With the exception of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I have never encountered the "relatively untapped genre of the vampire cowboy" anywhere.
Well Cowboy and Be-Bop don't exactly roll off the tongue either, but what Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) has done with his latest film certainly puts a new spin on the phrase 'slap leather, pardner!'
I do believe in Spooks (I do, I do, I do)
on
Review: Darkwatch
·
· Score: 1
Western Horror? Certainly doesn't come readily to mind (not like a good pirate thriller, w' a ship full 'o the dead and buckets o' blood, arr!)
A shooter is a shooter, eh? How about we include some gun play in the next Dungeons and Dragons roll-out. (What was that strip with the guy with the handgun that ran in
Dragon for ages? Some potlicker borrowed by book and ain't seen it since.) How do you kill spectres with bullets? Shouldn't they be silver?
Good to see the fine folks at uncyclopedia are participating in Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Avast ye swab! Here be the only keyboard yer evar need! 'Ave they got 'er in yer precious Uncyclopedia or e'en yer Wikipedia? Oi'd be scupper'd if oi hadn't studied me three Arr's at Pirate U.
I'd comment, but i have to download some Wesley Willis. Did you hear that, BigChampagne people? WESLEY WILLIS Oh yeah, down with the RIAA!! How dare they profit from something illegal! Rock on Chicago, Rock on London, Rock over RIAA.
RIAA Guy 1: "One Wesley Willis download? An aberation. A blip, doesn't count."
RIAA Guy 2: "But if there are 10 downloads?"
RIAA Guy 1: "Then that means by our reckoning that there were at least 3 illegal downloads which happened somewhere and we need to prosecute!"
This is no surprise. Microsoft has gotten so big that they have become a jack of all trades but no longer a master at anything. When you try to do everything you expand so large that its hard to control the growth of the company and management policies.
This had a lot to do with the downfall of General Motors. Once so big and mighty it could do no wrong. Then this punk Ralph Nader pointed at one of their major failures and they handled it badly, first denying the problem then eventually running away from it. The Corvair really was a great car and a few tweaks was all it needed. 20 years later they'd repeat this incredible behaviour with the Fiero (engine fires, hard shifting, stuck brakes, stuff coming apart, etc. (I had one)) But the wealth of the company allowed it to cast off promise and potential over really minor issues. They acquired EDS and Hughes, neither of which had jack to do with their core competency which was building cars, yet they failed with on a regular basis.
Microsofts sole power was in being able to compensate people well but people are leaving not because of money but because they do not like the job.
The money isn't even that good, particularly since an experienced developer who knows his arse from a hole in the ground could go elsewhere for better. Microsoft is delusional being blind-sided by this.
This could be a big problem for Microsoft and we will watch Google and other companies slowly eat up some of the top devs from MS.
It's been happening since the dawn of time. What Microsoft is utterly failing to do and what they should do is spin off companies. Instead they try to keep eveything under one roof -- Video games, Office Automation, Servers, ISP, Operating System, Consumer Electronics, Television, Web Portal, etc. They should be spinning these things off when they show potential, not continuing to bind everything together through Windows and IP. It's too much of a stretch and creates too much bureaucracy to keep it all together. We see the failure through the flaw count.
I have dealt with people at Microsoft in the past, and found that their problem is not with their engineers or with the guys in the trenches, but with the business development guys. Seriously, how many of them does it take to screw a lightbulb? It's pathetic... So much schmoozing and nonsense, no focus on real results - everyone is always trying to get that one big deal, not focusing on the incremental stuff that is vital to actual innovation taking place.
Yep. Been there.
About 20 years ago we have various vendors come in and pitch their Big Iron to us. We hardly needed DEC to show up, because we already loved them. We had to let IBM show up because the boss always had a soft spot in his heart for them and people with suits and ties who know nothing about operations or programming think IBM=Answers.
So these IBM guys come in and pitch to us like they were made in the Gotti family. A few questions are fielded semi-informatively, but the tone said "listen you stupid moron, stop wasting our time, just buy the the thing because we know and you should know, there's nothing better and you're just a damn fool if you don't".
We didn't. Ironically we ended up with Pr1me, because our new software would run on it. IBM eventually went through a few years of real housecleaning, as everytime I tried to contact Sales regarding an order for an RS/6000, I got a different salesman or an answering machine with "I'm no longer with IBM please direct your call to..." Finally getting the order through a district sales manager for the state(!) and even he had to be told what we were ordering and not to keep trying to tack on color monitors and laser printers we didn't want or need.
