Sure, they may allow you to suspend the game at any point, but if I'm in the middle of a complex series of maneuvers, and I get back to it a week later, chances are I won't remember what I was doing and screw up my game. Some RPGs are particularly unforgiving with boss fights. They simply don't lend themselves as easily to a "pick up and go" playing style.
Yes, they have to bless every release on the platform, and collect the licensing fees for each title, and royalties for every copy sold. The game library is a walled garden just like Apple's App Store. They know exactly how awful some of these games are, and they don't care.
When dealing with things like Eyefinity, you actually do want to expand the FOV (up to 360 if necessary). Otherwise you won't be seeing something as off-kilter as 6:1 in a non-wraparound display arrangement.
Then simply preface MPAA results with a little warning text, stating that the following website is run by double-talking profiteering thugs and should not be visited by anyone.
Well then, maybe the razor and blade model needs to be replaced with something more sustainable.
Make the console $800, but the games $40. Then Sony doesn't need to worry about licensing and royalties... oh, but wait, this is Sony we're talking about. They love royalties, fuck.
With the exception of my PS2, I haven't owned any other Sony product since my old Discman ESP2, back in the 90's. The damn thing had to be repaired (more like rebuilt) three times during the warranty period. The data ribbon between the two halves of the clamshell kept shearing, largely because it was a dinky freakin' ribbon clumsily snaked around the most high-stress areas of the device. The kicker of course, is that the pinout ensured that any short-circuiting due to wear on the outer edges of the ribbon would FRY the transport controller! Yes, let's put the most sensitive components on the traces most likely to get damaged by our retarded design.
TVs ? Sure, if you can ignore that they cost twice as much as the Samsung they rebadged.
Home audio is an utter joke, 9 times out of 10 when a receiver is brought in for warranty service, it's a Sony, typically with a blown fuse next to a marginal solder point. Worst QC I've ever seen. Old Sony receivers from the 70's were (and still are) awesome, but today's junk is, well, junk. Compare with even Panasonic, which I'll only see once in a blue moon - they just don't die.
Laptops ? A Vaio is a bargain-basement board in a shiny metal shell. Oh, and like all things Sony, it costs twice as much as any other brand. But hey, if you like paying Apple prices for Acer-grade laptops, that's your thing.
Headphones ? Okay... do you know why Sony headphones are favoured by certain DJs ? It's not because they sound particularly good, no. It's because they're relatively cheap, unusually durable (for a Sony product), and they exaggerate the bass which helps with beatmatching. Or maybe they're into hip-hop, in which case dulling the high frequency filth would be a good thing. For the best audiophile headphones, if price is no object you want Grado ($1000+). If you want something more reasonable, I'd recommend studio headphones from AKG or Beyer-Dynamic in the $150 range. Scour any audiophile boards, you won't see any mention of Sony headphones at all, because they don't make anything worth hearing.
Cameras ? Please. They insist on using their own memory format, which costs 5 times more than any SD card. The best point-and-shoot cameras come from Canon, Fujifilm and, to a slightly lesser extent, Panasonic. Everything else is at least one generation behind in terms of quality, ease of use and battery life. DSLRs are a different beast, largely dominated by Nikon and Canon again, though Sony arguably trails not too far behind them, at least in the prosumer range. So they don't entirely suck, for once.
So, to recap, yes it is entirely possible to ignore Sony and still have the best gadgets in every class. Sony markets squarely at the very goofy "high end consumer" segment, which is the consumer who shops at big-box stores and doesn't know about, or is afraid of, prosumer products, thanks to those magnificent creatures known as minimum wage sales associates. That fresh-out-of-high-school kid with the branded shirt and tie ? Yeah, he don't know jack, but he knows that Sony is an easy sale and the high sticker price nets him a bigger commission.
Yeah but there's a pretty big difference between games and music.
