You gain a lot by adding a second button. You gain contextual menus. By adding a 3rd button, you only gain half-assed alternative click actions in maybe 2/3rds of the applications out there. A scroll wheel would be neat, though to be perfectly honest I'd much rather have a scroll trackball. Of course, my mouse has 6 buttons and I want more, but I use a computer for a living.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. For most users, 2 buttons would be enough, and the design is simple enough to be non-intimidating. For the rest, they can use a regular mouse plugged into their macs.
Though here's hoping Apple ultimately wows us with something truly neat, like pressing down on the entire mouse engaging a grab-'n-pull functionality or something.
Unfortunately, many publishers insist that consoles be region-encoded. If you're thinking about picking up a property from Japan, the percieved value of that property is a lot lower if it has already leaked into your home market. It's more difficult to create a frenzy that way, and some of the demand will already have been satisfied. Of course the amount of people who would buy foreign titles is margin-of-error sized for any game less popular than Street Fighter 2, but that's still how publishers view the issue.
Of course, my personal reaction is "tough titty toenails. It's a global market. It's not worth the trouble you're causing your players." But that's probably why I'm not a publisher.
In case you don't know, the above poster is refering to PNG. PNG was supposed to take over for GIF when it was discovered that GIFs were patent encumbered. PNG also blows GIF out of the water in that it extended this to support an alpha channel in all images, allowing you to "fade" things with the background.
Think about it this way... You know those icons with drop shadows at the top of Slashdot? If they were PNG's, you could swap them across any background and the icon would look great, the shadow would fall correctly. You could anti-alias edges without worrying about what the background image is. You can layer multiple images on top of eachother so that the front page of websites don't have to be chopped up into millions of individual images. And it all just works.
And Microsoft promised full PNG support in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, I.E. 4. They bragged that they were going to be the first to implement full PNG support. They're actually the last. By about 7 frick'in years.
As a rough guess I'd say their lack of PNG support has cost over a million hours of web designer headaches. But they couldn't afford to put one lousy intern on the task of adding alpha channel support to PNG support. Which they promised in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, which they promised in I.E. 4.
They even have a perfectly suitable though terribly hacky series of workaround, using javascript. If they just fed their PNG's into their own functions which you can call through javascript, you're golden. But no, they've had to have broken PNG support for the last 7 years. Since I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, frick'in I.E. 4.
If there is any reason why webdevelopers hate Microsoft, this is it. PNG support. I would guess on a big project it would shave an hour off everybody's day, for everybody who works with images. Hell, people were shouting that they would pay Microsoft to do this. People volunteered to do this for them. But no, they "couldn't figure out how to do it," for 7 frick'in years.
Push it out to everyone. I don't care if they're on XP, ME, or OS9, proper Alpha Channel PNG support would save a ton of time. It's about bloody time.
Opera supports it. Mozilla supports it. Firefox, Konq, Netscape, Safari, iCab, and Omniweb support it. The Dreamcast and Web TV browsers support it. Everyone but Lynx supports it. Oh, that is everyone but Lynx and frick'in I.E.
I think you're misplacing "soul." The Souls in the original series are, in descending order.
Harrison "It was a lousy conversation anyway" Ford James "I find your lack of faith disturbing" Earl Jones Frank "Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things" Oz Carey "Into the chute fly boy" Fisher Anthony "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life" Daniels
Aside from the "wow" factor, how much does Raytracing really add?
This is one of their raytraced scenes, and this is a shot from the half-year-old Half-Life 2. Notice how while the shadows and lighting in HL2 are burned-in, they're still pretty convincing. This is a shot from a raytraced Quake 3. Notice how it's single-pass raytracing with no reflections and sharp edges... For the full benefit of raytracing you need multipass.
This is an early, leaked shot from Quake 4, a traditionally poly model engine. Traditional racing Games always have great lighting. This is a scene from GTA based on the Q3A raytracing engine, and this is a vaguely similar scene from the game.
