OT: Open it only when you're using your DS
on
DS WiFi On The Way
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· Score: 1
Please broadcast your SSID. If you don't, it makes it difficult to avoid being on the same channel and polluting eachother's signals. There are 4 wireless routers within earshot of my apartment who broadcast their SSID, and judging by the packets floating around about 8 that don't. The stealth ones frequently wind up sitting on eachother's signals, or sitting on an already-occupied channel of a broadcasted one. Not surprisingly, the ones that show their SSID and channel never wind up interfering with eachother.
During Beta, Ragnarok (a korean MMPORPG) casually asked for your gender at sign-up. After more factual collection it presented you with a palette of character options... but only in the gender you originally labeled yourself as. You could only be your gender.
It was an interesting twist, and I think it really helped the social dynamics of the game. However it pi$$ed off a lot of female gamers, who wanted to hide behind male characters to avoid the cat calling etc.
It seems like cellular phone networks always go down after an attack anyway. They also go down at big events. They go down when people are let out of a football game. They go down because it snowed. In New York, they go down when you turn the corner.
I don't know why a terrorist would need to do additional stuff to disrupt a cellphone network after an attack: Any event of note would be enough to take care of that.
in-game ad campaigns resulted in a 60 percent increase in awareness of new brands.
Hmm... are you aware of this brand you've never heard of? Ok, now play this game. Now are you aware of it? No? $%&#ing 40% jerkoffs.
50 percent of study participants said they found that in-game ads make the experience more realistic, while just 21 percent disagreed. Similarly, 54 percent said in-game advertising "catches your attention." Just 17 percent disagreed, the company said.
82% agreed that the ads were "bloody annoying." Oh wait, they didn't release that statistic. I'm sure tons of people would agree that Nike signs in a baseball stadium are realistic. And that they really do grab your attention away from the game that you're playing. Neither of these things is necessarily positive, nor does it imply a sale.
If you go to Double Fusion's home page, notice how all of the pictures in the bottom-left hand corner say "fictional advertisers" in tiny text that is almost entirely cut off?
At least Massive doesn't have to lie to people about its advertisers.
Even in the FAQ things sound a little dodgy. Does DoubleFusion gather personally identifiable information about game users? DoubleFusion conforms to the game publisher's policy.
Which is a nice way of saying, "as much as we can get away with."
And as a final nail in the coffin, would you trust your game to an unproven israeli company whose only managed to get into one game that nobody can find? And that game has a copycat name to a legitimate game developer?
If I remember correctly, when DivX died, they provided a number to call that would unlock the players for their customers. They might have died a well-deserved death, but they died with honor.
Previously you had the "time expired" DVD's that ran in a standard DVD player. They self-destructed 24 hours after coming into contact with air (I.E. they were unwrapped).
Nobody bought them anyway.
There is just that feeling of having your toys taken away. With a rental car, you rent the thing and have to give it back because the next person needs it. Same with video. But if you buy a disk, and it is set to explode after a few plays, you're buying something that is crippled. You don't have to give it back because somebody else needs it, they're taking it away purely to try and get more money from you. Microsoft is used to kicking it's customers in the teeth, but maybe that's why it is stuck in Operating Systems and Corporate Lock-in land.
Even without the player dongle this would probably be doomed. But with it, the system might as well run Microsoft Bob.
It all depends on how well they can make it, and how they make money off of it. If they're going ad-supported and can competently read / write.doc files, I could see lots of families using Google writer instead of buying or pirating Office.
I would guess that most medium to large businesses would stick with MS Office for the time being. But the smaller businesses who don't want to pirate MS Office will benefit from the service. And such a thing would be the first major crack in the armor of MS Office... a way to read / write DOC files that the average person knows about and might use. Nobody trusts StarOffice. But Google?
Here's hoping this isn't proved wrong in 3 hours, 45 minutes.
Whether or not it has manufacturing problems, the Nano is the biggest consumer electronics thing to happen this year. Yet it is nowhere to be found. The RIO Carbon? Someone needs to update the list.
They list Opera 8, which was a nice update to 7, but they don't mention 8.5 where the browser went free.
They don't mention Nintendogs. Say what you will about the "game," it is definitely a defining game of the year, in much the same way that Katamari was last year. They also claim that the PSP was the first handheld with Wi-Fi out of the box, but I'm going to stop talking about the DS before I sound like a fanboy.
June is way too early to publish a list of the best products of the year. The Motorola iTunes phone is still coming out. The Xbox 360 is still coming out.
Not to contradict your largely correct argument too much, but VHS tapes did have a form of copyprotection. VHS intentionally had unsynchronized play and record. If you recorded a 1st generation copy from an original tape, it came out looking just about the same. The 2nd generation had some bigger artifacting. The 3rd generation came out looking really bad. By the time you got to a 6th generation, all you would get is snow.
