For what it's worth, I think Mike was significantly better in the host segment skits than Joel ever was. When not in the theater, Joel pretty much fell back to prop comedy, and after a season or two it became rather formulaic. In the theater (which, of course, is really the most important part), I think they were both excellent, but in different ways: Joel's deadpan delivery was suited to a very different sort of comedy than Mike's approach. In the end, I tend to gravitate more towards Mike-hosted episodes than Joel-hosted ones, but I think that has more to do with the movie selection than anything else.
"Twisting" how, exactly? Peter Main's description of inventory management is not really in dispute: the practice was to refuse to fill retailer orders in full. Nintendo has never, to my knowledge, denied this fact. Indeed, Main's argument was that inventory management was necessary to prevent another 1983/84-style industry crash. It was part of the bevy of complaints that led to antitrust action against Nintendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As for the Wii, absolutely. I'm not attempting to offer any kind of evidence of wrongdoing on Nintendo's part. Peter Main, AFAIK, isn't even connected to Nintendo anymore, and the industry isn't the same place it was two decades ago.
Even if I were interested in making the argument that Nintendo is deliberately manufacturing scarcity with regards to the Wii, I don't really give a damn. Whereas with the NES, where Nintendo's inventory policies concerning both first and third party hardware and games had their third-party developers by the neck, there doesn't seem to be any such abuse here: they can make Wiis as quickly or slowly as they want, and while I may not agree with the decision, I don't think there's anything morally, ethically, or (as far as I understand it) legally wrong with it. Assuming there is an "it" in the first place, which I don't feel qualified to comment on (as I've repeated several times already).
As it happens, I think it makes Nintendo look better than the alternate explanation that they were so monumentally off on their initial estimates and left themselves no effective way to resolve the imbalance, especially after similar problems with the Nintendo DS. I find "Machiavellian" preferable to "foolish" any day;-)
That explains the initial shortage. But the Wii has been out for almost eight months, now. One would hope they would have been able to at least begin to address the shortage problems, but not much seems to have changed. At the very least, after being blindsided by the popularity of the DS, Nintendo just looks foolish to find themselves in pretty much the same situation with the Wii. In light of Nintendo's past history of engineering shortages (which I mentioned upthread, and is talked about in more depth here or here), there seems plenty of reason to be skeptical, even though I admit there's nothing conclusive about it.
"Stupid crazies" like Nintendo of America Vice-President Peter Main? Back at the height of the NES, he admitted that Nintendo deliberately refused to fill all retailer orders for NES hardware and cartridges in order to manufacture scarcity and heighten demand. From Nintendo's perspective, retailers were exaggerating demand and the process, which the company referred to as "inventory management," was designed to prevent the type of glut in the marketplace that nearly doomed the industry during the early 1980s.
They may have had a point, mind you: a landfill full of unsold E.T. cartridges for the Atari 2600 speaks to the dangers of flooding the market. But, even if they were right to do so, it was what it was. And given Nintendo's licensing choke hold over its third party developers at the time, it was a monumentally stupid decision that eventually got them sued by various licensees and competitors, including Atari and Activision.
There is no conspiracy theory involved in this: Nintendo does have this history. Whether or not they are doing it now, of course, is another story. Their relationship to game developers have changed significantly since the late 1980s, so they would arguably have less to gain: in the 1980s, they controlled the cartridge production process, and so could essentially control both the hardware and software ends of things. And Nintendo in 2007 is certainly not the only significant player in the video game industry as it was in 1989. Besides, as I said earlier, I'm not familiar enough with the situation today to have a real opinion, I'm merely stating that it has happened in the past, and it's no big secret, either.
Related to that is the fact that since Nintendo has shown repeated difficulty meeting their current sales demand, they have absolutely nothing to gain by increasing that demand. When Wii sales cool down enough that they're actually staying on shelves for more than five or six minutes on end, then a price cut would make sense. Until that point, it's counterproductive.
Why not? They have a history of throttling production in order to raise demand, from back in the NES days.
