I hate statistics like this. Which way does the correlation go?
Does participating in this mean you are going to watch less TV?
Or do people that have the guts to stick through this tend to not watch as much TV anyway? People who can't go a week without TV aren't going to reduce their habits.
Sorry, man, but we watch Comedy Central religiously, not to mention VH1 Classics and even CBS (thank god it's not football season...). They refuse to give a reasonable time table. If they said, stick it out for a couple weeks, I'd say ok. But, to not offer anything is a slap in the face ($2 reduction on my bill for a loss of 10 channels!) This isn't my fight. I'd pay extra for these channels. But, that's not an option, and I'm moving my service.
BTW, we chose dish because AT&T didn't offer Comedy Central. Now they do. Plus, our cable internet bill would go down $10 if we switch...
That's what I did. Joining a fraternity taught me how to interact with other people who are nothing like me, a proud "engi-nerd". In high school, I hung out with honors students, and until I joined a frat, I hung out with engineers. It was the most fun and most beneficial experience I had as an undergrad. Some frats are better than others, of course, but even nerds can have a good time in a frat.
Nitendo dead? Ha! You checked out the sales for the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color and now the Game Boy Advance? GBA sold 1 million in the first month in the US alone. Sony didn't even have that many PS2's out in the *world* in one month.
Nintendo has a struggle to prove themselves in the console market. But, they have Pokemon, Mario, & Zelda profits and GBA profits to help them through almost any hard time imaginable.
Analysts said that Sony was (is?) losing $180 *PER* PS2.
Nintendo stuck with a standard IBM CPU (slightly customized), graphics chip, but went all-out on 1T-SRAM, which makes all the difference.
PS2 is using RamBus memory, custom CPU, vector units, etc, than in themselves are amazingly powerful, but also amazing complicated and expensive to reproduce.
Why does the US essentially control the.gov and.mil domains? It seems to me that this is yet another example of American elitism...
This is a valid argument only if this were to happen today. When.MIL and.GOV were created, there was no such thing as a country code..EDU and.COM weren't even delegated to anybody when.MIL started up. The "internet" was really just a connection of researchers and US governmental institutes. This isn't an example of American elitism, or even a matter of America-centric thought -- the simple fact is, the internet started as an American government entity. That's why we have.MIL and.GOV.
just like when you fill out a form on a web site and there's a country drop-down..."United States" is often the FIRST option, as if the other countries in the list are trifiling and unimportant.
As you admit, you're American. Therefore, you visit a lot of websites that have an American presence (you probably don't visit too many Dutch farmers news sites, or?). When people fill out those forms, you want to make it easy for them. So, you put the country as the default for what most of your visitors are going to be. And on.DE sites, Germany is the top country. In.CO.UK sites, England or UK is going to be the default country.
Being an American and seeing the US chosen by default validates this point. How many times has another country shown up that you had to change it? I would venture you're not visiting too many Syrian sites where US was the default country. One the other hand, how annoying is it to find that you had to search a list of 200+ countries to find the US sandwiched somewhere between the United Arab Emirates and Uraguay, when you're on a site in English by a company that has a large American presence. At the very least, most companies put their top markets right at the top of the list so that the majority of their users don't have to take much effort searching through a list, whether that list is US & Canada or UK, Scotland, Ireland, etc.
The French are crying out that there's a McDonald's on every corner -- but there wouldn't be if they didn't support it financially.
I don't know what to say about our movies and music being everywhere. If you were to take them away, there would be a large hole, you have to admit that.
America most definitely has its own culture. Perhaps it's not as unique as the Brazilian, but it's a culture. Our culture (as well as our language) is a bastard of just about every other one out there. Most people in other countries couldn't speak about where they came from -- I can say I'm German, Austrian, Irish, Scandanavian. But, above all, I'm American. I'm proud of my "culture".
I agree. That's exactly why I was not required to learn any foreign language while growing up. I'm a university student right now, and I still am not required to learn a foreign language. Of course, then there's demographics that say that Spanish speakers will outnumber English speakers in America in just a couple decades...
What we fail to understand is your unability to understand that Europe do not exists (yet). There is still Italy, France, Germany, Spain and so on. With a hell of a lot of more diversification than, say, between Utah and California.
