And here we see the fruits of more than a decade of criminal monopoly power: the alchemists of Redmond converting half a billion in loot into "reviews," press "coverage," and "buzz" about its new toy. After a certain saturation point, it hardly matters whether the X-Box turns out to be any good at all. How can they fail? That's half a billion in tax deductible advertising, and today's media sing when they see the green flashing. You can hear the sycophants warming up their adjectives already.
It's a landmark experiment in engineering public attitudes, and a wonderful illustration of how the game of free markets is played.
I can't see how this will compete with platforms such as the PS2(or PS1).
Good point. The PS1 is still a very strong seller. In fact, if consumer confidence is low this holiday season, Sony can always slash prices even further on the old warhorse. Any system sold that doesn't have "X-box" on it hurts Microsoft, and that's a Good Thing.
Sorry to go off-topic, but your anecdote points to a revolting trend: Corporate America's use of low-paid sales lackeys to fawn for it. Just as you were visited by the servile "what did we do wrong?" fellow, so were we recently called by an abashed representative of the local newspaper (the Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul). "Oh, we've missed you!" were the first words out of her mouth, read, obviously, from a saccharine script. "What do we have to do to get you back?"
I told her we've little use for the establishment media. But, she insisted, surely I must have had a favorite section of the paper. Well, in fact, I did rather miss the food ads, these being simultanously the most useful, honest, and aesthetically pleasing aspect of the publication. Seizing upon this morsel to announce, proudly, "There! See?" she offered the paper at an insanely low price "to make us all friends again," and when I reckoned that it was costing the bastards more to send it to me than I would pay for it, I couldn't resist the offer of friendship.
I inquired whether there was a means just to have the food ads delivered -- save trees, you know, and cut to the quick -- but at these prices, you're stuck extracting them from the dross yourself.;)
Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
on
Digital TV Approaches
·
· Score: 1
Nicely put, PerlGeek.
To those worried about such trivialities as the encryption of idiocy on the boob tube: pshaw! Be thankful, instead, that one more layer of interference shall separate you from the abyss.
After you've seen enough of them, these blurbs all sound alike. They're actually a real favor, as they reduce potboilers to their bare essence. And any book whose essence can be reduced to a series of cliches is one to pass over:
"Open with A BIG TRITE METAPHOR FOR CONFLICT INVOLVING THE WEATHER.... For the three years that WELL-TROD CHARACTER NAME WITH ALLUSIONS TO COMICS, RADIO AND MOVIES spent in prison, he CLICHE'd and CLICHE'd. But days before his scheduled release, UNSURPRISING TRAGEDY occurred. On the plane home to the funeral, CONTRIVED PLOT BUMP is introduced FEATURING UNASSUMING AND THEREFORE VERY SIGNIFICANT VILLAIN, who is named ODDLY AND CLOYINGLY. The self-declared grifter and rogue ("Allow me to introduce myself. I am a grifter and rogue") offers a job. Before you know it, THINGS ARE GETTING CONVENTIONALLY WEIRDER JUST AS THEY ALWAYS DO IN THESE TIRED BLOATED GENRE NOVELS..."
In an age of declining enrollments and scary profit margins for campuses, the student consumer is king. Not that this is a good thing; far from it. However, if these students wished to exert their power, they would go en masse to the president of the university and threaten to pull their student loan funding from the school and give it to a competitor.
Our good professor would quickly discover how much academic integrity matters then!
Banal story overwritten; the Salon formula?
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 1
It's not simply that these stories are told all the time now -- it's that this one is flavorless, dull, cliched, and precious.
Yes, Salon runs some good political writing (by people such as Jake Tapper), but so much of Salon is self-indulgent tripe of this sort that it's not surprising at all that the site has months, maybe less, left before it closes, too. Unless somehow the "tasteful" porn market can rescue it -- but how many sepia tone silhouettes of nipples can they really shovel out a week?
And how would Heather Berry know? As one of the lower rungs of the gaming food chain, Happy Puppy has every incentive to say positive things about ads popping up in games.