I'm not saying they're doing it now, mind you: I haven't bothered to look closely enough to have an opinion one way or the other. But it wouldn't be unheard of.
When I think about getting a game console, I'm only thinking about games.
IMO, all three next gen consoles fail at that right now. There is one game for the Wii (Super Paper Mario) I'm interested in that isn't already available for other consoles. There are maybe three Xbox 360 games, and no PS3 games. And since I could buy, at bare minimum, two consoles of the previous generation for the price of one next gen console (all three if we're talking about either the 360 or PS3), it's a non-starter. Backwards compatibility is a plus, to be sure, but I still think that, if all you're interested in is the games, you're better off getting a used GameCube for $50 than a used Wii (if you can even find one) for over $200. And that's even more true for the PS3/PS2 and 360/Xbox (especially the latter, with its limited and frequently imperfect backwards compatibility).
Yes, eventually the games libraries will grow. And, when they do, I'll feel qualified to evaluate each next gen console on its relative merits. But it strikes me as incredibly premature to evaluate any of the consoles on the merits of their games when none of them perform particularly well on that front at the moment.
I just opened my first Wii yesterday: it most certainly did come with a Nunchuk. And it kind of had to, since at least one of the games that make up Wii Sports (Boxing) requires the Nunchuk.
You can get affordable health insurance - with the ability to go to ANY doctor - if you look for it.
Maybe you can. Your situation, however, may not apply to others. I suffer from type 1 diabetes: that's the largely juvenile-onset variety that isn't tied to weight, and is (as far as we can tell) unpreventable. I'm in good health, and I keep my blood sugar under control. I'm also basically uninsurable. If I did not take the insurance options offered by my employer, my choices would basically be limited to a plan that was well beyond my ability to pay and still didn't cover all my medical expenses, or no insurance at all. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other medical conditions that more or less make it impossible for a large number of Americans to obtain affordable health insurance. Many of the people affected are the victims of nothing more than bad luck or an unfortunate genetic heritage.
Somewhat perversely, the current status quo basically ensures that the people who least need health insurance are the only ones who can reliably obtain it.
For example, porting the OS X antialiasing over to Windows rather than using the native ClearType just seems weird (almost to the extent that I don't believe Ars Technica).
Believe it: they're right.
For what it's worth, I think OS X's antialiasing looks better for web page text rendering than ClearType on Windows, so it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm not crazy about how the UI doesn't fit in with other Windows applications (particularly the fact that it doesn't respect user font choices), but the pages themselves look aesthetically better than they do on any Windows-based browser, IMO.
Michael Jackson sold his rights to the Northern Songs catalog a year or two ago, but otherwise you're right.
Northern Songs was formed in 1963 to publish the songs written by Lennon and McCartney. They each had a 15% stake in the company until 1970, when they both agreed to sell their shares in exchange for getting out of the contract that required they continue their songwriting partnership through 1973: the band was in the middle of self-destructing at the time, and neither wanted to see the other, let alone have to share songwriting credit. In a sequence of messy legal maneuvers, the rights to Northern Songs were eventually sold to ATV (a British television company).
ATV held onto the rights until 1985, when they put them up for auction. Paul McCartney bid for them, but was outbid by Michael Jackson, who had apparently been encouraged to make an offer by Yoko Ono. McCartney had approached Ono about making a joint bid, but she had rebuffed him. This put Jackson and McCartney on bad terms, and after Jackson refused to raise McCartney's royalties (which had remained unchanged since the 1960s, despite continued sales) their friendship effectively ended.
In 1995, Jackson sold half of his shares in Northern Songs to Sony Music. This formed the basis of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which was jointly owned by Jackson and Sony (at 50% each). In 2005, as I mentioned before, Jackson put his half up as collateral on a loan to pay off his massive debt. The ultimate fate of the catalog remains in limbo.