That's exactly the reason we don't have to know that Europe exists or is anything but a vacation spot. In Europe, you drive an hour and you're in a completely different dialect and culture, if not a new language!
In America, you can drive for 40 hours and still speak almost the same English you speak at home. The differences wouldn't be that great that you could even talk about a different culture; maybe different political opinions.
America is large enough that people can live happilly not knowing anything that exists outside of America. I can't say that we're self-sufficient (because we do have a trade deficit) but I can say that culturally we're pretty independent. We don't listen to music or watch movies that are in any language but English (there are of course a few exceptions). Even stuff out of Britain faces pretty high levels of criticism (except music, where the differences are less obvious, and a lot of good music has come from there)
It's not OK in Germany. Germans are practically taught not to be proud, not to be patriotic. They are taught everything Germans did in history that was horendous in hopes of deterring it from ever happening again. It's not OK to be proud.
Can you imagine graffiti in America *AGAINST* racism? In Germany it's very normal. The kids that walk around with multi-colored hair spiked up in a mowhawk are the kids that wear anti-racism patches on their backpacks. It's a different idea.
I can't speak for much of Europe but Germany, but it's a different idea system!
If you don't recall, it's 225 years ago today that we told you (the British anyway) to bugger off.
As an American living in Germany, Europeans don't understand this at all. By "this" I mean refering to America as "we" and "us". Patriotism and owning a national flag is something that only the skinheads do. A political leader here in German said "I am proud to be German" and got lambasted for it. He got called everything in the book.
There is a debate about what you can say, "I am happy to be German," "I am happy to live in Germany", blah, blah. But you will never here a German talk about things "he" did 50-100 years ago. Granted, their history contains some things that they are not proud of, but so does ours.
Just my few words into why Europeans "don't understand us"...
I've got a friend from Spain here, and "Que pasaaaaaa?" is indeed what they say in place of our American "Wazzzzzzzzzzzuh". (Sorry for accents, I can't do Spanish very well)
German: "Was geht aaaaaaaaaaaaaab?"
Reading editorials like this makes me wonder what the "perfect world" would be for people like Brian Proffitt (the author of the above editorial).
There seems to be no other solution to this "Microsoft is evil" dilemma than for Microsoft to disapper, which would really cause us all to be in a lot of trouble. Imagine if the entire world had to start using Linux -- I'm sorry, Linux is not so user friendly that everyone and their grandmas are going to love using a computer. I get incredibly frustrated trying to do anything in Linux, but most of that is due to the couple of months I've used it in comparison to my 15 years of DOS/Windows experience. I can hardly imagine someone with no clue what a directory is trying to get Linux...
I get just as scared as all of you everytime I hear about MS changing licensing policies, whether it be to subscriptions, software timers, calling phone numbers to have to explain why I'm installing Office for a third time (regular reformatting is normal, of course...), etc. But, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it.
If Microsoft's business practices are causing that much harm to the industry, then something else will inevitably take its spot. If the new license is really that terrible, then companies will stop using it. And if Office is too annoying, then there will be something else to install over the top of it. But, it's certainly not anything to get into an uproar about, and it's certainly not anything to condemn the company for, which is just doing what it feels it needs to to keep progessing profitably and intellectually.
We all need to take a look at what exactly we want MS to do. Die? Play nice? Be our friend?
I'm curious to hear what you all think? I used to love MS products, now I wish there was an alternative... I'm just not sure anymore.
First, Konami and Capcom have already made announcements on games they plan to release for the GC. Which is a great sign. Nintendo isn't the least bit afraid of the "Square influence," since Mr. Y has stated that he would basically rather go to his grave than let Square develop for them. I would like to see him lay his spite to the side, but it will come as soon as he retires.
As far as your comment that Nintendo has essentially fallen by the way side in the console business, you're right, Nintendo didn't do as well as they hoped with their N64. It was by no means a failure though. 30 million units isn't bad. Not to mention some really earth-moving games like Mario 64, Zelda, GoldenEye.
We'll see. Nintendo's fate is by no means certain, but neither is Sony's. It pisses me off that they're already talking PS3...
(By the way, GC is slated for this fall, not next spring, unless you're in Europe...)
Except when you consider that the top 2 selling games (including all consoles) for 2000 were both Pokemon games, and each sold about twice as many as its nearest competitor, Tony Hawk 2.
