Does anybody else remember this ad? I guess it was kind of late in the Commodore 64's life cycle, but I swear I used to see this ad several times a day. When my friends saw that I had a Commodore 64, they'd mockingly sing the jingle, which indicates just how well-known it was, at least where I lived.
The article talks a lot about the effect of personal internet use on morale, but doesn't talk about how excessive filtering can affect productivity.
In my last job, I worked at various schools throughout the city of Sakai, Osaka. If you read my comments history, you'll probably notice that I talk about that a lot. Anyway, Sakai recently instituted a massive internet filter that all the schools had to go through (if they don't want to pay for it all out of their regular budget). This filter blocks any and all "non-work-related" internet use. This includes e-mail, message boards, shopping, adult-related content, and sites about network security ("cyber crime"). It even went so far as to block Google Image Search, probably because it could be used to find pornographic images.
I rarely was trying to do anything not related to work when that familiar "i-filter" logo came up. Maybe I was in a rut and looking for lesson ideas. Maybe I was trying to get to that piece of information I had in my e-mail box. Maybe I was trying to figure out how to get around Tweak UI to fix the virus that had infected every single computer on the network. Usually, I was just trying to get entertaining or informative images to put on my lesson handouts.
The big problem with forbidding general internet use is that it all too often blocks the tools necessary to get work done. In my situation, I ended up having to wait to go home to find the stuff that I needed for class the next day, using my own unpaid time, and my own uncompensated printer ink. You know something's wrong when employees have to do overtime because of your restrictions.
Opera compatibility used to be horrible, which is why I jumped ship to Phoenix around when Opera 7 came out. It's more or less fixed now. Opera's compatibility with standards-compliant web pages is perfect, and its compatibility with IE-specific sites is about as good as Firefox's. Actually, it's sometimes better than Firefox's.
My only complaint with regards to compatibility is that the Flash plugin doesn't work quite right. Youtube's progress bar, for example, doesn't show up until it's completely finished downloading. Other than that, it's great. My credit card company's web site, which used to not even work in Firefox, renders correctly in Opera, as does cnn.com.
The BitTorrent client is kind of useless if you torrent as a hobby, and actually care about how many pieces you have, or which file comes in which order. I do care, and that's why I don't use the Opera BitTorrent client.
But for most people, I think downloading torrents is no different from downloading via http or ftp. Why should you need a seperate program to download files off a web site? It's the same reason why all the new browsers have built-in RSS readers. Sure, there are third-party applications that do it better, but why should you need multiple programs to surf the web?
As the article says, and as everyone has commented, games are expensive these days. The days when arcade cabinets were relatively inexpensive and a half a generation ahead of the home systems are long gone, so that economic model can't work. You simply cannot have an arcade on every corner and have them all stay in business.
The key factor is a large, immediately accessible population. It's why the world's megalopolises like Tokyo and Hong Kong have booming arcade businesses while the rest of the world just doesn't. Even in Japan, it's only places like Tokyo and Osaka that actually have good, successful arcades that aren't attached to a bowling alley or other big draw. I live in Sakai, which was until recently a suburb of Osaka. It has roughly the population density of Seattle, and it has about a half dozen arcades that I can think of. Most of those arcades are filled primarily with slot machines and mahjongg games, with a few music games off in the corner.
Downtown Osaka, a mere thirty minutes away by train, is a wonderland of good arcades. In the entertainment districts, there's practically one on every corner. The difference is throughput. When you can expect a million people to pass in front of a location every weekend, it makes sense to put an arcade there and stock it full of a million dollars worth of arcade equipment. You can afford to hire people to make sure they work right, and you can afford to share that business with five other arcades within a one-mile radius. If you don't have that kind of population, then you can't have an arcade in this day and age. In Seattle, I can't think of a place that's nearly that crowded on a regular basis, where teenagers are likely to hang out.