This was intentional. It was actually a feature of the platform that was touted to the studios, and one of the reasons why studios chose to put our more movies on VHS than on BETA. You'll notice, if you do the same experiment in BETA you get basically the same image generation after generation. This is one of the reasons why TV was (and largely still is) on a BETA-derived standard. But the rest of us were pushed away from that standard, largely because VHS included this inherent copyprotection.
If the DVD standard hadn't included encryption, I wouldn't be surprised if we were on a WMP standard for video, just because that's what all of the movies would be released on.
I'm not saying they should, though it would be very helpful in getting digital distribution of movies going if the MPAA did it. It would also, hopefully, lead to less pushing-restrictive-laws-on-citizens and more pushing-restrictive-laws-on-competition.
The MPAA would serve the purpose of legitimizing the affair and bringing their constituent's back catalogs online. They would serve as lubrication, which somehow seems like a fitting analogy.
The MPAA, and the big movie studios and companies are looking a lot like Atari when it turned down Nintendo's offer to handle distribution of the NES in the U.S... They have a golden opportunity here, but it looks like they're not going to take that risk until someone else proves their business model for them. At which point it will be too late. In a year, Jobs is going to announce iMovies, and suddenly the studios will be kicking themselves for not doing it first. Well, they were too timid to do what they obviously needed to do, and missed their chance.
Take a major motion picture. Rip it. Add a "preview" feature that lets you watch the first 20 minutes of the film for free. At a tense moment, redirect the viewer to a website to unlock the rest of the content. Distributers bypassed, developers make money. MPAA makes money.
Yes, I said the MPAA makes money. While we're not talking about controlling traditional retail channels, there is no reason why they couldn't control online distribution. Get the members to agree, rework MPAA.com into the rental destination online, containing all of their member's catalogs available for preview and rental. People go there to find movies, and not other places.
I don't know why this is such a hard concept for the MPAA... People flock to somewhere online in the same way that they flock to Blockbuster in the real world. People flocked to napster, they flocked to supernova.org despite there being millions of alternatives out there, people flock to iTunes for their music purchases... they would flock to MPAA.com too if they provided what people wanted. The MPAA would still control the distribution channel, and they would continue to make stupid amounts of money.
It's just too bad that they're so afraid of losing their business to PC's that they forget just how much money they made on VHS sales and rentals (which they also thought would ruin them).
s-kill, basically, kills a process by name. "skill netscape" will kill netscape, no finding proc ID required. It's what kill should have been from the beginning.
The only command I love more than skill is apt-get, but that doesn't really count.
I'm convinced of this. Management at many companies likes to spend money, because to them it feels like an "investment." If they "invest" 200,000 dollars into OS purchases, there is a lot more percieved value than investing 0 dollars into OS purchases.
The famous economics example is the fur coat markup. A New York boutique got a lucky closeout and tried to pass that on to their customers. So they marked a rack full of fur coats at 400 dollars. Unfortunately none of these sold. So they shifted gears and marked the fur coats up to 2,000 dollars. Now they quickly sold out. Apparently, nobody wanted a cheap fur coat and everyone wanted a nice fur coat. And because none of these people knew how to judge a fur coat, the only thing they had to go on was the price.
The same thing is true of management at some companies and technology purchases. Office is 4x as expensive as Star Office, and infinitely more expensive as Open Office, so it must be substantially better. Right? Why cheap out on technology purchases when you are investing in your infrastructure and you have no idea what you're doing? Sign the big check... that will assure smooth sailing down the road.
Of course, down the road THEIR boss looks at that big check and wonders where all of that money went. And their infrastructure is unable to keep up with things so they feel the need to hire even more expensive consultants from IBM at 300 dollars an hour, and pour even more money into the most expensive solution they can find. If the 200,000 dollar NT webserver needs rebooting weekly, the solution must be the 400,000 dollar Win 2K webserver using all HP parts and solutions, right?
Unfortunately, sometimes the most expensive solution is the worst. Frequently in technology more expensive means more chefs in the kitchen, which leads to shoddy cohesion and ultimately shoddy construction. Additionally, the most expensive solutions are from companies that just want the money, and who will simply markup existing packages, overbill for time, and sell you hardware that is built at the cheapest Malasian refurb factories and that is guaranteed to die the moment the consultant steps out of your building with a check.
As a side note, I still find it shocking what I can bill for my time as a computer consultant. For that kind of money, just hire someone competent for your staff full-time. If you don't feel like you can do that, hire an outside consultant to hire someone for you.
They bite the vendors, and they screw everyone else, including the artists and the buyers. If this is not monopoly abuse then I don't know what is.
But they don't have a monopoly over Apple. Apple would still be selling oodles and oodles of iPods if they never had iTunes, iTMS just gives them respectability. If the iPod was MP3-only, it would still rock as a player. After all, you're not going to fill a 40GB player without at least doing some major CD rips.
