It's been said before so I'll say it again. Microsoft does not have a history of using patents to get what they want. Other companies do. Microsoft is coming down on Lindows, for example, for copyright violations, which they have a leg on which to stand, but they traditionally haven't used patents to get what they want. And why would they start now?
...only one episode made after 1998 made it into the top 25. And one from 2000 was listed as worst ever. I'm a huge Simpsons fan but perhaps its time for some new blood (or in case of new blood, old blood), or time to retire the old girl.
Still it's gonna be great in the Third Season hits DVD - then the good stuff really starts.
People keep saying "how come 'Console X' wasn't included?" The answer is twofold - first, these are dismal console failures. Second, most consoles fail, so the failures of these particular consoles are more interesting.
The two laserdisc consoles were simply retarded. The Virtual Boy is famous since it was percieved Nintendo could do no wrong post-NES/SNES, so it stands as a fascinating example (I still have one to this day). The 32X stands out since it was dumb to come out with a 32-bit add-on, then ditch it promptly when your "real" 32-bit console came out. The 3D0 stands out since they went for the different business model and happened to be around when FMV games were the talk of the town.
But the Dreamcast didn't make it to this list, neither did the Saturn, since they weren't dismal failures. The Nintendo 64 didn't make it since it wasn't a failure at all - it just never did as good as the PSX and it's not as popular with adults (who *ahem* should be the readers of this site). The Jaguar was done in by management bungling, not because it was a "bad" console.
The main reason "Console X" didn't make it is because the story behind it wasn't interesting. A console that flopped because it just wasn't the best is boring. A console that flopped because of bad management is boring. A console that flopped because no one wanted to pay $2K for one game or because the designer hadn't been wrong yet, or because they tried to replicate VHS, that's interesting.
The first point has been addressed (most usefull skills like J2EE and.NET are in fact essentially free to learn).
Although I hate to see small companies and independent developers hit, I don't agree with the idea that computer programming should be easier or less difficult. This is programming, not assembling furniture. It's now to the point where even the "hold-your-hand" RAD tools are cutting off the non-serious users (VB6 was the bane of bad programming, but VB.NET forces its users to code better, and VB6 "coders" aren't happy about it).
It's exponentially more difficult to be a programmer today than it was, say, twenty years ago and so what I see a lot of (and I'm not saying this is you) is people who got in on the low end (i.e., COBOL thirty years ago) and somewhere between Object Oriented and Polymorphism, fell off the curve. I work at a University that's moving (at some point) from a COBOL-based mainframe to a "web-based" system (whatever that means - PeopleSoft,.NET, something) and the majority of the people who work with me (most of which are at least thirty years older than me) just want to put it off until after they retire.
Once you get ensconced in "difficult" programming, you will either understand why it is how it is and why it is so difficult (i.e., it won't be so difficult anymore) or you'll get so flustered with it that you'll find another profession or hobby. And as programming gets more and more difficult, there will be less and less people to do it, and as a result these people will be worth more since their rarity is increasing.
Personally, I like the new Nintendo. Nintendo the company that is.
It's been pointed out in this thread that Nintendo was basically the Microsoft of the game industry in the late 1980's (90%+ of the industry, antitrust lawsuits - ring a bell). The difference is that everyone still liked them (how could we not - Mario! Zelda!)
Since then Nintendo has fallen from the king of the hill, partly due to the fact that the hill is so much bigger nowadays, but also due to some bad decisions. The Genesis came out before the SNES and Nintendo played catchup until right before the end (Donkey Kong Country pulled them slightly ahead of Sega's numbers, but Sega was still quite the contender). Then with the Nintendo 64, Nintendo pretty much got cocky. I loved the N64 but lots of the decisions they made (cartridges, no Metroid, etc.) were bad. Plus they were doing things like relying on Pokemon, franchises and the children's market. It was as if they didn't realize a portion of their target audience were now grownups
Now we have the new Nintendo. The old Nintendo stayed with a moribund format, the new Nintendo is DVD-based (though 3" DVD's). The old Nintendo wouldn't let a Metroid game be made, the new Nintendo released two last year. The old Nintendo would have had only one good game at launch, and a Mario one at that - the new Nintendo had lots of good games, none of which were Mario, and the Luigi game they did was completely non-traditional. The old (old) Nintendo would never have let a dark, violent game on their console, the new Nintendo scored the exclusives on the Resident Evil franchise. The old Nintendo would forget its roots, the new Nintendo rerelases old NES games in the form of a pack of cards. For that matter, only Nintendo would have thought of that. The old Nintendo would have swamped its console with Pokemon - the new Nintendo has yet to.
