Halo 2 has sold 6 million units at 50 dollars each. If you count wholesale againt "total sales" figures, that adds 180 million dollars. Considering Microsoft reaps publisher, producer, and licencing margins on each one sold, Halo 2 accounts for *all* 90 million in profit the Microsoft games division made last quarter.
Still, that's nothing compared to the 2.5 billion in profit from their desktop division.
And note, I'm not defending the free market. Markets can never be "free." Nature abhorrs a power vaccuum too much. But when people start saying that such-and-such is making money for their owners... Lots of stuff does that. Heck, the place where I work makes money. That in and of itself is not enough to make a company evil.
Red Hat makes money. They're not evil.
So they correlate your search patterns with your buying history. Great, so they know that I search for Karaoke CD's and I buy Karaoke CD's. And if you install their toolbar, they track your history. Maybe I've become a bit jaded, but you're installing a toolbar, which amongst other things has a history option. At that point it should be painfully obvious that they're going to track your URLS. Even if you didn't read the EULA that should be obvious.
The difference between that, and an application which installs itself while masquerading as something different, runs silently in the background at all times, and has the power to track all of your keystrokes and pop ads up at you all day long while frequently crashing is tremendous. In one way the user is giving up a small amount of privacy at least somewhat knowingly for a small amount of gain. In the other one the computer user is duped into giving away all privacy and a lot of stability on their machine for no reason whatsoever.
it only exists to maximise Amazon and their partners (those who pay the most) revenue.
So... how is this different from most businesses? Not to be a free-market fundie or anything, but at least one of the motivations for all businesses is to earn revenue. A9 has decided to earn revenue for it's owners by providing better features to and tighter tracking of it's customers. However, I fail to see how what A9 is doing is different than the paid inserts or supercookie that Google uses, or for that matter the wealth of info that Yahoo keeps on it's customers. Some businesses can be said to only exist to increase revenue for their owners. Look at all of the old software that is "supported" for the sake of businesses at extortionist rates and without any updates. Compared to them and a lot of other software businesses, A9 is pretty customer-focused.
I hate to say this, but if people keep spouting words like "severe privacy threat," when actual severe privacy threats (like Claria) arise, people won't listen.
It seems to extend further than just protecting their paying customers.
To analogize: Security is something that all people need and is sorely lacking in Microsoft products, and money is how Microsoft is milking their monopoly. That's like going in to vote, and getting arrested for unpaid parking tickets.
Windows desperately needs the security, and it is a sore spot how quickly an unpatched box will be taken over without constant updates. Anything that might reduce the severely lacking security is an affront. Window's unpunished monopoly status is also a sore spot to a lot of people.
What's Microsoft doing, then? Leveraging their bad security record to protect their illegal monopoly revenue stream. While none of those actions are illegal, the whole thing is in bad taste.
Doh! Yes, Warf was the big bring-over. O'Brien was always there.
Go back and re-watch the first few seasons of DS9. While they did start certain plot threads, they did so no differently than Q was introduced in TNG. None of what was in the show then had any hint of the grittyness that was to follow. Even though they were on an outpost in deep space, they could easily have been in the center of the fedaration with how easy it was to acquire food and supplies, support and such. It was a clean, safe, ST:TNG cleanroom world.
I didn't mean to imply that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 (I was going to write that the later DS9 out Babyloned Babylon 5, but I really don't like the word "Babyloned") But that DS9 was far greater for the competition.
We agree about basically everything, except perhaps you have more faith that the writers knew what they were doing when they introduced Sisko to the big glowing urns and the gods in the wormhole. Personally I think they were just making stuff up, like they did with the second caretaker or the bio-neural cells at the beginning of Voyager.
Can we just have a 10 year haiatus on software patents of any kind, please? So far most of them have been single descriptor patents... [blatently unpatentable thing] + "on the internets" [blatently unpatentable thing] + "automagically" [blatently unpatentable thing] + "in a browser" And now we have [blatently unpatentable thing] + "with a Firewall"
None of this should be patentable. New and truly novel approaches to computing issues should be, but those are exactly the types of things which are too important to patent. Where would computing be today if patents covered the concepts of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, evolutionary algorithims, or for that matter object-oriented programming and distributed networks?
Patents were supposed to be unlikely to be duplicated. Theoretically, if I wanted to do something and I didn't know how, I would have to turn to somebody with a patent. However, these days it's impossible to blow your nose without first calling a lawyer to figure out if someone patented nose-blowing in such a way. And chances are someone has.
We should just shut software patents down for 10 years, let the technology mature, then re-examine whether they're helping or slowing us down. In 10 years time we may have exhausted enough of the obvious things that only patentable things will remain.
I would hardly say DS9 got off to a solid start. They had far, far too many Quark Holodeck - style episodes in their first few seasons. Then something changed, what was that? I can't remember...