And one more thing, to everyone complaining about run-down arcades full of broken machines. It's because the money is gone. There isn't enough money to keep the games upgraded, there isn't enough money to hire a tech to fix the broken buttons, or if you want to do the tech yourself, there isn't enough money to hire a cashier to man the store while you're electrocuting yourself. In the Seattle area, there's an arcade called Illusionz, which used to be a mecha for fans of music games in the Northwest. The guy who ran it was really friendly, and kept the place sparkling clean. The machines were always kept in perfect condition, and I would take pleasure at riding a bus for an hour and a half each way to get there. But the money ran out, and last I checked, the games haven't been upgraded in years, there's tons of stuff broken, and the place looks dingy. This isn't because the owner's greedy. It's because he's broke.
Usually, it's stated in terms of the relatively uncontroversial, "well there are radical extremists on both sides of the issue." While this is usually true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the truth lies directly in between them. In addition, it's generally implied that the radical extremists are both equally wrong, which is usually not the case. Michael Moore is not Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly is not Al Franken, and Jon Stewart is not Dennis Miller (not that I've heard that comparison actually drawn).
You can use the equivalency fallacy to paint any issue as inconclusive, just by picking two people who disagree slightly and drawing a line between them. One guy says the earth is flat and resting on the back of a turtle, supported by four elephants, while the other guy says it's still flat, but just freely floating in space. Obviously the truth is somewhere in between the two, probably a turtle but no elephants.
In terms of convincing people of something, point of view is important, but it has no place in the fact-finding process. You have to consider the validity of everything you read independently, setting aside your own biases as well as those of the presenter. Sometimes things are just plain wrong, and often huge numbers of people believe things that are just plain wrong.
Dude, it's there. I swear it's there. It's under "downloads" in "advanced." All in all, I'm not too impressed with the preferences window (the "advanced" tab is a domain unto itself), but I still like it better than any of the alternatives, which just don't seem to have any of the options I want.
I agree with the parent that the built-in BitTorrent client isn't what I want. I prefer uTorrent, and its user interface, and all the visual information it gives you, and the amount of control it gives you over your directory structure. I currently have Opera configured to use uTorrent instead.
What really frickin amazes me is how seamlessly it all integrates when you disable the internal BT client and decide to use your own. There's no "open with" box that pops up, nor is there Firefox's signature empty popup. It just opens up your default BitTorrent program and lets it sort it out. And if you use a program like uTorrent where you can make it download to a default directory without asking, it means you click once and it starts downloading right where you want it.
Every time I open a torrent in my installation of Opera, I breathe a little sigh of relief for just how easy it was. This will probably continue until I'm hopelessly spoiled by it, as I've become with Opera's mouse gestures.
Setting up Opera to do this was not as easy as I might have liked (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Downloads -> application/x-bittorrent -> Edit -> Open With Default Application), but I'm pretty amazed that a non-default behavior works this well.
You really might want to try backing up your files some time.
When you back up your data, you don't just put a 100KB file on a 45GB disc. You put it on with everything else you could conceivably want to back up, so as to avoid wasting media. The problem is, when something changes, you have to burn a new disc, either copying and reburning the entire thing (hope you have free enough HDD space), or putting the new version on a new disc with a bunch of other random stuff (in which case you have multiple versions floating around). Even rewritable optical media can have this problem, as they have to be "blanked" before rewriting, which, depending on how full the disc is, may require wiping the whole thing, requiring lots of time.
From Wikipedia: Except for the ability to completely erase a disc, CD-RWs act very much like CD-Rs and are subject to the same restrictions; i.e., they can be extended, but not selectively overwritten...
CD-RW discs need to be blanked before reuse. Different blanking methods can be used, including "full" blanking in which the entire surface of the disc is cleared, and "fast" blanking in which only meta-data areas are cleared.
The grandparent poster is completely right. If you're backing up something you plan to change, use the smallest/cheapest media you have available, NOT the Blu-Ray disc.
The beauty of uTorrent is that it has all that GUI goodness while at the same time being low-overhead. The original BitTorrent client and other minimalist clients fit the Unix philosophy much better, but they're not uTorrent. uTorrent presents just as much useful (and useless) information as Azureus, but it's lower-overhead and better-designed. It's not the little screwdriver that only works for one kind of screw (Torx) but does it all in a half a second. It's the multitool that fits in your pocket, works on any kind of screw, nail or rivet, plays music while it runs, and also gets it all done in a half a second.
