For those in the South East: PublixDirect
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Webvan Out Of Gas
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· Score: 2
For those of us down here in the southeast of the US, there really is no Webvan-like grocery service. Why is that? Probably because PublixDirect will be coming soon, and I doubt anyone wants to compete with them.
And while it may sound like a version of unix, Publix is actually the best brick-and-mortar grocery store around these parts. And they are working on their first warehouse for their "online grocer" business as we speak.
Based on how excellent their grocery stores are, I will be very interested to see how a REAL grocer executes this business model.
All that coupled with the relatively few updates and minimal enthusiasm among developers other than "gee that looks like cool technology" is contributing to be's downfall.
I think you're confused. Be is not in the desktop market any more. They are in the IA market. What happens with the developers you're talking about, BeBits, etc. is pretty irrelevant as far as the company is concerned.
Be is pretty skin deep imo. I have used it and got over running 4 instances of a media player and an opengl tech display all at once, yippy what else can it do.
I'm not going to rehash what Be can do. Suffice it to say that BeOS is not "skin deep," you just don't know enough about the guts of BeOS. Go read some whitepapers on be.com, or some reviews. But as just a couple of points to your argument:
The file system is a thing of beauty. Aside from being a 64-bit file system (large file support), journaled (fast boot times, less problems corrupting files), it also has a wonderful query system (do a search of a drive and the results are usually pretty damn fast, and the query window is "live"... add a file somewhere that meets the criteria you searched for, and it will show up in the query window immediately). The built in support for MIME type handling, and how BeOS recognizes/handles file types is elegant (check Scot Hacker's article on Byte for more discussion of this compared to other OS's).
The way the system and practically ALL apps are pervasively multithreaded lends well to the SMP support. Contrary to Windows/Linux, if you pop a second CPU into a BeOS machine, you'll see better performance across all your apps immediately. Apps on Windows must be written to take advantage of multiple CPU's specifically (compare SQL Server vs. IIS, for example).
The responsiveness of not only the GUI, but the audio/video subsystems is faster than all other desktop OS's that I know of, which is one reason it got the moniker, "Media OS." That and how high priority A/V is in the system.
The system API is wonderful to program on! A joy. I don't cringe as I do with Windows/Mac API's (yeah, even MacOS X).
I could go on and on, but it's probably falling on deaf ears. There is much, much more to BeOS than running 4 MP3 players and some GL demos at the same time. The fact that that's the only thing you can offer up for it shows me that you spent no time at all with the OS.
I don't care if it take's me 5 minutes to sum up be because that's all one needs
Yeah, that's why countless technical articles have been written about the merits of BeOS. Uh huh...
when I consulted a be group on irc i was met with elitest attitudes about the chipset of my motherboard
And this is an argument against BeOS how exactly? Whenever I trudge onto IRC, I'm *ALWAYS* faced with elitist attitudes from geeks who think having an @ sign in front of their nickname makes them a god. This is an IRC problem, not BeOS...
I promptly installed another OS which was a bit more agnostic towards which hardware I could or could not use
Hmm, let's see. You're talking about BeOS, which runs on Hobbit, PPC, x86 (Intel or Athlon). Exactly how is this not hardware agnostic? Just because it may not have supported a particular chipset you had? Gimme a break.
They really need to "disclose" about now because things aren't exactly looking up as they say.
Huh? First, where have they said "things are looking up"? Secondly, what are they to disclose? They've disclosed everything they need to disclose, especially in the quarterly filings.
Up an impressive 1 cent today, they may yet have life in them however this dosen't leave much time to actively develop Beos and Beia there just isn't room to be mediocre anymore.
Man these arguments are just getting better and better. Hello! They are not developing BeOS anymore, just BeIA. BeOS is the dev platform for BeIA, so they do what they need to on it to support BeIA internally.
We've learned that hype and potential mean squat, what you deliver and at what cost is pretty important.