Babaylon 5 came along and rocked their world. With massive story arcs, a dark, gritty atmosphere, and a sense of impending doom from forces far too great for you to comprehend, Babylon 5 came along and out Trekked DS9. After it became clear that Babalon 5 was a better show, the crew stationed aboard DS9 discovered the Dominion, declared war on the Klingons, started killing eachother, and generally did a great job of writing gritty, gripping human emotion stories.
This is also the time that two Ex TNG cast members came aboard: Warf and O'Brian. Completely co-incidently, this is the time that Berman and Braga left DS9 to go work on Voyager. A lot of the Ex-trek castmembers started writing and filming DS9 episodes. The writers with seniority were taken over to Voyager, the writers with talent were sent back to Deep Space 9 like it was a summer training camp. Thanks to B&B's inability to see talent when it is slapping them in the face, they took all of the people who they thought were the best to their pet project, freeing up the people who were actually the best to do something great.
One of these models thrived. Can you guess which one? I'm only sad that Enterprise won't get a chance to answer the call of Battlestar Galactica the same way, and with the same talent, that DS9 answered Babylon 5
Also, the "charity" uses its money to accumulate major stakes in companies that just happen to be aligned with Microsoft's interests.
Well, yes. It is endowed. Meaning, it takes the money it has, invests, and returns to the wider world the returns on investment without consuming the capital. Theoretically, this will allow the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation to operate for centuries after the man is dead. Maybe even until Longhorn ships. It would be difficult to invest 20 billion dollars in small chunks across an economy centered around your stuff and not bump into people with at least a passing interest in what you do. A 5% stake in a cable provider? Investments in drug companies? That's nothing.
I don't remember the memo, but I do remember people recommending charity as a way to improve Microsoft's image. That it happened during an antitrust investigation (1994) is no surprise, considering how long the antitrust investigations have been going on. However, there is a difference between setting up a token charity trust and giving 1/3rd of your money to a charitable trust. That in and of itself is a lot larger than my 20 dollar tsunami gift. Plus whenever he talks about charity work the man sounds a lot more alive and vibrant than when he's talking about the new version of Windows. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Nothing is black and white. Especially not people.
Well, perl was written to be highly efficient for the everyday typist on a keyboard. Perhaps we need a phoenetic Perl, a variant that uses exclusively vocal shorthands like da-email-s-e-til-s-ess-sla-car-lbra-back-doubleu-d ot-plus-minus-rbra...
Not only would it be faster, I'm sure it would win the obfuscated Perl contest. And isn't that the goal of all Perl?
Let's see, expressed as a total of my reserve capital... minus outstanding debts... carry the one... I've donated twice as much as Bill, with my 20 dollar donation to the Tsunami relief fund.
In general I find the kind of people likely to give their money away, are not the kind of people likely to have any money to give.
(No offence meant to Mr. Gates, as he has given a lot more of his money to charitable causes than a lot of people, and even more importantly he seems to really care about them. No matter what you think about his business practices, the Bill and Melinda gates foundation has the largest endowment of any chairitible organization created in recent memory and will be doing positive things for the world long after the man has taken his blue screen of death to the black screen of death. Plus the B&M tend to be focused on practical things, and are pretty good about how they deal out grants.)
Whenever Slashdot links to a 50 MB exploding whale video hosted on someone's Atari 7800, post a torrent mirror of said file. It will drive your karma up, and help some little guys out.
Are the three original NES systems that you have all the oldschool tray-loading kind, and not the rare cartridge loading top-down units they released after the SNES? The problems associated with the tray-loading NES systems are legendary. People have all sorts of contortions involving blowing into cartridges, slamming cartridges into their systems, putting cartridges in as little as possible before pushing them down, etc. It's all very reminiscent of the early generation PS1's, which you now see people standing at weird angles to get the lazer to read just right. I've had better luck with the cheap Hong Kong clones, but perhaps it's just a question of which cheap Hong Kong clones I've gotten and which you have gotten.
Which is one of the reasons I asked if anyone out there had actually catalogued and ranked these clones.
To replace the QWERTY keyboard, one must offer something not only substantially better, but substantially better by an order of magnitude. Voice input might be it, once it's faster and all of the bugs are ironed out. Thought input might be faster still. You could also just moniter the nerves in a particular complex, like the inpulses through the arms to the fingers, and register that. All of these would be an order of magnitude faster, and perhaps more intuitive.
Just another keyboard layout, however, won't cut it. I learned Dvorak in college, and actually got as good typing Dvorak as I had been typing Qwerty. However, no matter where I went I was constantly running into Qwerty keyboards, and while I was learning Dvorak my Qwerty speeds went down significantly. Even if I could master Dvorak, it would bring my overall average typing speed down because everyone has a Qwerty. I switched back, and my typing speeds went back up.
Offer a truly revolutionary interface paradigm, or give up your illusions about changing the world.