There's those that don't like change, they're usually screwed. Then there's not liking the direction of the change. In the past five years, many of the larger tech companies have turned into real shits to work for.
Yep. Getting away from all the fun and excitement of Whizzy new products and rapidly expanding markets. It's always fun taking the other guy's lunch money.
Now many of those companies who survived the.com bust are looking to make a profit. Growing companies rarely show a profit, as they roll profits back into feuling expansion. Profitable companies are usually trying to get the most bang for the buck out of each seat and that usually means trimming underperforming branches, scaling back others which are performing well to find the minimum necessary expense to maintain the same revenue.
Microsoft being a monopoly hasn't really dealt with the question of what to do when revenue flattens, which it sure looks like it will when Vista ships.
Yet, who would have guessed he'd have done the monkey dance?
Even Bill Gates has been known to vent his ire inside the company compound, If I recall it was in regard to killing Java, and we saw the long battle with Sun after Microsoft began co-opting it with their own codes.
Google is the least of their problems -- They only choose to make it so.
Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers, it is suffering key
defections to Google and elsewhere... Much of the sharpest criticism comes
from within. Dozens of current and former employees are criticizing
-- in BusinessWeek interviews, court testimony, and personal blogs
-- the way the company operates internally.
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job. Eventually
things change. Workers set in their ways and expectations grumble the loudest. Truth may be, it still may
be a dream place to work, it's just that many people don't like change, where others thrive on it (hint: Change is often
an opportunity for promotion or to shift into another position you prefer.
Like my experiences, I fully expect some people will anonymously gripe, but still stay put because the change of
finding a new job, fitting into a new workplace, doing work in new and different ways is often a bigger challenge then
standing pat.
As for Ballmer, he's going to have to go through the kinds of things IBM has done many times over the past few decades. Competition is out
there (notably Linux) and Microsoft really is stagnating. Windows Vista may well be their Edsel.
It's illegal to buy a laptop from someone if it turns out that laptop was stolen, even if you didn't know that when you bought it?
Illegal is such a generic term -- think of it this way, the owner of stolen property has a right to retrieve it from someone who bought it unwittingly. Knowingly buying a stolen item can get you charged and convicted.
Is it also illegal for me to think that's excessive?
Depends what congress has been passing in the way of legislation lately.
I haven't looked, but eBay gives sellers of autos the ability to list the serial number. Do they offer the same for other mechandise, such as computers, musical instruments and bicycles? Seems a good practice to require it.
If Adobe actually had some sinister intention in crushing theGimp, why on earth would they go ape shit over a fork of it?
Because they have to!
You don't get hundreds of patents and copyrights only to let little fish go. You have to pursue all infringements or the next time you have to fight a big fish, say Microsoft coming out with the next latest and greatest, they can argue that you don't defend your intellectual property and therefore it's effectively public domain.
Moschella:I also thought that the guys at Adobe would soon be looking for me. I haven't heard from them... yet.
To borrow a quote from elsewhere: "If you build it, they will come."
One of Adobe's Lawyers (from their Barrel O' Lawyers): Your Honor, in the defendent's own words:
to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could
Judge: I have no recourse other than to find for the plaintiff and wreak all sorts of havoc with Open Source Development.
Where are the ads? This is Yahoo and they need to generate revenue. I don't like Yahoo mail because of all the ads in the current incarnation. I think this is probably a bit deceptive. There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.
So too is it important that industries concentrate on producing high-quality, wholesome products.
We're talking about the game industry here. Can you honestly see a design team meeting going like this:
"OK, what do we want from our next game, Bob?"
"We want a high quality, wholesome game."
"Right, what else do we want in this game, Joan?"
"Teaches something, like math or proper grammar."
"Excellent point! Yes, Jeff?"
"It should underscore moral values and show the value of good teamwork."
"By golly, Jeff, I knew there was a reason we signed you on! Toni?"
"It will have to feature players defeating computer players, because we wouldn't want to cause any injury to self esteem."
"Toni, I see what you mean. OK, break off into groups and brainstorm, we need to think of a theme for this game, what's in it, what the goals are and so on. Lou!"
"Yes, Pete?"
"You start drawing up the Chapter 11 papers."