Music can be a lot of fun to make and play. It is its own game. I'll even say that if you don't enjoy making music, you should get out of the scene and find something else that suits you. As both a producer and consumer of music, I know how it works. I go to shows, I help out fellow bands with marketing and online crap, I proudly wear their shirts because I think their music is awesome (well, some of them). On the other side, I produce my own tunes, release them on the net for free, and when one of them "goes viral," I absolutely beam with delight! If I make a few bucks on the ad revenue, great, but even if I don't, I still get my thrills out of entertaining others, and that alone is enough to motivate me to produce the next tune. I already have a day job to cover the bills, I don't need to make a fortune selling music.
Game development is most often just thankless work. Here, the ones who do it for the art, for fun, are the rare exceptions, though I suspect they do it for many of the same reasons as I make music. If you have an innate gift, a skill, an idea, you want to see it to fruition. There is no greater pain for a creative type, than to have a project rot inside your head forever. That shit has to come out. Even if it never makes a penny of profit, you want to stand behind it and say "I made this".
The merch is just another way to secure admiration. You love my music ? Show me, by wearing my logo! Yes, artists are attention whores, we crave recognition. Nintendo doesn't want recognition, they are a for-profit company, they want money. The two goals are often diametrically opposed.
For me, the big distinction is time. I simply don't have the time nor inclination to play a long, complex game on a mobile, because I no longer have daily hour-long bus commutes - I mostly work from home, or lived within walking distance of the office. The few bus and cab rides I do take are typically 10 to 15 minutes, so for something like Dragon Quest, where a single battle might take that long, it just ain't gonna happen. Angry Birds takes all of 10 seconds to play one level, so it is a far more effective time wasted in my situation.
I also don't like to stare at a tiny screen if I don't have to. If I'm at home, no way in hell am I going to spend hours playing an RPG hunched over mobile, dependent on batteries or a clumsy charging cable, when I can sit comfortably on the couch with a man-sized wireless controller and 50" HDTV.
So in the end, making a big game with high production values can be profitable, if you market it to the right audience. Mobiles are not it.
Is this the traditional gaming crowd that had to be protected from the violence in Mortal Kombat, so the blood was color-swapped to "sweat" ?
Nintendo was well into their wussification by the time the SNES came into its own. Conker was a rare oddity, a very transparent attempt to cater to this supposedly more mature crowd, by taking a decent (though rushed) game and adding a bit of swearing and sexual references to it. The fact that the title was so heavily marketed "for adults" was even more proof that Nintendo was essentially conducting a market experiment. Nobody was advertising the playability or fun-factor of the game, all they ever said was "holy $&@# that furry little $*@&#$ swears, you're gonna love it!".
I hope they don't move entirely to making cheap little fluff games
Dude... have you even seen the kind of shovelware they have on the Wii ? For every 'A' title like Metroid or Mario, there are 50 stinkfests by budget studios. Let's not forget that the Wii is a gimmicky overclocked Gamecube, a nearly 10 year old platform.
Nintendo is simply playing a bit of turf warfare with this puff piece. They're pissed off that they didn't move in on the mobile market, because they never figured people would be naïve enough to buy their prepubescent kids $800 iPhones with $50 data plans.
I know we're splitting nits, here, but there's a world of difference between "gay" and "faggot". If the lyrics had gone "that little homo, he's a millionaire"... well okay that's a lot closer to home, but faggot is on the same level as wuss and sissy, and is more commonly said of straight men who act effeminately (for the attention).
Now, think back to 1985. What did we have on MTV ? Glam metal! A bunch of straight men, with poofy long hair, wearing pounds of makeup to make them look like 3rd-rate drag queens, all in the name of fun and notoriety. That pretty much fits the colloquial definition of "faggot". Let's not forget that the lyrics expressed some form of envy, because "that little faggot" was living the high life while the narrator was stuck in his menial job. To read these lyrics as an assault on homosexuals, well that's a HUGE stretch typical of holier-than-thou conformists.