Real has been doing a good job of turning themselves around recently. They've gone from one of the most bloated, dated, spyware-riddled, unstable, closed application to a less-bloated, more modern, more reliable application. Real went from being a colonizer of people's machines to a well-behaved tool. I've even started using their app again to play back Real files (despite the existence of Real Alternative).
And now they have a linux client. And they paid Thompson for MP3 playback rights on their Linux app to boot. They are a major desktop player and they're now supporting Linux. Good for them.
Dear Slashdot: get some perspective. This is a good thing for Linux, which somebody at Real decided to stick their neck out to do. Grow up a little and accept that non-Stallman software can be a good thing for the platform.
I feel compelled to point out that unlicensed portable (and non-portable) systems come out of Hong Kong all of the time. Offhand I can think of Portable NES, SNES, Genesis (before the Nomad), and Dreamcast. There are also unlicensed consoles, usually limited to 8-bit and 16-bit systems. Arguably the 3rd party NES systems were better than the original Nintendo versions: They've lasted a lot longer.
Good stuff, though. Does anyone know of a listing of unofficial systems manufacturers. Is anyone keeping track of this little piece of gaming history?
Here you have two intersecting fallacys producing dire results: Good people do good things, and power to the president is power to a man. Bush is a good person trying to do good things (which I don't doubt), and so he will do good things for the country (which I do doubt). Ashcroft is a good person, and so everything he does will be good. It's a simplistic viewpoint that betrays the problem that Nobody in life is the bad guy. In their own eyes, the Insurgents and the Palestines and the Israelies and the Al Queda agents and the people trained at the School of the Americas are all doing what they believe to be right. They're all good people doing what they think is good. Hitler may or may not have felt that the Jews should be exterminated, but he probably felt strongly that if the world were unified underneath him there would be no more wars and everyone would be better off. The world is more complicated than Black and White. Good people do Bad things all of the time simply because they are human beings. We've been harming the Cubans for 20 years because we've felt it would help overthrow the dictator we put into power, but all it's done is unify the country around him. Just because a policy is created by a person with good intentions doesn't mean it isn't a bad policy.
And as I mentioned, people forget that Congress isn't giving powers to Bush, they're giving powers to the office of the President. I'm sure many in congress now would feel uncomfortable giving such powers to the next Democratic administration, or all of the Republican administrations down the road, but that's exactly what they're doing. If you give this administration the power to arbitrarily wiretap and monitor citizens, or to strip citizenship from those they don't like, you give that power to all administrations. To once again re-use that most abused of examples: Hitler was Democratically elected, and was given wartime powers by congress to remake the government as he saw fit. At which point he promptly disbanded the congress, legally, and became a dictator.
Mr. Litan commits what Hayek called the fatal conceit of believing that government bureaucrats, rather than entrepreneurs and consumers, are in the best position to decide what constitutes a legitimate business purpose.
By adhering to this false maxim antitrust regulators are attempting to supersede the informed judgment of millions of consumers with the opinions Janet Reno and her former antitrust sidekick Joel Klein.
So... they start by saying that no monopoly should be regulated, or indeed no business should be regulated at all. And then they base their case off of this.
The idea that a free market is a perfect market has been shot down so thoroughly and so repeatedly that it doesn't deserve comment. But I'll just throw a few things out there anyway. Patent Law. Copyright Law. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. "The" phone company. The California Power Outages. Mad Cow Disease. Bovine Growth Hormones. FDA. The whole "government is bad for business" is a religion, not an economic reality. And most of the people who feel that way still want government protections, just on things that they expect, like racketeering, protection against unions, contract violations, dishonest business practices from their suppliers, police protection, etc.
That is not to say that the author cannot have any correct ideas because he subscribes to a popular but completely illogical set of beliefs, but rather that because the completely illogical set of beliefs are the basis for this particular article that the article itself can be only viewed, at best, as suspect.
Re:SONY isn't MemoryStick exclusively anymore...
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Yes, but CF isn't gone, and is still used in many of the same applications that it always was. SD has been around for years in similar form factors (though there are, I believe, size compatibility issues), in a lot of devices that CF was never used for, like Cell Phones and PDAs.
The Memory stick upgrade issues isn't so much that it has been replaced, but that it has been replaced so frequently. The original Memory Sticks flatlined at 128. They released an incompatible up-to 256 sized version, I believe it was the Memory Stick Duo or it might have been the first Memory Stick Pro. Then they released the modern Memory Stick Pro standard that goes to a reasonably high number. And now, apparently, they're releasing a Memory Stick Mini, which will require another memory format upgrade.
If you buy your memory with your camera, and use it as internal memory, this isn't a big issue. But as I tend to upgrade memory capacity and cameras separately it becomes a problem. We have three cameras now, and there are another two we borrow from a professional photographer friend of ours, all of which take the same memory. If the CF standard had been changed repeatedly during that time, like Memory Sticks have been, we would have a lot of useless tech lying around.