Does anyone remember Active Enterprises? This was one of those companies in the heyday of the NES that came out with unlicensed games (but for the most part they consisted of a guy in his basement). They're most notorious for Action 52, which was a cartridge with 52 games on it. Of course, pretty much every game on there was total crap - like quick coding examples. This wouldn't have been so bad had they not been asking $199 for it. Whether they were gunning for the rental market or betting on the notion that $199/52 was a good deal no one knows.
What a lot of people don't remember however was that they came out with a bizarre press release wherein they announced all the stuff they'd done, how successful it had been (*snicker*) and, most amazingly, their plans for the Action Game Master, which would be a portable handheld system (and a gigantic one at that) that would play - get this - NES, SNES, Genesis and "CDROM" games, plus have a TV Tuner adapter card. Of course it never existed in any form other than a 3D Studio render (and a poor one at that). Does any of this sound familiar?
So what we really need to know is this - who is this Infitium (sp?) company? Are they really a legit company or two guys in a basement? Really they sound like Indrema but with less credibility (and remember, Indrema didn't have too much credibility).
I guess I meant to say that when someone says ".NET" and you ask them to be more specific and they just look at you like you're stupid and they don't know the names of what exactly they're using then they don't know what they're talking about.
If any programming language/framework has a chance it will become an OS it is.NET.
Which, if it turns out to be true, explains why Microsoft is not only doing.NET but why they went out of their way and hired Corel to port the CLI and C# compilers to FreeBSD, Mac OSX, and (apparently) Linux (the Rotor project). It's been theorized that in the grand scheme of things.NET is helping Microsoft prepare for the day in which Operating Systems are irrelevant or at least not the way they're done today. And of course the complete class libraries the.NET framework relies upon will only run on Windows, and even when/if the open source reimplementations of them ever catch up, they'll still (in theory) always run best on Windows, to say nothing of the Visual Studio.NET tool always running in Windows.
Of course the other reason MS might be pushing.NET so much is the money they stand to make off of the hundreds of books they've written on the subject.
Note that.NET is not a programming language (and I've already seen it used this way in this thread)..NET is a platform (the CLI is like the Java VM) and a framework (the class libraries) but it's not a language. C# is a.NET language, VB.NET is a.NET language, (language).NET is a language, but.NET isn't a language.
Tip: If you ever ask someone what they're writing their app/web site in and they say ".NET" and can't say anything else (like C# or ASP.net) then they don't know what they're talking about (and I should know - I used to do it myself).
but really there was never a "Microsoft type" marketing push. Maybe because there wasn't a "product" to push?
Well there was the.NET framework, the free C# and VB.NET compilers, and Visual Studio.NET - four products. All but one free. And of course there were the ECMA ratified C# and CLI standards..NET is "something" and if you still don't get that Windows.NET Server was not all ther was to.NET you clearly haven't been reading some of these highly moderated comments.
Re:Interesting possibilities...
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
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· Score: 2
For that matter you can also go to a Barnes & Noble, grab a coffee, and sit there and read an ENTIRE book without them wanting you to buy it or get out. Try that at Musicland with a CD.
Interesting possibilities...
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I see lots of interesting possibilities if this "thing" catches on.
It would appear that the publishing industry and the recording industry are similar in that they are difficult to get into and tend to "stiff" new artists/authors. Of course the recording industry is difficult to get into because they're looking for the next 18-24 year old Britney Spears clone and the publishing industry is difficult to get into unless your work has something that will sell (for sci-fi your works these days either have to be attached to a franchise or be militaristic in nature).