The feds would scoop up him (her? himher? it? THEM?) under the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
You've heard of this law: it's the one that allows foreigners to be held without telling them why. It was passed after an American, the soon-not-to-be T. McVeigh, blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building. In the U.S., when our own citizens go looney, we like to crack down on dangerous foreigners.
The sad fact is that no alien, terrestial or extraterrestial, has much in the way of "rights," civil or otherwise, here.
Yes, nicely said, and let us be frank: it's the new Microsoft revenue model.
A flat PC market means a flat OS market. There have been diminishing returns since the great Win 95 sell-through, and the prospects for XP and.Net are ludicrously bad.
Hence this tactic. It can be expressed in a maxim. Call it Gates' Law:
"When you no longer can earn money selling what you make, it's time to force consumers to pay you again for what they've already bought."
I agree that it shall backfire in the long run. A company that wanted to destroy its name would be hard pressed to buy the kind of ill will and animosity engendered by this policy of license strip mining. Or as the Coen Brothers put it in "The Big Lebowski": "Do you see, Donny? Do you see?!? This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!"
There's a sufficient pattern of corrupt practices - and the purveying of endless patches and lucrative OS "upgrades" should be construed as an ongoing protection racket.
Anyone using Windows learns how to block ads in five minutes' time here:
http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/
And one gets the regular updates here:
http://www.smartin-designs.com/
And on a personal note, let me add that I like Salon, and regard it as the intellectual peer of some print publications. Unfortunately for Salon, said print publications give me something in hand to take out of the house or to the crapper with me, and that substantially increases the value to the point where I'm willing to pay 30 clams a year and up. If Salon starts printing, I might subscribe.
Yet everything - every bloody word - that appears on my PC screen is ephemera. Don't even think of asking me to pay for it. And don't insult my intelligence by offering me the equivalent of a no-ads protection racket - really, do you think we've all been allowing you to pump those obnoxious things at us? Get a clue, dinosaurs; this is the Internet age.;)
How, in a world such as ours, could wanting to play games involving pink and blue animals and caricatures of hopping Italian-Americans on a dinky little screen ever qualify as "socially depraved"?
Moronic, maybe, but depraved? Please; it is society with its violence and dehumanization that is depraved, not the proto-nerd with his GBA.:)
Even if what you say is true, there is still one key difference in the business model between failing sites and successful sites that trumps all the other factors combined.
The problem is: what is a reasonable time? The bulk of earnings from a given creative work has already transpired by the time the heirs get their hands on it. That, as weighed against the good to society of having works in the public domain, mitigates against our absurdly over-long copyright period.
It's even worse when there is no estate and the rights are held in perpetuity by a corporation. Then we are speaking of the public good being harmed by anonymous profiteers.
CmdrTaco wouldn't be thinking of himself, would he, when he writes "the folks capable of, say, defacing a website, usually aren't the same folks able to intelligently communicate a message."
Where's the evidence to support your broad claim, Taco?
Intelligence is multifaceted, and speech isn't only verbal. It's arguable that speech as simple as a nudie pic plastered across a government or corporate site communicates "intelligently": the act says, "Ha!" and the message is lost on no one.
While it should always be evaluated on a case by case basis, the value of hacktivism lies in denying power its imperial privilege. It is a reminder to those at the top that those at the bottom are not merely consumers or taxpayers, not only the regulated and the controlled, the paying and the paid off; and it speaks of a shortage of fear, which is a drought that power abhors. As rebellion, it recalls the same wild vein in the American spirit that can be traced to the Boston Tea Party.
That is a vein that no amount of corporate culture can ever bleed dry.
Sixpints couldn't be more foolishly wrong about the Guardian, one of the best newspapers in the world -- its reporting on the Balkans alone putting American rags to shame.
Slashdot Mirror
NPRQuake doesn't alter geometry, either. It merely fudges the rendering of surfaces; the underlying map geometry stays the same.
;)
As for Pencil Whipped, well, it's dark and moody as hell -- OMM Game of the Year!
And here we see the fruits of more than a decade of criminal monopoly power: the alchemists of Redmond converting half a billion in loot into "reviews," press "coverage," and "buzz" about its new toy. After a certain saturation point, it hardly matters whether the X-Box turns out to be any good at all. How can they fail? That's half a billion in tax deductible advertising, and today's media sing when they see the green flashing. You can hear the sycophants warming up their adjectives already.