BeOS is free, and we all know what it can deliver. It's problems are lack of further development by Be for the foreseeable future, lack of new hardware drivers, networking/hardware OpenGL support, and 3rd-party application support. Most of these things would improve if Be could further develop the OS, but they need to concentrate on staying alive right now. If they can, and BeIA turns a profit, they can always pick up BeOS later.
According to the Nasdaq's regulations, a company can be de-listed if its stock languishes too long under $1. Or $5, depending on the company's qualifications when it listed.
There are many other things that affect whether or not a stock is delisted, not just whether it sits under $1 for "too long." NASDAQ also has full discretion as to which companies it keeps listed. Incidentally, a stock being delisted does not mean the company goes under, or anything other than it's not being actively traded. If BEOS is delisted, and at a later date Be starts making a profit, the stock price will go up, the volume will go up, and it will be relisted.
Reverse split anyone?
As a stockholder, I sure hope not. Reverse splits usually do more harm than good. Right now the stock has been sitting at around 45 to 50 cents. If they do a 1-2 reverse split, it will go up to 90 to 100 cents a share. Then what happens? The price will most likely continue to drop. It's far more likely to drop back down to 50 cents than it is to stay at $1, which means we lose half the worth of the stock that much more quickly.
Reverse splits rarely work to keep a company above $1 for listing purposes...
The only thing that will save BEOS is improved revenues from BeIA, plain and simple. As an investor in BEOS, it's tough, but I still believe in their product. Just hope they can get money to hold on long enough to see it through. Then again, they've been hanging around for 11 years now, so I've not given up all hope.
Be inc was sitting around 40 cents a share yesterday, that's delisting territory afaik.
Well you apparantly don't know that much. Please read up on NASDAQ delistment procedures. It is not as simple as being below $1... there is a lot more to it than that, which I'm not going to rehash here. Just go to www.nasdaq.com.
Apparently BEIA is thier main revenue stream and it ain't much. Yet another failed company, not because Beos was bad but because it wasn't good enough.
Thank you for your 5-minute analysis of Be. I, on the other hand, have been following them since about 1998. Also been using BeOS since that time.
Their product and their ideas are indeed "good enough." In fact, time and time again, review after review, has proclaimed how great/cool/modern BeOS is -- but they could never get into the desktop market, due mostly to Microsoft's strangehold on OEM's.
The only problem is they are low on money, and facing competitors with deeper pockets in the IA market. If they can hold out long enough, they have an awesome IA OS that could become very popular in an arena not yet dominated by any one OS company.
Be is not "yet another failed company." They have a well-known deal with a tiny company called SONY, as well as several other IA deals, and I'm sure several undisclosed (just as the Sony deal was undisclosed for about 9 months before anyone outside Be had heard about it!)... specifically, I'm thinking they've got some HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform) partners.
Much as I loathe adult filters, I wish they had one for this service, just so I don't get the random fellatio image on my screen at work.
They do have an adult filter in place, on the search result page it would appear where you can see the results without it on. Obviously it's not perfected, though.
Linux is advancing fast and furious on Microsoft's turf, the desktop.
Microsoft - 95% of the desktop market
Linux - Some fraction of 5%
And no, Linux is only advancing on the GEEK desktop market, and in the server market, NOT in the normal-person market. Sorry.
Palm still dominates the PDA market.
Yes, and Netscape dominated the browser market until Microsoft eventually came from owning 0% to the 80-90% or so they have now.
Microsoft isn't even on the map for the wireless market.
Microsoft is making inroads into most internet appliance makers (much to my chagrin -- heavy investor in BEOS). The wireless market is going to be all devices soon, not just cell phones. Webpads, tablet PC's, appliances in the home, etc.
Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Talk about burying your head in the sand... irrelevant? How can you say that without a;) at the end of your sentence?
The small innovative companies MS has tried to crush, or buy, are rising up to the challenge, and beating Microsoft.
Now, maybe that's a whole bunch of bunk, but if it's accurate, what effect would this new device have? It surely would "dirty" up your power a bit, not to mention everyone elses on your phase loop.