With normal mapping coming into it's own and polygon edges mostly a thing of the past, what benefit does raytracing give us? Shadows? It costs us less than one character to draw a drop shadow. Dynamic lighting? There are tricks to doing pseudo dynamic lighting in many circumstances. Generally, though, you don't want too many moving lights in your scene anyway, as the effect is quite nauseating.
The only major benefit that I see with real time raytracing is that it would free up the artists and coders to drop some of the tricks they've been putting in place for the usual lighting stuff.
But for lighting effects, we've got a lot already going, and more coming in soon. I personally can't wait for relative light levels to make their way into more game engines. And normal mapping to become really normal. For many years I had wanted realtime raytracing, but now it seems so unnecessary.
It just seems like raytracing will always be so much more expensive, that the flat-polys-with-tricks models will always look better for the same hardware.
Of course, knowing this industry in 5 years we'll probably have chip boards that have one processor spit out a traditionally drawn 3d polygon scene and another which renders and layers upon that a 2d greyscale light map at a slightly lower resolution using a reduced parallel geometry set or some such. Instead of making things easier, they usually tend to make things harder. Oh well.
Can anyone here with more experience than I explain what raytracing gives you that you couldn't fake more cheaply?
Unless anyone knows of another place to get a very clean sound bite of Adam West saying "Look - Madonna!" we're talking about original recordings here.
Most of the MMO designers I know are aware of basic economic principles. Heck, most companies have someone who is specifically tasked to make sure that the economy doesn't fall to pieces.
The problem with expanded-skill based combat is that you must account for lag, which while not as bad as it used to be is still a reality in most MMPORPG's. You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off. You could do combat on the local machine, but then you have all sorts of security issues. So unless by skill you mean take the focus off of power leveling and gold hording and put it squarely on just power leveling, then this is unfortunately a no-go.
I do agree about the wage-slave problem, though. It isn't much fun. But if you take out leveling, gold/resource farming, then you can only progress through items and quests. And while quests can be nice, and do need to take an expanded role in games, there just isn't the resources to create enough quests for a group of people who may be playing 6 hours a day every day for a year. Player created quests would be better, but it seems like everyone who has done player-generated content over the years has gone seriously overboard with it (see 2nd life).
I'm not saying the current situation is ideal by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just saying that it is complicated.
Honestly, I want them to get a Mac first, and be done with it. But the people I've tried this route with was mad that they couldn't run "X", where "X" is some windows-only application or game that all of their friends were running. They didn't yet have the technical sophistication to relize that equivalent functionality equals an equivalent program. All they knew was that their friends were watching "The O.C," and they were rejecting being fed a show that everyone said was "just like the O.C." or "even better than the O.C."
I wish I was joking. Trust me. But people have to realize that Windows has major problems on their own. Otherwise they'll always see the grass as greener.
As the best browsers are download-only, you're still using Internet Explorer, right?
And as you can't get I.M. systems on CD, you use MSN, right?
Can I assume that when you want to edit small config files, you open Notepad and struggle through the interface?
And you must be using Outlook or outlook express, as all of the good alternatives are download. Except for Lotus, which I've never had the pleasure of using but others assure me is great.
Face it, going no-downloaded software is unrealistic for most people. The first thing I do on most client's machines is install AVG antivirus (freeware, online only), and Kerio Personal Firewall (free for personal use, online only). Then install AdAware (free, online) and SpyBot (free, online). If they want e-mail it's either Thunderbird, K4, or PegasusMail, depending upon their needs. If they're really hardcore I recommend The Bat!, but that's just if they want more power in their filtering than an e-mail client should have.
If they have any really sensitive data, I recommend Dekart Private Disk... a convienient download-only encrypted volume creator.
For telnet and FTP there is Filezilla and Putty, which are far more secure than the command-line equivalents because sftp and ssh don't send passwords in plaintext.
And of course browsing is all Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera (again, my choice if they have the chops for the interface).