While piracy in general in Korea seems to be on the rise, as of 2003, entertainment software piracy was actually on the decline, at 36% as opposed to 90% in 2000. While that's still pretty obscene, I'm not really sure how that compares to figures in the US. On the other hand, I'm not sure how these numbers were arrived at, or if they have any meaning whatsoever.
Although it seems pretty bad, if it's such a problem, why haven't the companies pulled out already? That does suggest a strategy for Microsoft, though. Maybe if they rallied a bunch of big-name developers together and threatened jointly, they might have some effect. Microsoft does have a pretty dominant games division, but I wonder just how big those games are in Korea compared to the wares of Blizzard, NC Soft and Nexon.
This is not funny. This is true. You can joke all you want, "Starcraft kekekeke," but it doesn't change the fact that computer games are a major part of life over there, and even after all these years, Starcraft is still king. If Microsoft pulled out of Korea, their popular culture would be sent reeling.
Well, for about six months. After six months, all the game manufacturers start pushing Linux in a big way, since there's no way any of them would leave Korea of their own free will -- and they sure as hell won't let Microsoft pull them out without a good fight.
South Korea's got some 17 million PC gamers. How many does America have? If you count consoles, it's probably no contest, but I'm under the impression that PC gaming is a bit of a niche market in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if South Korea has more PC gamers than the entire US, even with only 1/6 the population.
No, the day Microsoft pulls out of Korea is the day that Blizzard and NC Soft shift focus to Linux. Once that happens, the hardware vendors start writing decent drivers for Linux, and all of a sudden Linux doesn't suck as a gaming platform anymore, and Windows becomes an "also supported" platform.
This is a bluff, and Microsoft stands to lose a lot from it. They've set the charges and are pushing the plunger from inside the parking garage.
4) You have camera control, if the view sucks it's your own fault.
You had me until here. You have camera control, except for when you don't. The game grabs control away from you for split seconds at a time, causing your controls to become misaligned and making you screw up jumps in midair in the worst cases. If you ever do anything significant, the camera swings around, and sometimes gets stuck behind something. This is mostly beyond your control, although if you're psychic, you can anticipate it and counteract the camera's movement. It's still very hard, and saying you have camera control is very misleading.
So next time you are tempted to buy a Sony product and instead decide to boycott it, write them a nice (I mean it) letter (not email) to their headquarters, preferable to a manager (find it on their site):
The only problem with this is that I, and probably many other slashdot users, can't start writing about this stuff without getting angry, and once you get yourself good and angry, it's hard to write something that doesn't sound somewhat abusive.
Or maybe you overcompensate and say something like, "Oh, you are such great people who make such wonderful products. I really wish you would stop bundling software with your music CDs, but I guess it's only a minor gripe, right? Sorry I didn't buy your CD today. Maybe next time! Keep up the good work!" which of course completely undermines the point.
That's actually a real scientific dilemma, and it's the dilemma that's causing string theory so much controversy. Now I'm not an actual physicist, and I'm just getting all this from "The Elegant Universe," so take it with an appropriate grain of salt. But anyway, string theory pretty much explains everything satisfactorily. It's basically the Grand Unification that we've all been hoping for. The problem is that the theorized particles (or not particles at all, but rather strings) are not even theoretically observable. Furthermore, it explains all observed phenomena but makes no disprovable predictions. As a result, a great number of serious scientists refuse to call it a theory. It's the same exact problem as you're talking about.
I'm an avid fan of Lost, and I don't live in the US right now, which is a bit of a problem for the former. I've been relying on internet piracy to watch this show, and when I heard about Lost being available for download from Apple, I was overjoyed.
So I grabbed the first four episodes of Season 2, and started watching one. And I notice there's no letterbox. And the video is really jerky, and doesn't handle fast cuts or pans at all. So here I am, thinking I'm doing the right thing by paying for the download, only to find out that I'm getting a poorly-encoded pan-and-scan version of the show.
Alright, ideally they shouldn't have to worry about competition from pirates, but the fact is that piracy is a reality. And if you want to fight piracy, you have to provide something of equal or greater value than the pirates are willing or able to give. I want to be able to watch Lost on my widescreen TV through my computer's TV-Out card, roughly the way it was meant to be viewed.