Jobs could tell the record industry tomorrow to screw, and the dip might not even register in Apple's revenue stream. iTMS is good for Apple's future, but it isn't as important to Apple as creating a legitimate online revenue stream is to the music industry.
But the only reason the Internet is free is because the companies controlling its infrastructure are not only in a free country, but in the only country founded on individual rights.
Microsoft and Sony aren't Behemoths. A behemoth is a giant creature with one brain. Microsoft and Sony are Kudzus... Essentially dozens of big companies operating under the same name, often times competing with eachother. For example, the Memory Stick division and Sony's Playstation division couldn't agree on licensing terms, and so the Playstation (and the PS2) didn't ship with Sony's own memory card standard.
Sony's tech support on their 2,000k dollar fragile-as-crystal notebooks is an exercise in pain. Yet Sony has been the most agreeable publisher I've had the pleasure of working with. Their notebooks are terrible. But their PDA's were the best on the market.
In case you haven't noticed, both companies have their shoddy construction problems in certain areas. Sony's flagship PlayStation was known for a short lifespan and needing to be propped up at funny angles. Microsoft's Windows had to be rearchitected and rebuilt (the latest delay of Vista) because the XP codebase was just crap.
On the other hand, both of their gaming divisions delivered respectable platforms this past generation. Sony's PS2 was a cheaply built little machine, but it had good development tools, good adaptability, and a realistic price point. The Xbox had some great features like XBL and a HDD.
Yet with all of this, the debate over Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD seems like an argument over which Japanese DoCoMo handset is better to sell in New York: Both are incompatible with the current generation of televisions (even cutting edge ones), so what's the point? They're so DRM emcumbered that you can't get a better-than-DVD signal without re-upgrading your home theater system to a "trusted" one.
While HD-DVD requires managed copy ability, companies can still veto it by offering the service for some ridiculous fee.
Ironically Blu-Ray not taking off is better for Sony's PS3. That will ensure lower piracy rates due to the lower availability of duplicating hardware. We also know that it isn't "many years" away, as the PS3 will ship with it. And while the PS3 ship date is optimistic, it will ship within 1-2 years.
Both companies have vested interestes in the technology. What, you think Microsoft is pushing this for consumers? What company do you think is providing the mandatory managed copy software? What, did you think you could copy that HD-DVD to Linux?
Apple is selling the nano as a vanity item. Everyone wants one because they look so damned sexy. You can walk down the street in New York wearing wearing Prada shoes and a Dolce & Gabana outfit with a fashionably shoplifted 2nd hand jacket, and still the Nano is the hottest thing on you. If you shell out that much cash because the thing is just so bloody lickable, you want it to stay that way for at least a little while.
My cell-phone is a plastic candybar style that shares a pocket with a rather unwieldy set of keys and a less-cool-than-I-thought-it-would-be aluminum moneyclip. Yet, in a year of abuse it has gotten less scratches than some of the pictures I've seen of day-old nanos. My girlfriend's iRiver looks less abused after two years of use, and it's also black and also goes everywhere with her. And it's by HP for crying out loud.
It seems like older iPod owners have this attitude that "Yeah, I put up with it, and so should you." Demand better, damn it. Also, realize that this is a different thing. The nano is half the size of your iPod, meaning the scratches are twice as large. And your iPods are white, whereas a lot of the Nanos sold are black, which make the scratches stand out more. And while the iPods get scratched, I haven't seen an iPod get scratched this quickly. Most of the pictures out there look like a 2 or 3 year old iPod, yet are only a few days out of the gate. I can only imagine how badly scratched up they will be in 2 to 3 actual years. Some people are already complaining that they're sufficiently scratched to make the song titles completely illegible. I've never heard of an iPod get that bad.
I had been planning on buying a Nano, either for myself or my S.O., but I'm definitely waiting until they have this problem solved.
And the bras on the front of cars absorb radar, letting you drive a bit faster and still slow down in time for the cop. They're functional.
Yeah. I had to make a custom sound-deadening enclosure with it's own series of fans to get my HDD's down to a reasonable volume. Of course, I also need a computer capable of running games... My fanless C3 is with a 1GB flashcard is pretty quiet, but try getting that to run Half-Life 2. So I'm stuck with the more noisy one. But there is a lot you can do to get the noise down.
It sounds like you're already hooked up, but just in case I recommend Silent PC Review. They were one of the first sites dedicated to the topic, and they're still the best.
First, rich don't get riched "at the expense" of anyone. When someone gets richer, that doesn't mean they stole that money from someone else. Why do you hold such disdain for someone who is successful, who has worked smarter or harder, or planned better than someone else?