Add in iZarc (free, download only) for compression / decompression, and the Folder Size windows extension because, well, Microsoft should have shipped with that functionality in the first place, and you have a system that is more secure, more functional, and faster than a retail CD - only system could be, for a lot less money.
Oh, and Psi (free, download only) for chatting. If they refuse Jabber, then Trillian (free, download only).
There are a lot of great ways to make your computing platform more secure / faster / easier through applications you find online. And there are a whole lot of holes in applications that are CD only. But saying that the route to security is by staying in your sandbox is not terribly helpful. This kind of abstinence is neither enlightening, nor realistic, nor very fun.
Grandparent shouldn't forget, Civilized societies don't just attempt to protect the weak from the unscrupulous, they attempt to protect everyone from the unscrupulous. One may know how a computer works, but that doesn't mean they're not going to fall for a tax scam, a photographic equipment scam, or a scam lawsuit. Or an extortion scheme, a protection racket, one of those unscrupulous shipping companies, construction companies, overpriced medicines with generic equivalents...
There are enough things going on in life that no one person can keep track of it all. We're all weak in some area.
To be fair, Andy Serkis is slated to play Kong, meaning the big monster will probably be pulled off with a lot of skill and personality. If anyone can do it right, he can.
The other actors associated with the project, Jack Black (Tenatious D, and an underrated performance in The Jackal), Naomi Watts (The Ring, I Heart Huckabees), etc, are all totally underrated gems... The kinds of actors that you think would be able to come together in support of eachother and make something great.
King Kong deserves a good remake. The original story was essentially a quintessential animal human trapped and ostracised in a modern environment. But unlike certain other films which have been remade recently (Dawn of the Dead anyone?) that stop motion ape is falling apart. Having a real actor in a real modern remake that paid close attention to what made the original story so touching could be worth seeing. You and I may think the original 10 fps lump of clay and hair is cute, but the story can be told far, far better these days.
If your goal was to sell someone who didn't have a computer on having a computer at all, then yes, sell them on Windows. They'll have a much easier time finding games they like, and getting support from their friends.
And when they're ready, you sell them on Mandrake. You show them a live CD on their system. You give them apps they're familiar with to lure them over to the better OS. You show them how most of the software can be automatically downloaded and installed by just asking for it. You show them crossover office and the Linux gaming community.
And when they're ready, you sell them on Gentoo, Portage, and even better burning software. You show them how to compile everything for their own system. You teach them how to write their own shell scripts to automate tedious tasks, and how to install and setup servers on their home machine for easier remote access.
And when they've gone through all of that and they're ready for the ultimate Linux experience, you sell them an iBook.
The big names do bring something of value to the table. They bring security. Not the Linux "I'm not going to be hacked" kind of security, but a security that if these other possibilities don't work out, at least you have this devil you know to fall back on. It's the kind of reassurance that most people need before they'll switch to a new system.
As I've said, even on Windows XP Nero is redundant for most people. But it brings legitimacy and security for people who don't know the ropes, and those are exactly the kinds of people that need to be brought into the Linux fold if 2005,6,7,8, or 9 is to be the "year of the Linux desktop."
Yes, but when someone asks "How do I burn CD's on Linux?" you can say "just like windows, use Nero." Ignoring the fact that Windows XP has an excellent built-in CD burning tool that is inline with the file system, people recognize Nero as CD burning. Telling them to use the "Gnome whatchamacallit" is not just not going to ring with people, not matter how much better the software really is.
Saying that you see value in a decent burning GUI is entirely besides the point. What you need are big names as assurances that a platform is not a flash in the pan. With bigname 3D rendering packages supporting Linux, you can now point to Hollywood and say that Linux is going to be around in 5 years. Whether or not you personally need to setup a linux-based renderfarm at a 20k per year per seat is irrelevant. Having the defacto CD/DVD burning suite available on Linux means that someone considering switching to Linux doesn't have to worry whether or not they're going to have adequate CD / DVD burning support. Even if there are better things out there, this is good enough to allay that concern. It's not the quality of the software that is important, but the public's perception of the platform that is important.