It is interesting what happens when someone just guesses about what a technology does. Why are you so positive it will "dirty" up the power? What do you know about the technology? Why on earth would 92 companies agree to something that is not going to play nicely with the appliances in people's homes? Seems to me that would be a good way to piss off your customers and invite lawyers to your doorstep with class-action lawsuits.
I'd wager any standard they end up with is going to be "safe" in your house for appliances.
On another note, wouldn't this technology have similar problems as cable modem? If the whole neighborhood signs up, what kind of throughput will you get?
Well, seeing as how this technology is for LAN's, not WAN's, I don't see how this argument applies, at all.
1) Tom Duff sounds on the money with regards to the technical misconceptions...but an even bigger ever elusive problem: 2) "Pixar-level" animation in the end is not about polygon count, it's about COUNTLESS man-hours spent modelling, lighting, and animating....no card can ever replace that.
I totally disagree. Take a look at the Quake movies that were made. Before Quake came out, how many thousands of man-hours would it have taken to render and animate those movies "the old-fashioned way"? A shitload! Then Quake came out, and you could get semi-realistic 3D graphics, and people could "act out" the scenes with rudimentary tools.
Skip ahead 5-10 years, where the CPU power and "acting" tools available are much more sophisticated. Are you still going to claim that "pixar-level animation" cannot be done with a good 3D model artist, a scene artist, and an electronic actor?
Re:If you wanted a revolutionary 3d fps...
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Five Years of Quake
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· Score: 2
Then you've got to be talking about Marathon. Sure, it was only for the Macintosh for the longest time, but not only did it manage to include some amazing 3d engine work (for the time), it had a plot.
The credit for the greatness of Quake is often shared between John Carmack (for his technical prowess) and John Romero (for his design skills). I, however, believe that the real genius behind Quake was American McGee.
No, actually the credit is given to Carmack, rightfully so, because he wrote the engine from scratch and basically pioneered realistic 3D games on "mere mortal" PC hardware.
Romero tried to take as much credit as possible for Quake, but I always got the impression from various interviews that he was floating on his success with Doom.
American McGee's DM levels WERE awesome; the best. However, he'd be staring at them in 3DMax if it weren't for Carmack's engines.
And, BTW, American McGee's Alice used the Quake3 engine...
Ever been pissed off at the phone company? So which other phone company did you switch to, I'd like to know because I hate mine...
Well, not that it's really comparable (which ISP's have monopolies, like phone companies?), but YES, I have been pissed off at my local phone company many times. What did I do? I dropped their service and chose one of several cell phone providers in my area.
Anyway, if all the major ISPs adopted this there would be *nowhere to run to.* Frankly I am surprised that it isn't happening already.
Again, it's simple economics. Most people hate spam. Assuming for a moment the ludicrous notion is true, that all the major ISP's would take up something that is going to piss off 90% of their customers, there would ALWAYS be smaller companies coming in to service the DEMAND -- spam-free service.
Apparantly you aren't familiar with economics. If the ISP's start pissing off their customers, they will cease to have customers, and they will cease to be ISP's.
This is what most politicians would like you to believe. Actually, corporations pass the taxes they "pay" right on down to the common man in several ways:
Lessening the amount of stock dividends paid out to people that have invested in the company.
Charging more money for their products.
Paying their employees less.
Corporate taxes are really just another way to tax regular people, but the sheep like it better when you say, "We're going to lower your income taxes, and tax those mean corporations instead!! Hardy har har!!"
Yes, we're that much closer to big brother, and once again, we see that it is the corporate world who will bring him to life. Even if we disregard, for a moment, the threat to the constitutional right to privacy and the issues of contract law, the government by rights SHOULD step in NOW in a BIG WAY to put a stop to this.
I realize this might be a hard concept for you to understand, but you don't HAVE to rent cars from companies that do this, ya know? You could:
- Use another rental agency.
- Buy/borrow/steal a car.