Also, to be precise, while the Northern Songs catalog comprises most of the Beatles' output, it doesn't comprise all of it. Although George Harrison's early work was produced under contract to Northern (an arrangement that annoyed Harrison enough that he wrote a song about his disillusionment, "Only a Northern Song"), his later material was published under his own company. Also, there are a number of early Lennon/McCartney compositions that were published prior to the formation of Northern Songs, including "Love Me Do," the rights to which have since been purchased by McCartney's own company, MPL Communications.
To further muddy the waters, this is only part of the reason why the Beatles' catalog has yet to appear online. The Beatles' Apple Corps has been engaged in a number of legal battles with a variety of groups, including Apple Computer over trademark issues and EMI over unpaid royalties, that have cast a cloud over things. Since both of these cases have recently been resolved, there's been a lot of speculation that the catalog will be made available online soon. Regardless, most of this can be said to stem from the same root cause, namely the poor management and general disinterest of the Beatles themselves during the period of the group's breakup in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In that sense, one might be able to blame it on McCartney (and Lennon, Harrison, and Starr), but it's not like McCartney made a deliberate decision to keep the Beatles' songs offline.
Er... the BBC isn't a commercial network. It's not in the business of "making money." Although, for what it's worth, the show is a highly profitable venture for the BBC's dedicated commercial wing, and it does gangbusters in the ratings. It's up there as one of the highest-rated non-soap operas on UK television and has only dipped out of the top 20 rated programs of the week once since its return in 2005.
And it's sort of a Russell Davies thing. He's got a notoriously short attention span, even in the world of British television, which is a lot more used to limited-run series than the US market. And leaving a show to "pursue other opportunities" is hardly unheard of it, even in the US: "Seinfeld" ended under similar circumstances, even considering that it was still immensely popular. "M.A.S.H." did likewise, as did "Friends" and "Cheers."
And it's close to completely worthless on OS X, last time I checked at least. The long-standing font rendering bug makes it extremely difficult to use.
It's a pity, too, since AbiWord is my favorite word processor on both Windows and *nix. When they do get things sorted on OS X, I'll probably switch to it there as well.
I wonder if this rerelease of FFXII is evidence that it, too, was rushed.
I doubt it. The game may have been rushed, but more to the point is the fact that International Editions are becoming par for the course these days. Both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 had 'em, as well. In both cases, there were some significant changes to the game, but I'm not sure they were really "refinements," per se. They were just different, and I suspect the intention was to provide a different way to play.
I'm not sure where I've seen any evidence the music industry is running on razor-thin margins. This sounds like pure BS, and only hurts their credibility every time they try to state their "case"... So far, I'm not convinced.
If I understand the article properly, it's not the music industry that's running on razor-thin margins per se, it's the retailer. It's been said that Apple makes only a few pennies on the dollar for every song they move over the iTunes Music Store. If the industry started demanding more money for unrestricted music files, that already minimal profit would vanish. Which means that either Apple would need to start selling music at a loss, which cannot and will not happen, or they would need to raise their prices. In other words, the difference would need to be made up for by the consumer, because there's no way to absorb it.
Er... Final Fantasy III was never planned for the PS2. It was originally announced (close to eight years ago) for Bandai's Wonder Swan Color portable, which also saw rereleases of the first two Final Fantasy games, which were in turn ported to the PS1 as Final Fantasy Origins. The WSC fizzled before Final Fantasy III was released, and the game was eventually moved to the DS in a very different form than had been originally intended. But it was always intended for a portable system.
They also don't necessarily release for the prettiest console. N64 was prettier than PS1....
No, not really. Yes, the graphics hardware in the N64 was superior to the PS1, but that's only part of the story. The PS1-era Final Fantasy games relied heavily on prerendered textures and full motion video sequences, and there was quite simply not enough storage space on Nintendo's cartridge format to accomodate them.
They moved Dragon Quest to the DS, so moving FF to the Wii wouldn't be that much of a shock.
I wouldn't hold my breath, personally. From all accounts, Final Fantasy XIII is already well into production, and is all but committed to the PS3 at this stage. The announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be released for the DS occurred simultaneously with the confirmation of the game's existence.