Clearly you haven't seen some of the golden parachutes flying around. Carly Fiona got 21 million dollars as a reward for getting fired for driving HP into the ground. Of course, her job at HP was a reward for getting fired for driving Lucent into the ground. You can work hard, work smart, and make a nice 120,000 dollar a year living for yourself. Or you can raid pension funds, make terrible but flashy decisions, and jump ship with millions of dollars before the consequences of your bad decisions catch up to you. And while you're at it, don't forget to cook the books leaving your workers out in the cold when your company goes under. Don't worry, by that time you'll have made your money and cashed out.
Money isn't a zero-sum game, but it can be close. The GDP only goes up by so much every year. I totally agree that the person who invented bubble wrap deserves the fortune he has recieved. And there are some examples of that kind of wealth. But most of the people who get rich do so doing things like re-selling consulting services at 500% markups to poor dupes. Or selling substandard armor to the military at insane prices. Or by using marketing techniques to make parents feel bad if they don't buy their kids McDonalds every day. And nearly everyone who is rich is so because their parents were rich.
Simply working "hard" doesn't mean you will -- or even deserve -- to strike it rich. That's lunacy. That's not the American dream. The American Dream is that the only one stopping you from being successful in America is yourself.
And that is what the grandparent poster was saying was incorrect. It's not "yourself" that stops you from getting rich in the US. Getting rich is a secret club, and if you don't happen to have a friend at diebold, or had the misfortune of being born black, you're pretty much screwed. That's not to say there aren't successful black people out there, but how many black presidents have we had? How many presidents have we had that dragged themselves out of poverty as kids?
One of the odd things about the American Dream is that it perpetuates the myth that the lower class is the lower class because they are lazy or uncreative. Go read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She goes into some great details like how if you can't save up 3 months rent, you must rent by the week at much higher costs, further preventing you from saving anything. Or how by being poor and therefore not having a car, the only jobs you can get are on bus lines, severely limiting your options and further guaranteeing that you will stay poor.
Or better yet, take a sabbatical from wherever you work, and live a lower-class life for a few months. I think you'll be surprised to find that the working class, despite having different lingual characteristics, are every bit as bright as you or I, and generally work their tails off. But the American Dream says that if they are doing that, why aren't they successful? Either they must be actually lazy, or the American Dream is wrong.
You can guess which one I believe in.
the only one stopping you from being successful in America is yourself. That, and the bureaucrats.
Right. Those god-damned people at the FDA. My coolant-pops were a big hit at the auto shop. It's all a bunch of red tape about fill-out-this-paper and half-of-our-mice-died. Just get off my back!
What happened to personal responsibility? That is the corner stone of the American Dream. If the American Dream truly is dead as you claim, then it is for this reason alone.
To be fair, silent would also have no coil whine. Even without a fan you can still hear a power supply, you just have to get close enough. "Silent" just means quiet enough that you can't hear it over the background noise. It's a subjective definition, and that's what they're counting on.
Volume generally decreases with the number of fans, for a given airflow volume. If you want your machine to more quiet, double the number of fans and halve their rotational speed. Or quadrouple the number of fans, and run them almost at the point where they stop. You want a PSU that has 2X fans, running at.5 speed... Airflow increases linearly with rotation speed, whereas volume increases exponentially.
Generally the loud fans are the smaller single fans that are run at high speed. Seemingly paradoxically, a 120mm case fan will almost always be silent compared to the 40MM screamers they put on northbridge chips.
Oddly enough, there is a local minimum. If developers are afraid of the Revolution, and they don't make games for it, then making games for the Revolution starts to almost guarantee a sale. Nintendo's in-house titles are of high-enough quality to guarantee some console sales, and the uniqueness of the controller will get more. Some degree of support will be optimal for the 3rd parties.
But mainly I think Nintendo is embracing and extending. They've made a controller system that looks like it can support game types from other systems (via an attachment... *shudder*), but those competing systems can't support the Nintendo exclusive titles. So you can buy an Xbox 360, a PS3, or a Revolution if you want to play Sly Cooper 4, but if you want to play Star Wars: Lightsaber Battles properly you will need a Revolution. That's a pretty big incentive to pick one console over another. That's why Microsoft bought Bungee instead of just working with them, and why Nintendo gives Miyamoto anything he asks for. Nintendo is guaranteeing themselves some unique exclusives. And unlike their past exclusives, they don't have to be the ones to build them.
They're going for a lock, basically. And while everyone is going for a lock in their own ways, (free live online, PS2 compatibility, etc), this seems like a potentially fun lock.
I think the real question is whether or not the add-on controller idea will take off everywhere... such a thing might fly in Japan, where peripheral sales are high, but in the US and Europe that plan has repeatedly failed. The interface is probably too limited without more than two buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
WMD's are sold at a loss?
