HD-DVD needs three layers to reach 51 GB. Blu-Ray hits 50 GB at two layers. Both formats are capable of more layers than that, but the demand for that much space is not yet significant enough to justify the investment costs. For what it's worth, however, prototype Blu-Ray discs have been produced with a capacity of up to 200 GB. All of this information is likewise on Wikipedia.
Newer VCRs and DVRs (reasonably priced models from the past ten years or so) have connections for RF transmitters that you can place next to the remote receiver of your decoder box. The VCR can use that to change channels in the same way it could if the connection was directly to the VCR itself. If it doesn't have that, you may be out of luck. Sorry.
The thing is, movies are typically shot in high definition nowadays. Those aren't going to fit on a DVD uncompressed, even a double layer DVD. Honestly, you'd have trouble fitting them on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc without some form of lossy compression. And that's just the actual film itself, mind you, with all of the cut footage and extraneous material that is typically excised from the final product. It's not unusual for the total amount of deleted scenes, alternate takes, and so on, to equal or exceed the amount of material actual kept in the final cut of the movie.
And DVDs are a problematic storage medium, anyway, for archival purposes. Kept in a controlled environment, modern analog film will last for a very long time (a hundred years or more). And even if there is some degradation, it can be more easily reconstructed than digital media. On top of that, you need to contend with format shifting and other hurdles facing any kind of digital technology. Analog film from 1900 can still be played back on most modern projectors, and, even if you're deal with an atypical format, it's still relatively easy to deal with (frames of analog film are human readable). DVDs have been around for less than fifteen years, and we're already looking at BR or HD-DVD as possible successors. In fifty years I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if you have a hard time finding hardware that can read DVDs. Which means that a realistic preservation schedule will need to factor in format shifting every decade or so, which is a lot more attention than is required for analog media.
And that, of course, assumes that we're talking about legitimate DVD pressing facilities: DVD+/-R discs are not suitable for archival purposes, as their lifespan is considerably shorter. And that's an additional expense that is frequently beyond the means of smaller studios and independent filmmakers. The benefit of digital media is that it is comparatively inexpensive to produce and distribute. But only if you're doing so on a level that is not suitable for long-term storage and maintenance. The costs climb very quickly when trying to deal with those concerns. Until rather recently, the standard solution to this has actually been to shift back into an analog format for preservation purposes, but there's an increasing awareness that this is unacceptable for a variety of reasons.
This is not the first time this story I've seen people comment on how digital footage can be archived by storing it on DVD.
This is, in a word, ridiculous. MPEG-2 is a lossy format. The quality is good, of course, and perfectly acceptable to most audiences, but it's entirely unacceptable for an archival copy, which should ideally be stored in whatever format it was recorded in (which is typically lossless).
Ultimately, that's the difference between preserving analog and digital video: it's fairly cheap and easy to maintain a copy of a digital film of reasonably acceptable quality for viewing purposes. But preserving a pristine archival copy that can be later used as a master is considerably trickier than that, and requires a lot more overhead (currently) than analog preservation. There's also the degradation factor: degraded analog material is easier to restore than degraded digital material. Likewise, digital material typically requires more complicated (and more expensive) hardware to access than analog material.
The numbers seem slightly high to me, but not alarmingly so. The costs will come down over time, but digital will remain more expensive than analog for these purposes for a long time to come.
I have a PSP and a DS. I find these days that the PSP largely sits gathering dust, while the DS lives in my pocket and gets a fair amount of use whilst commuting. The exact opposite for me, actually. I spend far more time with my PSP than my DS, and the time I do spend with my DS is generally not spent playing the "innovative" titles that have become Nintendo's claim to fame in recent years. Games like New Super Mario Bros., Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, or Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass aren't exactly innovative, but they're also the most enjoyable games for a system that seems to flounder under the weight of innovative-but-unpolished first party titles and a barrage of third-party shovelware. Not to say that there aren't plenty of less-than-stellar titles for the PSP, but recently there have been a lot of games coming out for the system that really don't have much of a analog on the DS (yet), in-depth RPGs and strategy RPGs like Jeanne D'Arc and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions being the most significant to my preferences.
Nintendo's "innovation" is a market strategy and not much else. They've had justifiable success with some of it (Nintendogs, Brain Age, and, on the Wii, Wii Sports), but generally the games that people really talk about are much more traditional: the aforementioned Mario and Zelda games, the never-ending Pokemon franchise, Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii, and so forth. Fundamentally, the difference between Nintendo and Sony (and Microsoft, for that matter) seems to be that Nintendo has hit upon the strategy of using its "innovative" titles as an effective lure: draw new gamers in with promises of something entirely different. There are innovative titles for the PSP, as well, but they're not generally the focus of the system's media campaigns. That's certainly not a criticism of Nintendo: all advertising has its fair share of hot air. But I'm always a bit surprised how many gamers take it at face value.