Getting Nero for Linux is a definite small step forwards. You can shout until you're blue in the face that kGNOme3B is better than anything else out there, but being able to tell a potential convert that "we've got Nero, and things even better than that," is much more convincing. Real too. And Firefox has made enough of a name for itself that it's also recognized. Now we just need MSOffice, or CodeWeavers to have the cajones to glue together an MS Office box and a CrossOver office box and sell it at retail, and we're all set.
The first rule of thumb is "always bring your mail with you." If you change clients, or you change OS's, there is always a way, however roundabout or painful, to get mail into a usable form. This may involve installing Outlook, exporting all of your mail to Outlook, and importing it all from outlook, but it is worth it. Worst comes to worst, redirect it all back to yourself.
If you do this religiously, you will only ever have to worry about your current mail format, and how you're going to upgrade it all to your new mail client. For archiving, you can either put it all in a folder that you never open or search, or under a different account that you never open or search, but at least it is all together.
It's a lot easier to figure out how to take e-mails across current and last generation systems and current and last generation mail clients than it is to try and bridge a 15 year old machine that ran from 5 1/2" floppies using some nasty proprietary mail format and modern floppyless OS using some nasty proprietary mail format.
Right. But if you're a business who is in a position to need that kind of secrecy, you shouldn't be sending I.M.'s in plaintext over an unsecure network protocol to 3rd party remote servers from a company notorious for getting owned and man-on-the-inside jobs. In other words, I don't see how this changes the equation.
If you are even thinking of paying a lawyer to see if it is true, give the six hundred bucks to your network administrator to setup a local Jabber server, and keep all I.M.'s encrypted and on your network. If you're in a posistion to worry about such things, there are much bigger things to worry about already.
Actually, Peapod is doing quite well out here in Boston, Via Stop 'n Shop. It makes more sense to get into door-to-door delivery if you already have distributions and infrastructure in place.
Personally I'm surprised more grocery stores don't deliver in such a fashion. You would have to find a way to tie your inventory to an online interface, but overall it is a great way to get lazy people to shop with you... Especially in the winter when it's 5 degrees out and your car is buried under three feet of snow. And 16-year-olds with cars can make quite a lot of deliveries for 8 bucks an hour.
As a side note, one of the major reasons why the dot-coms collapsed was because people forgot that just because you removed the major expenses related to traditional media doesn't mean that everything is free. I can't count the number of online magazines who thought that because there was no paper or ink or distribution costs that any income would equal a profit. That ad-supported paper mailing service was the epitome of this, as they had a fixed and very clear cost that they totally ignored because "everything online is free."
You encrypt your posts? How will people read them?
I hate to sound like an AOL sympathizer, but the TOS specifically refers to "posts." Besides IM, AIM also provides message board services (or so I'm told by people who don't use Trillian, Gaim, or Psi).
Does "posts" refer to regular IM usage? AOL implies not, referring to "message board posts, chat participation, and homepages."
My reading of this is that AOL retains usage rights to everything you post on their static forums... forums which basically anyone can access. While I would feel better if this were not the case, that is a good bit better than AOL reading the I.M.'s you send to your co-workers.
It sounds like CYA to me. As if AOL were giving themselves the right to decide to add access to the chat forums online or through AOL's proprietary service. It's the kind of CYA that inspired them to prohibit people from using AIM "while driving, operating hazardous equipment, or engaging in other forms of hazardous activities."
On the other hand, go ahead and tell everyone on AIM about the TOS, without explaining that it's only posts. Then try to switch everyone over to Jabber. Please. The whole I.M. universe right now is about as convienient as sending E-mails from CompuServe to AOL in 1992.
Slashdot Mirror
You gain a lot by adding a second button. You gain contextual menus. By adding a 3rd button, you only gain half-assed alternative click actions in maybe 2/3rds of the applications out there. A scroll wheel would be neat, though to be perfectly honest I'd much rather have a scroll trackball. Of course, my mouse has 6 buttons and I want more, but I use a computer for a living.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. For most users, 2 buttons would be enough, and the design is simple enough to be non-intimidating. For the rest, they can use a regular mouse plugged into their macs.
