet, stop trying to record a specific program on a specific network at a specific time, and just download the show via BitTorrent at any time, starting a couple hours after it first airs.
when the FBI's suspected suicidal hijackers start turning up alive after 9/11, I think we have to question their whole case
Or, by Occam's Razor, we conclude that the hijackers were using stolen identification.
legitimate issues with regards to the nature of the WTC building collapses (3 buildings suffered complete, symmetric collapses that resembled controlled demolitions)
Issues, I will grant you. As to their legitimacy, I'm not an expert in structural engineering (nor are most people raising these issues), so I wouldn't deign to say. What I do know is that buildings collapsing due to have big firey holes bashed into them by airplanes is a lot more plausible than secret demolitions squads sneaking in and placing charges on hundreds of supports.
Slashdot Mirror
The crashes were impossible - instructions like
xor eax, eax
Watch out -- you may have just reverse-engineered Sony's latest DRM enforcement mechanism!
$40K/CPU is full-boat retail.
If Oracle doesn't want to come off looking bad in these types of cost comparisons, they should stop telling people that their product costs $40K/CPU. Who else can be blamed for the perception that Oracle costs that much -- besides Oracle themselves?
Oracle's strong points over PG:
- advanced SQL (cubes, trees, etc)
If by "advanced", you mean "nonstandard and proprietary". I'll admit, I do like Oracle's START WITH/CONNECT BY extensions for navigating a results set as a tree, but woe to the developer who later has to port an application that relies on them to another RDBMS that only implements the SQL92 standard dialect.
PLEASE kill The Simpsons already. The longer it goes on, the darker the future is for all of us.
If you don't think it's worth watching anymore, just don't watch it.
Shouldn't any machine capable of playing the FPS games also be capable of playing the "family" games?
It should, but the reverse isn't necessarily true: a machine capable of playing the "family" games may not be capable of playing the high-performance FPS/driving/simulation games.
So it makes sense that a company like Nintendo, who has always had a focus on gameplay over glitter, would distance themselves from the textured-polygon arms race -- but I don't understand why Sony and Microsoft, and their developers, seem so hesitant to wade into the "family" waters. Have they forfeited that market to Nintendo already? Is there just a lack of developer creativity?
You are free to openly disagree with the President and his policies with NO WORRY of retribution.
This is more or less incorrect.
First Amendment protections only guarantee you that you have no worry of retribution FROM THE GOVERNMENT for openly disagreeing with the President. Your employer can still fire you. Private citizens may attempt to dig up dirt on you and discredit you.
The QuickTime architecture seems solid and elegantly designed, and I like that it avoids the morass of codec problems that so often plagues Windows Media Player.
Despite all this, I still can't bring myself to use it any more often than absolutely necessary, because the user interface is frankly awful. This is especially true on Windows, where QT Player retains a Mac OS brushed-metal design, instead of looking like any other Windows app. It's jarring.
Should I ever want to discuss something illegal I would either use GPG through email or encrypted IM anyway.
What it you want to discuss something entirely legal, but private? Like talking to your lawyer about a case brought against you? Or discussing your child's medical condition with your spouse?
Are you really okay with Google keeping a record of such conversations?
I'm not, which is why I wouldn't use Google's services for anything which needs to stay confidential.
Looks like they're going to have to reengineer their solution :o(
I'm surprised they were using fluorescent lighing for this in the first place. I would have thought a couple banks of inexpensive LEDs would provide the effect quite nicely.
to say there haven't been single player games ignores every kid that's kicked a ball against a wall, driven toy cars or flown toy planes around, flown a kite, used a hulahoop, jumped rope, played with a yo-yo, had a dolls tea party, built a cardboard and tinfoil spaceship for a trip to the moon, or kept a hoop rolling with a stick.
But are those "games", or are they toys?
And is there any reason why "video toys" like the ones people have been enjoying by themselves for the past 21 (???) years couldn't continue to flourish?
What myths?
None of the links you provide contradict the claim in the cite.
"Decrease the frequency of mechanical failure" and "slow typists down" are not necessarily the same goal.
if they keep 70% of the ps2 user base - they still have enough revenue to ride well into the next decade.
Nintendo has a reputation for strong consumer loyalty. Let's see how their userbase retention has fared over the years.
NES - 62 million consoles sold worldwide
SNES - 49 million - 79% retention
N64 - 33 million - 67% retention
GC - 20 million - 61% retention
So a 70% retention rate for Sony isn't too inconceivable -- provided that the new console costs about as much as the previous one did, as Nintendo's have. If the PS3 has an MSRP of $600, you're not going to see many casual PS2-owning gamers making the upgrade.
[Xbox 360] damn near does everything except make dinner.
Or play games that aren't combat or sports simulations. Okay, there are some, but there's really nothing on the 360 to woo (for example) RPG fans.
they haven't sold non-gamers enough to make it a good value home entertainment center
Because it isn't one. To do much of anything home-entertainmenty with it besides playing games or watching DVDs, you need a $1500 Media Center PC for the 360 to stream content from.
How about just guaranteeing food, shelter and clean water.
That kind of campaign plank doesn't resonate with the voters who already have access to food, shelter, and clean water, i.e. almost all of them.