It's not really that much of a stretch, look at how the entertainment industry ran away from kid-theme movies before Toy Story, Aladdin and Lion King, now they're right cranking out some decent family pictures (though Disney's seem to be just repackaging the same tired stereotyped characters they've been beating to death for the past 40 years.) Try developing something decent and competitive. It can be done, but the trend is more and more violence because it shows it sells.
The Mac was hardly storming ahead. The computer was seriously expensive and IIRC Apple's discounts to educators, which got them firmly inside the door with education, had dwindled. Apple was nearly complacent. If they'd been highly aggressive, Bill Gates would probably have shifted Microsoft to Office Automation.
if the PC had faded into obscurity, there were many other architectures that could have quite easily become what the PC eventually did. Capable computers like the Acorn Archimedes running RiscOS, the Amiga, Atari - any one of those could have easily burgeoned had the IBM PC failed.
I never encountered the Acorn, but the Amiga was highly promising, if not for the catastrophic marketing blunders, it could have seized a large chunk of the market. One former Amiga employees described the company's marketing strategy as something akin to
"Ready!
Fire!
Aim!"
As for the Atari ST, a decent computer, but the company behind it had even less savvy in marketing to businesses than Commodore. Commodore at least did sell PC clones, whereas Atari was known almost exclusively as a video game company. They really should have spun a new company name for the brand and distanced it from games if they wanted to attract customers who would see it as more than a toy. The ST survived largely as a choice for musicians, while the Amiga was an economical choice for video specialists (thanks to the Video Toaster)
Re:Old Concept Revisited with more schmaltz
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I myself have never understood the obsession with a fake pet; it just doesn't do anything for me.
Like myself, you are probably nowhere near the target demographic for such a product anyway. These will probably immediately appeal to adolesent females in the same way the Tamogochi did.
As for whether or not there is a place for Windows in the computing world... well,
I would definitely say yes. I don't like Windows, and, from what I've heard and read,
I don't particularly like Mr. Bill [Gates], but you have to give credit where credit
is due. If it weren't for the Gates gang, I really doubt the personal computer world
would be where it is today.
This is also is a strong reason why Linux, MacOS, etc, get better. Without Microsoft's machinations
there wouldn't be much motivation for innovation. Imagine a world where the PC actually died out due to
the superior interface and usability of the Mac, yet the Mac remained expensive and advanced slowly, painstakingly.
[On the arrive of Vista/IE7]Also, the fact that Vista will reportedly only work on machines with accelerated graphics might also cause some folks lacking in that department to take a second look at the Linux option.
I remember Russell Lieblich's Web Dimension and something else he created about 20 years ago which were more along the lines of "Experiences" No scores, no frags, just endless variation influenced by your input. Some of it was pretty cool.
Re:Old Concept Revisited with more schmaltz
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There aren't that many euphonic alternatives.
Perhaps deer? Nintendoes
Or cross-licensing with FOX, NintenD'oh!
I think variation on wordplay is a preposterous limitation. I'd like to see a SDK for something like this where you effectively build the DNA of your creature.
Slashdot Mirror
Well Cowboy and Be-Bop don't exactly roll off the tongue either, but what Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) has done with his latest film certainly puts a new spin on the phrase 'slap leather, pardner!'
Western Horror? Certainly doesn't come readily to mind (not like a good pirate thriller, w' a ship full 'o the dead and buckets o' blood, arr!) A shooter is a shooter, eh? How about we include some gun play in the next Dungeons and Dragons roll-out. (What was that strip with the guy with the handgun that ran in Dragon for ages? Some potlicker borrowed by book and ain't seen it since.) How do you kill spectres with bullets? Shouldn't they be silver?
Got the trots? I prescribe Unlax, it stops people in their tracts.
Or is that the Castle Arrrrgggghhhh?
Avast ye swab! Here be the only keyboard yer evar need! 'Ave they got 'er in yer precious Uncyclopedia or e'en yer Wikipedia? Oi'd be scupper'd if oi hadn't studied me three Arr's at Pirate U.
Ralph: "Where do I learn everything? The Uncyclopedia!"
Chief Wiggum: "Ha ha ha! That's my boy!"
RIAA Guy 1: "One Wesley Willis download? An aberation. A blip, doesn't count."
RIAA Guy 2: "But if there are 10 downloads?"
RIAA Guy 1: "Then that means by our reckoning that there were at least 3 illegal downloads which happened somewhere and we need to prosecute!"