Though here's hoping Apple ultimately wows us with something truly neat, like pressing down on the entire mouse engaging a grab-'n-pull functionality or something.
Unfortunately, many publishers insist that consoles be region-encoded. If you're thinking about picking up a property from Japan, the percieved value of that property is a lot lower if it has already leaked into your home market. It's more difficult to create a frenzy that way, and some of the demand will already have been satisfied. Of course the amount of people who would buy foreign titles is margin-of-error sized for any game less popular than Street Fighter 2, but that's still how publishers view the issue.
Of course, my personal reaction is "tough titty toenails. It's a global market. It's not worth the trouble you're causing your players." But that's probably why I'm not a publisher.
In case you don't know, the above poster is refering to PNG. PNG was supposed to take over for GIF when it was discovered that GIFs were patent encumbered. PNG also blows GIF out of the water in that it extended this to support an alpha channel in all images, allowing you to "fade" things with the background.
Think about it this way... You know those icons with drop shadows at the top of Slashdot? If they were PNG's, you could swap them across any background and the icon would look great, the shadow would fall correctly. You could anti-alias edges without worrying about what the background image is. You can layer multiple images on top of eachother so that the front page of websites don't have to be chopped up into millions of individual images. And it all just works.
And Microsoft promised full PNG support in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, I.E. 4. They bragged that they were going to be the first to implement full PNG support. They're actually the last. By about 7 frick'in years.
As a rough guess I'd say their lack of PNG support has cost over a million hours of web designer headaches. But they couldn't afford to put one lousy intern on the task of adding alpha channel support to PNG support. Which they promised in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, which they promised in I.E. 4.
They even have a perfectly suitable though terribly hacky series of workaround, using javascript. If they just fed their PNG's into their own functions which you can call through javascript, you're golden. But no, they've had to have broken PNG support for the last 7 years. Since I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, frick'in I.E. 4.
If there is any reason why webdevelopers hate Microsoft, this is it. PNG support. I would guess on a big project it would shave an hour off everybody's day, for everybody who works with images. Hell, people were shouting that they would pay Microsoft to do this. People volunteered to do this for them. But no, they "couldn't figure out how to do it," for 7 frick'in years.
Push it out to everyone. I don't care if they're on XP, ME, or OS9, proper Alpha Channel PNG support would save a ton of time. It's about bloody time.
Opera supports it. Mozilla supports it. Firefox, Konq, Netscape, Safari, iCab, and Omniweb support it. The Dreamcast and Web TV browsers support it. Everyone but Lynx supports it. Oh, that is everyone but Lynx and frick'in I.E.
[/Rant]
I think you're misplacing "soul." The Souls in the original series are, in descending order.
Harrison "It was a lousy conversation anyway" Ford
James "I find your lack of faith disturbing" Earl Jones
Frank "Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things" Oz
Carey "Into the chute fly boy" Fisher
Anthony "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life" Daniels
Aside from the "wow" factor, how much does Raytracing really add?
This is one of their raytraced scenes, and this is a shot from the half-year-old Half-Life 2. Notice how while the shadows and lighting in HL2 are burned-in, they're still pretty convincing. This is a shot from a raytraced Quake 3. Notice how it's single-pass raytracing with no reflections and sharp edges... For the full benefit of raytracing you need multipass.
This is an early, leaked shot from Quake 4, a traditionally poly model engine. Traditional racing Games always have great lighting. This is a scene from GTA based on the Q3A raytracing engine, and this is a vaguely similar scene from the game.
With normal mapping coming into it's own and polygon edges mostly a thing of the past, what benefit does raytracing give us? Shadows? It costs us less than one character to draw a drop shadow. Dynamic lighting? There are tricks to doing pseudo dynamic lighting in many circumstances. Generally, though, you don't want too many moving lights in your scene anyway, as the effect is quite nauseating.