Broadband internet, or the lack of availability thereof, is an issue that a lot of the middle class can relate to.
i could go to toys r us and buy toys more powerful and less costly than these wind up devices.
Then why haven't you done it already?
You seem to have all the answers about how to foster a technical renaissance in the third world; gonna do anything to make it happen, or just sit here on Slashdot showing us how great you are?
What you don't seem to recognize is that the introduction of an information economy works better if it's done gradually. You didn't study calculus in first grade, did you? No. Even if you were smart for your age, we all started with counting, then worked our way up to addition and subtraction, and on from there. Information technology is no different.
Every database developer I know simply refers to the product as "Post-gress". (The 'QL' is implied.)
Pronounciation and association problems solved. It's a similar to the word "progress", but it's post-progress. All connotations are positive.
Our IT department has been downsized and now it is almost impossible to get assistance
O RLY?
Maybe this should have been a wake-up call to the bozos with pointy hair that they actually NEEDED all the headcount that used to be on payroll.
Until those problems in technology are solved, I'm sorry Rupert, newspapers will not die.
The broadsheet newspaper is one of the all-time greats of distribution formats, sure. But don't forget that the ultimate goal of a newspaper is not to benefit the reader; it is to benefit their ADVERTISERS. And many traditional newspaper advertisers are starting to realize that they can get a better product, and a better ROI, if they move to Internet advertising.
If I'm a car dealership, I shouldn't be spending my advertising budget on a quarter-page ad every day and a full-page on Sunday, listing brief details about one-third of my available inventory in glorious 4-tone dithered color. Not when I could use the money to build a website where potential customers can find my FULL inventory, with FULL descriptions of each car, and a half dozen photos of each car in FULL 24-bit color.
Voice actors are also not cheap. They can be one of the biggest expenses in an animated show. Simpsons actors make several hundred thousand per episode. Multiply that by six actors and you're topping a million per episode just for the talent.
Sure, the voice talent on The Simpsons make top dollar -- the show couldn't exist without them. Same is true for a lot of the big names in cartoon voices: Maurice LaMarche, Frank Welker, Tress MacNeille.
I'm not so sure Family Guy would fall into the same category of expensive-but-worth-it voice talent expenses. Most of the voice are done by creator Seth McFarlane himself (note I didn't say plural "voices", as they're all pretty much that same), and the other voices are more or less replaceable. As they already did when Mila Kunis replaced Lacey Chabert as the voice of Meg.
Ideally, a judge would, like the article's author, take one look at the charges and say, "whaaaaat?" just before throwing the whole silly thing out. Now three loops have decided returning the drive clean is a crime, unanimously.
I urge you to consider the possibility that all the judges who have thus far ruled that it can be a criminal act to destroy information that does not belong to you may, in fact, not be "out of their league" regarding workplaces and technology, and even may understand the issues better than either you or Mr. McCullagh.
I wonder how long it will take for Nintendo to announce the ability to play the classic games downloaded by the Revo to also be able to be played on the DS.... that would be a great announcement.
And, to some extent, impractical.
The DS hardware is not powerful enough to emulate GameCube or N64, though ports of games for those systems to native DS programs can be done (vis Super Mario 64 DS et al).
The DS should be able to emulate most if not all NES and SNES titles, but the problem is that those consoles run at higher resolutions than one DS display can handle. There's several potential solutions to the problem (dropping scanlines, pan-and-scan, splitting the screen onto both of the DS's displays), but none are optimal.
Gameboy and Gameboy Color emulation are no problem; emulators exist for those platforms on the GBA already, and the DS can run GBA code natively.
So MAYBE Nintendo could devise a way to make earlier Gameboy games available on the DS, perhaps even get their multiplayer modes working via Nintendo WiFi. But I wouldn't ask for much more than that as far as classic gaming officially supported on the DS.
Please, Senator Lieberman. You're one of the only active Democrats in power which I don't desperately want to punch in the throat.
Really? I would have thought that someone even remotely familiar with Lieberman's record in office would not be surprised by this. He's always been of fan of this kind of big-government nanny program.
Very little is widely known about the two games that were going to be made from the movie A.I., except that they were both supposed to be launch titles for the original X-BOX.
I think they were cancelled when playtesters expressed confusion over why David always falls down that goddam hole, and why his neck stretches as he levitates out of it -- ONLY TO FALL RIGHT BACK DOWN THAT FUCKING HOLE AGAIN!!!
Even better yet, stop trying to record a specific program on a specific network at a specific time, and just download the show via BitTorrent at any time, starting a couple hours after it first airs.
WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE...
For me, it takes a Slashdotter posting in bold and all-capitals.
Thanks, man, you really showed us all the light.
when the FBI's suspected suicidal hijackers start turning up alive after 9/11, I think we have to question their whole case
Or, by Occam's Razor, we conclude that the hijackers were using stolen identification.
legitimate issues with regards to the nature of the WTC building collapses (3 buildings suffered complete, symmetric collapses that resembled controlled demolitions)
Issues, I will grant you. As to their legitimacy, I'm not an expert in structural engineering (nor are most people raising these issues), so I wouldn't deign to say. What I do know is that buildings collapsing due to have big firey holes bashed into them by airplanes is a lot more plausible than secret demolitions squads sneaking in and placing charges on hundreds of supports.