The main difference, as far as I can see, is that this author and, say, Bruce Eckel, is that they also publish their works through major book publishers. There's lots of websites wherein you can download the entire CD of a small artist, usually the ones who press their own albums on CD-R. But as soon as these guys sign to a major record label, this practice goes away. How it is that TOR is allowing Doctrow to do this is beyond me. No way would they let Robert Jordan release Wheel of Time 10 this way.
But something occured to me - this is a book that's like 136 pages (though Amazon says the hardcover is 208). And it's being published in hardcover for $22.95. That's more than most DVD's or CD's. You can usually pick it up for less than that, but doesn't that seem a little pricey to anyone else? I know that hardcover first issue books are steep, like $29.95 for Wheel of Time 10, but that's a 700 page book whose target audience is rabid about it. Shouldn't a 136 page hardcover book be a little cheaper?
Even better question - how come no one complains about this? People complain about the price of a lot of things - CD's, DVD's, Movies, etc. but they never complain about the price of books. Of course you can download your music if you really want to, you can wait for the movie to hit DVD, you can download the DivX of the movie/DVD if you can find it, and the DVD is loaded down with extras so you don't feel jipped. Could uneasy accessibility to books in digital form be the reason no one complains about their prices?
And what will this do to the mix? Will authors release their material this way in the future in the hopes that being noticed will land them a book deal so they can sell copies to all of those who want a keepsake of something they read for free? Will this guy sell a ton of copies of this book because he was on a Slashdot story? Will this work on a fiction document (Eckel's works are programming books)?
Can the recording industry learn a thing or two from the publishing industry? Or is it the other way around? And whose cause does it help if the Slashdot community buys a ton of this book?
Yeah but his point was that this was a mention of a tin foil hat in this very reasoning (to protect your brain from influences) way prior to 1991. Urban legend or no, if it was told in the 1960's then this was quite a while back and therefore qualifies.
Well, problem number one - you showed Terminator 2 to someone's kids. I hope you knew them or their parents well, or else you'd find yourself shitcanned and unpaid at the end of the night.
Problem number two - it may have made the kids more agressive, something which lots of things may do (including going to school and playing on a playground with other butthole kids) but did it make them violent enough to kill? Big difference. Plus it doesn't bully them at school, neglect them at home, or give them access to guns - all Columbine factors.
I've watched violent movies all my life and it doesn't affect me much now. But I saw footage of a guy killing himself at a press conference (the "Hey Man Nice Shot" guy) and it still haunts me. There's a world of difference between violence people know is fake and that people know is real. This is why even after we watched September 11 on TV we lined up to see The Sum Of All Fears and we didn't pull Armageddon from stores.
I also love Bowling for Columbine but he pointed out one thing about video games that, while it helps our "cause", it isn't quite accurate. He states:
"Heck, most of the violent video games come from Japan, a country with 57 gun deaths last year..."
He's probably right about most games coming from Japan and the death toll over there, but most of the games people are concerned about are First Person Shooter games, which are mostly an American product. The Columbine killers weren't avid Pokemon players, they were avid DOOM players.
I think the episode would be better if the dialouge and video sound quality was as bad as the shots and sound effects of the original, but man - this is impressive ambition to say the least.
Hi there, I'm another Windows/PC user who knows little of the true nature of the Apple/iMac lines. My question is - what now?
My entire post may be redundant, so feel free to point out and mod down, but as I understood it, the classic 1-piece iMac machines were the "iMacs" and the new lamp-shaped ones were the
"iMac 2's", and I had assumed that when they started making the iMac 2, they stopped the iMac's. So now what, if this is the end of the iMac 2? Is there an iMac 3 on the horizon? Or is Apple sticking with another system? Making more iMacs?