Yeah I see the appeal for laptops, lower power draw + better graphics = excellent. I guess for my desktop needs (wants), I'll be stuck waiting for enthusiast/server LGA 2011 boards. My biggest issue is that I make extensive use of virtual machines on my desktop, for client/server and cluster testing, so I need boatloads of Ram and CPU. Clearly, Sandy Bridge is not for my type of usage.
Yes, actually, you can blow things up rather easily, thanks to the excellent scaling and filtering algos provided by all modern GPUs. If I have a very exotic configuration (like my 2560x1440 displays), I am quite happy to tolerate slightly fuzzy UI bitmaps, and it is a very easy task to adjust the FOV for any given aspect ratio.
Here's the idiotically simple math:
Let the base FOV be 90 degrees Let A be the game's native aspect ratio, for example 4:3 Let B be the target ratio, 16:9 The new FOV is thus: 90 / (4/3) * (16/9) = 120
If a game developer is incapable of performing such basic arithmetic, they need to go back to flipping burgers.
Let's take a step back and look at what SATA 6 Gbps actually offers: 6 Gbps signal rate. Do the usual Shitachi or Fushitsu hard drives favored by OEMs even come close to 6 Gbps ? No. They can't even hit 1 Gbps, but they're inexpensive and most of the time the PC around them is limited in countless other ways.
Even a high-end, performance-oriented hard drive will barely scratch the ceiling of first-gen SATA's 1.5Gbps, so your little gamer friend is also not seeing any tangible benefit from SATA 6Gbps.
So this leaves two very small niches: SSDs which already hit the 3Gbps mark, and port multipliers. I pity the fool who drops a small fortune on a port multiplier enclosure, only to plug it into a low-cost Sandy Bridge PC. As for the SSDs, well you still need to buy a special one whose controller also runs at 6Gbps, and surprise: none of the OEMs ship these yet. Heck, they rarely offer anything better than an Intel X25M or old-stock Corsair/Kingston, which top out at 2Gbps on a good day.
So really, Intel continuing to ship these B-grade boards to select OEMs is simply common sense. The people who might be affected by the tainted SATA ports 3 years down the road, do not even figure in the target demographic. It's not like these boards will wind up in mission-critical systems, and there's still the OEM's warranty to handle any lemons down the road.
Correction: Joe Tweaker who wants to put one of those 4-2.5inch-trays-in-one-5.25inch-bay devices in a Dell will have to suffer.
FTFY, and while I would love to watch Joe Tweaker get electrocuted in a freak SATA port accident, chances are he won't even be affected by the bug until well after his Dell gives up the ghost.
The summary should have read "FiringSquad ad revenue is on the decline, here's an article about nothing, for you to linkspam".
Yeah, console games usually make for shitty PC ports, which is freakin' pathetic since the console title had to be developed on a PC in the first place, and today's middleware makes the distinctions largely irrelevant. This is not news. The same was true back in the 80's (minus the middleware).
My biggest peeve ? Not the shitty controls. Not the slightly degraded textures. Not the total lack of post-release fixes. No, my biggest peeve is when a stupid console port restricts your choice of display resolution. It is trivial to pull a list of API-sourced geometries and run with it, rather than hardcode for 720p and 1080p... or worse yet: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768. Yeah ok, I was running 1024x768 fifteen years ago, it's kinda tired.
It sounds like it would be relatively easy to detect this willful corruption and counter it... not a 100% inverse transformation, but it should be pretty damn easy to run a mock recompression, make note of the spots where it clips hard, and apply some kind of smoothing. Or, you know, I could smudge your evil pixels into oblivion.
It's an interesting piece of academia, but its reliance on what is effectively a glitch in the common JPEG algorithm means this technique will be trivially neutered by the very people it tries to affect. Heck, some guy will put up a single-serving website that uncripples your images, and that bastard will make a (small) mint on ad revenue.