There are good games for both the DS and the PSP. Both libraries cover pretty much the same bases, from the extremely traditional to the truly original. For me, I find the larger size of the PSP makes it a lot more comfortable to hold for long periods of time than the DS, and the PSP generally features more of the kinds of titles that appeal to me as a gamer. But that's just personal preference, and the differences between the two aren't anywhere near as significant as I frequently hear told.
I was in agreement with you until this. While I find slavery abhorrent, slavery in the US would have died without the Civil War within 20 or 30 years of the war. Economists studying the period concluded that slavery was more expensive than paying freemen a living wage and that those who relied on slaves would have had to free the slaves to keep their costs down or go out of business. Some economists claim that. Most historians, however, think that those economists are being willfully ignorant of the facts.
The southern agricultural model was essentially low-technology work requiring a massive amount of labor. This made it fundamentally less amenable to free labor than the northern (and European) industrial model. As it is, the antebellum economy of the agricultural south ended with the Civil War not because it was inherently unprofitable (it wasn't, by a long shot) but because it could not transition to a post-slavery workforce. The south had an extremely profitable cash crop in cotton that almost everyone wanted and almost no competition to undercut them. Slavery could not have survived in the American south of 1890, but the American south of 1890 would probably not have existed had non-market forces not forced an end to slavery in 1865.
The sad part is that slavery was abandoned *because* it was economically inacceptable. In 1861, Russia has gotten rid of the serfdom (effectively slavery) because the Europeans were beating us with all those factories and inventions and stuff. Russia in 1860 was not the American south in 1860.
Russia's agriculture model (which relied on serfdom) was failing to keep pace with industrializing Europe. The American south, however, was not being greatly outpaced by the industrializing northern states. Far from it, in fact: the cotton industry was still hugely successful, and, despite revisionist history claims to the contrary, the slave-based economy of the south was not on the verge of collapsing before the Civil War.
Would it have eventually collapsed? Maybe. Probably, even. The problem was that it was something of a monoculture, and if the market for cotton went belly-up, there would certainly have been some kind of change. But even that doesn't ensure the collapse of slavery, as an institution. Before the invention of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century, it really did look like slavery was on fast on its way to becoming economically inviable. But the rise of cotton ensured that the institution got a second wind and, if anything, became more lucrative than it had ever been before.
Slavery did not end in America because it was unprofitable. Almost the opposite, actually: it was profitable enough that the southern states were willing to go to war to preserve the system. There were certainly social pressures against slavery, but these were not being translated to the market: the northern states and much of Europe may have heartily disapproved of the practice, but that disapproval was typically forgotten when whenever they wanted to purchase American cotton. As horrible and degrading as it was, economic forces were not going to put an end to American slavery any time soon.
Having played on the Wii a good bit now has convinced me that it isn't the revolutionary next step people claim it to be. Sure, it's got some great games and the controller is quite entertaining. The Wii, for me has provided a gaming experience no different from that offered by the Gamecube. What has made the console so approachable to non-gamers is not the controller but rather Nintendo's marketing and their game design. The controller may allow for some flexibility with game design, but not to the profound extent some believe. I think that's the key, really. "Innovation" is a buzzword of the console industry, but it's in danger of losing all meaning. I've long been of the opinion that the Wiimote is going to eventually wind up like the Nintendo DS touch screen. It's a clever device, and there's certainly nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing revolutionary about it. Most games throw a bone to the concept of touch screen controls, but very few do anything so wildly original that the game plays significantly differently than it would on a non-touch screen system.
We've already seen pretty much the same thing at work with the Wii. The most popular games so far have been ports of or sequels to previous generation titles (Resident Evil 4, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3) that don't play significantly differently than earlier installments/versions. Like the DS, there are only a handful of games that really exploit the much-vaunted "innovation" of the system (and most of them are first-party titles, at that). But Nintendo's real skill is not their ability to innovate, per se, but their ability to sell the concept of innovation to the public. In reality, it doesn't matter if the Wii is "truly" innovative or not if Nintendo can convince its audience of the fact. Add to that the obviously more competitive price point of the Wii when compared to the 360 and the PS3 and Nintendo has clearly hit upon a winning combination.
So a monoculture would basically achieve a monopoly by one manufacturer with no incentive to innovate. Almost certainly. In fact, that's pretty much what has happened in the past.
Nintendo gets a lot of credit for innovation these days, from the DS's touch screen to the Wii's motion sensing remote. But I would argue that this innovation emerged directly from Nintendo's string of setbacks in the last decade or so. For the late 1980s and (to a lesser degree) the early 1990s, Nintendo was a console monoculture, and they showed comparatively little interest in innovation. The Super NES was hardly a revolution in console design, and the original Game Boy was actually considerably less powerful than other portable systems of its era. By the mid-1990s, there was some attempt at innovation on the hardware side of things, but it was initially half-hearted and poorly received (Virtual Boy, anyone?). Even the Nintendo 64, which did have some genuinely innovative features (for a console, anyway), like analog controls and force feedback/rumble capabilities, still showed Nintendo clinging to tradition in some key ways, such as stubbornly clinging the cartridge technology when the entire industry (and many of their own third-party developers) were moving towards disc-based storage.