I'm annoyed that Apple has used a proprietary format that isn't supported by any other media players. My primary gripe with it is that I'm forced into using Apple's underfeatured video player to watch my TV shows. Why can't they make a Directshow filter for it, complete with whatever DRM they want to use, so that I can play it in Media Player Classic, or God forbid, my PSP?
I sincerely hope they have some sort of plan to iron these issues out in the near future.
When I watched that 10+ hour documentary, I just sorta assumed they included every remotely interesting thing they had, otherwise you'd have a 3-hour series along the lines of Triumph of the Nerds. I mean, heck, Cringely managed to condense the history of the personal computer up until 1995 into a three-episode miniseries, right?
After seeing that there's actually 200+ hours of footage, I can understand how they'd be reluctant to cut it down past 10 hours. Still, I think they could've cut down on some of the boring politics and still gotten a few hours out of it without omitting anything important.
Still an immensely interesting documentary, and if you've got nothing to do for a week, I recommend watching it. I watched it in a two-day binge, but then I really should have been doing something else.
Actually, it's worse than that. Even if you're in Japan, you need to have a valid Japanese credit card with a Japanese billing address in order to use the store. I live in Osaka, but that doesn't matter. I'm not Japanese, so I don't get to use it.
Is it just me, or do these figures seem a little cheap? On the one hand, NASA budgets billions of dollars for these missions, but when it comes time to outsource them and have other people do all the really hard design work, they only give a tenth of what they would normally spend.
Maybe my sense of prices is off, but it looks to me like the prize money isn't going to cover all the work that goes into each project.
His fifth request was for smaller hard drives, ideally resulting in a smaller computer. To this, I suggest a Mini-ITX form factor PC, which uses laptop hard drives (2.5") and very small motherboards to achieve an overall package the size of a Mac Mini.
It seems to me that Amazon's main advantage, and its basis for most of its patents, is the fact that they were the first merchant to use collaborative filtering (using Bayes' Law to determine what the user will likely do next based on the actions of users with similar habits). While collaborative filtering is something widely used in AI, it seems like Amazon is slowly patenting every single practical application of it, to the point that sooner or later Amazon will be the only company allowed to use computerized statistics in their technology.
Except for the fact that most advanced weaponry couldn't be used on one's own people without severe political consequences. If a rebellion had a single compound out in the middle of nowhere, it would be trivial for the government to suppress it. But that's not how it is. We all live together, and if you use highly destructive weapons (not WMDs, even a simple one-ton bomb would be enough) in an urban setting, you risk killing lots of innocents in the process.
It's bad enough in Iraq, where a good percentage of Americans don't even care if civilians are killed. Imagine doing it at home! A bunch of people spread out across a state in groups of 12 or so, armed with Columbine-style weaponry, could be a real problem for the government, and draw it out into an uphill battle with people growing rapidly more sympathetic to their cause as the government inadvertantly kills more and more innocents.
Make no mistake, even in the nuclear age, violent upheaval is still possible.
Yup, it does. I'm not a Linux or Mac user, but my former roommate is. Honestly, it's an ill-advised move. Most application writers don't think about the Mac and its architecture, resulting in lots of things just sorta not working at all.
The problem is something called "endianness," (if you know that word, you have no business posting what you just did). Endianness refers to the way the system represents numbers. Imagine going to a foreign country where they wrote numbers exactly the same way we do but with the exception that they wrote them right-to-left instead of left-to-right. Imagine if you didn't know this, and tried to do a simple math problem (addition, subtraction, whatever) in front of everybody. You'd sure wonder why everybody started laughing at you.
That's exactly what happens when you try to run carelessly-written PC Linux software on a Mac, where the numbers are written "backwards." And the end result of this little architectural culture shock, is that programs often don't work as advertised.
In other words, don't try Mac Linux unless you want to mess with everything anyone here is complaining about, because if my friend's experience means anything, it will all come up. For the record, his Gentoo Linux Mac "just works" nowadays, but it took a long time to get it to that stage, and it's an undertaking that I personally wouldn't attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QRETD2BtDZI
Does anybody else remember this ad? I guess it was kind of late in the Commodore 64's life cycle, but I swear I used to see this ad several times a day. When my friends saw that I had a Commodore 64, they'd mockingly sing the jingle, which indicates just how well-known it was, at least where I lived.