CBC needs to stop trying to be like its U.S. uncles. And for the love of Jebus, stop producing those imbecilic comedy shows like "This hour has 22 minutes" and whatever absurdist filth Rick Mercer is peddling. We have a lot of great content and artistry, there is no point in stooping to Fox-like depths with this lowest-common-denominator programming. They already know what quality is, thanks to the magnificent CBC Radio, so what's with the mediocre TV ?
Not the government, the CRTC, which is a federally-subsidized shill operating on behalf of the big 3 telcos. Officially, the CRTC is supposed to keep them in check, fighting for the consumers, but in reality they just cash their "thank you" cheques and read whatever propaganda Bell/Rogers/Telus puts on the lectern.
More importantly: the CRTC needs to be destroyed with extreme prejudice. They are so utterly transparent in their role as federal shills for the incumbent mega-telcos, largely staffed by ex-board members. Those assclowns should be lined up in front of Ted Rogers' grave and executed by firing squad.
The CRTC is single-handedly responsible for setting Canada back 15 years on the network front. I'm not shitting you, my internet was faster and more reliable, back in 1995 when the first wave of cable modems hit my area. No caps, 10/1.5 mbits, no throttling, no peak-time decimation, no DNS hijacking, and no blocked ports whatsoever. Today you're lucky if you can even websurf without some goddamned P-Cube box giving your packets a colonoscopy. The entire industry has devolved into a nihilistic "fuck the customer" game, thanks to this protectionism under guise of consumer advocacy, and all the propaganda that "average users only need 2gb, everyone above that must be an evil pirate", which of course a lot of (sheepish) people blindly accept as the gospel truth.
Ditch the CRTC, socialize the damn telcos since just about every citizen is paying into the same 3 corporations anyway, and let's get back to being offensively polite before I liquefy Fincklestein's fat head.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine then, just put that malware interstitial they stick on nasty sites.
Warning: this site may harm your computer, bank accounts, civil rights, freedoms and/or ability to think rationally. Viewer discretion is advised.
Sure, they may allow you to suspend the game at any point, but if I'm in the middle of a complex series of maneuvers, and I get back to it a week later, chances are I won't remember what I was doing and screw up my game. Some RPGs are particularly unforgiving with boss fights. They simply don't lend themselves as easily to a "pick up and go" playing style.
Yes, they have to bless every release on the platform, and collect the licensing fees for each title, and royalties for every copy sold. The game library is a walled garden just like Apple's App Store. They know exactly how awful some of these games are, and they don't care.
Aiiiie... that should teach me for /.ing on cold medication :P I did get them backwards.
When dealing with things like Eyefinity, you actually do want to expand the FOV (up to 360 if necessary). Otherwise you won't be seeing something as off-kilter as 6:1 in a non-wraparound display arrangement.
Then simply preface MPAA results with a little warning text, stating that the following website is run by double-talking profiteering thugs and should not be visited by anyone.
Well then, maybe the razor and blade model needs to be replaced with something more sustainable.
Make the console $800, but the games $40. Then Sony doesn't need to worry about licensing and royalties... oh, but wait, this is Sony we're talking about. They love royalties, fuck.
Mike Lockman, is that you ?
Mike Lochman, is that you ?
Best ?
With the exception of my PS2, I haven't owned any other Sony product since my old Discman ESP2, back in the 90's. The damn thing had to be repaired (more like rebuilt) three times during the warranty period. The data ribbon between the two halves of the clamshell kept shearing, largely because it was a dinky freakin' ribbon clumsily snaked around the most high-stress areas of the device. The kicker of course, is that the pinout ensured that any short-circuiting due to wear on the outer edges of the ribbon would FRY the transport controller! Yes, let's put the most sensitive components on the traces most likely to get damaged by our retarded design.
TVs ? Sure, if you can ignore that they cost twice as much as the Samsung they rebadged.