Nintendo was forced to innovate because they had lost their veritable monopoly over the console industry. And they're not the only example. While Nintendo appears to have succeeded in reinvigorating themselves, one need only to look at Atari, who grew complacent in the early 1980s and effectively lost their dominant position in the video game industry. Monocultures breed complacency, and complacency opens a window for more innovative competition to emerge. So I'm not sure that a console monoculture is even attainable at this point, and, if it were, I don't believe it would be a positive thing by any stretch.
Nope. This has been discussed ad nauseum already, but Comcast (and Sandvine, which they are in all likelihood using) isn't looking at the actual data, it's looking at the overall pattern of traffic. It is still going to send RST packets, regardless of whether or not your connections are encrypted.
The "No x... y... Lame" bit was a reference to CmdrTaco's "No wirless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." verdict concerning the iPod at the time of its release.
That's true, but kind of an unfair burden of proof. There are very, very few people from the first century of which there are extant contemporaneous accounts. The fact that people started talking about Jesus during the probable lifetime of his contemporaries (early Christian writings date to the 50s or so, even though the earliest gospels are a decade or two later), makes it increasingly probable that, if Jesus had been a complete fabrication, someone would have spoken up. The Romans were fairly meticulous record keepers, for the era, and while it's unlikely they would have had detailed records about everyone they crucified in Judea, there's enough verisimilitude to the story so that it didn't set off an obvious alarm bells. Historically, there were plenty of would-be religious/cult leaders in the region, so there's not much reason to doubt the basic outline of the story: that there was a Jesus who died sometime around 30 AD.
That's not proof positive, but it's unusually good evidence given the time and location of the story. It doesn't say anything about what Jesus did or did not preach, mind you, and I grant you that Paul's rendition of Jesus and his teaching for wider consumption was quite probably as much invention as historical reality.
That supposes that most buyers go to Internet review sites and rate the games they bought. That's just not true at all, especially for the DS, which has lots of casual gamers that don't even know what these sites. Which is why it's only roughly accurate. But it's also the only even vaguely reliable metric we have, short of going on and individually surveying everyone who bought a particular game. I'm really not trying to be tyrannical on this point, and I'm not even really arguing your point. But, again, such reviews at least directly speak to the quality issue where most other methods of measuring popularity (like sales figures) do not, and we can at least make a meaningful comparison within that limited framework. Which is at least better than the hoary old "silent majority" argument.
Which can be explained by the fact that the DS dominates in game sales far more than the GBA, with a far more diverse library, meaning fiercer competition and allowing the RPG devs to make new genres. Wait... what? I'm not sure how this logically follows in the first place, and I also fail to see how, even if it does, it has any relevance. The issue was the quantity and quality of RPGs for the DS compared to the GBA. That there are a higher percentage of training games and minigame collections for the DS than the GBA may be true, but it's also a complete non-sequitur. If I want to play an RPG, Wario Ware isn't going to appeal to me. A diverse library is certainly not a bad thing in the larger picture, but, again, if I want a prime rib, the world's most delicious selection of hamburgers isn't going suit me.
Which is nonsense of course. If it sold well, that's because it has been well received by gamers. Not so much. It's an indirect indicator, at best. It's actually a much better indicator of how well a game has been advertised. Word-of-mouth advertising is a big part of advertising, and that is pretty closely tied to how well a game is received, but there are too many other factors to draw a direct relation between how many people bought a game and how many people actually enjoyed a game.
Reviews are no indication of how well a title has been received by gamers. Again, not so much. They're very far from perfect, of course, but at least they are directly concerned with the actual quality of the game in a way that raw sales figures are not. And, in any case, though the scores I cited were averaged from professional reviews, the fan/player ratings are pretty much all within a few points of the other, which suggests that they're at least roughly accurate.
If you want to talk popularity of RPG between GBA and DS, like I said, you can refuting it now is a matter of opinion, but after this huge DS RPG winter and after DQ IX is released, there just won't be any wondering as to which of the DS or the GBA had more of the good RPG. Ah, well, I prefer to rely on what actually exists now, as opposed to what may or may not come to pass in the future. And even if the DS benefits from an onslaught of truly excellent RPGs from now until the system's retirement, it still suffers from the fact that it took considerably longer to reach that point than the GBA.
From what I've heard from friends, it's not as good as the GBA installments. But I'm a fan of the series, so I'll probably check it out at some point. There's also Rune Factory, which is billed as a fantasy version of the game, and is supposed to be pretty decent.