The article talks a lot about the effect of personal internet use on morale, but doesn't talk about how excessive filtering can affect productivity.
In my last job, I worked at various schools throughout the city of Sakai, Osaka. If you read my comments history, you'll probably notice that I talk about that a lot. Anyway, Sakai recently instituted a massive internet filter that all the schools had to go through (if they don't want to pay for it all out of their regular budget). This filter blocks any and all "non-work-related" internet use. This includes e-mail, message boards, shopping, adult-related content, and sites about network security ("cyber crime"). It even went so far as to block Google Image Search, probably because it could be used to find pornographic images.
I rarely was trying to do anything not related to work when that familiar "i-filter" logo came up. Maybe I was in a rut and looking for lesson ideas. Maybe I was trying to get to that piece of information I had in my e-mail box. Maybe I was trying to figure out how to get around Tweak UI to fix the virus that had infected every single computer on the network. Usually, I was just trying to get entertaining or informative images to put on my lesson handouts.
The big problem with forbidding general internet use is that it all too often blocks the tools necessary to get work done. In my situation, I ended up having to wait to go home to find the stuff that I needed for class the next day, using my own unpaid time, and my own uncompensated printer ink. You know something's wrong when employees have to do overtime because of your restrictions.
Opera compatibility used to be horrible, which is why I jumped ship to Phoenix around when Opera 7 came out. It's more or less fixed now. Opera's compatibility with standards-compliant web pages is perfect, and its compatibility with IE-specific sites is about as good as Firefox's. Actually, it's sometimes better than Firefox's.
My only complaint with regards to compatibility is that the Flash plugin doesn't work quite right. Youtube's progress bar, for example, doesn't show up until it's completely finished downloading. Other than that, it's great. My credit card company's web site, which used to not even work in Firefox, renders correctly in Opera, as does cnn.com.
The BitTorrent client is kind of useless if you torrent as a hobby, and actually care about how many pieces you have, or which file comes in which order. I do care, and that's why I don't use the Opera BitTorrent client.
But for most people, I think downloading torrents is no different from downloading via http or ftp. Why should you need a seperate program to download files off a web site? It's the same reason why all the new browsers have built-in RSS readers. Sure, there are third-party applications that do it better, but why should you need multiple programs to surf the web?
As the article says, and as everyone has commented, games are expensive these days. The days when arcade cabinets were relatively inexpensive and a half a generation ahead of the home systems are long gone, so that economic model can't work. You simply cannot have an arcade on every corner and have them all stay in business.
The key factor is a large, immediately accessible population. It's why the world's megalopolises like Tokyo and Hong Kong have booming arcade businesses while the rest of the world just doesn't. Even in Japan, it's only places like Tokyo and Osaka that actually have good, successful arcades that aren't attached to a bowling alley or other big draw. I live in Sakai, which was until recently a suburb of Osaka. It has roughly the population density of Seattle, and it has about a half dozen arcades that I can think of. Most of those arcades are filled primarily with slot machines and mahjongg games, with a few music games off in the corner.
Downtown Osaka, a mere thirty minutes away by train, is a wonderland of good arcades. In the entertainment districts, there's practically one on every corner. The difference is throughput. When you can expect a million people to pass in front of a location every weekend, it makes sense to put an arcade there and stock it full of a million dollars worth of arcade equipment. You can afford to hire people to make sure they work right, and you can afford to share that business with five other arcades within a one-mile radius. If you don't have that kind of population, then you can't have an arcade in this day and age. In Seattle, I can't think of a place that's nearly that crowded on a regular basis, where teenagers are likely to hang out.
And one more thing, to everyone complaining about run-down arcades full of broken machines. It's because the money is gone. There isn't enough money to keep the games upgraded, there isn't enough money to hire a tech to fix the broken buttons, or if you want to do the tech yourself, there isn't enough money to hire a cashier to man the store while you're electrocuting yourself. In the Seattle area, there's an arcade called Illusionz, which used to be a mecha for fans of music games in the Northwest. The guy who ran it was really friendly, and kept the place sparkling clean. The machines were always kept in perfect condition, and I would take pleasure at riding a bus for an hour and a half each way to get there. But the money ran out, and last I checked, the games haven't been upgraded in years, there's tons of stuff broken, and the place looks dingy. This isn't because the owner's greedy. It's because he's broke.