To be fair to the typical gamer, we've been teaching them that if it's weird and incomprehensible, it should be shot for years. Most games follow this formula. Puzzles are obvious and understandable with very clear lights and meaning, whereas bosses are those big things with funny faces that you shoot.
Things that are not to be shot have to be comprehensible to the players, or else they won't figure out what to do with it.
Re:SONY isn't MemoryStick exclusively anymore...
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And, the cards for the PS2 are memory sticks in a different form factor.
They might have done a tech upgrade since then, but the PS1 memory cards were licenced through an outside company using none of the memory stick tech. I've heard that there was a bit squabble inside of the company over internal licencing issues and the Playstation division went with an outside company. I don't know if they've kissed and made up for the PS2, but as I've yet to see a 10MB memory stick I doubt it.
Of course, it's a new, smaller memory stick
And that is another problem with the memory stick line: constant upgrades. It can't be a standard if you keep making the new stuff incompatible with the old stuff, and didn't make the standard with growth in mind.
Re:SONY isn't MemoryStick exclusively anymore...
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To be honest, it's a completely unnecessary format. CF is larger, but basically infinitely expandable, as it keeps the driver chip onboard. That's why you can take a 6-year-old camera and slap a 2GB CF card in it and it will run happily. Memory stick devices, on the other hand, are very limited in terms of the upper size they will take. On the other hand, SD / MMC cards take up less space than Memory Stick devices, especially in terms of length. Ever notice how Memory Sticks stick out of a lot of electronics, but SD cards never do?
It is true that recently they've solved the price / size issues, though that brings the cards from a bad deal to an unremarkable deal. But that doesn't prevent It from being a bad format: Memory Sticks don't do anything better than the other formats out there. If a major company hadn't been desperately trying to throw it into everyone's faces, it would have died a long time ago.
And yes, even my Girlfriend's Clie comes with both a Memory Stick and a CF slot. Sony realizes that there are a lot of people who just won't buy into the whole Memory Stick thing... Like Sony's Video Game department.
Actually, it was Visual Concepts Entertainment, a studio owned by but separate from Sega. They are a talented bunch of guys. Their 2k* lineup really took sports gaming ahead a few years.
Kush Games also took over some of the 2K* duties, with college basketball and hockey games under their direction. They are not owned by Sega. At least, not as far as I know.
As a side note, I wonder how much longer vcentertainment.com will refer people to the ESPN branded site?
Are games just more complicated to make than a movie?
Yes. For one, problems with movies generally don't snowball. For example, if you can't shoot the scene where Harrison Ford jumps out of the helicopter and lands on the top of the state building because it is raining too much every day you have available, you quickly film a shot where he's taking off in a helicopter, then cut to an interior of the state building with Harrison Ford sneaking around and the helicopter flying off. On the other hand, if you're reusing code and you discover that while your graphics subsystem can easily handle 1,000,000 polys it can't deal with the 1,000 units of 100 polys you were planning on throwing at it, you're screwed. You may have to redo your graphics engine, you may have to re-do your in-game graphics, you may have to re-author your worlds to compensate. Or you may discover that your idea for an RTSRPS, while seeming great, is actually boring in practice (Anyone else remember the revisions to Warcraft 3?). A lot of these things a competent director on film can tell by looking at dailys, but videogame developers have to wait until running code is in front of them to know. And unfortunately for code to run all of the support code has to be in place, etc, etc... generally for half of the project all people can do is hope that things will work out. Furthermore the painful debug period can last anywhere from as long as you think it will until infinity. You can't ship a game if it is buggy: the publisher won't let you. But you can ship a crappy movie. You can also fix many problems with movies during the editing phase, whereas games can't just be re-cut.
If you consider a game in development to be like a script in development, the cycles are similarly predictable. Nobody knows how long the latest Superman movie will be passed around from author to author before it's done with revisions and ready to go, but it could be a long while. Likewise, nobody knows how long it will be before Starcraft Ghost is ready for prime time, but it could be a while.
On the other hand, I haven't always seen the correlation between "when it's done" and greatness. Some companies have games that aren't done because they want to polish it to perfection. But quite frequently you have games that aren't done because it just isn't fun, and while the spark of insight is great enough to avoid putting it to sleep, nobody can really make it work. Sometimes you just have to get it out the door so that you can start over.
Not to veer dangerously close to the topic, but there is also the flip side to this, namely that while books engage one's imagination, games engage one's strategic thinking. While a story about the kreb cycle would probably be dry and boring, a videogame could be absolutely engaging and unforgettable. A large chunk of economic theory could be taught memorably through interactive simulations, as could the sciences and many other disciplines as well.
Don't discount gaming as not-books. They are not books. But they have their strengths as a medium too. And quite frankly, if young adult's exposure to reading is through High School Textbooks, no wonder they consider it dry, boring, and poorly done. I fail to see how circumventing some of that would hurt.
P.S. Since 7, the Final Fantasy games have contained more text than most any books. I believe that is what the parent was referring to.
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Just to put these numbers into perspective...