That's not true. The original Castlevania was released for the Famicom Disk System (FDS), the Japan-only floppy disk add-on for the NES, in September 1986. The MSX2 version was released one month later. While the MSX version was released in Europe significantly before the NES/FDS version, the latter was developed first.
Konami had to port the FDS version to cartridge for the North American and European release, but it was for all intents and purposes a direct port: the only benefit the FDS had over the normal NES deck was an improved sound chip, and I'm not even sure that the original Castlevania made use of it. There were a lot of FDS-to-NES ports made in order to facilitate international release: Metroid, Doki Doki Panic (a.k.a. Super Mario Bros. 2), Kid Icarus, and The Legend of Zelda are probably the most notable. All were subsequently rereleased in Japan as cartridges, although often not for many years (Castlevania wasn't released as a cartridge in Japan until 1993 or so).
To be fair, there's been hard linking functionality in NTFS since the first version of XP. It may even have been there in Win2000, but I can't remember for sure. The problem, of course, is that Explorer itself offers no support for the concept, and Microsoft doesn't even ship command-line tools with the OS itself. But they do exist, and can be exploited, if somewhat awkwardly, with various tools.
I find this sentence confusing. Are you saying Spocko had no right to explain to the program's advertisers why they might not want to back this program? That strikes me as 100% specious if that is indeed your argument.
Er... no. Sorry, that was probably a bit awkward. Allow me to rephrase: ABC/Disney does not have the right to send legal threats to Spocko (or anyone else) simply because they don't like what he has to say. You don't need to agree with Spocko's politics in order to feel that he's been railroaded.
I will be hard-pressed to contain my humor, however, when some conservative goes to a company for advertising on a show like "Will and Grace", for example, and Slashdot readers will be sure to criticize that corporation for withdrawing ad dollars.
That's just it, though. Criticizing a corporation for withdrawing its advertising from a particular program is not really the issue. If all that ABC/Disney was doing in this case was criticizing, they'd be well within their rights. Sending threatening legal notices to the person or persons responsible for persuading the corporation that it might not be in their business interest to continue to spend advertising dollars on the program is emphatically not within anyone's rights.
Put more bluntly, this is a straw man argument. The right-vs-left politics are a sideshow, and they're distracting from a more serious issue at the heart of this mess. The question shouldn't be whether or not the blogger Spocko is a liberal, or whether ABC/Disney is conservative. If Spocko violated ABC's copyright, he should be reprimanded/made to stop. If, on the other hand, ABC/Disney is merely using legal threats to silence a critic who has not violated the law, then they need to be reprimanded/made to stop. This is true, regardless of the political orientation of anyone involved. Period. Whether or not you agree with the actual substantive arguments of Spocko or of ABC's hosts is immaterial.
This argument doesn't really make sense. In brief, "I may not like what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Like the grandparent poster, I'm deeply disgusted by the words of ABC's hosts, and, yes, I do find it shameful that my country lays claim to violent bigots. I accept the right of unpleasant gasbags to spew unpleasant gas, but that hardly means I need to like what they have to say.
Actually, I'm not sure that there are that many Americans who like to admit when they're wrong, either....
But, more to the point, this seems like a somewhat contradictory argument. Sony's been taking a lot of criticism from the gaming community regarding the PS3's price point, as it is. Having to fork over a license fee for the rumble technology is only going to make the PS3 more expensive to produce, and, in all likelihood, more expensive for the consumer. There's really no easy way out for them on this one, and it looks increasingly like they'd be criticized regardless of whether they licensed the tech or not.
Actually, while the Dragon Quest series routinely breaks sales records in Japan, it's a weak performer pretty much everywhere else. The inverse is not true of Final Fantasy, which also sells gangbusters in Japan (though not as well as Dragon Quest), in addition to doing well internationally. While it's true that SE answers first and foremost to the Japanese market, the popularity of the DQ series in Japan is not sufficient to offset the international popularity of the FF series, and the latter undoubtedly ranks as more important to SE's bottom line than the DQ series. Certainly, there's generally more development of the FF franchise than the DQ franchise.