So you're comparing the library of a not yet 3 years old console with one which is more like 6+? Golden Sun came out in 2001, the same year as the GBA. Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis in 2002. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in 2003. Most of the highly regarded GBA RPGs came out fairly early in the system's life cycle. There's no reason that the DS, which is rapidly approaching its third anniversary, shouldn't be able to boast an equally impressive library. And yet, it really doesn't.
Which is why I specifically said that you may not like them, but they are still RPG. Which is why it's entirely irrelevant to the issue I was discussing.
The issue was the number of "really good" RPGs for the system. Yes, this is a subjective judgment, which I've admittedly repeatedly now, but it is at least a judgment that I can corroborate with critics' reviews. Not only is the total number of RPGs for the DS less than the total number of RPGs for the GBA at an equivalent point in the system's lifespan, but those RPGs have generally been received much more harshly by critics. And yes, if I want well-prepared prime rib, McDonald's hamburgers do not count.
This is emphatically not an issue of sales. Nor is it an issue of personal preference. It's not an absolutist argument, either: I'm not claiming that the DS doesn't have any RPGs, or even that it doesn't have any good RPGs. The only claim I have ever made is that it falls short in quantity (objectively speaking) and quality (in my opinion, and in overall critical opinion) to the system that preceded it.
An average critical score of 65/100 (from Metacritic, for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) does not stack up favorably to an average critical score of 91/100 (again from Metacritic, for Golden Sun). A score of 59/100 (for Lunar Dragon Song) pales before a score of 88/100 (for Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis). 69/100 (for Magical Starsign) does not impress when placed next to Fire Emblem's 88/100.
Of the American-released games you listed, only four were reviewed above 80/100: Rune Factory, squeaking in at 80, Lunar Knights at 82, and the Pokemon Diamond / Pearl combo at 85 each. I'm not diminishing this. Particularly the Pokemon games, which scored higher than any of the GBA iterations. But, all-in-all, it's still not a greatly impressive track record, considering.
And you got to be kidding, as FF III destroyed the sales of any of the GBA ones. It's a million seller in Japan alone! Again, sales are a fairly poor indicator of quality. The average reviews (which have problems of their own, don't get me wrong, but at least directly address the question in a way that sales figures do not) put Final Fantasy III, at 77/100 below even the poorest reviewed of the GBA remakes (which was Dawn of Souls at 79/100). It sold well, sure, but doesn't appear to have been received all that well by gamers.
Even if the DS did have twice the number of RPGs as were ever available for the GBA, it doesn't mean much if people don't actually like them. If you do enjoy them, more power to you, but it's not like this claim is new, and the numbers more or less support it.
The key phrase was "in comparison." Compared to the GBA, there are considerably fewer RPGs for the DS. Plus, if you're counting the Mana games, you're not really excluding action/RPGs.:-)
More to the point, there are a fewer great RPGs for the DS. Yeah, this is subjective, but few of the games you've listed have gotten the kind of positive critical reviews of games like Golden Sun, Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to say nothing of the Final Fantasy remakes. The Lunar DS, Narnia, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games were pretty roundly trashed, and Magical Starsign got rather mediocre scores. Even Final Fantasy III, which did better than any of the above, seems to rank below the GBA FF remakes.
Contact? The first six Final Fantasy games? Pokemon? Mario & Luigi (though quite a few people prefer the GBA version)? What about half-sim half-RPGs such as Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, LostMagic, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and Harvest Moon? Do those all suck? A rather significant portion of those aren't DS games. All of the Final Fantasy remakes except Final Fantasy III, several iterations of Pokemon games, the first Mario & Luigi, the Fire Emblem games, Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and Harvest Moon are all Game Boy Advance games.
Yes, they work on the DS courtesy of backwards compatibility. But when one of the dozens of different versions of the GBA can be had for significantly less money than a DS or DS Lite, that's a relatively minor point in the DS's favor. The fact that the PS3 plays almost all of the hundreds of PS2 and PS1 games doesn't address the basic lack of decent games that can be played exclusively on the PS3. The same thing applies here. There are a lot of really good RPGs for the GBA. There are a couple for the DS, don't get me wrong, but the selection is much more limited in comparison.
There's nothing shocking or revolutionary about Microsoft or Microsoft-affiliated studios producing games for Nintendo portables. After being purchased by Microsoft, Rare later produced a DS sequel to its Nintendo 64 Diddy Kong Racing. Since Microsoft isn't in the portable gaming market at the moment, there's not really a downside to it.
I'd be a little more surprised if they started releasing games for the Wii. Not shocked, mind you: I'm old enough to remember when Mattel, Atari, and Coleco used to release games for each other's consoles in the early 80s. But it's still more significant than a company that focuses on the set-top box console market releasing a game for another company's handheld.
I want Civ. I want Starcraft. Diablo. Master of Magic. Battlefield. X-Com. Populous. Battlezone. To be fair, there are a fair number of games that would formerly have been considered PC-centric that have made the jump to the DS. A fair number of point-and-click adventure games, for one. And SimCity, as well. There's a Civ game in the works for next year, as well.