The only major benefit that I see with real time raytracing is that it would free up the artists and coders to drop some of the tricks they've been putting in place for the usual lighting stuff.
But for lighting effects, we've got a lot already going, and more coming in soon. I personally can't wait for relative light levels to make their way into more game engines. And normal mapping to become really normal. For many years I had wanted realtime raytracing, but now it seems so unnecessary.
It just seems like raytracing will always be so much more expensive, that the flat-polys-with-tricks models will always look better for the same hardware.
Of course, knowing this industry in 5 years we'll probably have chip boards that have one processor spit out a traditionally drawn 3d polygon scene and another which renders and layers upon that a 2d greyscale light map at a slightly lower resolution using a reduced parallel geometry set or some such. Instead of making things easier, they usually tend to make things harder. Oh well.
Can anyone here with more experience than I explain what raytracing gives you that you couldn't fake more cheaply?
Unless anyone knows of another place to get a very clean sound bite of Adam West saying "Look - Madonna!" we're talking about original recordings here.
It's LA. They'll probably just think he's looking for the freeway.
Most of the MMO designers I know are aware of basic economic principles. Heck, most companies have someone who is specifically tasked to make sure that the economy doesn't fall to pieces.
The problem with expanded-skill based combat is that you must account for lag, which while not as bad as it used to be is still a reality in most MMPORPG's. You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off. You could do combat on the local machine, but then you have all sorts of security issues. So unless by skill you mean take the focus off of power leveling and gold hording and put it squarely on just power leveling, then this is unfortunately a no-go.
I do agree about the wage-slave problem, though. It isn't much fun. But if you take out leveling, gold/resource farming, then you can only progress through items and quests. And while quests can be nice, and do need to take an expanded role in games, there just isn't the resources to create enough quests for a group of people who may be playing 6 hours a day every day for a year. Player created quests would be better, but it seems like everyone who has done player-generated content over the years has gone seriously overboard with it (see 2nd life).
I'm not saying the current situation is ideal by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just saying that it is complicated.
http://degreez.net/Batman_Net.mov.torrent, courtesy of TheSHADOW.
Please help seed.
Direct link to the trailer, in case it ever comes back up.
Honestly, I want them to get a Mac first, and be done with it. But the people I've tried this route with was mad that they couldn't run "X", where "X" is some windows-only application or game that all of their friends were running. They didn't yet have the technical sophistication to relize that equivalent functionality equals an equivalent program. All they knew was that their friends were watching "The O.C," and they were rejecting being fed a show that everyone said was "just like the O.C." or "even better than the O.C."
I wish I was joking. Trust me. But people have to realize that Windows has major problems on their own. Otherwise they'll always see the grass as greener.
As the best browsers are download-only, you're still using Internet Explorer, right?
And as you can't get I.M. systems on CD, you use MSN, right?
Can I assume that when you want to edit small config files, you open Notepad and struggle through the interface?
And you must be using Outlook or outlook express, as all of the good alternatives are download. Except for Lotus, which I've never had the pleasure of using but others assure me is great.
Face it, going no-downloaded software is unrealistic for most people. The first thing I do on most client's machines is install AVG antivirus (freeware, online only), and Kerio Personal Firewall (free for personal use, online only). Then install AdAware (free, online) and SpyBot (free, online). If they want e-mail it's either Thunderbird, K4, or PegasusMail, depending upon their needs. If they're really hardcore I recommend The Bat!, but that's just if they want more power in their filtering than an e-mail client should have.
If they have any really sensitive data, I recommend Dekart Private Disk... a convienient download-only encrypted volume creator.
For telnet and FTP there is Filezilla and Putty, which are far more secure than the command-line equivalents because sftp and ssh don't send passwords in plaintext.
And of course browsing is all Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera (again, my choice if they have the chops for the interface).