Home audio is an utter joke, 9 times out of 10 when a receiver is brought in for warranty service, it's a Sony, typically with a blown fuse next to a marginal solder point. Worst QC I've ever seen. Old Sony receivers from the 70's were (and still are) awesome, but today's junk is, well, junk. Compare with even Panasonic, which I'll only see once in a blue moon - they just don't die.
Laptops ? A Vaio is a bargain-basement board in a shiny metal shell. Oh, and like all things Sony, it costs twice as much as any other brand. But hey, if you like paying Apple prices for Acer-grade laptops, that's your thing.
Headphones ? Okay... do you know why Sony headphones are favoured by certain DJs ? It's not because they sound particularly good, no. It's because they're relatively cheap, unusually durable (for a Sony product), and they exaggerate the bass which helps with beatmatching. Or maybe they're into hip-hop, in which case dulling the high frequency filth would be a good thing. For the best audiophile headphones, if price is no object you want Grado ($1000+). If you want something more reasonable, I'd recommend studio headphones from AKG or Beyer-Dynamic in the $150 range. Scour any audiophile boards, you won't see any mention of Sony headphones at all, because they don't make anything worth hearing.
Cameras ? Please. They insist on using their own memory format, which costs 5 times more than any SD card. The best point-and-shoot cameras come from Canon, Fujifilm and, to a slightly lesser extent, Panasonic. Everything else is at least one generation behind in terms of quality, ease of use and battery life. DSLRs are a different beast, largely dominated by Nikon and Canon again, though Sony arguably trails not too far behind them, at least in the prosumer range. So they don't entirely suck, for once.
So, to recap, yes it is entirely possible to ignore Sony and still have the best gadgets in every class. Sony markets squarely at the very goofy "high end consumer" segment, which is the consumer who shops at big-box stores and doesn't know about, or is afraid of, prosumer products, thanks to those magnificent creatures known as minimum wage sales associates. That fresh-out-of-high-school kid with the branded shirt and tie ? Yeah, he don't know jack, but he knows that Sony is an easy sale and the high sticker price nets him a bigger commission.
Yeah but there's a pretty big difference between games and music.
Music can be a lot of fun to make and play. It is its own game. I'll even say that if you don't enjoy making music, you should get out of the scene and find something else that suits you. As both a producer and consumer of music, I know how it works. I go to shows, I help out fellow bands with marketing and online crap, I proudly wear their shirts because I think their music is awesome (well, some of them). On the other side, I produce my own tunes, release them on the net for free, and when one of them "goes viral," I absolutely beam with delight! If I make a few bucks on the ad revenue, great, but even if I don't, I still get my thrills out of entertaining others, and that alone is enough to motivate me to produce the next tune. I already have a day job to cover the bills, I don't need to make a fortune selling music.
Game development is most often just thankless work. Here, the ones who do it for the art, for fun, are the rare exceptions, though I suspect they do it for many of the same reasons as I make music. If you have an innate gift, a skill, an idea, you want to see it to fruition. There is no greater pain for a creative type, than to have a project rot inside your head forever. That shit has to come out. Even if it never makes a penny of profit, you want to stand behind it and say "I made this".
The merch is just another way to secure admiration. You love my music ? Show me, by wearing my logo! Yes, artists are attention whores, we crave recognition. Nintendo doesn't want recognition, they are a for-profit company, they want money. The two goals are often diametrically opposed.
For me, the big distinction is time. I simply don't have the time nor inclination to play a long, complex game on a mobile, because I no longer have daily hour-long bus commutes - I mostly work from home, or lived within walking distance of the office. The few bus and cab rides I do take are typically 10 to 15 minutes, so for something like Dragon Quest, where a single battle might take that long, it just ain't gonna happen. Angry Birds takes all of 10 seconds to play one level, so it is a far more effective time wasted in my situation.
I also don't like to stare at a tiny screen if I don't have to. If I'm at home, no way in hell am I going to spend hours playing an RPG hunched over mobile, dependent on batteries or a clumsy charging cable, when I can sit comfortably on the couch with a man-sized wireless controller and 50" HDTV.