Please broadcast your SSID. If you don't, it makes it difficult to avoid being on the same channel and polluting eachother's signals. There are 4 wireless routers within earshot of my apartment who broadcast their SSID, and judging by the packets floating around about 8 that don't. The stealth ones frequently wind up sitting on eachother's signals, or sitting on an already-occupied channel of a broadcasted one. Not surprisingly, the ones that show their SSID and channel never wind up interfering with eachother.
During Beta, Ragnarok (a korean MMPORPG) casually asked for your gender at sign-up. After more factual collection it presented you with a palette of character options... but only in the gender you originally labeled yourself as. You could only be your gender.
It was an interesting twist, and I think it really helped the social dynamics of the game. However it pi$$ed off a lot of female gamers, who wanted to hide behind male characters to avoid the cat calling etc.
It seems like cellular phone networks always go down after an attack anyway. They also go down at big events. They go down when people are let out of a football game. They go down because it snowed. In New York, they go down when you turn the corner.
I don't know why a terrorist would need to do additional stuff to disrupt a cellphone network after an attack: Any event of note would be enough to take care of that.
I'd like to be able to play online at home but I'm not about to turn off encryption to do it.
Then allow only Nintendo's range of MAC addresses to connect without encryption. Your router does support that, right?
At which point a quick sniff and anyone can be on your network. I do hope they include encryption. The alternative isn't particularly secure.
in-game ad campaigns resulted in a 60 percent increase in awareness of new brands.
Hmm... are you aware of this brand you've never heard of? Ok, now play this game. Now are you aware of it? No? $%&#ing 40% jerkoffs.
50 percent of study participants said they found that in-game ads make the experience more realistic, while just 21 percent disagreed. Similarly, 54 percent said in-game advertising "catches your attention." Just 17 percent disagreed, the company said.
82% agreed that the ads were "bloody annoying." Oh wait, they didn't release that statistic. I'm sure tons of people would agree that Nike signs in a baseball stadium are realistic. And that they really do grab your attention away from the game that you're playing. Neither of these things is necessarily positive, nor does it imply a sale.
If you go to Double Fusion's home page, notice how all of the pictures in the bottom-left hand corner say "fictional advertisers" in tiny text that is almost entirely cut off?
At least Massive doesn't have to lie to people about its advertisers.
Even in the FAQ things sound a little dodgy.
Does DoubleFusion gather personally identifiable information about game users?
DoubleFusion conforms to the game publisher's policy.
Which is a nice way of saying, "as much as we can get away with."
And as a final nail in the coffin, would you trust your game to an unproven israeli company whose only managed to get into one game that nobody can find? And that game has a copycat name to a legitimate game developer?
If I remember correctly, when DivX died, they provided a number to call that would unlock the players for their customers. They might have died a well-deserved death, but they died with honor.
Previously you had the "time expired" DVD's that ran in a standard DVD player. They self-destructed 24 hours after coming into contact with air (I.E. they were unwrapped).
Nobody bought them anyway.
There is just that feeling of having your toys taken away. With a rental car, you rent the thing and have to give it back because the next person needs it. Same with video. But if you buy a disk, and it is set to explode after a few plays, you're buying something that is crippled. You don't have to give it back because somebody else needs it, they're taking it away purely to try and get more money from you. Microsoft is used to kicking it's customers in the teeth, but maybe that's why it is stuck in Operating Systems and Corporate Lock-in land.
Even without the player dongle this would probably be doomed. But with it, the system might as well run Microsoft Bob.
It all depends on how well they can make it, and how they make money off of it. If they're going ad-supported and can competently read / write .doc files, I could see lots of families using Google writer instead of buying or pirating Office.
I would guess that most medium to large businesses would stick with MS Office for the time being. But the smaller businesses who don't want to pirate MS Office will benefit from the service. And such a thing would be the first major crack in the armor of MS Office... a way to read / write DOC files that the average person knows about and might use. Nobody trusts StarOffice. But Google?
Here's hoping this isn't proved wrong in 3 hours, 45 minutes.
Has it really been THAT boring a year?
Some people found the PSP pretty exciting.
Whether or not it has manufacturing problems, the Nano is the biggest consumer electronics thing to happen this year. Yet it is nowhere to be found. The RIO Carbon? Someone needs to update the list.
They list Opera 8, which was a nice update to 7, but they don't mention 8.5 where the browser went free.
They don't mention Nintendogs. Say what you will about the "game," it is definitely a defining game of the year, in much the same way that Katamari was last year. They also claim that the PSP was the first handheld with Wi-Fi out of the box, but I'm going to stop talking about the DS before I sound like a fanboy.
June is way too early to publish a list of the best products of the year. The Motorola iTunes phone is still coming out. The Xbox 360 is still coming out.
Not to contradict your largely correct argument too much, but VHS tapes did have a form of copyprotection. VHS intentionally had unsynchronized play and record. If you recorded a 1st generation copy from an original tape, it came out looking just about the same. The 2nd generation had some bigger artifacting. The 3rd generation came out looking really bad. By the time you got to a 6th generation, all you would get is snow.