This had a lot to do with the downfall of General Motors. Once so big and mighty it could do no wrong. Then this punk Ralph Nader pointed at one of their major failures and they handled it badly, first denying the problem then eventually running away from it. The Corvair really was a great car and a few tweaks was all it needed. 20 years later they'd repeat this incredible behaviour with the Fiero (engine fires, hard shifting, stuck brakes, stuff coming apart, etc. (I had one)) But the wealth of the company allowed it to cast off promise and potential over really minor issues. They acquired EDS and Hughes, neither of which had jack to do with their core competency which was building cars, yet they failed with on a regular basis.
Microsofts sole power was in being able to compensate people well but people are leaving not because of money but because they do not like the job.
The money isn't even that good, particularly since an experienced developer who knows his arse from a hole in the ground could go elsewhere for better. Microsoft is delusional being blind-sided by this.
This could be a big problem for Microsoft and we will watch Google and other companies slowly eat up some of the top devs from MS.
It's been happening since the dawn of time. What Microsoft is utterly failing to do and what they should do is spin off companies. Instead they try to keep eveything under one roof -- Video games, Office Automation, Servers, ISP, Operating System, Consumer Electronics, Television, Web Portal, etc. They should be spinning these things off when they show potential, not continuing to bind everything together through Windows and IP. It's too much of a stretch and creates too much bureaucracy to keep it all together. We see the failure through the flaw count.
About 20 years ago we have various vendors come in and pitch their Big Iron to us. We hardly needed DEC to show up, because we already loved them. We had to let IBM show up because the boss always had a soft spot in his heart for them and people with suits and ties who know nothing about operations or programming think IBM=Answers.
So these IBM guys come in and pitch to us like they were made in the Gotti family. A few questions are fielded semi-informatively, but the tone said "listen you stupid moron, stop wasting our time, just buy the the thing because we know and you should know, there's nothing better and you're just a damn fool if you don't".
We didn't. Ironically we ended up with Pr1me, because our new software would run on it. IBM eventually went through a few years of real housecleaning, as everytime I tried to contact Sales regarding an order for an RS/6000, I got a different salesman or an answering machine with "I'm no longer with IBM please direct your call to ..." Finally getting the order through a district sales manager for the state(!) and even he had to be told what we were ordering and not to keep trying to tack on color monitors and laser printers we didn't want or need.
Yep. Getting away from all the fun and excitement of Whizzy new products and rapidly expanding markets. It's always fun taking the other guy's lunch money.
Now many of those companies who survived the .com bust are looking to make a profit. Growing companies rarely show a profit, as they roll profits back into feuling expansion. Profitable companies are usually trying to get the most bang for the buck out of each seat and that usually means trimming underperforming branches, scaling back others which are performing well to find the minimum necessary expense to maintain the same revenue.
Microsoft being a monopoly hasn't really dealt with the question of what to do when revenue flattens, which it sure looks like it will when Vista ships.
Yet, who would have guessed he'd have done the monkey dance?
Even Bill Gates has been known to vent his ire inside the company compound, If I recall it was in regard to killing Java, and we saw the long battle with Sun after Microsoft began co-opting it with their own codes.
Google is the least of their problems -- They only choose to make it so.
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job. Eventually things change. Workers set in their ways and expectations grumble the loudest. Truth may be, it still may be a dream place to work, it's just that many people don't like change, where others thrive on it (hint: Change is often an opportunity for promotion or to shift into another position you prefer.
Like my experiences, I fully expect some people will anonymously gripe, but still stay put because the change of finding a new job, fitting into a new workplace, doing work in new and different ways is often a bigger challenge then standing pat.
As for Ballmer, he's going to have to go through the kinds of things IBM has done many times over the past few decades. Competition is out there (notably Linux) and Microsoft really is stagnating. Windows Vista may well be their Edsel.
Illegal is such a generic term -- think of it this way, the owner of stolen property has a right to retrieve it from someone who bought it unwittingly. Knowingly buying a stolen item can get you charged and convicted.
Is it also illegal for me to think that's excessive?
Depends what congress has been passing in the way of legislation lately.
I haven't looked, but eBay gives sellers of autos the ability to list the serial number. Do they offer the same for other mechandise, such as computers, musical instruments and bicycles? Seems a good practice to require it.
Because they have to!