- Use a taxi service.
- Ride your bike.
- Not go wherever it is you think you need to go.
You know, it IS possible to live normally without giving the government even more control over our lives!
Also, from my perceptions, they threw so much budget money and emphasis was thrown into special effects, that no time or effort was spent on picking good actors...
I'm sorry, I agree with most of what you wrote, but this is a sticking point! The original 3 Star Wars movies had only TWO great actors -- Harrison Ford and Sir Alec Guiness.
Compare this to the actors for Episode I, especially: Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp are all wonderful, and even Natalie "Hot Grits" Portman is pretty good.
Sure, Jake sucks, but compared to Mark Hamill, who can complain?
This isn't meant as flamebait, but Americans seem to have a rather unique perspective in the western world concerning society and trust of government.
I'll take that as a compliment.
For a majority of people in the north western hemisphere (excluding the US), there is more trust of governemt and an expectation that the government will do what is right for society in general, providing a better standard of living the poor, potentially at the expense of the rich.
In other words, you're socialists. We have those here in America also, but we call them liberals.
This contrasts highly with the US were people seem more interested in themselves and getting to the top at everybody else's expense.
Yeah, and Canadians seem much more interested in drinking beer and watching hockey. But let's stop throwing stereotypes around for a minute, eh?
Americans have such an obsession with money!
You say we're obsessed with money; I say we're obsessed with freedom.
I would much rather live in a place where the government does not control what I can do, take money out of my pocket, take freedom away from me in order to give it to someone else -- at their discretion. If I want to donate my hard-earned money to the needy, let me make that decision, don't force it on me. That's all that income tax is -- taking money away from me to use towards programs I wouldn't normally support by threat of force.
But really, your response has less to do with Canada vs. America than it does to do with Socialism vs. Libertarianism.
I can think a better use of $50 to insure that your genes get propagated. It's called asking out that cute girl in class, taking her to a fancy restaurant, then knocking her up.
Aside from the fact that you can't go out on a date at a fancy restaurant for $50 anywhere I know, a baby costs considerably more than $50 to raise.
They have been talking about a new version of their InDemand broadcasting (pay-per-view) that will allow people using time warner digital cable to fast-forward/rewind/pause movies that they've ordered via their digital cable boxes from TW. I remember reading about this coming feature about 9 months ago... (this is in Orlando, FL)
Americans are a notorious stingy lot.
The alternative fuel cars- pure electric, hybrid,
and natural gas- all have cost premiums of 20-50%. They don't do well in the market except for a few dedicated enthusiasts.
Correllation does not equal causation.
Perhaps it's not the cost of electric/hybrid cars, but the fact that they are ugly/small/not-sexy?
Your complaint conveniently leaves out that GM has has electric cars far longer than Toyota/Honda have had their hybrids. Take a look at the GM EV1; it's used primarily in fleets.
I find people that think expensive stereo equipment is a waste of money have probably never heard any.
It's much more likely that even if they had heard any, their ears would not be good enough to make a difference. My parents still need me to point out which is the trombone and which is the trumpet when listening to brass CD's, even though I played trombone for 10 years! 90% of the population cannot distinguish sound that well.
Besides, at $10-$15 per CD, I bet everyone knows somebody who owns several thousand dollars worth of music. Why play them on a $200 stereo? It's like putting a 60GB hard drive in a 486.
Eeeh gads... what a horrible analogy. I'm not even going to bother... it's just wrong on so many levels...
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us down here in the southeast of the US, there really is no Webvan-like grocery service. Why is that? Probably because PublixDirect will be coming soon, and I doubt anyone wants to compete with them.
And while it may sound like a version of unix, Publix is actually the best brick-and-mortar grocery store around these parts. And they are working on their first warehouse for their "online grocer" business as we speak.
Based on how excellent their grocery stores are, I will be very interested to see how a REAL grocer executes this business model.
http://www.publixdirect.com/
from the i-hate-rats dept.