When I was running a Voodoo3, I couldn't run crap once I upgraded to DX 8.1 (though IIRC, RX 8.0 was fine). Due to the wonderful way DX works, I had to reinstall Win98 (yeah yeah I know) to ditch it. I then found Voodoo Files where, somehow, people were still writing/hacking/whatever new Voodoo drivers. I downloaded some recent ones and viola - DX 8.1 worked - minus things even the HAL couldn't even do at that point. My best guess was that something in DX 8.1 did something the last official 3dfx drivers really didn't like, so DX wouldn't get along with them at all - but newer, obviously unofficial ones did.
So if you want to upgrade to DX 9 I'd say hit up Voodoo Files first. By that token though, I don't think DX 9 will go any faster for you and you in all likelihood won't be able to run any of the "new" features, but it's better than nothing. Might help put off that upgrade for a little while.
I'd love to know how people are making these new drivers, though.
Well back when I saw T2 I knew they could make a sequel. When Cyberdyne was destoyed, then the Terminators couldn't exist, like you said. So at that point in time the T-1000 should have disappeared. As well as the T-800. But they didn't, so that means they still existed, so something happened to make sure Cyberdyne still made terminators.
This reminds me of the line in Austin Powers 2 where when he thinks of time travel too much his brain freezes up.
The great part about science fiction is that nothing has to make sense or have any continuity, and people still like it. Can't really do that with period pieces or westerns. But 50 novels about Kirk and Picard kicking ass throughout the universe? Sign me up!
Slashdot Mirror
It's been said before so I'll say it again. Microsoft does not have a history of using patents to get what they want. Other companies do. Microsoft is coming down on Lindows, for example, for copyright violations, which they have a leg on which to stand, but they traditionally haven't used patents to get what they want. And why would they start now?
I don't think it can stop a monorail as quickly as its pastry bretheren.
</Simpsons>
Colin Fahey has authored a C# OpenGL Wrapper if that helps any...
Still it's gonna be great in the Third Season hits DVD - then the good stuff really starts.
The two laserdisc consoles were simply retarded. The Virtual Boy is famous since it was percieved Nintendo could do no wrong post-NES/SNES, so it stands as a fascinating example (I still have one to this day). The 32X stands out since it was dumb to come out with a 32-bit add-on, then ditch it promptly when your "real" 32-bit console came out. The 3D0 stands out since they went for the different business model and happened to be around when FMV games were the talk of the town.
But the Dreamcast didn't make it to this list, neither did the Saturn, since they weren't dismal failures. The Nintendo 64 didn't make it since it wasn't a failure at all - it just never did as good as the PSX and it's not as popular with adults (who *ahem* should be the readers of this site). The Jaguar was done in by management bungling, not because it was a "bad" console.
The main reason "Console X" didn't make it is because the story behind it wasn't interesting. A console that flopped because it just wasn't the best is boring. A console that flopped because of bad management is boring. A console that flopped because no one wanted to pay $2K for one game or because the designer hadn't been wrong yet, or because they tried to replicate VHS, that's interesting.
Linux has 25 games now? I guess they all win...
- Development has become too expensive, and
- Development has become too difficult
The first point has been addressed (most usefull skills like J2EE andAlthough I hate to see small companies and independent developers hit, I don't agree with the idea that computer programming should be easier or less difficult. This is programming, not assembling furniture. It's now to the point where even the "hold-your-hand" RAD tools are cutting off the non-serious users (VB6 was the bane of bad programming, but VB.NET forces its users to code better, and VB6 "coders" aren't happy about it).
It's exponentially more difficult to be a programmer today than it was, say, twenty years ago and so what I see a lot of (and I'm not saying this is you) is people who got in on the low end (i.e., COBOL thirty years ago) and somewhere between Object Oriented and Polymorphism, fell off the curve. I work at a University that's moving (at some point) from a COBOL-based mainframe to a "web-based" system (whatever that means - PeopleSoft, .NET, something) and the majority of the people who work with me (most of which are at least thirty years older than me) just want to put it off until after they retire.
Once you get ensconced in "difficult" programming, you will either understand why it is how it is and why it is so difficult (i.e., it won't be so difficult anymore) or you'll get so flustered with it that you'll find another profession or hobby. And as programming gets more and more difficult, there will be less and less people to do it, and as a result these people will be worth more since their rarity is increasing.