Halo 2 has sold 6 million units at 50 dollars each. If you count wholesale againt "total sales" figures, that adds 180 million dollars. Considering Microsoft reaps publisher, producer, and licencing margins on each one sold, Halo 2 accounts for *all* 90 million in profit the Microsoft games division made last quarter.
Still, that's nothing compared to the 2.5 billion in profit from their desktop division.
I own no amazon stock.
And note, I'm not defending the free market. Markets can never be "free." Nature abhorrs a power vaccuum too much. But when people start saying that such-and-such is making money for their owners... Lots of stuff does that. Heck, the place where I work makes money. That in and of itself is not enough to make a company evil.
Red Hat makes money. They're not evil.
So they correlate your search patterns with your buying history. Great, so they know that I search for Karaoke CD's and I buy Karaoke CD's. And if you install their toolbar, they track your history. Maybe I've become a bit jaded, but you're installing a toolbar, which amongst other things has a history option. At that point it should be painfully obvious that they're going to track your URLS. Even if you didn't read the EULA that should be obvious.
The difference between that, and an application which installs itself while masquerading as something different, runs silently in the background at all times, and has the power to track all of your keystrokes and pop ads up at you all day long while frequently crashing is tremendous. In one way the user is giving up a small amount of privacy at least somewhat knowingly for a small amount of gain. In the other one the computer user is duped into giving away all privacy and a lot of stability on their machine for no reason whatsoever.
Big difference.
it only exists to maximise Amazon and their partners (those who pay the most) revenue.
So... how is this different from most businesses? Not to be a free-market fundie or anything, but at least one of the motivations for all businesses is to earn revenue. A9 has decided to earn revenue for it's owners by providing better features to and tighter tracking of it's customers. However, I fail to see how what A9 is doing is different than the paid inserts or supercookie that Google uses, or for that matter the wealth of info that Yahoo keeps on it's customers. Some businesses can be said to only exist to increase revenue for their owners. Look at all of the old software that is "supported" for the sake of businesses at extortionist rates and without any updates. Compared to them and a lot of other software businesses, A9 is pretty customer-focused.
I hate to say this, but if people keep spouting words like "severe privacy threat," when actual severe privacy threats (like Claria) arise, people won't listen.
It seems to extend further than just protecting their paying customers.
To analogize: Security is something that all people need and is sorely lacking in Microsoft products, and money is how Microsoft is milking their monopoly. That's like going in to vote, and getting arrested for unpaid parking tickets.
Windows desperately needs the security, and it is a sore spot how quickly an unpatched box will be taken over without constant updates. Anything that might reduce the severely lacking security is an affront. Window's unpunished monopoly status is also a sore spot to a lot of people.
What's Microsoft doing, then? Leveraging their bad security record to protect their illegal monopoly revenue stream. While none of those actions are illegal, the whole thing is in bad taste.
Doh! Yes, Warf was the big bring-over. O'Brien was always there.
Go back and re-watch the first few seasons of DS9. While they did start certain plot threads, they did so no differently than Q was introduced in TNG. None of what was in the show then had any hint of the grittyness that was to follow. Even though they were on an outpost in deep space, they could easily have been in the center of the fedaration with how easy it was to acquire food and supplies, support and such. It was a clean, safe, ST:TNG cleanroom world.
I didn't mean to imply that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 (I was going to write that the later DS9 out Babyloned Babylon 5, but I really don't like the word "Babyloned") But that DS9 was far greater for the competition.
We agree about basically everything, except perhaps you have more faith that the writers knew what they were doing when they introduced Sisko to the big glowing urns and the gods in the wormhole. Personally I think they were just making stuff up, like they did with the second caretaker or the bio-neural cells at the beginning of Voyager.
Can we just have a 10 year haiatus on software patents of any kind, please? So far most of them have been single descriptor patents...
[blatently unpatentable thing] + "on the internets"
[blatently unpatentable thing] + "automagically"
[blatently unpatentable thing] + "in a browser"
And now we have
[blatently unpatentable thing] + "with a Firewall"
None of this should be patentable. New and truly novel approaches to computing issues should be, but those are exactly the types of things which are too important to patent. Where would computing be today if patents covered the concepts of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, evolutionary algorithims, or for that matter object-oriented programming and distributed networks?
Patents were supposed to be unlikely to be duplicated. Theoretically, if I wanted to do something and I didn't know how, I would have to turn to somebody with a patent. However, these days it's impossible to blow your nose without first calling a lawyer to figure out if someone patented nose-blowing in such a way. And chances are someone has.
We should just shut software patents down for 10 years, let the technology mature, then re-examine whether they're helping or slowing us down. In 10 years time we may have exhausted enough of the obvious things that only patentable things will remain.
I would hardly say DS9 got off to a solid start. They had far, far too many Quark Holodeck - style episodes in their first few seasons. Then something changed, what was that? I can't remember...