Add in iZarc (free, download only) for compression / decompression, and the Folder Size windows extension because, well, Microsoft should have shipped with that functionality in the first place, and you have a system that is more secure, more functional, and faster than a retail CD - only system could be, for a lot less money.
Oh, and Psi (free, download only) for chatting. If they refuse Jabber, then Trillian (free, download only).
There are a lot of great ways to make your computing platform more secure / faster / easier through applications you find online. And there are a whole lot of holes in applications that are CD only. But saying that the route to security is by staying in your sandbox is not terribly helpful. This kind of abstinence is neither enlightening, nor realistic, nor very fun.
It's the white hat version of animalcrackerz.com
Grandparent shouldn't forget, Civilized societies don't just attempt to protect the weak from the unscrupulous, they attempt to protect everyone from the unscrupulous. One may know how a computer works, but that doesn't mean they're not going to fall for a tax scam, a photographic equipment scam, or a scam lawsuit. Or an extortion scheme, a protection racket, one of those unscrupulous shipping companies, construction companies, overpriced medicines with generic equivalents...
There are enough things going on in life that no one person can keep track of it all. We're all weak in some area.
To be fair, Andy Serkis is slated to play Kong, meaning the big monster will probably be pulled off with a lot of skill and personality. If anyone can do it right, he can.
The other actors associated with the project, Jack Black (Tenatious D, and an underrated performance in The Jackal), Naomi Watts (The Ring, I Heart Huckabees), etc, are all totally underrated gems... The kinds of actors that you think would be able to come together in support of eachother and make something great.
King Kong deserves a good remake. The original story was essentially a quintessential animal human trapped and ostracised in a modern environment. But unlike certain other films which have been remade recently (Dawn of the Dead anyone?) that stop motion ape is falling apart. Having a real actor in a real modern remake that paid close attention to what made the original story so touching could be worth seeing. You and I may think the original 10 fps lump of clay and hair is cute, but the story can be told far, far better these days.
If your goal was to sell someone who didn't have a computer on having a computer at all, then yes, sell them on Windows. They'll have a much easier time finding games they like, and getting support from their friends.
And when they're ready, you sell them on Mandrake. You show them a live CD on their system. You give them apps they're familiar with to lure them over to the better OS. You show them how most of the software can be automatically downloaded and installed by just asking for it. You show them crossover office and the Linux gaming community.
And when they're ready, you sell them on Gentoo, Portage, and even better burning software. You show them how to compile everything for their own system. You teach them how to write their own shell scripts to automate tedious tasks, and how to install and setup servers on their home machine for easier remote access.
And when they've gone through all of that and they're ready for the ultimate Linux experience, you sell them an iBook.
The big names do bring something of value to the table. They bring security. Not the Linux "I'm not going to be hacked" kind of security, but a security that if these other possibilities don't work out, at least you have this devil you know to fall back on. It's the kind of reassurance that most people need before they'll switch to a new system.
As I've said, even on Windows XP Nero is redundant for most people. But it brings legitimacy and security for people who don't know the ropes, and those are exactly the kinds of people that need to be brought into the Linux fold if 2005,6,7,8, or 9 is to be the "year of the Linux desktop."
Wow, where did you find a 5-1/2" floppy drive? Will it read my old 5-1/4" floppies?
Well, you know, data expands over time...
Yes, but when someone asks "How do I burn CD's on Linux?" you can say "just like windows, use Nero." Ignoring the fact that Windows XP has an excellent built-in CD burning tool that is inline with the file system, people recognize Nero as CD burning. Telling them to use the "Gnome whatchamacallit" is not just not going to ring with people, not matter how much better the software really is.
Saying that you see value in a decent burning GUI is entirely besides the point. What you need are big names as assurances that a platform is not a flash in the pan. With bigname 3D rendering packages supporting Linux, you can now point to Hollywood and say that Linux is going to be around in 5 years. Whether or not you personally need to setup a linux-based renderfarm at a 20k per year per seat is irrelevant. Having the defacto CD/DVD burning suite available on Linux means that someone considering switching to Linux doesn't have to worry whether or not they're going to have adequate CD / DVD burning support. Even if there are better things out there, this is good enough to allay that concern. It's not the quality of the software that is important, but the public's perception of the platform that is important.