This is the equivalency fallacy.
Usually, it's stated in terms of the relatively uncontroversial, "well there are radical extremists on both sides of the issue." While this is usually true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the truth lies directly in between them. In addition, it's generally implied that the radical extremists are both equally wrong, which is usually not the case. Michael Moore is not Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly is not Al Franken, and Jon Stewart is not Dennis Miller (not that I've heard that comparison actually drawn).
You can use the equivalency fallacy to paint any issue as inconclusive, just by picking two people who disagree slightly and drawing a line between them. One guy says the earth is flat and resting on the back of a turtle, supported by four elephants, while the other guy says it's still flat, but just freely floating in space. Obviously the truth is somewhere in between the two, probably a turtle but no elephants.
In terms of convincing people of something, point of view is important, but it has no place in the fact-finding process. You have to consider the validity of everything you read independently, setting aside your own biases as well as those of the presenter. Sometimes things are just plain wrong, and often huge numbers of people believe things that are just plain wrong.
The only problem with opening where you left off is that it loads up the page that crashed it in the first place, somewhat defeating the purpose.
Dude, it's there. I swear it's there. It's under "downloads" in "advanced." All in all, I'm not too impressed with the preferences window (the "advanced" tab is a domain unto itself), but I still like it better than any of the alternatives, which just don't seem to have any of the options I want.
I agree with the parent that the built-in BitTorrent client isn't what I want. I prefer uTorrent, and its user interface, and all the visual information it gives you, and the amount of control it gives you over your directory structure. I currently have Opera configured to use uTorrent instead.
What really frickin amazes me is how seamlessly it all integrates when you disable the internal BT client and decide to use your own. There's no "open with" box that pops up, nor is there Firefox's signature empty popup. It just opens up your default BitTorrent program and lets it sort it out. And if you use a program like uTorrent where you can make it download to a default directory without asking, it means you click once and it starts downloading right where you want it.
Every time I open a torrent in my installation of Opera, I breathe a little sigh of relief for just how easy it was. This will probably continue until I'm hopelessly spoiled by it, as I've become with Opera's mouse gestures.
Setting up Opera to do this was not as easy as I might have liked (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Downloads -> application/x-bittorrent -> Edit -> Open With Default Application), but I'm pretty amazed that a non-default behavior works this well.
Thats one long novel
...
You really might want to try backing up your files some time.
When you back up your data, you don't just put a 100KB file on a 45GB disc. You put it on with everything else you could conceivably want to back up, so as to avoid wasting media. The problem is, when something changes, you have to burn a new disc, either copying and reburning the entire thing (hope you have free enough HDD space), or putting the new version on a new disc with a bunch of other random stuff (in which case you have multiple versions floating around). Even rewritable optical media can have this problem, as they have to be "blanked" before rewriting, which, depending on how full the disc is, may require wiping the whole thing, requiring lots of time.
From Wikipedia:
Except for the ability to completely erase a disc, CD-RWs act very much like CD-Rs and are subject to the same restrictions; i.e., they can be extended, but not selectively overwritten
CD-RW discs need to be blanked before reuse. Different blanking methods can be used, including "full" blanking in which the entire surface of the disc is cleared, and "fast" blanking in which only meta-data areas are cleared.
The grandparent poster is completely right. If you're backing up something you plan to change, use the smallest/cheapest media you have available, NOT the Blu-Ray disc.
The beauty of uTorrent is that it has all that GUI goodness while at the same time being low-overhead. The original BitTorrent client and other minimalist clients fit the Unix philosophy much better, but they're not uTorrent. uTorrent presents just as much useful (and useless) information as Azureus, but it's lower-overhead and better-designed. It's not the little screwdriver that only works for one kind of screw (Torx) but does it all in a half a second. It's the multitool that fits in your pocket, works on any kind of screw, nail or rivet, plays music while it runs, and also gets it all done in a half a second.