DQIX might show up for the Wii. But I think it's more likely that we'll see various spin-off titles for the Wii, along the lines of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. If the Wii really does supplant the PS3 as the dominant console (and I'm not yet convinced this is going to happen, mind you), than we might see some higher profile development for the Wii, but I wouldn't expect any such titles to appear for a couple of years at best.
They probably will get hate mail. On the other hand, network execs are probably immune to it by now. It's not like this is the first cult-favorite television series they've cancelled, as evidenced by Farscape and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Hell, they probably enjoy the publicity it brings them.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, I think Mike was significantly better in the host segment skits than Joel ever was. When not in the theater, Joel pretty much fell back to prop comedy, and after a season or two it became rather formulaic. In the theater (which, of course, is really the most important part), I think they were both excellent, but in different ways: Joel's deadpan delivery was suited to a very different sort of comedy than Mike's approach. In the end, I tend to gravitate more towards Mike-hosted episodes than Joel-hosted ones, but I think that has more to do with the movie selection than anything else.
"Twisting" how, exactly? Peter Main's description of inventory management is not really in dispute: the practice was to refuse to fill retailer orders in full. Nintendo has never, to my knowledge, denied this fact. Indeed, Main's argument was that inventory management was necessary to prevent another 1983/84-style industry crash. It was part of the bevy of complaints that led to antitrust action against Nintendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As for the Wii, absolutely. I'm not attempting to offer any kind of evidence of wrongdoing on Nintendo's part. Peter Main, AFAIK, isn't even connected to Nintendo anymore, and the industry isn't the same place it was two decades ago.
;-)
Even if I were interested in making the argument that Nintendo is deliberately manufacturing scarcity with regards to the Wii, I don't really give a damn. Whereas with the NES, where Nintendo's inventory policies concerning both first and third party hardware and games had their third-party developers by the neck, there doesn't seem to be any such abuse here: they can make Wiis as quickly or slowly as they want, and while I may not agree with the decision, I don't think there's anything morally, ethically, or (as far as I understand it) legally wrong with it. Assuming there is an "it" in the first place, which I don't feel qualified to comment on (as I've repeated several times already).
As it happens, I think it makes Nintendo look better than the alternate explanation that they were so monumentally off on their initial estimates and left themselves no effective way to resolve the imbalance, especially after similar problems with the Nintendo DS. I find "Machiavellian" preferable to "foolish" any day
That explains the initial shortage. But the Wii has been out for almost eight months, now. One would hope they would have been able to at least begin to address the shortage problems, but not much seems to have changed. At the very least, after being blindsided by the popularity of the DS, Nintendo just looks foolish to find themselves in pretty much the same situation with the Wii. In light of Nintendo's past history of engineering shortages (which I mentioned upthread, and is talked about in more depth here or here), there seems plenty of reason to be skeptical, even though I admit there's nothing conclusive about it.
"Stupid crazies" like Nintendo of America Vice-President Peter Main? Back at the height of the NES, he admitted that Nintendo deliberately refused to fill all retailer orders for NES hardware and cartridges in order to manufacture scarcity and heighten demand. From Nintendo's perspective, retailers were exaggerating demand and the process, which the company referred to as "inventory management," was designed to prevent the type of glut in the marketplace that nearly doomed the industry during the early 1980s.
They may have had a point, mind you: a landfill full of unsold E.T. cartridges for the Atari 2600 speaks to the dangers of flooding the market. But, even if they were right to do so, it was what it was. And given Nintendo's licensing choke hold over its third party developers at the time, it was a monumentally stupid decision that eventually got them sued by various licensees and competitors, including Atari and Activision.