I know it's been 12 years since the last movie, but come on, it's snakes he hates, not rats. His father is the one who hated rats.
Maybe CmdrTaco hates rats, too?
...technology that DESERVES to be patented!
Abbott: I'm having a problem logging onto your network.
Costello: Well then what's your password?
Abbott: Yes!
Costello: I mean the text of the password!
Abbott: What!
Costello: Your password!
Abbott: What!
Costello: The thing you type to gain access to our network!
Abbott: What!
Costello: The text of your password!
Abbott: What is my password!
Costello: Now whaddya askin' me for?
Abbott: I'm telling you What is my password.
Costello: Well, I'm asking YOU what's your password!
Abbott: That's text of the password.
Costello: That's what's text?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: What.
Costello: Your password.
Abbott: What!
Costello: The text of your password.
Abbott: What is my password!
...
All that coupled with the relatively few updates and minimal enthusiasm among developers other than "gee that looks like cool technology" is contributing to be's downfall.
... add a file somewhere that meets the criteria you searched for, and it will show up in the query window immediately). The built in support for MIME type handling, and how BeOS recognizes/handles file types is elegant (check Scot Hacker's article on Byte for more discussion of this compared to other OS's).
I think you're confused. Be is not in the desktop market any more. They are in the IA market. What happens with the developers you're talking about, BeBits, etc. is pretty irrelevant as far as the company is concerned.
Be is pretty skin deep imo. I have used it and got over running 4 instances of a media player and an opengl tech display all at once, yippy what else can it do.
I'm not going to rehash what Be can do. Suffice it to say that BeOS is not "skin deep," you just don't know enough about the guts of BeOS. Go read some whitepapers on be.com, or some reviews. But as just a couple of points to your argument:
The file system is a thing of beauty. Aside from being a 64-bit file system (large file support), journaled (fast boot times, less problems corrupting files), it also has a wonderful query system (do a search of a drive and the results are usually pretty damn fast, and the query window is "live"
The way the system and practically ALL apps are pervasively multithreaded lends well to the SMP support. Contrary to Windows/Linux, if you pop a second CPU into a BeOS machine, you'll see better performance across all your apps immediately. Apps on Windows must be written to take advantage of multiple CPU's specifically (compare SQL Server vs. IIS, for example).
The responsiveness of not only the GUI, but the audio/video subsystems is faster than all other desktop OS's that I know of, which is one reason it got the moniker, "Media OS." That and how high priority A/V is in the system.
The system API is wonderful to program on! A joy. I don't cringe as I do with Windows/Mac API's (yeah, even MacOS X).
I could go on and on, but it's probably falling on deaf ears. There is much, much more to BeOS than running 4 MP3 players and some GL demos at the same time. The fact that that's the only thing you can offer up for it shows me that you spent no time at all with the OS.
I don't care if it take's me 5 minutes to sum up be because that's all one needs
Yeah, that's why countless technical articles have been written about the merits of BeOS. Uh huh...
when I consulted a be group on irc i was met with elitest attitudes about the chipset of my motherboard
And this is an argument against BeOS how exactly? Whenever I trudge onto IRC, I'm *ALWAYS* faced with elitist attitudes from geeks who think having an @ sign in front of their nickname makes them a god. This is an IRC problem, not BeOS...
I promptly installed another OS which was a bit more agnostic towards which hardware I could or could not use
Hmm, let's see. You're talking about BeOS, which runs on Hobbit, PPC, x86 (Intel or Athlon). Exactly how is this not hardware agnostic? Just because it may not have supported a particular chipset you had? Gimme a break.
They really need to "disclose" about now because things aren't exactly looking up as they say.
Huh? First, where have they said "things are looking up"? Secondly, what are they to disclose? They've disclosed everything they need to disclose, especially in the quarterly filings.
Up an impressive 1 cent today, they may yet have life in them however this dosen't leave much time to actively develop Beos and Beia there just isn't room to be mediocre anymore.