This was intentional. It was actually a feature of the platform that was touted to the studios, and one of the reasons why studios chose to put our more movies on VHS than on BETA. You'll notice, if you do the same experiment in BETA you get basically the same image generation after generation. This is one of the reasons why TV was (and largely still is) on a BETA-derived standard. But the rest of us were pushed away from that standard, largely because VHS included this inherent copyprotection.
If the DVD standard hadn't included encryption, I wouldn't be surprised if we were on a WMP standard for video, just because that's what all of the movies would be released on.
I'm not saying they should, though it would be very helpful in getting digital distribution of movies going if the MPAA did it. It would also, hopefully, lead to less pushing-restrictive-laws-on-citizens and more pushing-restrictive-laws-on-competition.
The MPAA would serve the purpose of legitimizing the affair and bringing their constituent's back catalogs online. They would serve as lubrication, which somehow seems like a fitting analogy.
The MPAA, and the big movie studios and companies are looking a lot like Atari when it turned down Nintendo's offer to handle distribution of the NES in the U.S... They have a golden opportunity here, but it looks like they're not going to take that risk until someone else proves their business model for them. At which point it will be too late. In a year, Jobs is going to announce iMovies, and suddenly the studios will be kicking themselves for not doing it first. Well, they were too timid to do what they obviously needed to do, and missed their chance.
Take a major motion picture. Rip it. Add a "preview" feature that lets you watch the first 20 minutes of the film for free. At a tense moment, redirect the viewer to a website to unlock the rest of the content. Distributers bypassed, developers make money. MPAA makes money.
Yes, I said the MPAA makes money. While we're not talking about controlling traditional retail channels, there is no reason why they couldn't control online distribution. Get the members to agree, rework MPAA.com into the rental destination online, containing all of their member's catalogs available for preview and rental. People go there to find movies, and not other places.
I don't know why this is such a hard concept for the MPAA... People flock to somewhere online in the same way that they flock to Blockbuster in the real world. People flocked to napster, they flocked to supernova.org despite there being millions of alternatives out there, people flock to iTunes for their music purchases... they would flock to MPAA.com too if they provided what people wanted. The MPAA would still control the distribution channel, and they would continue to make stupid amounts of money.
It's just too bad that they're so afraid of losing their business to PC's that they forget just how much money they made on VHS sales and rentals (which they also thought would ruin them).
I'm not much of a linux guru, so my favorite is simple.
skill
s-kill, basically, kills a process by name. "skill netscape" will kill netscape, no finding proc ID required. It's what kill should have been from the beginning.
The only command I love more than skill is apt-get, but that doesn't really count.
I'm convinced of this. Management at many companies likes to spend money, because to them it feels like an "investment." If they "invest" 200,000 dollars into OS purchases, there is a lot more percieved value than investing 0 dollars into OS purchases.
The famous economics example is the fur coat markup. A New York boutique got a lucky closeout and tried to pass that on to their customers. So they marked a rack full of fur coats at 400 dollars. Unfortunately none of these sold. So they shifted gears and marked the fur coats up to 2,000 dollars. Now they quickly sold out. Apparently, nobody wanted a cheap fur coat and everyone wanted a nice fur coat. And because none of these people knew how to judge a fur coat, the only thing they had to go on was the price.
The same thing is true of management at some companies and technology purchases. Office is 4x as expensive as Star Office, and infinitely more expensive as Open Office, so it must be substantially better. Right? Why cheap out on technology purchases when you are investing in your infrastructure and you have no idea what you're doing? Sign the big check... that will assure smooth sailing down the road.
Of course, down the road THEIR boss looks at that big check and wonders where all of that money went. And their infrastructure is unable to keep up with things so they feel the need to hire even more expensive consultants from IBM at 300 dollars an hour, and pour even more money into the most expensive solution they can find. If the 200,000 dollar NT webserver needs rebooting weekly, the solution must be the 400,000 dollar Win 2K webserver using all HP parts and solutions, right?
Unfortunately, sometimes the most expensive solution is the worst. Frequently in technology more expensive means more chefs in the kitchen, which leads to shoddy cohesion and ultimately shoddy construction. Additionally, the most expensive solutions are from companies that just want the money, and who will simply markup existing packages, overbill for time, and sell you hardware that is built at the cheapest Malasian refurb factories and that is guaranteed to die the moment the consultant steps out of your building with a check.
As a side note, I still find it shocking what I can bill for my time as a computer consultant. For that kind of money, just hire someone competent for your staff full-time. If you don't feel like you can do that, hire an outside consultant to hire someone for you.
They bite the vendors, and they screw everyone else, including the artists and the buyers. If this is not monopoly abuse then I don't know what is.