There is no conspiracy theory involved in this: Nintendo does have this history. Whether or not they are doing it now, of course, is another story. Their relationship to game developers have changed significantly since the late 1980s, so they would arguably have less to gain: in the 1980s, they controlled the cartridge production process, and so could essentially control both the hardware and software ends of things. And Nintendo in 2007 is certainly not the only significant player in the video game industry as it was in 1989. Besides, as I said earlier, I'm not familiar enough with the situation today to have a real opinion, I'm merely stating that it has happened in the past, and it's no big secret, either.
Related to that is the fact that since Nintendo has shown repeated difficulty meeting their current sales demand, they have absolutely nothing to gain by increasing that demand. When Wii sales cool down enough that they're actually staying on shelves for more than five or six minutes on end, then a price cut would make sense. Until that point, it's counterproductive.
Why not? They have a history of throttling production in order to raise demand, from back in the NES days.
I'm not saying they're doing it now, mind you: I haven't bothered to look closely enough to have an opinion one way or the other. But it wouldn't be unheard of.
IMO, all three next gen consoles fail at that right now. There is one game for the Wii (Super Paper Mario) I'm interested in that isn't already available for other consoles. There are maybe three Xbox 360 games, and no PS3 games. And since I could buy, at bare minimum, two consoles of the previous generation for the price of one next gen console (all three if we're talking about either the 360 or PS3), it's a non-starter. Backwards compatibility is a plus, to be sure, but I still think that, if all you're interested in is the games, you're better off getting a used GameCube for $50 than a used Wii (if you can even find one) for over $200. And that's even more true for the PS3/PS2 and 360/Xbox (especially the latter, with its limited and frequently imperfect backwards compatibility).
Yes, eventually the games libraries will grow. And, when they do, I'll feel qualified to evaluate each next gen console on its relative merits. But it strikes me as incredibly premature to evaluate any of the consoles on the merits of their games when none of them perform particularly well on that front at the moment.
I just opened my first Wii yesterday: it most certainly did come with a Nunchuk. And it kind of had to, since at least one of the games that make up Wii Sports (Boxing) requires the Nunchuk.
Maybe you can. Your situation, however, may not apply to others. I suffer from type 1 diabetes: that's the largely juvenile-onset variety that isn't tied to weight, and is (as far as we can tell) unpreventable. I'm in good health, and I keep my blood sugar under control. I'm also basically uninsurable. If I did not take the insurance options offered by my employer, my choices would basically be limited to a plan that was well beyond my ability to pay and still didn't cover all my medical expenses, or no insurance at all. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other medical conditions that more or less make it impossible for a large number of Americans to obtain affordable health insurance. Many of the people affected are the victims of nothing more than bad luck or an unfortunate genetic heritage.
Somewhat perversely, the current status quo basically ensures that the people who least need health insurance are the only ones who can reliably obtain it.
Believe it: they're right.
For what it's worth, I think OS X's antialiasing looks better for web page text rendering than ClearType on Windows, so it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm not crazy about how the UI doesn't fit in with other Windows applications (particularly the fact that it doesn't respect user font choices), but the pages themselves look aesthetically better than they do on any Windows-based browser, IMO.
Michael Jackson sold his rights to the Northern Songs catalog a year or two ago, but otherwise you're right.
Northern Songs was formed in 1963 to publish the songs written by Lennon and McCartney. They each had a 15% stake in the company until 1970, when they both agreed to sell their shares in exchange for getting out of the contract that required they continue their songwriting partnership through 1973: the band was in the middle of self-destructing at the time, and neither wanted to see the other, let alone have to share songwriting credit. In a sequence of messy legal maneuvers, the rights to Northern Songs were eventually sold to ATV (a British television company).
ATV held onto the rights until 1985, when they put them up for auction. Paul McCartney bid for them, but was outbid by Michael Jackson, who had apparently been encouraged to make an offer by Yoko Ono. McCartney had approached Ono about making a joint bid, but she had rebuffed him. This put Jackson and McCartney on bad terms, and after Jackson refused to raise McCartney's royalties (which had remained unchanged since the 1960s, despite continued sales) their friendship effectively ended.