Man these arguments are just getting better and better. Hello! They are not developing BeOS anymore, just BeIA. BeOS is the dev platform for BeIA, so they do what they need to on it to support BeIA internally.
We've learned that hype and potential mean squat, what you deliver and at what cost is pretty important.
BeOS is free, and we all know what it can deliver. It's problems are lack of further development by Be for the foreseeable future, lack of new hardware drivers, networking/hardware OpenGL support, and 3rd-party application support. Most of these things would improve if Be could further develop the OS, but they need to concentrate on staying alive right now. If they can, and BeIA turns a profit, they can always pick up BeOS later.
According to the Nasdaq's regulations, a company can be de-listed if its stock languishes too long under $1. Or $5, depending on the company's qualifications when it listed.
There are many other things that affect whether or not a stock is delisted, not just whether it sits under $1 for "too long." NASDAQ also has full discretion as to which companies it keeps listed. Incidentally, a stock being delisted does not mean the company goes under, or anything other than it's not being actively traded. If BEOS is delisted, and at a later date Be starts making a profit, the stock price will go up, the volume will go up, and it will be relisted.
Reverse split anyone?
As a stockholder, I sure hope not. Reverse splits usually do more harm than good. Right now the stock has been sitting at around 45 to 50 cents. If they do a 1-2 reverse split, it will go up to 90 to 100 cents a share. Then what happens? The price will most likely continue to drop. It's far more likely to drop back down to 50 cents than it is to stay at $1, which means we lose half the worth of the stock that much more quickly.
Reverse splits rarely work to keep a company above $1 for listing purposes...
The only thing that will save BEOS is improved revenues from BeIA, plain and simple. As an investor in BEOS, it's tough, but I still believe in their product. Just hope they can get money to hold on long enough to see it through. Then again, they've been hanging around for 11 years now, so I've not given up all hope.
Be inc was sitting around 40 cents a share yesterday, that's delisting territory afaik.
... there is a lot more to it than that, which I'm not going to rehash here. Just go to www.nasdaq.com.
Well you apparantly don't know that much. Please read up on NASDAQ delistment procedures. It is not as simple as being below $1
Apparently BEIA is thier main revenue stream and it ain't much. Yet another failed company, not because Beos was bad but because it wasn't good enough.
Thank you for your 5-minute analysis of Be. I, on the other hand, have been following them since about 1998. Also been using BeOS since that time.
Their product and their ideas are indeed "good enough." In fact, time and time again, review after review, has proclaimed how great/cool/modern BeOS is -- but they could never get into the desktop market, due mostly to Microsoft's strangehold on OEM's.
The only problem is they are low on money, and facing competitors with deeper pockets in the IA market. If they can hold out long enough, they have an awesome IA OS that could become very popular in an arena not yet dominated by any one OS company.
Be is not "yet another failed company." They have a well-known deal with a tiny company called SONY, as well as several other IA deals, and I'm sure several undisclosed (just as the Sony deal was undisclosed for about 9 months before anyone outside Be had heard about it!)... specifically, I'm thinking they've got some HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform) partners.
Much as I loathe adult filters, I wish they had one for this service, just so I don't get the random fellatio image on my screen at work.
They do have an adult filter in place, on the search result page it would appear where you can see the results without it on. Obviously it's not perfected, though.
Linux is advancing fast and furious on Microsoft's turf, the desktop.
;) at the end of your sentence?
Microsoft - 95% of the desktop market
Linux - Some fraction of 5%
And no, Linux is only advancing on the GEEK desktop market, and in the server market, NOT in the normal-person market. Sorry.
Palm still dominates the PDA market.
Yes, and Netscape dominated the browser market until Microsoft eventually came from owning 0% to the 80-90% or so they have now.
Microsoft isn't even on the map for the wireless market.
Microsoft is making inroads into most internet appliance makers (much to my chagrin -- heavy investor in BEOS). The wireless market is going to be all devices soon, not just cell phones. Webpads, tablet PC's, appliances in the home, etc.
Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Talk about burying your head in the sand... irrelevant? How can you say that without a
The small innovative companies MS has tried to crush, or buy, are rising up to the challenge, and beating Microsoft.
Goddamnit I spent all this time on a troll!!!
Now, maybe that's a whole bunch of bunk, but if it's accurate, what effect would this new device have? It surely would "dirty" up your power a bit, not to mention everyone elses on your phase loop.
It is interesting what happens when someone just guesses about what a technology does. Why are you so positive it will "dirty" up the power? What do you know about the technology? Why on earth would 92 companies agree to something that is not going to play nicely with the appliances in people's homes? Seems to me that would be a good way to piss off your customers and invite lawyers to your doorstep with class-action lawsuits.
I'd wager any standard they end up with is going to be "safe" in your house for appliances.
On another note, wouldn't this technology have similar problems as cable modem? If the whole neighborhood signs up, what kind of throughput will you get?
Well, seeing as how this technology is for LAN's, not WAN's, I don't see how this argument applies, at all.
1) Tom Duff sounds on the money with regards to the technical misconceptions...but an even bigger ever elusive problem: 2) "Pixar-level" animation in the end is not about polygon count, it's about COUNTLESS man-hours spent modelling, lighting, and animating....no card can ever replace that.
I totally disagree. Take a look at the Quake movies that were made. Before Quake came out, how many thousands of man-hours would it have taken to render and animate those movies "the old-fashioned way"? A shitload! Then Quake came out, and you could get semi-realistic 3D graphics, and people could "act out" the scenes with rudimentary tools.
Skip ahead 5-10 years, where the CPU power and "acting" tools available are much more sophisticated. Are you still going to claim that "pixar-level animation" cannot be done with a good 3D model artist, a scene artist, and an electronic actor?
Then you've got to be talking about Marathon. Sure, it was only for the Macintosh for the longest time, but not only did it manage to include some amazing 3d engine work (for the time), it had a plot.
By "3d" did you mean "2d"? I thought so.
The credit for the greatness of Quake is often shared between John Carmack (for his technical prowess) and John Romero (for his design skills). I, however, believe that the real genius behind Quake was American McGee.
...
No, actually the credit is given to Carmack, rightfully so, because he wrote the engine from scratch and basically pioneered realistic 3D games on "mere mortal" PC hardware.
Romero tried to take as much credit as possible for Quake, but I always got the impression from various interviews that he was floating on his success with Doom.
American McGee's DM levels WERE awesome; the best. However, he'd be staring at them in 3DMax if it weren't for Carmack's engines.
And, BTW, American McGee's Alice used the Quake3 engine
Ever been pissed off at the phone company? So which other phone company did you switch to, I'd like to know because I hate mine...
Well, not that it's really comparable (which ISP's have monopolies, like phone companies?), but YES, I have been pissed off at my local phone company many times. What did I do? I dropped their service and chose one of several cell phone providers in my area.
Anyway, if all the major ISPs adopted this there would be *nowhere to run to.* Frankly I am surprised that it isn't happening already.
Again, it's simple economics. Most people hate spam. Assuming for a moment the ludicrous notion is true, that all the major ISP's would take up something that is going to piss off 90% of their customers, there would ALWAYS be smaller companies coming in to service the DEMAND -- spam-free service.
Apparantly you aren't familiar with economics. If the ISP's start pissing off their customers, they will cease to have customers, and they will cease to be ISP's.
This is what most politicians would like you to believe. Actually, corporations pass the taxes they "pay" right on down to the common man in several ways:
Corporate taxes are really just another way to tax regular people, but the sheep like it better when you say, "We're going to lower your income taxes, and tax those mean corporations instead!! Hardy har har!!"
Yeah.
Yes, we're that much closer to big brother, and once again, we see that it is the corporate world who will bring him to life. Even if we disregard, for a moment, the threat to the constitutional right to privacy and the issues of contract law, the government by rights SHOULD step in NOW in a BIG WAY to put a stop to this.