But they don't have a monopoly over Apple. Apple would still be selling oodles and oodles of iPods if they never had iTunes, iTMS just gives them respectability. If the iPod was MP3-only, it would still rock as a player. After all, you're not going to fill a 40GB player without at least doing some major CD rips.
Jobs could tell the record industry tomorrow to screw, and the dip might not even register in Apple's revenue stream. iTMS is good for Apple's future, but it isn't as important to Apple as creating a legitimate online revenue stream is to the music industry.
But the only reason the Internet is free is because the companies controlling its infrastructure are not only in a free country, but in the only country founded on individual rights.
ICANN is Canadian?
Microsoft and Sony aren't Behemoths. A behemoth is a giant creature with one brain. Microsoft and Sony are Kudzus... Essentially dozens of big companies operating under the same name, often times competing with eachother. For example, the Memory Stick division and Sony's Playstation division couldn't agree on licensing terms, and so the Playstation (and the PS2) didn't ship with Sony's own memory card standard.
Sony's tech support on their 2,000k dollar fragile-as-crystal notebooks is an exercise in pain. Yet Sony has been the most agreeable publisher I've had the pleasure of working with. Their notebooks are terrible. But their PDA's were the best on the market.
In case you haven't noticed, both companies have their shoddy construction problems in certain areas. Sony's flagship PlayStation was known for a short lifespan and needing to be propped up at funny angles. Microsoft's Windows had to be rearchitected and rebuilt (the latest delay of Vista) because the XP codebase was just crap.
On the other hand, both of their gaming divisions delivered respectable platforms this past generation. Sony's PS2 was a cheaply built little machine, but it had good development tools, good adaptability, and a realistic price point. The Xbox had some great features like XBL and a HDD.
Yet with all of this, the debate over Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD seems like an argument over which Japanese DoCoMo handset is better to sell in New York: Both are incompatible with the current generation of televisions (even cutting edge ones), so what's the point? They're so DRM emcumbered that you can't get a better-than-DVD signal without re-upgrading your home theater system to a "trusted" one.
While HD-DVD requires managed copy ability, companies can still veto it by offering the service for some ridiculous fee.
Ironically Blu-Ray not taking off is better for Sony's PS3. That will ensure lower piracy rates due to the lower availability of duplicating hardware. We also know that it isn't "many years" away, as the PS3 will ship with it. And while the PS3 ship date is optimistic, it will ship within 1-2 years.
Both companies have vested interestes in the technology. What, you think Microsoft is pushing this for consumers? What company do you think is providing the mandatory managed copy software? What, did you think you could copy that HD-DVD to Linux?
Apple is selling the nano as a vanity item. Everyone wants one because they look so damned sexy. You can walk down the street in New York wearing wearing Prada shoes and a Dolce & Gabana outfit with a fashionably shoplifted 2nd hand jacket, and still the Nano is the hottest thing on you. If you shell out that much cash because the thing is just so bloody lickable, you want it to stay that way for at least a little while.
My cell-phone is a plastic candybar style that shares a pocket with a rather unwieldy set of keys and a less-cool-than-I-thought-it-would-be aluminum moneyclip. Yet, in a year of abuse it has gotten less scratches than some of the pictures I've seen of day-old nanos. My girlfriend's iRiver looks less abused after two years of use, and it's also black and also goes everywhere with her. And it's by HP for crying out loud.
It seems like older iPod owners have this attitude that "Yeah, I put up with it, and so should you." Demand better, damn it. Also, realize that this is a different thing. The nano is half the size of your iPod, meaning the scratches are twice as large. And your iPods are white, whereas a lot of the Nanos sold are black, which make the scratches stand out more. And while the iPods get scratched, I haven't seen an iPod get scratched this quickly. Most of the pictures out there look like a 2 or 3 year old iPod, yet are only a few days out of the gate. I can only imagine how badly scratched up they will be in 2 to 3 actual years. Some people are already complaining that they're sufficiently scratched to make the song titles completely illegible. I've never heard of an iPod get that bad.
I had been planning on buying a Nano, either for myself or my S.O., but I'm definitely waiting until they have this problem solved.
And the bras on the front of cars absorb radar, letting you drive a bit faster and still slow down in time for the cop. They're functional.
Yeah. I had to make a custom sound-deadening enclosure with it's own series of fans to get my HDD's down to a reasonable volume. Of course, I also need a computer capable of running games... My fanless C3 is with a 1GB flashcard is pretty quiet, but try getting that to run Half-Life 2. So I'm stuck with the more noisy one. But there is a lot you can do to get the noise down.
It sounds like you're already hooked up, but just in case I recommend Silent PC Review. They were one of the first sites dedicated to the topic, and they're still the best.
First, rich don't get riched "at the expense" of anyone. When someone gets richer, that doesn't mean they stole that money from someone else. Why do you hold such disdain for someone who is successful, who has worked smarter or harder, or planned better than someone else?