While piracy in general in Korea seems to be on the rise, as of 2003, entertainment software piracy was actually on the decline, at 36% as opposed to 90% in 2000. While that's still pretty obscene, I'm not really sure how that compares to figures in the US. On the other hand, I'm not sure how these numbers were arrived at, or if they have any meaning whatsoever.
Here's the survey I found on Google:
http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2004/2004SPEC301KOREA.pdf
Although it seems pretty bad, if it's such a problem, why haven't the companies pulled out already? That does suggest a strategy for Microsoft, though. Maybe if they rallied a bunch of big-name developers together and threatened jointly, they might have some effect. Microsoft does have a pretty dominant games division, but I wonder just how big those games are in Korea compared to the wares of Blizzard, NC Soft and Nexon.
This is not funny. This is true. You can joke all you want, "Starcraft kekekeke," but it doesn't change the fact that computer games are a major part of life over there, and even after all these years, Starcraft is still king. If Microsoft pulled out of Korea, their popular culture would be sent reeling.
Well, for about six months. After six months, all the game manufacturers start pushing Linux in a big way, since there's no way any of them would leave Korea of their own free will -- and they sure as hell won't let Microsoft pull them out without a good fight.
South Korea's got some 17 million PC gamers. How many does America have? If you count consoles, it's probably no contest, but I'm under the impression that PC gaming is a bit of a niche market in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if South Korea has more PC gamers than the entire US, even with only 1/6 the population.
No, the day Microsoft pulls out of Korea is the day that Blizzard and NC Soft shift focus to Linux. Once that happens, the hardware vendors start writing decent drivers for Linux, and all of a sudden Linux doesn't suck as a gaming platform anymore, and Windows becomes an "also supported" platform.
This is a bluff, and Microsoft stands to lose a lot from it. They've set the charges and are pushing the plunger from inside the parking garage.
4) You have camera control, if the view sucks it's your own fault.
You had me until here. You have camera control, except for when you don't. The game grabs control away from you for split seconds at a time, causing your controls to become misaligned and making you screw up jumps in midair in the worst cases. If you ever do anything significant, the camera swings around, and sometimes gets stuck behind something. This is mostly beyond your control, although if you're psychic, you can anticipate it and counteract the camera's movement. It's still very hard, and saying you have camera control is very misleading.
So next time you are tempted to buy a Sony product and instead decide to boycott it, write them a nice (I mean it) letter (not email) to their headquarters, preferable to a manager (find it on their site):
The only problem with this is that I, and probably many other slashdot users, can't start writing about this stuff without getting angry, and once you get yourself good and angry, it's hard to write something that doesn't sound somewhat abusive.
Or maybe you overcompensate and say something like, "Oh, you are such great people who make such wonderful products. I really wish you would stop bundling software with your music CDs, but I guess it's only a minor gripe, right? Sorry I didn't buy your CD today. Maybe next time! Keep up the good work!" which of course completely undermines the point.
That's actually a real scientific dilemma, and it's the dilemma that's causing string theory so much controversy. Now I'm not an actual physicist, and I'm just getting all this from "The Elegant Universe," so take it with an appropriate grain of salt. But anyway, string theory pretty much explains everything satisfactorily. It's basically the Grand Unification that we've all been hoping for. The problem is that the theorized particles (or not particles at all, but rather strings) are not even theoretically observable. Furthermore, it explains all observed phenomena but makes no disprovable predictions. As a result, a great number of serious scientists refuse to call it a theory. It's the same exact problem as you're talking about.
I'm an avid fan of Lost, and I don't live in the US right now, which is a bit of a problem for the former. I've been relying on internet piracy to watch this show, and when I heard about Lost being available for download from Apple, I was overjoyed.
So I grabbed the first four episodes of Season 2, and started watching one. And I notice there's no letterbox. And the video is really jerky, and doesn't handle fast cuts or pans at all. So here I am, thinking I'm doing the right thing by paying for the download, only to find out that I'm getting a poorly-encoded pan-and-scan version of the show.
Alright, ideally they shouldn't have to worry about competition from pirates, but the fact is that piracy is a reality. And if you want to fight piracy, you have to provide something of equal or greater value than the pirates are willing or able to give. I want to be able to watch Lost on my widescreen TV through my computer's TV-Out card, roughly the way it was meant to be viewed.