It's a landmark experiment in engineering public attitudes, and a wonderful illustration of how the game of free markets is played.
Good point. The PS1 is still a very strong seller. In fact, if consumer confidence is low this holiday season, Sony can always slash prices even further on the old warhorse. Any system sold that doesn't have "X-box" on it hurts Microsoft, and that's a Good Thing.
Sorry to go off-topic, but your anecdote points to a revolting trend: Corporate America's use of low-paid sales lackeys to fawn for it. Just as you were visited by the servile "what did we do wrong?" fellow, so were we recently called by an abashed representative of the local newspaper (the Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul). "Oh, we've missed you!" were the first words out of her mouth, read, obviously, from a saccharine script. "What do we have to do to get you back?"
;)
I told her we've little use for the establishment media. But, she insisted, surely I must have had a favorite section of the paper. Well, in fact, I did rather miss the food ads, these being simultanously the most useful, honest, and aesthetically pleasing aspect of the publication. Seizing upon this morsel to announce, proudly, "There! See?" she offered the paper at an insanely low price "to make us all friends again," and when I reckoned that it was costing the bastards more to send it to me than I would pay for it, I couldn't resist the offer of friendship.
I inquired whether there was a means just to have the food ads delivered -- save trees, you know, and cut to the quick -- but at these prices, you're stuck extracting them from the dross yourself.
Nicely put, PerlGeek.
To those worried about such trivialities as the encryption of idiocy on the boob tube: pshaw! Be thankful, instead, that one more layer of interference shall separate you from the abyss.
After you've seen enough of them, these blurbs all sound alike. They're actually a real favor, as they reduce potboilers to their bare essence. And any book whose essence can be reduced to a series of cliches is one to pass over:
"Open with A BIG TRITE METAPHOR FOR CONFLICT INVOLVING THE WEATHER.... For the three years that WELL-TROD CHARACTER NAME WITH ALLUSIONS TO COMICS, RADIO AND MOVIES spent in prison, he CLICHE'd and CLICHE'd. But days before his scheduled release, UNSURPRISING TRAGEDY occurred. On the plane home to the funeral, CONTRIVED PLOT BUMP is introduced FEATURING UNASSUMING AND THEREFORE VERY SIGNIFICANT VILLAIN, who is named ODDLY AND CLOYINGLY. The self-declared grifter and rogue ("Allow me to introduce myself. I am a grifter and rogue") offers a job. Before you know it, THINGS ARE GETTING CONVENTIONALLY WEIRDER JUST AS THEY ALWAYS DO IN THESE TIRED BLOATED GENRE NOVELS..."
Nice op-art effects by Aardappel.
:)
Heh. Even distorted in this way, Quake 1 maps look so much cooler than Quake 3 maps.
In an age of declining enrollments and scary profit margins for campuses, the student consumer is king. Not that this is a good thing; far from it. However, if these students wished to exert their power, they would go en masse to the president of the university and threaten to pull their student loan funding from the school and give it to a competitor.
Our good professor would quickly discover how much academic integrity matters then!
It's not simply that these stories are told all the time now -- it's that this one is flavorless, dull, cliched, and precious.
Yes, Salon runs some good political writing (by people such as Jake Tapper), but so much of Salon is self-indulgent tripe of this sort that it's not surprising at all that the site has months, maybe less, left before it closes, too. Unless somehow the "tasteful" porn market can rescue it -- but how many sepia tone silhouettes of nipples can they really shovel out a week?
First it was our urine.
Now our blood.
Where will they stop?
I think a clear pattern is discernible here, one that is cause for great alarm...
Corporations are proven piss fetishists and blood-sucking freaks.
And how would Heather Berry know? As one of the lower rungs of the gaming food chain, Happy Puppy has every incentive to say positive things about ads popping up in games.
MS can't hide behind the EULA forever.
Which law firm is going to make a big pile suing MS for the known defects in IE/OE?