Trolling aside, I'm not sure that'd have any effect.
Type 2 diabetes (by far the most common) is associated with obesity and overconsumption of refined sugars. This does not apply to other types of the syndrome. For example, type 1 diabetes (formerly known as juvenile diabetes) is not. Though ultimately the effects are similar, both do very different things. Roughly speaking, type 2 diabetics develop a resistance to insulin, but their bodies may still produce it. Type 1 diabetics don't necessarily develop that resistance, but lose the cells that produce insulin in the first place. There's no known medical way to prevent the onset of type 1 diabetes: it's just the luck of the draw, genetically.
The article in question doesn't go into many details, but I'm not sure I'd put money down on a direct correlation between unhealthy eating and Alzheimer's. Considering the amount of attention on Alzheimer's, I'd be rather surprised that such a correlation had not been discovered before now, anecdotally if nothing else.
The two men have very different goals, though: what, precisely, would they unite over?
Torvalds wants to produce a decent, *nix-like operating system (or kernel, really), and, for the time being, views the GPL as the best license to work under in pursuit of that goal. If he felt that Linux would be better served via a proprietary, non-Free license, I expect he would advocate a move towards that position.
Stallman doesn't care about any of that, per se: he's concerned with the philosophy and ethics of software licensing, not one particular piece of code. Currently, his goal is to push GPLv3. Given Torvalds repeated lack of any interest whatsoever in the license, they are not part of the same team. They're not necessarily enemies, of course, but since Torvalds has been openly criticizing the new version of the GPL for many months now, it's in Stallman's interests to respond.
The two men don't see eye to eye, and since they're both appealing to a different goal, they're unlikely to be able to convince each other to change their positions.
There really wasn't anything wrong with Chamberlain's tactics, of course. The problem was his appalling ineptitude when it came to public relations. His actions were eminently practical and responsible, and showed that he really understood the threat posed by Germany. But since this means he clearly understood that the reprieve was likely to be brief, he really should have known better to go trumpeting "peace in our time." Putting a brave face on cold reality is one thing: irrational exuberance is something else entirely.
Er, no, I'm not. I'm deliberately not deriding anyone for denying anything (at least in the post you're responding to). I'm just expressing shock at the suggestion that invoking the word "denier" immediately draws to mind Holocaust deniers. Regardless of whether or not global warming (man-made or otherwise) is a fact, fiction, hypothesis, or small species of subarctic rodent is immaterial.
What matters to me at this moment is the frankly insulting suggestion using the word "denier" shows disrespect to the memory of Holocaust victims. I have no problem with anyone disputing or denying "something established as fact" on its merits.
Er... the word "denier" was neither created in response to the Holocaust, nor is it exclusively associated with that particular breed of assholes. Using the word in conjunction in no way "hijacks the memory" of Holocaust survivors.
Honestly, leaving aside the question of whether or not I agree or disagree with your skepticism, this has got to be one of the strangest and most unsavory trolls I've ever seen.
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HD-DVD needs three layers to reach 51 GB. Blu-Ray hits 50 GB at two layers. Both formats are capable of more layers than that, but the demand for that much space is not yet significant enough to justify the investment costs. For what it's worth, however, prototype Blu-Ray discs have been produced with a capacity of up to 200 GB. All of this information is likewise on Wikipedia.
Newer VCRs and DVRs (reasonably priced models from the past ten years or so) have connections for RF transmitters that you can place next to the remote receiver of your decoder box. The VCR can use that to change channels in the same way it could if the connection was directly to the VCR itself. If it doesn't have that, you may be out of luck. Sorry.
The thing is, movies are typically shot in high definition nowadays. Those aren't going to fit on a DVD uncompressed, even a double layer DVD. Honestly, you'd have trouble fitting them on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc without some form of lossy compression. And that's just the actual film itself, mind you, with all of the cut footage and extraneous material that is typically excised from the final product. It's not unusual for the total amount of deleted scenes, alternate takes, and so on, to equal or exceed the amount of material actual kept in the final cut of the movie.
And DVDs are a problematic storage medium, anyway, for archival purposes. Kept in a controlled environment, modern analog film will last for a very long time (a hundred years or more). And even if there is some degradation, it can be more easily reconstructed than digital media. On top of that, you need to contend with format shifting and other hurdles facing any kind of digital technology. Analog film from 1900 can still be played back on most modern projectors, and, even if you're deal with an atypical format, it's still relatively easy to deal with (frames of analog film are human readable). DVDs have been around for less than fifteen years, and we're already looking at BR or HD-DVD as possible successors. In fifty years I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if you have a hard time finding hardware that can read DVDs. Which means that a realistic preservation schedule will need to factor in format shifting every decade or so, which is a lot more attention than is required for analog media.