You don't get hundreds of patents and copyrights only to let little fish go. You have to pursue all infringements or the next time you have to fight a big fish, say Microsoft coming out with the next latest and greatest, they can argue that you don't defend your intellectual property and therefore it's effectively public domain.
Adobe does pursue anyone who apes their works.
To borrow a quote from elsewhere: "If you build it, they will come."
One of Adobe's Lawyers (from their Barrel O' Lawyers): Your Honor, in the defendent's own words:
Judge: I have no recourse other than to find for the plaintiff and wreak all sorts of havoc with Open Source Development.Yes, but you can patent the business process of getting it wrong, but we're all friends here, right?
BTW Did this video podcasting really take anyone by surprise? I nearly dislocated a jaw yawning.
It only took about a zillion years for them to invent the idea...
Where are the ads? This is Yahoo and they need to generate revenue. I don't like Yahoo mail because of all the ads in the current incarnation. I think this is probably a bit deceptive. There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.
We're talking about the game industry here. Can you honestly see a design team meeting going like this:
"OK, what do we want from our next game, Bob?"
"We want a high quality, wholesome game."
"Right, what else do we want in this game, Joan?"
"Teaches something, like math or proper grammar."
"Excellent point! Yes, Jeff?"
"It should underscore moral values and show the value of good teamwork."
"By golly, Jeff, I knew there was a reason we signed you on! Toni?"
"It will have to feature players defeating computer players, because we wouldn't want to cause any injury to self esteem."
"Toni, I see what you mean. OK, break off into groups and brainstorm, we need to think of a theme for this game, what's in it, what the goals are and so on. Lou!"
"Yes, Pete?"
"You start drawing up the Chapter 11 papers."
It's not really that much of a stretch, look at how the entertainment industry ran away from kid-theme movies before Toy Story, Aladdin and Lion King, now they're right cranking out some decent family pictures (though Disney's seem to be just repackaging the same tired stereotyped characters they've been beating to death for the past 40 years.) Try developing something decent and competitive. It can be done, but the trend is more and more violence because it shows it sells.
The Mac was hardly storming ahead. The computer was seriously expensive and IIRC Apple's discounts to educators, which got them firmly inside the door with education, had dwindled. Apple was nearly complacent. If they'd been highly aggressive, Bill Gates would probably have shifted Microsoft to Office Automation.
if the PC had faded into obscurity, there were many other architectures that could have quite easily become what the PC eventually did. Capable computers like the Acorn Archimedes running RiscOS, the Amiga, Atari - any one of those could have easily burgeoned had the IBM PC failed.
I never encountered the Acorn, but the Amiga was highly promising, if not for the catastrophic marketing blunders, it could have seized a large chunk of the market. One former Amiga employees described the company's marketing strategy as something akin to
As for the Atari ST, a decent computer, but the company behind it had even less savvy in marketing to businesses than Commodore. Commodore at least did sell PC clones, whereas Atari was known almost exclusively as a video game company. They really should have spun a new company name for the brand and distanced it from games if they wanted to attract customers who would see it as more than a toy. The ST survived largely as a choice for musicians, while the Amiga was an economical choice for video specialists (thanks to the Video Toaster)Like myself, you are probably nowhere near the target demographic for such a product anyway. These will probably immediately appeal to adolesent females in the same way the Tamogochi did.
This is also is a strong reason why Linux, MacOS, etc, get better. Without Microsoft's machinations there wouldn't be much motivation for innovation. Imagine a world where the PC actually died out due to the superior interface and usability of the Mac, yet the Mac remained expensive and advanced slowly, painstakingly.
[On the arrive of Vista/IE7]Also, the fact that Vista will reportedly only work on machines with accelerated graphics might also cause some folks lacking in that department to take a second look at the Linux option.
Or in our case stagnate at XP for years to come.
The author is a strong supporter of desktop Linux and has been getting quite a bit of attention for his views on the subject." "Steve, hire him and put him in the office next to ESR."
The way I heard it: If hitting it doesn't work, get a bigger hammer.
I remember Russell Lieblich's Web Dimension and something else he created about 20 years ago which were more along the lines of "Experiences" No scores, no frags, just endless variation influenced by your input. Some of it was pretty cool.
Perhaps deer? Nintendoes
Or cross-licensing with FOX, NintenD'oh!
I think variation on wordplay is a preposterous limitation. I'd like to see a SDK for something like this where you effectively build the DNA of your creature.