The feds would scoop up him (her? himher? it? THEM?) under the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
You've heard of this law: it's the one that allows foreigners to be held without telling them why. It was passed after an American, the soon-not-to-be T. McVeigh, blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building. In the U.S., when our own citizens go looney, we like to crack down on dangerous foreigners.
The sad fact is that no alien, terrestial or extraterrestial, has much in the way of "rights," civil or otherwise, here.
Yes, nicely said, and let us be frank: it's the new Microsoft revenue model.
.Net are ludicrously bad.
A flat PC market means a flat OS market. There have been diminishing returns since the great Win 95 sell-through, and the prospects for XP and
Hence this tactic. It can be expressed in a maxim. Call it Gates' Law:
"When you no longer can earn money selling what you make, it's time to force consumers to pay you again for what they've already bought."
I agree that it shall backfire in the long run. A company that wanted to destroy its name would be hard pressed to buy the kind of ill will and animosity engendered by this policy of license strip mining. Or as the Coen Brothers put it in "The Big Lebowski": "Do you see, Donny? Do you see?!? This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!"
There's a sufficient pattern of corrupt practices - and the purveying of endless patches and lucrative OS "upgrades" should be construed as an ongoing protection racket.
Let's close down the Redmond mob.
Anyone using Windows learns how to block ads in five minutes' time here:
;)
http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/
And one gets the regular updates here:
http://www.smartin-designs.com/
And on a personal note, let me add that I like Salon, and regard it as the intellectual peer of some print publications. Unfortunately for Salon, said print publications give me something in hand to take out of the house or to the crapper with me, and that substantially increases the value to the point where I'm willing to pay 30 clams a year and up. If Salon starts printing, I might subscribe.
Yet everything - every bloody word - that appears on my PC screen is ephemera. Don't even think of asking me to pay for it. And don't insult my intelligence by offering me the equivalent of a no-ads protection racket - really, do you think we've all been allowing you to pump those obnoxious things at us? Get a clue, dinosaurs; this is the Internet age.
How, in a world such as ours, could wanting to play games involving pink and blue animals and caricatures of hopping Italian-Americans on a dinky little screen ever qualify as "socially depraved"?
:)
Moronic, maybe, but depraved? Please; it is society with its violence and dehumanization that is depraved, not the proto-nerd with his GBA.
Elron Hubbard, noted cult founder at Rivendell? ;)
Brilliant piece of commentary.
;)
For a moment, I was almost willing to pay for it.
Even if what you say is true, there is still one key difference in the business model between failing sites and successful sites that trumps all the other factors combined.
Successful sites have porn.
Thank you for alerting me to a site that I shall surely avoid. May you choke on your own "total focus."
The problem is: what is a reasonable time? The bulk of earnings from a given creative work has already transpired by the time the heirs get their hands on it. That, as weighed against the good to society of having works in the public domain, mitigates against our absurdly over-long copyright period.
It's even worse when there is no estate and the rights are held in perpetuity by a corporation. Then we are speaking of the public good being harmed by anonymous profiteers.
Good comment.
However, if you've not read Martin Amis, then you've missed a case of the fils outdoing the pere (Kingsley Amis).
CmdrTaco wouldn't be thinking of himself, would he, when he writes "the folks capable of, say, defacing a website, usually aren't the same folks able to intelligently communicate a message."
Where's the evidence to support your broad claim, Taco?
Intelligence is multifaceted, and speech isn't only verbal. It's arguable that speech as simple as a nudie pic plastered across a government or corporate site communicates "intelligently": the act says, "Ha!" and the message is lost on no one.
While it should always be evaluated on a case by case basis, the value of hacktivism lies in denying power its imperial privilege. It is a reminder to those at the top that those at the bottom are not merely consumers or taxpayers, not only the regulated and the controlled, the paying and the paid off; and it speaks of a shortage of fear, which is a drought that power abhors. As rebellion, it recalls the same wild vein in the American spirit that can be traced to the Boston Tea Party.
That is a vein that no amount of corporate culture can ever bleed dry.
Sixpints couldn't be more foolishly wrong about the Guardian, one of the best newspapers in the world -- its reporting on the Balkans alone putting American rags to shame.