And that, of course, assumes that we're talking about legitimate DVD pressing facilities: DVD+/-R discs are not suitable for archival purposes, as their lifespan is considerably shorter. And that's an additional expense that is frequently beyond the means of smaller studios and independent filmmakers. The benefit of digital media is that it is comparatively inexpensive to produce and distribute. But only if you're doing so on a level that is not suitable for long-term storage and maintenance. The costs climb very quickly when trying to deal with those concerns. Until rather recently, the standard solution to this has actually been to shift back into an analog format for preservation purposes, but there's an increasing awareness that this is unacceptable for a variety of reasons.
This is not the first time this story I've seen people comment on how digital footage can be archived by storing it on DVD.
This is, in a word, ridiculous. MPEG-2 is a lossy format. The quality is good, of course, and perfectly acceptable to most audiences, but it's entirely unacceptable for an archival copy, which should ideally be stored in whatever format it was recorded in (which is typically lossless).
Ultimately, that's the difference between preserving analog and digital video: it's fairly cheap and easy to maintain a copy of a digital film of reasonably acceptable quality for viewing purposes. But preserving a pristine archival copy that can be later used as a master is considerably trickier than that, and requires a lot more overhead (currently) than analog preservation. There's also the degradation factor: degraded analog material is easier to restore than degraded digital material. Likewise, digital material typically requires more complicated (and more expensive) hardware to access than analog material.
The numbers seem slightly high to me, but not alarmingly so. The costs will come down over time, but digital will remain more expensive than analog for these purposes for a long time to come.
Nintendo's "innovation" is a market strategy and not much else. They've had justifiable success with some of it (Nintendogs, Brain Age, and, on the Wii, Wii Sports), but generally the games that people really talk about are much more traditional: the aforementioned Mario and Zelda games, the never-ending Pokemon franchise, Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii, and so forth. Fundamentally, the difference between Nintendo and Sony (and Microsoft, for that matter) seems to be that Nintendo has hit upon the strategy of using its "innovative" titles as an effective lure: draw new gamers in with promises of something entirely different. There are innovative titles for the PSP, as well, but they're not generally the focus of the system's media campaigns. That's certainly not a criticism of Nintendo: all advertising has its fair share of hot air. But I'm always a bit surprised how many gamers take it at face value.
There are good games for both the DS and the PSP. Both libraries cover pretty much the same bases, from the extremely traditional to the truly original. For me, I find the larger size of the PSP makes it a lot more comfortable to hold for long periods of time than the DS, and the PSP generally features more of the kinds of titles that appeal to me as a gamer. But that's just personal preference, and the differences between the two aren't anywhere near as significant as I frequently hear told.
The southern agricultural model was essentially low-technology work requiring a massive amount of labor. This made it fundamentally less amenable to free labor than the northern (and European) industrial model. As it is, the antebellum economy of the agricultural south ended with the Civil War not because it was inherently unprofitable (it wasn't, by a long shot) but because it could not transition to a post-slavery workforce. The south had an extremely profitable cash crop in cotton that almost everyone wanted and almost no competition to undercut them. Slavery could not have survived in the American south of 1890, but the American south of 1890 would probably not have existed had non-market forces not forced an end to slavery in 1865.
Russia's agriculture model (which relied on serfdom) was failing to keep pace with industrializing Europe. The American south, however, was not being greatly outpaced by the industrializing northern states. Far from it, in fact: the cotton industry was still hugely successful, and, despite revisionist history claims to the contrary, the slave-based economy of the south was not on the verge of collapsing before the Civil War.
Would it have eventually collapsed? Maybe. Probably, even. The problem was that it was something of a monoculture, and if the market for cotton went belly-up, there would certainly have been some kind of change. But even that doesn't ensure the collapse of slavery, as an institution. Before the invention of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century, it really did look like slavery was on fast on its way to becoming economically inviable. But the rise of cotton ensured that the institution got a second wind and, if anything, became more lucrative than it had ever been before.
Slavery did not end in America because it was unprofitable. Almost the opposite, actually: it was profitable enough that the southern states were willing to go to war to preserve the system. There were certainly social pressures against slavery, but these were not being translated to the market: the northern states and much of Europe may have heartily disapproved of the practice, but that disapproval was typically forgotten when whenever they wanted to purchase American cotton. As horrible and degrading as it was, economic forces were not going to put an end to American slavery any time soon.
We've already seen pretty much the same thing at work with the Wii. The most popular games so far have been ports of or sequels to previous generation titles (Resident Evil 4, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3) that don't play significantly differently than earlier installments/versions. Like the DS, there are only a handful of games that really exploit the much-vaunted "innovation" of the system (and most of them are first-party titles, at that). But Nintendo's real skill is not their ability to innovate, per se, but their ability to sell the concept of innovation to the public. In reality, it doesn't matter if the Wii is "truly" innovative or not if Nintendo can convince its audience of the fact. Add to that the obviously more competitive price point of the Wii when compared to the 360 and the PS3 and Nintendo has clearly hit upon a winning combination.