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I hate statistics like this. Which way does the correlation go?
Does participating in this mean you are going to watch less TV?
Or do people that have the guts to stick through this tend to not watch as much TV anyway? People who can't go a week without TV aren't going to reduce their habits.
To me, Dish stood up for my interests.
Sorry, man, but we watch Comedy Central religiously, not to mention VH1 Classics and even CBS (thank god it's not football season...). They refuse to give a reasonable time table. If they said, stick it out for a couple weeks, I'd say ok. But, to not offer anything is a slap in the face ($2 reduction on my bill for a loss of 10 channels!) This isn't my fight. I'd pay extra for these channels. But, that's not an option, and I'm moving my service.
BTW, we chose dish because AT&T didn't offer Comedy Central. Now they do. Plus, our cable internet bill would go down $10 if we switch...
That's what I did. Joining a fraternity taught me how to interact with other people who are nothing like me, a proud "engi-nerd". In high school, I hung out with honors students, and until I joined a frat, I hung out with engineers. It was the most fun and most beneficial experience I had as an undergrad. Some frats are better than others, of course, but even nerds can have a good time in a frat.
Maybe that's so that when the site becomes spotty due to DDoS they can claim they were running Linux at the time... wouldn't put anything past them.
I like how of the five reasons, only one of them even mentions Linux, and that's a questionable claim at best!
PS2 at launch: $299.
PS2 in Japan right now: $249.
Will PS2 match GameCube's price this Xmas. I bet my money on it.
Nintendo has a struggle to prove themselves in the console market. But, they have Pokemon, Mario, & Zelda profits and GBA profits to help them through almost any hard time imaginable.
Props to Nintendo.
By DVD's not even fitting in the GameCube, Nintendo is protecting themselves majorly against piracy. A good move? We'll see.
I don't know about $99 for an X-Box. That would barely pay for the hard drive, let alone the Pentium processor, SDRAM, and all the components...
Nintendo stuck with a standard IBM CPU (slightly customized), graphics chip, but went all-out on 1T-SRAM, which makes all the difference.
PS2 is using RamBus memory, custom CPU, vector units, etc, than in themselves are amazingly powerful, but also amazing complicated and expensive to reproduce.
It should be a fun war!
This is a valid argument only if this were to happen today. When .MIL and .GOV were created, there was no such thing as a country code. .EDU and .COM weren't even delegated to anybody when .MIL started up. The "internet" was really just a connection of researchers and US governmental institutes. This isn't an example of American elitism, or even a matter of America-centric thought -- the simple fact is, the internet started as an American government entity. That's why we have .MIL and .GOV.
As you admit, you're American. Therefore, you visit a lot of websites that have an American presence (you probably don't visit too many Dutch farmers news sites, or?). When people fill out those forms, you want to make it easy for them. So, you put the country as the default for what most of your visitors are going to be. And on .DE sites, Germany is the top country. In .CO.UK sites, England or UK is going to be the default country.
Being an American and seeing the US chosen by default validates this point. How many times has another country shown up that you had to change it? I would venture you're not visiting too many Syrian sites where US was the default country. One the other hand, how annoying is it to find that you had to search a list of 200+ countries to find the US sandwiched somewhere between the United Arab Emirates and Uraguay, when you're on a site in English by a company that has a large American presence. At the very least, most companies put their top markets right at the top of the list so that the majority of their users don't have to take much effort searching through a list, whether that list is US & Canada or UK, Scotland, Ireland, etc.
They dropped the rules on .ORG years ago, but recently they began talking about trying to begin to reinstate the rules for reasons exactly like this...
The French are crying out that there's a McDonald's on every corner -- but there wouldn't be if they didn't support it financially.
I don't know what to say about our movies and music being everywhere. If you were to take them away, there would be a large hole, you have to admit that.
America most definitely has its own culture. Perhaps it's not as unique as the Brazilian, but it's a culture. Our culture (as well as our language) is a bastard of just about every other one out there. Most people in other countries couldn't speak about where they came from -- I can say I'm German, Austrian, Irish, Scandanavian. But, above all, I'm American. I'm proud of my "culture".