Babaylon 5 came along and rocked their world. With massive story arcs, a dark, gritty atmosphere, and a sense of impending doom from forces far too great for you to comprehend, Babylon 5 came along and out Trekked DS9. After it became clear that Babalon 5 was a better show, the crew stationed aboard DS9 discovered the Dominion, declared war on the Klingons, started killing eachother, and generally did a great job of writing gritty, gripping human emotion stories.
This is also the time that two Ex TNG cast members came aboard: Warf and O'Brian. Completely co-incidently, this is the time that Berman and Braga left DS9 to go work on Voyager. A lot of the Ex-trek castmembers started writing and filming DS9 episodes. The writers with seniority were taken over to Voyager, the writers with talent were sent back to Deep Space 9 like it was a summer training camp. Thanks to B&B's inability to see talent when it is slapping them in the face, they took all of the people who they thought were the best to their pet project, freeing up the people who were actually the best to do something great.
One of these models thrived. Can you guess which one? I'm only sad that Enterprise won't get a chance to answer the call of Battlestar Galactica the same way, and with the same talent, that DS9 answered Babylon 5
Also, the "charity" uses its money to accumulate major stakes in companies that just happen to be aligned with Microsoft's interests.
Well, yes. It is endowed. Meaning, it takes the money it has, invests, and returns to the wider world the returns on investment without consuming the capital. Theoretically, this will allow the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation to operate for centuries after the man is dead. Maybe even until Longhorn ships. It would be difficult to invest 20 billion dollars in small chunks across an economy centered around your stuff and not bump into people with at least a passing interest in what you do. A 5% stake in a cable provider? Investments in drug companies? That's nothing.
I don't remember the memo, but I do remember people recommending charity as a way to improve Microsoft's image. That it happened during an antitrust investigation (1994) is no surprise, considering how long the antitrust investigations have been going on. However, there is a difference between setting up a token charity trust and giving 1/3rd of your money to a charitable trust. That in and of itself is a lot larger than my 20 dollar tsunami gift. Plus whenever he talks about charity work the man sounds a lot more alive and vibrant than when he's talking about the new version of Windows. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Nothing is black and white. Especially not people.
Will this have a negative impact on the Duke Nukem Forever ship date?
Considering all of the fun we've had at the expense of this title, I'd consider it a positive impact.
Well, perl was written to be highly efficient for the everyday typist on a keyboard. Perhaps we need a phoenetic Perl, a variant that uses exclusively vocal shorthands like da-email-s-e-til-s-ess-sla-car-lbra-back-doubleu-d ot-plus-minus-rbra...
Not only would it be faster, I'm sure it would win the obfuscated Perl contest. And isn't that the goal of all Perl?
Let's see, expressed as a total of my reserve capital... minus outstanding debts... carry the one... I've donated twice as much as Bill, with my 20 dollar donation to the Tsunami relief fund.
In general I find the kind of people likely to give their money away, are not the kind of people likely to have any money to give.
(No offence meant to Mr. Gates, as he has given a lot more of his money to charitable causes than a lot of people, and even more importantly he seems to really care about them. No matter what you think about his business practices, the Bill and Melinda gates foundation has the largest endowment of any chairitible organization created in recent memory and will be doing positive things for the world long after the man has taken his blue screen of death to the black screen of death. Plus the B&M tend to be focused on practical things, and are pretty good about how they deal out grants.)
Whenever Slashdot links to a 50 MB exploding whale video hosted on someone's Atari 7800, post a torrent mirror of said file. It will drive your karma up, and help some little guys out.
Are the three original NES systems that you have all the oldschool tray-loading kind, and not the rare cartridge loading top-down units they released after the SNES? The problems associated with the tray-loading NES systems are legendary. People have all sorts of contortions involving blowing into cartridges, slamming cartridges into their systems, putting cartridges in as little as possible before pushing them down, etc. It's all very reminiscent of the early generation PS1's, which you now see people standing at weird angles to get the lazer to read just right. I've had better luck with the cheap Hong Kong clones, but perhaps it's just a question of which cheap Hong Kong clones I've gotten and which you have gotten.
Which is one of the reasons I asked if anyone out there had actually catalogued and ranked these clones.
To replace the QWERTY keyboard, one must offer something not only substantially better, but substantially better by an order of magnitude. Voice input might be it, once it's faster and all of the bugs are ironed out. Thought input might be faster still. You could also just moniter the nerves in a particular complex, like the inpulses through the arms to the fingers, and register that. All of these would be an order of magnitude faster, and perhaps more intuitive.
Just another keyboard layout, however, won't cut it. I learned Dvorak in college, and actually got as good typing Dvorak as I had been typing Qwerty. However, no matter where I went I was constantly running into Qwerty keyboards, and while I was learning Dvorak my Qwerty speeds went down significantly. Even if I could master Dvorak, it would bring my overall average typing speed down because everyone has a Qwerty. I switched back, and my typing speeds went back up.