So in the end, making a big game with high production values can be profitable, if you market it to the right audience. Mobiles are not it.
Bingo! Nintendo is just jealous that other developers are beating them in the race to the bottom, with much lower overhead and massive profits.
Is this the traditional gaming crowd that had to be protected from the violence in Mortal Kombat, so the blood was color-swapped to "sweat" ?
Nintendo was well into their wussification by the time the SNES came into its own. Conker was a rare oddity, a very transparent attempt to cater to this supposedly more mature crowd, by taking a decent (though rushed) game and adding a bit of swearing and sexual references to it. The fact that the title was so heavily marketed "for adults" was even more proof that Nintendo was essentially conducting a market experiment. Nobody was advertising the playability or fun-factor of the game, all they ever said was "holy $&@# that furry little $*@&#$ swears, you're gonna love it!".
I hope they don't move entirely to making cheap little fluff games
Dude... have you even seen the kind of shovelware they have on the Wii ? For every 'A' title like Metroid or Mario, there are 50 stinkfests by budget studios. Let's not forget that the Wii is a gimmicky overclocked Gamecube, a nearly 10 year old platform.
Nintendo is simply playing a bit of turf warfare with this puff piece. They're pissed off that they didn't move in on the mobile market, because they never figured people would be naïve enough to buy their prepubescent kids $800 iPhones with $50 data plans.
I know we're splitting nits, here, but there's a world of difference between "gay" and "faggot". If the lyrics had gone "that little homo, he's a millionaire"... well okay that's a lot closer to home, but faggot is on the same level as wuss and sissy, and is more commonly said of straight men who act effeminately (for the attention).
Now, think back to 1985. What did we have on MTV ? Glam metal! A bunch of straight men, with poofy long hair, wearing pounds of makeup to make them look like 3rd-rate drag queens, all in the name of fun and notoriety. That pretty much fits the colloquial definition of "faggot". Let's not forget that the lyrics expressed some form of envy, because "that little faggot" was living the high life while the narrator was stuck in his menial job. To read these lyrics as an assault on homosexuals, well that's a HUGE stretch typical of holier-than-thou conformists.
Thanks to everyone who replied :)
Yeah I see the appeal for laptops, lower power draw + better graphics = excellent. I guess for my desktop needs (wants), I'll be stuck waiting for enthusiast/server LGA 2011 boards. My biggest issue is that I make extensive use of virtual machines on my desktop, for client/server and cluster testing, so I need boatloads of Ram and CPU. Clearly, Sandy Bridge is not for my type of usage.
Yes, actually, you can blow things up rather easily, thanks to the excellent scaling and filtering algos provided by all modern GPUs. If I have a very exotic configuration (like my 2560x1440 displays), I am quite happy to tolerate slightly fuzzy UI bitmaps, and it is a very easy task to adjust the FOV for any given aspect ratio.
Here's the idiotically simple math:
Let the base FOV be 90 degrees
Let A be the game's native aspect ratio, for example 4:3
Let B be the target ratio, 16:9
The new FOV is thus: 90 / (4/3) * (16/9) = 120
If a game developer is incapable of performing such basic arithmetic, they need to go back to flipping burgers.
Let's take a step back and look at what SATA 6 Gbps actually offers: 6 Gbps signal rate. Do the usual Shitachi or Fushitsu hard drives favored by OEMs even come close to 6 Gbps ? No. They can't even hit 1 Gbps, but they're inexpensive and most of the time the PC around them is limited in countless other ways.
Even a high-end, performance-oriented hard drive will barely scratch the ceiling of first-gen SATA's 1.5Gbps, so your little gamer friend is also not seeing any tangible benefit from SATA 6Gbps.
So this leaves two very small niches: SSDs which already hit the 3Gbps mark, and port multipliers. I pity the fool who drops a small fortune on a port multiplier enclosure, only to plug it into a low-cost Sandy Bridge PC. As for the SSDs, well you still need to buy a special one whose controller also runs at 6Gbps, and surprise: none of the OEMs ship these yet. Heck, they rarely offer anything better than an Intel X25M or old-stock Corsair/Kingston, which top out at 2Gbps on a good day.