Nintendo gets a lot of credit for innovation these days, from the DS's touch screen to the Wii's motion sensing remote. But I would argue that this innovation emerged directly from Nintendo's string of setbacks in the last decade or so. For the late 1980s and (to a lesser degree) the early 1990s, Nintendo was a console monoculture, and they showed comparatively little interest in innovation. The Super NES was hardly a revolution in console design, and the original Game Boy was actually considerably less powerful than other portable systems of its era. By the mid-1990s, there was some attempt at innovation on the hardware side of things, but it was initially half-hearted and poorly received (Virtual Boy, anyone?). Even the Nintendo 64, which did have some genuinely innovative features (for a console, anyway), like analog controls and force feedback/rumble capabilities, still showed Nintendo clinging to tradition in some key ways, such as stubbornly clinging the cartridge technology when the entire industry (and many of their own third-party developers) were moving towards disc-based storage.
Nintendo was forced to innovate because they had lost their veritable monopoly over the console industry. And they're not the only example. While Nintendo appears to have succeeded in reinvigorating themselves, one need only to look at Atari, who grew complacent in the early 1980s and effectively lost their dominant position in the video game industry. Monocultures breed complacency, and complacency opens a window for more innovative competition to emerge. So I'm not sure that a console monoculture is even attainable at this point, and, if it were, I don't believe it would be a positive thing by any stretch.
Nope. This has been discussed ad nauseum already, but Comcast (and Sandvine, which they are in all likelihood using) isn't looking at the actual data, it's looking at the overall pattern of traffic. It is still going to send RST packets, regardless of whether or not your connections are encrypted.
More correctly:
Joke
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Hitto
The "No x... y... Lame" bit was a reference to CmdrTaco's "No wirless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." verdict concerning the iPod at the time of its release.
That's true, but kind of an unfair burden of proof. There are very, very few people from the first century of which there are extant contemporaneous accounts. The fact that people started talking about Jesus during the probable lifetime of his contemporaries (early Christian writings date to the 50s or so, even though the earliest gospels are a decade or two later), makes it increasingly probable that, if Jesus had been a complete fabrication, someone would have spoken up. The Romans were fairly meticulous record keepers, for the era, and while it's unlikely they would have had detailed records about everyone they crucified in Judea, there's enough verisimilitude to the story so that it didn't set off an obvious alarm bells. Historically, there were plenty of would-be religious/cult leaders in the region, so there's not much reason to doubt the basic outline of the story: that there was a Jesus who died sometime around 30 AD.
That's not proof positive, but it's unusually good evidence given the time and location of the story. It doesn't say anything about what Jesus did or did not preach, mind you, and I grant you that Paul's rendition of Jesus and his teaching for wider consumption was quite probably as much invention as historical reality.
From what I've heard from friends, it's not as good as the GBA installments. But I'm a fan of the series, so I'll probably check it out at some point. There's also Rune Factory, which is billed as a fantasy version of the game, and is supposed to be pretty decent.
The issue was the number of "really good" RPGs for the system. Yes, this is a subjective judgment, which I've admittedly repeatedly now, but it is at least a judgment that I can corroborate with critics' reviews. Not only is the total number of RPGs for the DS less than the total number of RPGs for the GBA at an equivalent point in the system's lifespan, but those RPGs have generally been received much more harshly by critics. And yes, if I want well-prepared prime rib, McDonald's hamburgers do not count.
This is emphatically not an issue of sales. Nor is it an issue of personal preference. It's not an absolutist argument, either: I'm not claiming that the DS doesn't have any RPGs, or even that it doesn't have any good RPGs. The only claim I have ever made is that it falls short in quantity (objectively speaking) and quality (in my opinion, and in overall critical opinion) to the system that preceded it.
An average critical score of 65/100 (from Metacritic, for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) does not stack up favorably to an average critical score of 91/100 (again from Metacritic, for Golden Sun). A score of 59/100 (for Lunar Dragon Song) pales before a score of 88/100 (for Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis). 69/100 (for Magical Starsign) does not impress when placed next to Fire Emblem's 88/100.
Of the American-released games you listed, only four were reviewed above 80/100: Rune Factory, squeaking in at 80, Lunar Knights at 82, and the Pokemon Diamond / Pearl combo at 85 each. I'm not diminishing this. Particularly the Pokemon games, which scored higher than any of the GBA iterations. But, all-in-all, it's still not a greatly impressive track record, considering. And you got to be kidding, as FF III destroyed the sales of any of the GBA ones. It's a million seller in Japan alone! Again, sales are a fairly poor indicator of quality. The average reviews (which have problems of their own, don't get me wrong, but at least directly address the question in a way that sales figures do not) put Final Fantasy III, at 77/100 below even the poorest reviewed of the GBA remakes (which was Dawn of Souls at 79/100). It sold well, sure, but doesn't appear to have been received all that well by gamers.