Offer a truly revolutionary interface paradigm, or give up your illusions about changing the world.
Real has been doing a good job of turning themselves around recently. They've gone from one of the most bloated, dated, spyware-riddled, unstable, closed application to a less-bloated, more modern, more reliable application. Real went from being a colonizer of people's machines to a well-behaved tool. I've even started using their app again to play back Real files (despite the existence of Real Alternative).
And now they have a linux client. And they paid Thompson for MP3 playback rights on their Linux app to boot. They are a major desktop player and they're now supporting Linux. Good for them.
Dear Slashdot: get some perspective. This is a good thing for Linux, which somebody at Real decided to stick their neck out to do. Grow up a little and accept that non-Stallman software can be a good thing for the platform.
I feel compelled to point out that unlicensed portable (and non-portable) systems come out of Hong Kong all of the time. Offhand I can think of Portable NES, SNES, Genesis (before the Nomad), and Dreamcast. There are also unlicensed consoles, usually limited to 8-bit and 16-bit systems. Arguably the 3rd party NES systems were better than the original Nintendo versions: They've lasted a lot longer.
Good stuff, though. Does anyone know of a listing of unofficial systems manufacturers. Is anyone keeping track of this little piece of gaming history?
Here you have two intersecting fallacys producing dire results: Good people do good things, and power to the president is power to a man. Bush is a good person trying to do good things (which I don't doubt), and so he will do good things for the country (which I do doubt). Ashcroft is a good person, and so everything he does will be good. It's a simplistic viewpoint that betrays the problem that Nobody in life is the bad guy. In their own eyes, the Insurgents and the Palestines and the Israelies and the Al Queda agents and the people trained at the School of the Americas are all doing what they believe to be right. They're all good people doing what they think is good. Hitler may or may not have felt that the Jews should be exterminated, but he probably felt strongly that if the world were unified underneath him there would be no more wars and everyone would be better off. The world is more complicated than Black and White. Good people do Bad things all of the time simply because they are human beings. We've been harming the Cubans for 20 years because we've felt it would help overthrow the dictator we put into power, but all it's done is unify the country around him. Just because a policy is created by a person with good intentions doesn't mean it isn't a bad policy.
And as I mentioned, people forget that Congress isn't giving powers to Bush, they're giving powers to the office of the President. I'm sure many in congress now would feel uncomfortable giving such powers to the next Democratic administration, or all of the Republican administrations down the road, but that's exactly what they're doing. If you give this administration the power to arbitrarily wiretap and monitor citizens, or to strip citizenship from those they don't like, you give that power to all administrations. To once again re-use that most abused of examples: Hitler was Democratically elected, and was given wartime powers by congress to remake the government as he saw fit. At which point he promptly disbanded the congress, legally, and became a dictator.
Mr. Litan commits what Hayek called the fatal conceit of believing that government bureaucrats, rather than entrepreneurs and consumers, are in the best position to decide what constitutes a legitimate business purpose.
By adhering to this false maxim antitrust regulators are attempting to supersede the informed judgment of millions of consumers with the opinions Janet Reno and her former antitrust sidekick Joel Klein.
So... they start by saying that no monopoly should be regulated, or indeed no business should be regulated at all. And then they base their case off of this.
The idea that a free market is a perfect market has been shot down so thoroughly and so repeatedly that it doesn't deserve comment. But I'll just throw a few things out there anyway. Patent Law. Copyright Law. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. "The" phone company. The California Power Outages. Mad Cow Disease. Bovine Growth Hormones. FDA. The whole "government is bad for business" is a religion, not an economic reality. And most of the people who feel that way still want government protections, just on things that they expect, like racketeering, protection against unions, contract violations, dishonest business practices from their suppliers, police protection, etc.
That is not to say that the author cannot have any correct ideas because he subscribes to a popular but completely illogical set of beliefs, but rather that because the completely illogical set of beliefs are the basis for this particular article that the article itself can be only viewed, at best, as suspect.
Yes, but CF isn't gone, and is still used in many of the same applications that it always was. SD has been around for years in similar form factors (though there are, I believe, size compatibility issues), in a lot of devices that CF was never used for, like Cell Phones and PDAs.
The Memory stick upgrade issues isn't so much that it has been replaced, but that it has been replaced so frequently. The original Memory Sticks flatlined at 128. They released an incompatible up-to 256 sized version, I believe it was the Memory Stick Duo or it might have been the first Memory Stick Pro. Then they released the modern Memory Stick Pro standard that goes to a reasonably high number. And now, apparently, they're releasing a Memory Stick Mini, which will require another memory format upgrade.
If you buy your memory with your camera, and use it as internal memory, this isn't a big issue. But as I tend to upgrade memory capacity and cameras separately it becomes a problem. We have three cameras now, and there are another two we borrow from a professional photographer friend of ours, all of which take the same memory. If the CF standard had been changed repeatedly during that time, like Memory Sticks have been, we would have a lot of useless tech lying around.