I agree. That's exactly why I was not required to learn any foreign language while growing up. I'm a university student right now, and I still am not required to learn a foreign language. Of course, then there's demographics that say that Spanish speakers will outnumber English speakers in America in just a couple decades...
That's exactly the reason we don't have to know that Europe exists or is anything but a vacation spot. In Europe, you drive an hour and you're in a completely different dialect and culture, if not a new language!
In America, you can drive for 40 hours and still speak almost the same English you speak at home. The differences wouldn't be that great that you could even talk about a different culture; maybe different political opinions.
America is large enough that people can live happilly not knowing anything that exists outside of America. I can't say that we're self-sufficient (because we do have a trade deficit) but I can say that culturally we're pretty independent. We don't listen to music or watch movies that are in any language but English (there are of course a few exceptions). Even stuff out of Britain faces pretty high levels of criticism (except music, where the differences are less obvious, and a lot of good music has come from there)
It's not OK in Germany. Germans are practically taught not to be proud, not to be patriotic. They are taught everything Germans did in history that was horendous in hopes of deterring it from ever happening again. It's not OK to be proud.
Can you imagine graffiti in America *AGAINST* racism? In Germany it's very normal. The kids that walk around with multi-colored hair spiked up in a mowhawk are the kids that wear anti-racism patches on their backpacks. It's a different idea.
I can't speak for much of Europe but Germany, but it's a different idea system!
There is a debate about what you can say, "I am happy to be German," "I am happy to live in Germany", blah, blah. But you will never here a German talk about things "he" did 50-100 years ago. Granted, their history contains some things that they are not proud of, but so does ours. Just my few words into why Europeans "don't understand us"...
Anybody got a link or a cache? That one's dead...
I've got a friend from Spain here, and "Que pasaaaaaa?" is indeed what they say in place of our American "Wazzzzzzzzzzzuh". (Sorry for accents, I can't do Spanish very well) German: "Was geht aaaaaaaaaaaaaab?"
Heh, I either posted this one too late, or no one is brave enough to respond... :>
There seems to be no other solution to this "Microsoft is evil" dilemma than for Microsoft to disapper, which would really cause us all to be in a lot of trouble. Imagine if the entire world had to start using Linux -- I'm sorry, Linux is not so user friendly that everyone and their grandmas are going to love using a computer. I get incredibly frustrated trying to do anything in Linux, but most of that is due to the couple of months I've used it in comparison to my 15 years of DOS/Windows experience. I can hardly imagine someone with no clue what a directory is trying to get Linux...
I get just as scared as all of you everytime I hear about MS changing licensing policies, whether it be to subscriptions, software timers, calling phone numbers to have to explain why I'm installing Office for a third time (regular reformatting is normal, of course...), etc. But, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it.
If Microsoft's business practices are causing that much harm to the industry, then something else will inevitably take its spot. If the new license is really that terrible, then companies will stop using it. And if Office is too annoying, then there will be something else to install over the top of it. But, it's certainly not anything to get into an uproar about, and it's certainly not anything to condemn the company for, which is just doing what it feels it needs to to keep progessing profitably and intellectually.
We all need to take a look at what exactly we want MS to do. Die? Play nice? Be our friend?
I'm curious to hear what you all think? I used to love MS products, now I wish there was an alternative... I'm just not sure anymore.
That's not his problem. It's his employer's.
First, Konami and Capcom have already made announcements on games they plan to release for the GC. Which is a great sign. Nintendo isn't the least bit afraid of the "Square influence," since Mr. Y has stated that he would basically rather go to his grave than let Square develop for them. I would like to see him lay his spite to the side, but it will come as soon as he retires.
As far as your comment that Nintendo has essentially fallen by the way side in the console business, you're right, Nintendo didn't do as well as they hoped with their N64. It was by no means a failure though. 30 million units isn't bad. Not to mention some really earth-moving games like Mario 64, Zelda, GoldenEye.
We'll see. Nintendo's fate is by no means certain, but neither is Sony's. It pisses me off that they're already talking PS3...
(By the way, GC is slated for this fall, not next spring, unless you're in Europe...)
Except when you consider that the top 2 selling games (including all consoles) for 2000 were both Pokemon games, and each sold about twice as many as its nearest competitor, Tony Hawk 2.
Imagine the shadow this thing creates! So long, you could probably see it move at its tip.