In 1995, Jackson sold half of his shares in Northern Songs to Sony Music. This formed the basis of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which was jointly owned by Jackson and Sony (at 50% each). In 2005, as I mentioned before, Jackson put his half up as collateral on a loan to pay off his massive debt. The ultimate fate of the catalog remains in limbo.
Also, to be precise, while the Northern Songs catalog comprises most of the Beatles' output, it doesn't comprise all of it. Although George Harrison's early work was produced under contract to Northern (an arrangement that annoyed Harrison enough that he wrote a song about his disillusionment, "Only a Northern Song"), his later material was published under his own company. Also, there are a number of early Lennon/McCartney compositions that were published prior to the formation of Northern Songs, including "Love Me Do," the rights to which have since been purchased by McCartney's own company, MPL Communications.
To further muddy the waters, this is only part of the reason why the Beatles' catalog has yet to appear online. The Beatles' Apple Corps has been engaged in a number of legal battles with a variety of groups, including Apple Computer over trademark issues and EMI over unpaid royalties, that have cast a cloud over things. Since both of these cases have recently been resolved, there's been a lot of speculation that the catalog will be made available online soon. Regardless, most of this can be said to stem from the same root cause, namely the poor management and general disinterest of the Beatles themselves during the period of the group's breakup in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In that sense, one might be able to blame it on McCartney (and Lennon, Harrison, and Starr), but it's not like McCartney made a deliberate decision to keep the Beatles' songs offline.
Er... the BBC isn't a commercial network. It's not in the business of "making money." Although, for what it's worth, the show is a highly profitable venture for the BBC's dedicated commercial wing, and it does gangbusters in the ratings. It's up there as one of the highest-rated non-soap operas on UK television and has only dipped out of the top 20 rated programs of the week once since its return in 2005.
And it's sort of a Russell Davies thing. He's got a notoriously short attention span, even in the world of British television, which is a lot more used to limited-run series than the US market. And leaving a show to "pursue other opportunities" is hardly unheard of it, even in the US: "Seinfeld" ended under similar circumstances, even considering that it was still immensely popular. "M.A.S.H." did likewise, as did "Friends" and "Cheers."
And it's close to completely worthless on OS X, last time I checked at least. The long-standing font rendering bug makes it extremely difficult to use.
It's a pity, too, since AbiWord is my favorite word processor on both Windows and *nix. When they do get things sorted on OS X, I'll probably switch to it there as well.
I doubt it. The game may have been rushed, but more to the point is the fact that International Editions are becoming par for the course these days. Both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 had 'em, as well. In both cases, there were some significant changes to the game, but I'm not sure they were really "refinements," per se. They were just different, and I suspect the intention was to provide a different way to play.
If I understand the article properly, it's not the music industry that's running on razor-thin margins per se, it's the retailer. It's been said that Apple makes only a few pennies on the dollar for every song they move over the iTunes Music Store. If the industry started demanding more money for unrestricted music files, that already minimal profit would vanish. Which means that either Apple would need to start selling music at a loss, which cannot and will not happen, or they would need to raise their prices. In other words, the difference would need to be made up for by the consumer, because there's no way to absorb it.
Er... Final Fantasy III was never planned for the PS2. It was originally announced (close to eight years ago) for Bandai's Wonder Swan Color portable, which also saw rereleases of the first two Final Fantasy games, which were in turn ported to the PS1 as Final Fantasy Origins. The WSC fizzled before Final Fantasy III was released, and the game was eventually moved to the DS in a very different form than had been originally intended. But it was always intended for a portable system.
No, not really. Yes, the graphics hardware in the N64 was superior to the PS1, but that's only part of the story. The PS1-era Final Fantasy games relied heavily on prerendered textures and full motion video sequences, and there was quite simply not enough storage space on Nintendo's cartridge format to accomodate them.
I wouldn't hold my breath, personally. From all accounts, Final Fantasy XIII is already well into production, and is all but committed to the PS3 at this stage. The announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be released for the DS occurred simultaneously with the confirmation of the game's existence.