Clearly you haven't seen some of the golden parachutes flying around. Carly Fiona got 21 million dollars as a reward for getting fired for driving HP into the ground. Of course, her job at HP was a reward for getting fired for driving Lucent into the ground. You can work hard, work smart, and make a nice 120,000 dollar a year living for yourself. Or you can raid pension funds, make terrible but flashy decisions, and jump ship with millions of dollars before the consequences of your bad decisions catch up to you. And while you're at it, don't forget to cook the books leaving your workers out in the cold when your company goes under. Don't worry, by that time you'll have made your money and cashed out.
Money isn't a zero-sum game, but it can be close. The GDP only goes up by so much every year. I totally agree that the person who invented bubble wrap deserves the fortune he has recieved. And there are some examples of that kind of wealth. But most of the people who get rich do so doing things like re-selling consulting services at 500% markups to poor dupes. Or selling substandard armor to the military at insane prices. Or by using marketing techniques to make parents feel bad if they don't buy their kids McDonalds every day. And nearly everyone who is rich is so because their parents were rich.
Simply working "hard" doesn't mean you will -- or even deserve -- to strike it rich. That's lunacy. That's not the American dream. The American Dream is that the only one stopping you from being successful in America is yourself.
And that is what the grandparent poster was saying was incorrect. It's not "yourself" that stops you from getting rich in the US. Getting rich is a secret club, and if you don't happen to have a friend at diebold, or had the misfortune of being born black, you're pretty much screwed. That's not to say there aren't successful black people out there, but how many black presidents have we had? How many presidents have we had that dragged themselves out of poverty as kids?
One of the odd things about the American Dream is that it perpetuates the myth that the lower class is the lower class because they are lazy or uncreative. Go read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America . She goes into some great details like how if you can't save up 3 months rent, you must rent by the week at much higher costs, further preventing you from saving anything. Or how by being poor and therefore not having a car, the only jobs you can get are on bus lines, severely limiting your options and further guaranteeing that you will stay poor.
Or better yet, take a sabbatical from wherever you work, and live a lower-class life for a few months. I think you'll be surprised to find that the working class, despite having different lingual characteristics, are every bit as bright as you or I, and generally work their tails off. But the American Dream says that if they are doing that, why aren't they successful? Either they must be actually lazy, or the American Dream is wrong.
You can guess which one I believe in.
the only one stopping you from being successful in America is yourself. That, and the bureaucrats.
Right. Those god-damned people at the FDA. My coolant-pops were a big hit at the auto shop. It's all a bunch of red tape about fill-out-this-paper and half-of-our-mice-died. Just get off my back!
What happened to personal responsibility? That is the corner stone of the American Dream. If the American Dream truly is dead as you claim, then it is for this reason alone.
I'l
To be fair, silent would also have no coil whine. Even without a fan you can still hear a power supply, you just have to get close enough. "Silent" just means quiet enough that you can't hear it over the background noise. It's a subjective definition, and that's what they're counting on.
.5 speed... Airflow increases linearly with rotation speed, whereas volume increases exponentially.
Volume generally decreases with the number of fans, for a given airflow volume. If you want your machine to more quiet, double the number of fans and halve their rotational speed. Or quadrouple the number of fans, and run them almost at the point where they stop. You want a PSU that has 2X fans, running at
Generally the loud fans are the smaller single fans that are run at high speed. Seemingly paradoxically, a 120mm case fan will almost always be silent compared to the 40MM screamers they put on northbridge chips.
Oddly enough, there is a local minimum. If developers are afraid of the Revolution, and they don't make games for it, then making games for the Revolution starts to almost guarantee a sale. Nintendo's in-house titles are of high-enough quality to guarantee some console sales, and the uniqueness of the controller will get more. Some degree of support will be optimal for the 3rd parties.
But mainly I think Nintendo is embracing and extending. They've made a controller system that looks like it can support game types from other systems (via an attachment... *shudder*), but those competing systems can't support the Nintendo exclusive titles. So you can buy an Xbox 360, a PS3, or a Revolution if you want to play Sly Cooper 4, but if you want to play Star Wars: Lightsaber Battles properly you will need a Revolution. That's a pretty big incentive to pick one console over another. That's why Microsoft bought Bungee instead of just working with them, and why Nintendo gives Miyamoto anything he asks for. Nintendo is guaranteeing themselves some unique exclusives. And unlike their past exclusives, they don't have to be the ones to build them.
They're going for a lock, basically. And while everyone is going for a lock in their own ways, (free live online, PS2 compatibility, etc), this seems like a potentially fun lock.
I think the real question is whether or not the add-on controller idea will take off everywhere... such a thing might fly in Japan, where peripheral sales are high, but in the US and Europe that plan has repeatedly failed. The interface is probably too limited without more than two buttons.
What power supply was the server using?