I realize this might be a hard concept for you to understand, but you don't HAVE to rent cars from companies that do this, ya know? You could:
- Use another rental agency.
- Buy/borrow/steal a car.
- Use a taxi service.
- Ride your bike.
- Not go wherever it is you think you need to go.
You know, it IS possible to live normally without giving the government even more control over our lives!
Also, from my perceptions, they threw so much budget money and emphasis was thrown into special effects, that no time or effort was spent on picking good actors...
I'm sorry, I agree with most of what you wrote, but this is a sticking point! The original 3 Star Wars movies had only TWO great actors -- Harrison Ford and Sir Alec Guiness.
Compare this to the actors for Episode I, especially: Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp are all wonderful, and even Natalie "Hot Grits" Portman is pretty good.
Sure, Jake sucks, but compared to Mark Hamill, who can complain?
This isn't meant as flamebait, but Americans seem to have a rather unique perspective in the western world concerning society and trust of government.
I'll take that as a compliment.
For a majority of people in the north western hemisphere (excluding the US), there is more trust of governemt and an expectation that the government will do what is right for society in general, providing a better standard of living the poor, potentially at the expense of the rich.
In other words, you're socialists. We have those here in America also, but we call them liberals.
This contrasts highly with the US were people seem more interested in themselves and getting to the top at everybody else's expense.
Yeah, and Canadians seem much more interested in drinking beer and watching hockey. But let's stop throwing stereotypes around for a minute, eh?
Americans have such an obsession with money!
You say we're obsessed with money; I say we're obsessed with freedom.
I would much rather live in a place where the government does not control what I can do, take money out of my pocket, take freedom away from me in order to give it to someone else -- at their discretion. If I want to donate my hard-earned money to the needy, let me make that decision, don't force it on me. That's all that income tax is -- taking money away from me to use towards programs I wouldn't normally support by threat of force.
But really, your response has less to do with Canada vs. America than it does to do with Socialism vs. Libertarianism.
If you are willing to do without the guide, you can do all that stuff with the TIVO. Pause and rewind live TV, record by time/date/channel/duration.
If you plan to use it simply as a digital VCR, don't let it upgrade you to 2.0.1.
Just trust me on this one...
I can think a better use of $50 to insure that your genes get propagated. It's called asking out that cute girl in class, taking her to a fancy restaurant, then knocking her up.
Aside from the fact that you can't go out on a date at a fancy restaurant for $50 anywhere I know, a baby costs considerably more than $50 to raise.
Whereas an alien clone costs nothing!
They have been talking about a new version of their InDemand broadcasting (pay-per-view) that will allow people using time warner digital cable to fast-forward/rewind/pause movies that they've ordered via their digital cable boxes from TW. I remember reading about this coming feature about 9 months ago... (this is in Orlando, FL)
Americans are a notorious stingy lot.
The alternative fuel cars- pure electric, hybrid,
and natural gas- all have cost premiums of 20-50%. They don't do well in the market except for a few dedicated enthusiasts.
Correllation does not equal causation.
Perhaps it's not the cost of electric/hybrid cars, but the fact that they are ugly/small/not-sexy?
Your complaint conveniently leaves out that GM has has electric cars far longer than Toyota/Honda have had their hybrids. Take a look at the GM EV1; it's used primarily in fleets.
I find people that think expensive stereo equipment is a waste of money have probably never heard any.
It's much more likely that even if they had heard any, their ears would not be good enough to make a difference. My parents still need me to point out which is the trombone and which is the trumpet when listening to brass CD's, even though I played trombone for 10 years! 90% of the population cannot distinguish sound that well.
Besides, at $10-$15 per CD, I bet everyone knows somebody who owns several thousand dollars worth of music. Why play them on a $200 stereo? It's like putting a 60GB hard drive in a 486.
Eeeh gads... what a horrible analogy. I'm not even going to bother... it's just wrong on so many levels...
The number of people talking about how long Moore's Law will last doubles every 18-24 months.