So really, Intel continuing to ship these B-grade boards to select OEMs is simply common sense. The people who might be affected by the tainted SATA ports 3 years down the road, do not even figure in the target demographic. It's not like these boards will wind up in mission-critical systems, and there's still the OEM's warranty to handle any lemons down the road.
Correction: Joe Tweaker who wants to put one of those 4-2.5inch-trays-in-one-5.25inch-bay devices in a Dell will have to suffer.
FTFY, and while I would love to watch Joe Tweaker get electrocuted in a freak SATA port accident, chances are he won't even be affected by the bug until well after his Dell gives up the ghost.
The summary should have read "FiringSquad ad revenue is on the decline, here's an article about nothing, for you to linkspam".
Yeah, console games usually make for shitty PC ports, which is freakin' pathetic since the console title had to be developed on a PC in the first place, and today's middleware makes the distinctions largely irrelevant. This is not news. The same was true back in the 80's (minus the middleware).
My biggest peeve ? Not the shitty controls. Not the slightly degraded textures. Not the total lack of post-release fixes. No, my biggest peeve is when a stupid console port restricts your choice of display resolution. It is trivial to pull a list of API-sourced geometries and run with it, rather than hardcode for 720p and 1080p... or worse yet: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768. Yeah ok, I was running 1024x768 fifteen years ago, it's kinda tired.
It sounds like it would be relatively easy to detect this willful corruption and counter it... not a 100% inverse transformation, but it should be pretty damn easy to run a mock recompression, make note of the spots where it clips hard, and apply some kind of smoothing. Or, you know, I could smudge your evil pixels into oblivion.
It's an interesting piece of academia, but its reliance on what is effectively a glitch in the common JPEG algorithm means this technique will be trivially neutered by the very people it tries to affect. Heck, some guy will put up a single-serving website that uncripples your images, and that bastard will make a (small) mint on ad revenue.
CBC needs to stop trying to be like its U.S. uncles. And for the love of Jebus, stop producing those imbecilic comedy shows like "This hour has 22 minutes" and whatever absurdist filth Rick Mercer is peddling. We have a lot of great content and artistry, there is no point in stooping to Fox-like depths with this lowest-common-denominator programming. They already know what quality is, thanks to the magnificent CBC Radio, so what's with the mediocre TV ?
Not the government, the CRTC, which is a federally-subsidized shill operating on behalf of the big 3 telcos. Officially, the CRTC is supposed to keep them in check, fighting for the consumers, but in reality they just cash their "thank you" cheques and read whatever propaganda Bell/Rogers/Telus puts on the lectern.
More importantly: the CRTC needs to be destroyed with extreme prejudice. They are so utterly transparent in their role as federal shills for the incumbent mega-telcos, largely staffed by ex-board members. Those assclowns should be lined up in front of Ted Rogers' grave and executed by firing squad.
The CRTC is single-handedly responsible for setting Canada back 15 years on the network front. I'm not shitting you, my internet was faster and more reliable, back in 1995 when the first wave of cable modems hit my area. No caps, 10/1.5 mbits, no throttling, no peak-time decimation, no DNS hijacking, and no blocked ports whatsoever. Today you're lucky if you can even websurf without some goddamned P-Cube box giving your packets a colonoscopy. The entire industry has devolved into a nihilistic "fuck the customer" game, thanks to this protectionism under guise of consumer advocacy, and all the propaganda that "average users only need 2gb, everyone above that must be an evil pirate", which of course a lot of (sheepish) people blindly accept as the gospel truth.
Ditch the CRTC, socialize the damn telcos since just about every citizen is paying into the same 3 corporations anyway, and let's get back to being offensively polite before I liquefy Fincklestein's fat head.