Or maybe that's just what I want.
It's been pointed out in this thread that Nintendo was basically the Microsoft of the game industry in the late 1980's (90%+ of the industry, antitrust lawsuits - ring a bell). The difference is that everyone still liked them (how could we not - Mario! Zelda!)
Since then Nintendo has fallen from the king of the hill, partly due to the fact that the hill is so much bigger nowadays, but also due to some bad decisions. The Genesis came out before the SNES and Nintendo played catchup until right before the end (Donkey Kong Country pulled them slightly ahead of Sega's numbers, but Sega was still quite the contender). Then with the Nintendo 64, Nintendo pretty much got cocky. I loved the N64 but lots of the decisions they made (cartridges, no Metroid, etc.) were bad. Plus they were doing things like relying on Pokemon, franchises and the children's market. It was as if they didn't realize a portion of their target audience were now grownups
Now we have the new Nintendo. The old Nintendo stayed with a moribund format, the new Nintendo is DVD-based (though 3" DVD's). The old Nintendo wouldn't let a Metroid game be made, the new Nintendo released two last year. The old Nintendo would have had only one good game at launch, and a Mario one at that - the new Nintendo had lots of good games, none of which were Mario, and the Luigi game they did was completely non-traditional. The old (old) Nintendo would never have let a dark, violent game on their console, the new Nintendo scored the exclusives on the Resident Evil franchise. The old Nintendo would forget its roots, the new Nintendo rerelases old NES games in the form of a pack of cards. For that matter, only Nintendo would have thought of that. The old Nintendo would have swamped its console with Pokemon - the new Nintendo has yet to.
The old Nintendo would just tell its customers what they want, the new Nintendo asks its customers what they think of Xbox live.
Imagine what Microsoft would be like if, in ten years, they fell from the top of the heap and had to fight for customers all of a sudden.
I'm a longtime admitted Nintendo fanboy and it's becoming easier to do so.
Vivendi does not own Valve, Sierra published Half-Life and it stands to reason they'll publish whatever else Valve does, but they don't own them.
What a lot of people don't remember however was that they came out with a bizarre press release wherein they announced all the stuff they'd done, how successful it had been (*snicker*) and, most amazingly, their plans for the Action Game Master, which would be a portable handheld system (and a gigantic one at that) that would play - get this - NES, SNES, Genesis and "CDROM" games, plus have a TV Tuner adapter card. Of course it never existed in any form other than a 3D Studio render (and a poor one at that). Does any of this sound familiar?
So what we really need to know is this - who is this Infitium (sp?) company? Are they really a legit company or two guys in a basement? Really they sound like Indrema but with less credibility (and remember, Indrema didn't have too much credibility).
Perhaps its like those Asian pirate carts you can get a million games but they're all randomly generated hacks of Contra.
I guess I meant to say that when someone says ".NET" and you ask them to be more specific and they just look at you like you're stupid and they don't know the names of what exactly they're using then they don't know what they're talking about.
Of course the other reason MS might be pushing .NET so much is the money they stand to make off of the hundreds of books they've written on the subject.
Note that .NET is not a programming language (and I've already seen it used this way in this thread). .NET is a platform (the CLI is like the Java VM) and a framework (the class libraries) but it's not a language. C# is a .NET language, VB.NET is a .NET language, (language).NET is a language, but .NET isn't a language.
Tip: If you ever ask someone what they're writing their app/web site in and they say ".NET" and can't say anything else (like C# or ASP.net) then they don't know what they're talking about (and I should know - I used to do it myself).
For that matter you can also go to a Barnes & Noble, grab a coffee, and sit there and read an ENTIRE book without them wanting you to buy it or get out. Try that at Musicland with a CD.
It would appear that the publishing industry and the recording industry are similar in that they are difficult to get into and tend to "stiff" new artists/authors. Of course the recording industry is difficult to get into because they're looking for the next 18-24 year old Britney Spears clone and the publishing industry is difficult to get into unless your work has something that will sell (for sci-fi your works these days either have to be attached to a franchise or be militaristic in nature).