That's not true. The original Castlevania was released for the Famicom Disk System (FDS), the Japan-only floppy disk add-on for the NES, in September 1986. The MSX2 version was released one month later. While the MSX version was released in Europe significantly before the NES/FDS version, the latter was developed first.
Konami had to port the FDS version to cartridge for the North American and European release, but it was for all intents and purposes a direct port: the only benefit the FDS had over the normal NES deck was an improved sound chip, and I'm not even sure that the original Castlevania made use of it. There were a lot of FDS-to-NES ports made in order to facilitate international release: Metroid, Doki Doki Panic (a.k.a. Super Mario Bros. 2), Kid Icarus, and The Legend of Zelda are probably the most notable. All were subsequently rereleased in Japan as cartridges, although often not for many years (Castlevania wasn't released as a cartridge in Japan until 1993 or so).
There's more information at Wikipedia's Castlevania article.
To be fair, there's been hard linking functionality in NTFS since the first version of XP. It may even have been there in Win2000, but I can't remember for sure. The problem, of course, is that Explorer itself offers no support for the concept, and Microsoft doesn't even ship command-line tools with the OS itself. But they do exist, and can be exploited, if somewhat awkwardly, with various tools.
That's just it, though. Criticizing a corporation for withdrawing its advertising from a particular program is not really the issue. If all that ABC/Disney was doing in this case was criticizing, they'd be well within their rights. Sending threatening legal notices to the person or persons responsible for persuading the corporation that it might not be in their business interest to continue to spend advertising dollars on the program is emphatically not within anyone's rights.
Put more bluntly, this is a straw man argument. The right-vs-left politics are a sideshow, and they're distracting from a more serious issue at the heart of this mess. The question shouldn't be whether or not the blogger Spocko is a liberal, or whether ABC/Disney is conservative. If Spocko violated ABC's copyright, he should be reprimanded/made to stop. If, on the other hand, ABC/Disney is merely using legal threats to silence a critic who has not violated the law, then they need to be reprimanded/made to stop. This is true, regardless of the political orientation of anyone involved. Period. Whether or not you agree with the actual substantive arguments of Spocko or of ABC's hosts is immaterial.
This argument doesn't really make sense. In brief, "I may not like what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Like the grandparent poster, I'm deeply disgusted by the words of ABC's hosts, and, yes, I do find it shameful that my country lays claim to violent bigots. I accept the right of unpleasant gasbags to spew unpleasant gas, but that hardly means I need to like what they have to say.
Actually, I'm not sure that there are that many Americans who like to admit when they're wrong, either....
But, more to the point, this seems like a somewhat contradictory argument. Sony's been taking a lot of criticism from the gaming community regarding the PS3's price point, as it is. Having to fork over a license fee for the rumble technology is only going to make the PS3 more expensive to produce, and, in all likelihood, more expensive for the consumer. There's really no easy way out for them on this one, and it looks increasingly like they'd be criticized regardless of whether they licensed the tech or not.
Actually, while the Dragon Quest series routinely breaks sales records in Japan, it's a weak performer pretty much everywhere else. The inverse is not true of Final Fantasy, which also sells gangbusters in Japan (though not as well as Dragon Quest), in addition to doing well internationally. While it's true that SE answers first and foremost to the Japanese market, the popularity of the DQ series in Japan is not sufficient to offset the international popularity of the FF series, and the latter undoubtedly ranks as more important to SE's bottom line than the DQ series. Certainly, there's generally more development of the FF franchise than the DQ franchise.
DQIX might show up for the Wii. But I think it's more likely that we'll see various spin-off titles for the Wii, along the lines of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. If the Wii really does supplant the PS3 as the dominant console (and I'm not yet convinced this is going to happen, mind you), than we might see some higher profile development for the Wii, but I wouldn't expect any such titles to appear for a couple of years at best.
They probably will get hate mail. On the other hand, network execs are probably immune to it by now. It's not like this is the first cult-favorite television series they've cancelled, as evidenced by Farscape and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Hell, they probably enjoy the publicity it brings them.