Getting Nero for Linux is a definite small step forwards. You can shout until you're blue in the face that kGNOme3B is better than anything else out there, but being able to tell a potential convert that "we've got Nero, and things even better than that," is much more convincing. Real too. And Firefox has made enough of a name for itself that it's also recognized. Now we just need MSOffice, or CodeWeavers to have the cajones to glue together an MS Office box and a CrossOver office box and sell it at retail, and we're all set.
There was at least one movie that season was honest.
The first rule of thumb is "always bring your mail with you." If you change clients, or you change OS's, there is always a way, however roundabout or painful, to get mail into a usable form. This may involve installing Outlook, exporting all of your mail to Outlook, and importing it all from outlook, but it is worth it. Worst comes to worst, redirect it all back to yourself.
If you do this religiously, you will only ever have to worry about your current mail format, and how you're going to upgrade it all to your new mail client. For archiving, you can either put it all in a folder that you never open or search, or under a different account that you never open or search, but at least it is all together.
It's a lot easier to figure out how to take e-mails across current and last generation systems and current and last generation mail clients than it is to try and bridge a 15 year old machine that ran from 5 1/2" floppies using some nasty proprietary mail format and modern floppyless OS using some nasty proprietary mail format.
Right. But if you're a business who is in a position to need that kind of secrecy, you shouldn't be sending I.M.'s in plaintext over an unsecure network protocol to 3rd party remote servers from a company notorious for getting owned and man-on-the-inside jobs. In other words, I don't see how this changes the equation.
If you are even thinking of paying a lawyer to see if it is true, give the six hundred bucks to your network administrator to setup a local Jabber server, and keep all I.M.'s encrypted and on your network. If you're in a posistion to worry about such things, there are much bigger things to worry about already.
Actually, Peapod is doing quite well out here in Boston, Via Stop 'n Shop. It makes more sense to get into door-to-door delivery if you already have distributions and infrastructure in place.
Personally I'm surprised more grocery stores don't deliver in such a fashion. You would have to find a way to tie your inventory to an online interface, but overall it is a great way to get lazy people to shop with you... Especially in the winter when it's 5 degrees out and your car is buried under three feet of snow. And 16-year-olds with cars can make quite a lot of deliveries for 8 bucks an hour.
As a side note, one of the major reasons why the dot-coms collapsed was because people forgot that just because you removed the major expenses related to traditional media doesn't mean that everything is free. I can't count the number of online magazines who thought that because there was no paper or ink or distribution costs that any income would equal a profit. That ad-supported paper mailing service was the epitome of this, as they had a fixed and very clear cost that they totally ignored because "everything online is free."
You encrypt your posts? How will people read them?
I hate to sound like an AOL sympathizer, but the TOS specifically refers to "posts." Besides IM, AIM also provides message board services (or so I'm told by people who don't use Trillian, Gaim, or Psi).
Does "posts" refer to regular IM usage? AOL implies not, referring to "message board posts, chat participation, and homepages."
My reading of this is that AOL retains usage rights to everything you post on their static forums... forums which basically anyone can access. While I would feel better if this were not the case, that is a good bit better than AOL reading the I.M.'s you send to your co-workers.
It sounds like CYA to me. As if AOL were giving themselves the right to decide to add access to the chat forums online or through AOL's proprietary service. It's the kind of CYA that inspired them to prohibit people from using AIM "while driving, operating hazardous equipment, or engaging in other forms of hazardous activities."
On the other hand, go ahead and tell everyone on AIM about the TOS, without explaining that it's only posts. Then try to switch everyone over to Jabber. Please. The whole I.M. universe right now is about as convienient as sending E-mails from CompuServe to AOL in 1992.
Linkified
What about when a son chops off his father's head, they show the cauterized neck and lifeless face, and it's his own?
PG it is.