I'm annoyed that Apple has used a proprietary format that isn't supported by any other media players. My primary gripe with it is that I'm forced into using Apple's underfeatured video player to watch my TV shows. Why can't they make a Directshow filter for it, complete with whatever DRM they want to use, so that I can play it in Media Player Classic, or God forbid, my PSP?
I sincerely hope they have some sort of plan to iron these issues out in the near future.
When I watched that 10+ hour documentary, I just sorta assumed they included every remotely interesting thing they had, otherwise you'd have a 3-hour series along the lines of Triumph of the Nerds. I mean, heck, Cringely managed to condense the history of the personal computer up until 1995 into a three-episode miniseries, right?
After seeing that there's actually 200+ hours of footage, I can understand how they'd be reluctant to cut it down past 10 hours. Still, I think they could've cut down on some of the boring politics and still gotten a few hours out of it without omitting anything important.
Still an immensely interesting documentary, and if you've got nothing to do for a week, I recommend watching it. I watched it in a two-day binge, but then I really should have been doing something else.
Actually, it's worse than that. Even if you're in Japan, you need to have a valid Japanese credit card with a Japanese billing address in order to use the store. I live in Osaka, but that doesn't matter. I'm not Japanese, so I don't get to use it.
Is it just me, or do these figures seem a little cheap? On the one hand, NASA budgets billions of dollars for these missions, but when it comes time to outsource them and have other people do all the really hard design work, they only give a tenth of what they would normally spend.
Maybe my sense of prices is off, but it looks to me like the prize money isn't going to cover all the work that goes into each project.
His fifth request was for smaller hard drives, ideally resulting in a smaller computer. To this, I suggest a Mini-ITX form factor PC, which uses laptop hard drives (2.5") and very small motherboards to achieve an overall package the size of a Mac Mini.
Is this what you had in mind?
It seems to me that Amazon's main advantage, and its basis for most of its patents, is the fact that they were the first merchant to use collaborative filtering (using Bayes' Law to determine what the user will likely do next based on the actions of users with similar habits). While collaborative filtering is something widely used in AI, it seems like Amazon is slowly patenting every single practical application of it, to the point that sooner or later Amazon will be the only company allowed to use computerized statistics in their technology.
Except for the fact that most advanced weaponry couldn't be used on one's own people without severe political consequences. If a rebellion had a single compound out in the middle of nowhere, it would be trivial for the government to suppress it. But that's not how it is. We all live together, and if you use highly destructive weapons (not WMDs, even a simple one-ton bomb would be enough) in an urban setting, you risk killing lots of innocents in the process.
It's bad enough in Iraq, where a good percentage of Americans don't even care if civilians are killed. Imagine doing it at home! A bunch of people spread out across a state in groups of 12 or so, armed with Columbine-style weaponry, could be a real problem for the government, and draw it out into an uphill battle with people growing rapidly more sympathetic to their cause as the government inadvertantly kills more and more innocents.
Make no mistake, even in the nuclear age, violent upheaval is still possible.
Yup, it does. I'm not a Linux or Mac user, but my former roommate is. Honestly, it's an ill-advised move. Most application writers don't think about the Mac and its architecture, resulting in lots of things just sorta not working at all.
The problem is something called "endianness," (if you know that word, you have no business posting what you just did). Endianness refers to the way the system represents numbers. Imagine going to a foreign country where they wrote numbers exactly the same way we do but with the exception that they wrote them right-to-left instead of left-to-right. Imagine if you didn't know this, and tried to do a simple math problem (addition, subtraction, whatever) in front of everybody. You'd sure wonder why everybody started laughing at you.
That's exactly what happens when you try to run carelessly-written PC Linux software on a Mac, where the numbers are written "backwards." And the end result of this little architectural culture shock, is that programs often don't work as advertised.
In other words, don't try Mac Linux unless you want to mess with everything anyone here is complaining about, because if my friend's experience means anything, it will all come up. For the record, his Gentoo Linux Mac "just works" nowadays, but it took a long time to get it to that stage, and it's an undertaking that I personally wouldn't attempt.
I thought the quote was, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded full of backup tapes." Same principle, though.