The main difference, as far as I can see, is that this author and, say, Bruce Eckel, is that they also publish their works through major book publishers. There's lots of websites wherein you can download the entire CD of a small artist, usually the ones who press their own albums on CD-R. But as soon as these guys sign to a major record label, this practice goes away. How it is that TOR is allowing Doctrow to do this is beyond me. No way would they let Robert Jordan release Wheel of Time 10 this way.
But something occured to me - this is a book that's like 136 pages (though Amazon says the hardcover is 208). And it's being published in hardcover for $22.95. That's more than most DVD's or CD's. You can usually pick it up for less than that, but doesn't that seem a little pricey to anyone else? I know that hardcover first issue books are steep, like $29.95 for Wheel of Time 10, but that's a 700 page book whose target audience is rabid about it. Shouldn't a 136 page hardcover book be a little cheaper?
Even better question - how come no one complains about this? People complain about the price of a lot of things - CD's, DVD's, Movies, etc. but they never complain about the price of books. Of course you can download your music if you really want to, you can wait for the movie to hit DVD, you can download the DivX of the movie/DVD if you can find it, and the DVD is loaded down with extras so you don't feel jipped. Could uneasy accessibility to books in digital form be the reason no one complains about their prices?
And what will this do to the mix? Will authors release their material this way in the future in the hopes that being noticed will land them a book deal so they can sell copies to all of those who want a keepsake of something they read for free? Will this guy sell a ton of copies of this book because he was on a Slashdot story? Will this work on a fiction document (Eckel's works are programming books)?
Can the recording industry learn a thing or two from the publishing industry? Or is it the other way around? And whose cause does it help if the Slashdot community buys a ton of this book?
Yeah but his point was that this was a mention of a tin foil hat in this very reasoning (to protect your brain from influences) way prior to 1991. Urban legend or no, if it was told in the 1960's then this was quite a while back and therefore qualifies.
Problem number two - it may have made the kids more agressive, something which lots of things may do (including going to school and playing on a playground with other butthole kids) but did it make them violent enough to kill? Big difference. Plus it doesn't bully them at school, neglect them at home, or give them access to guns - all Columbine factors.
I've watched violent movies all my life and it doesn't affect me much now. But I saw footage of a guy killing himself at a press conference (the "Hey Man Nice Shot" guy) and it still haunts me. There's a world of difference between violence people know is fake and that people know is real. This is why even after we watched September 11 on TV we lined up to see The Sum Of All Fears and we didn't pull Armageddon from stores.
My apologies if this does it in, but here are some direct links to the portions of the movies (i.e., not framed in HTML pages)
Teaser
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Tag/End Credits
I think the episode would be better if the dialouge and video sound quality was as bad as the shots and sound effects of the original, but man - this is impressive ambition to say the least.
My entire post may be redundant, so feel free to point out and mod down, but as I understood it, the classic 1-piece iMac machines were the "iMacs" and the new lamp-shaped ones were the "iMac 2's", and I had assumed that when they started making the iMac 2, they stopped the iMac's. So now what, if this is the end of the iMac 2? Is there an iMac 3 on the horizon? Or is Apple sticking with another system? Making more iMacs?
Or do I have this completely wrong?
So if you want to upgrade to DX 9 I'd say hit up Voodoo Files first. By that token though, I don't think DX 9 will go any faster for you and you in all likelihood won't be able to run any of the "new" features, but it's better than nothing. Might help put off that upgrade for a little while.
I'd love to know how people are making these new drivers, though.
This reminds me of the line in Austin Powers 2 where when he thinks of time travel too much his brain freezes up.
The great part about science fiction is that nothing has to make sense or have any continuity, and people still like it. Can't really do that with period pieces or westerns. But 50 novels about Kirk and Picard kicking ass throughout the universe? Sign me up!
Watching it now. Pretty cool, and pretty effective - but the video seems a little bit too bright.