Even if the DS did have twice the number of RPGs as were ever available for the GBA, it doesn't mean much if people don't actually like them. If you do enjoy them, more power to you, but it's not like this claim is new, and the numbers more or less support it.
The key phrase was "in comparison." Compared to the GBA, there are considerably fewer RPGs for the DS. Plus, if you're counting the Mana games, you're not really excluding action/RPGs. :-)
More to the point, there are a fewer great RPGs for the DS. Yeah, this is subjective, but few of the games you've listed have gotten the kind of positive critical reviews of games like Golden Sun, Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to say nothing of the Final Fantasy remakes. The Lunar DS, Narnia, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games were pretty roundly trashed, and Magical Starsign got rather mediocre scores. Even Final Fantasy III, which did better than any of the above, seems to rank below the GBA FF remakes.
Yes, they work on the DS courtesy of backwards compatibility. But when one of the dozens of different versions of the GBA can be had for significantly less money than a DS or DS Lite, that's a relatively minor point in the DS's favor. The fact that the PS3 plays almost all of the hundreds of PS2 and PS1 games doesn't address the basic lack of decent games that can be played exclusively on the PS3. The same thing applies here. There are a lot of really good RPGs for the GBA. There are a couple for the DS, don't get me wrong, but the selection is much more limited in comparison.
There's nothing shocking or revolutionary about Microsoft or Microsoft-affiliated studios producing games for Nintendo portables. After being purchased by Microsoft, Rare later produced a DS sequel to its Nintendo 64 Diddy Kong Racing. Since Microsoft isn't in the portable gaming market at the moment, there's not really a downside to it.
I'd be a little more surprised if they started releasing games for the Wii. Not shocked, mind you: I'm old enough to remember when Mattel, Atari, and Coleco used to release games for each other's consoles in the early 80s. But it's still more significant than a company that focuses on the set-top box console market releasing a game for another company's handheld.
Trolling aside, I'm not sure that'd have any effect.
Type 2 diabetes (by far the most common) is associated with obesity and overconsumption of refined sugars. This does not apply to other types of the syndrome. For example, type 1 diabetes (formerly known as juvenile diabetes) is not. Though ultimately the effects are similar, both do very different things. Roughly speaking, type 2 diabetics develop a resistance to insulin, but their bodies may still produce it. Type 1 diabetics don't necessarily develop that resistance, but lose the cells that produce insulin in the first place. There's no known medical way to prevent the onset of type 1 diabetes: it's just the luck of the draw, genetically.
The article in question doesn't go into many details, but I'm not sure I'd put money down on a direct correlation between unhealthy eating and Alzheimer's. Considering the amount of attention on Alzheimer's, I'd be rather surprised that such a correlation had not been discovered before now, anecdotally if nothing else.
The two men have very different goals, though: what, precisely, would they unite over?
Torvalds wants to produce a decent, *nix-like operating system (or kernel, really), and, for the time being, views the GPL as the best license to work under in pursuit of that goal. If he felt that Linux would be better served via a proprietary, non-Free license, I expect he would advocate a move towards that position.
Stallman doesn't care about any of that, per se: he's concerned with the philosophy and ethics of software licensing, not one particular piece of code. Currently, his goal is to push GPLv3. Given Torvalds repeated lack of any interest whatsoever in the license, they are not part of the same team. They're not necessarily enemies, of course, but since Torvalds has been openly criticizing the new version of the GPL for many months now, it's in Stallman's interests to respond.
The two men don't see eye to eye, and since they're both appealing to a different goal, they're unlikely to be able to convince each other to change their positions.
There really wasn't anything wrong with Chamberlain's tactics, of course. The problem was his appalling ineptitude when it came to public relations. His actions were eminently practical and responsible, and showed that he really understood the threat posed by Germany. But since this means he clearly understood that the reprieve was likely to be brief, he really should have known better to go trumpeting "peace in our time." Putting a brave face on cold reality is one thing: irrational exuberance is something else entirely.
Er, no, I'm not. I'm deliberately not deriding anyone for denying anything (at least in the post you're responding to). I'm just expressing shock at the suggestion that invoking the word "denier" immediately draws to mind Holocaust deniers. Regardless of whether or not global warming (man-made or otherwise) is a fact, fiction, hypothesis, or small species of subarctic rodent is immaterial.
What matters to me at this moment is the frankly insulting suggestion using the word "denier" shows disrespect to the memory of Holocaust victims. I have no problem with anyone disputing or denying "something established as fact" on its merits.
Er... the word "denier" was neither created in response to the Holocaust, nor is it exclusively associated with that particular breed of assholes. Using the word in conjunction in no way "hijacks the memory" of Holocaust survivors.
Honestly, leaving aside the question of whether or not I agree or disagree with your skepticism, this has got to be one of the strangest and most unsavory trolls I've ever seen.