To be fair to the typical gamer, we've been teaching them that if it's weird and incomprehensible, it should be shot for years. Most games follow this formula. Puzzles are obvious and understandable with very clear lights and meaning, whereas bosses are those big things with funny faces that you shoot.
Things that are not to be shot have to be comprehensible to the players, or else they won't figure out what to do with it.
And, the cards for the PS2 are memory sticks in a different form factor.
They might have done a tech upgrade since then, but the PS1 memory cards were licenced through an outside company using none of the memory stick tech. I've heard that there was a bit squabble inside of the company over internal licencing issues and the Playstation division went with an outside company. I don't know if they've kissed and made up for the PS2, but as I've yet to see a 10MB memory stick I doubt it.
Of course, it's a new, smaller memory stick
And that is another problem with the memory stick line: constant upgrades. It can't be a standard if you keep making the new stuff incompatible with the old stuff, and didn't make the standard with growth in mind.
To be honest, it's a completely unnecessary format. CF is larger, but basically infinitely expandable, as it keeps the driver chip onboard. That's why you can take a 6-year-old camera and slap a 2GB CF card in it and it will run happily. Memory stick devices, on the other hand, are very limited in terms of the upper size they will take. On the other hand, SD / MMC cards take up less space than Memory Stick devices, especially in terms of length. Ever notice how Memory Sticks stick out of a lot of electronics, but SD cards never do?
It is true that recently they've solved the price / size issues, though that brings the cards from a bad deal to an unremarkable deal. But that doesn't prevent It from being a bad format: Memory Sticks don't do anything better than the other formats out there. If a major company hadn't been desperately trying to throw it into everyone's faces, it would have died a long time ago.
And yes, even my Girlfriend's Clie comes with both a Memory Stick and a CF slot. Sony realizes that there are a lot of people who just won't buy into the whole Memory Stick thing... Like Sony's Video Game department.
Actually, it was Visual Concepts Entertainment, a studio owned by but separate from Sega. They are a talented bunch of guys. Their 2k* lineup really took sports gaming ahead a few years.
Kush Games also took over some of the 2K* duties, with college basketball and hockey games under their direction. They are not owned by Sega. At least, not as far as I know.
As a side note, I wonder how much longer vcentertainment.com will refer people to the ESPN branded site?
Are games just more complicated to make than a movie?
Yes. For one, problems with movies generally don't snowball. For example, if you can't shoot the scene where Harrison Ford jumps out of the helicopter and lands on the top of the state building because it is raining too much every day you have available, you quickly film a shot where he's taking off in a helicopter, then cut to an interior of the state building with Harrison Ford sneaking around and the helicopter flying off. On the other hand, if you're reusing code and you discover that while your graphics subsystem can easily handle 1,000,000 polys it can't deal with the 1,000 units of 100 polys you were planning on throwing at it, you're screwed. You may have to redo your graphics engine, you may have to re-do your in-game graphics, you may have to re-author your worlds to compensate. Or you may discover that your idea for an RTSRPS, while seeming great, is actually boring in practice (Anyone else remember the revisions to Warcraft 3?). A lot of these things a competent director on film can tell by looking at dailys, but videogame developers have to wait until running code is in front of them to know. And unfortunately for code to run all of the support code has to be in place, etc, etc... generally for half of the project all people can do is hope that things will work out. Furthermore the painful debug period can last anywhere from as long as you think it will until infinity. You can't ship a game if it is buggy: the publisher won't let you. But you can ship a crappy movie. You can also fix many problems with movies during the editing phase, whereas games can't just be re-cut.
If you consider a game in development to be like a script in development, the cycles are similarly predictable. Nobody knows how long the latest Superman movie will be passed around from author to author before it's done with revisions and ready to go, but it could be a long while. Likewise, nobody knows how long it will be before Starcraft Ghost is ready for prime time, but it could be a while.
On the other hand, I haven't always seen the correlation between "when it's done" and greatness. Some companies have games that aren't done because they want to polish it to perfection. But quite frequently you have games that aren't done because it just isn't fun, and while the spark of insight is great enough to avoid putting it to sleep, nobody can really make it work. Sometimes you just have to get it out the door so that you can start over.
Not to veer dangerously close to the topic, but there is also the flip side to this, namely that while books engage one's imagination, games engage one's strategic thinking. While a story about the kreb cycle would probably be dry and boring, a videogame could be absolutely engaging and unforgettable. A large chunk of economic theory could be taught memorably through interactive simulations, as could the sciences and many other disciplines as well.
Don't discount gaming as not-books. They are not books. But they have their strengths as a medium too. And quite frankly, if young adult's exposure to reading is through High School Textbooks, no wonder they consider it dry, boring, and poorly done. I fail to see how circumventing some of that would hurt.
P.S. Since 7, the Final Fantasy games have contained more text than most any books. I believe that is what the parent was referring to.