It would be nice to be sent an e-reminder when the street cleaning day is, so that they don't keep towing my car. Plus contruction, street or area relevent to me, etc would be very nice... Like a community newsletter but in more convienient, relevant form, flitered for my personal location.
It was much more convienient when the major form of currency was coon skins. I'd say, "how many coon skins is that them thar server?" And 'Packard say, "how many coon skins you got?" And I'd say "I gots me 2000 coon skins, tho haf of 'em be rotten, on account a I been saving for this here server" And Hewlet Packard say "Is they rotten on the inside or the furry part?" And I say "The inside. The furry part is as soft and furry as my granma's chin." And then I gets me a server, yupserrie.
Sorry, but if you haven't figured out yet that value is a human perception, and that currency (whatever form it may take) is just a way exchanging value due to rigorously controlled perceptions, then you have a lot of economics classes left to go. Look up what DeBeers did to the diamond markets in the past 100 years, and how their most effective marketing campaign in history changed the humble diamond from an OK jewel on par with rubys and emralds into the defacto expression of love and permanence it has become, not to mention generating tremendous money for themselves.
Stores and exchanges of value are necessary because of the sheer improbability of finding mutual needs and satisfactions in a given interchange. Hewlett Packard doesn't need coonskins, they need fab plants and chips and designs. Money allows that. The belief in and protection of the monetary supply is not lunacy, but a sign of a mature culture which can erect and enforce abstract but grounded rules for the betterment of all. It's a cultural construction, like adoption, property ownership, and history, much less solid than stone but no less real.
This sounds like the "click of death" that zip drives started developing a few years back. First one drive would click and fail. Then any drive that had a disk from the clicking drive would click and fail. Turns out the read heads were ripping off, which was tearing up the disks, which would then be put in other drives and rip off the read heads, and so on.
Keep your important papers on a couple of floppy disks that you keep in your bag at all times.
It helps if there is a clean separation between work space and play space, and your laptop will quickly become your play space. Use your floppies to work at labs, where you can print things out or fall asleep without worrying about someone stealing your gear. Or you can type up your papers on the campus lawn on your laptop, but working with floppies gives you the freedom of choice.
As for protecting expensive gear... good luck. The only thing truly sacred in a college environment is your backpack. Keep your laptop in this at all times. If you are going to sleep in a lab or at the library, use the bag as a pillow so nobody can steal it. If your dorm is at all worth living in, your door will be open at essentially all times. And even when it's not, it takes approximately 15 minutes to figure out how to pick most college dorm locks using coathangers and string (hint: those easy-to-use disabled latches pull downward!), or a bit longer to learn to pick locks the traditional way. But if it's with you, it's basically safe.
If you don't want to go cutting into the LED's heat them until they die. Of course you could just wire in extra voltage until the LED's fail. Either way you're likely to damage your electronics in the process, and are better off just using black tape.
If you're running at a good clip per second, that's several frames per second that you're giving it animation information. As the microsoft researcher says, it's interpolating between keyframes, smoothing for trajectory. It's probably also taking averages of color inbetween the frames, and running it through a natural media highlight algorithim. Think those oldfangled "morph" programs mixed with a photoshop filter.
It should be doing some edge detection for the inbetween frames, but it probably isn't. I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Today, the only the electronic music most of us hear is the repetitive, simplistic beat of dance or industrial music piped into clubs and dubbed over with offensive lyrics and banter.
I think someone needs to check out ishkur's guide to electronic music. There is a pretty wide variation between the intricate beats of Drum 'n Base and the repetitive, simplistic beat of House. Of course, if you want more experimental electronica, look for IDM, Aka intelligent (unintelligible) dance music. None of these would be possible without using computers carefully as instruments, and none of them fit into mainstream musical categorization.
I must also argue with the idea that game artists haven't evolved the craft. Most games now feature dynamically adjusting music based at bare minimum on character states. They adjust for boss encounters without interrupting musical lines, and can dynamically increase or decrease instrumentation based upon on-screen action. While most game audio creators do focus on sounding like traditional recordings, this is probably because most are traditional recording artists these days.
Some of the best game soundtracks are traditional recordings. Final Fantasy, Xenogears, and Wipeout all spring to mind as great soundtracks involving "dumped-in" music. Even Street Sk8er, with it's off-kilter collection of grungy tunes, was a great listen.
That's not to say that the article doesn't have it's points. But to say that videogame composers should be at the forefront of experimentation just because they used to need to be is erroneous. Of course, if everyone were as original and good as The Fat Man (no lie, he's one of the greats) game audio would be far better off. But that combination of original sound and skill is rare in any medium... and The Fat Man's genius is not so easily replicated.
Game audio should be convincing, engaging without being detracting, and should heighten enjoyment the first time heard without getting annoying the 10th. It should dynamically change based upon the character's situation, and should contain an original artistic spark. Game audio shouldn't be the tunes you hear in your car... Nor should they be the buzzes and blips of yesteryear. While certain composers pioneer original genres (Tommy Tallerico springs to mind), this shouldn't be the defining feature.
What's going to motivate my kids to play more games," says Reggie, "are things like [marketspeak] and [marketspeak] and [marketspeak]."
Actually, what Reggie said was this: [marketspeak]
Yes, Reggie really did say that, at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition (a.k.a. E3) in May, as he introduced Nintendo's new game platform -- an innovative dual-screen, wireless handheld, code-named Nintendo DS, and scheduled to hit stores in time for the holidays.
Reggie's high-voltage verbs sent shockwaves of anticipation -- and adulation -- through the Nintendo community. You know, all he really meant was [marketspeak]. But the way he said it -- man-oh-man-- internet bulletin boards and chat rooms just went bonkers. "Reggie is the [marketspeak]!" posted one true believer. Another wrote: [marketspeak].
Feeling the itch to get back to his roots in consumer marketing, Reggie became Nintendo's chief marketing officer last November. "For me," says Reggie, "the opportunity here at Nintendo really was to get back to my market speak, apply what I've done in the teen market speaking space for the last ten, twelve years and really speak the market."
Why did you threaten to kick asses and take names at the E3 conference? You were just joking, right?
To catch on, e-books will need to be neutral as to the medium they are read on, like MP3's. They should be readable on a PC, Mac, Laptop, PDA, Phone, e-book reader, or whatever you have handy. Right now the "official" e-book schemes tie text to hardware in a way that ensures the market stays fragmented. But if you look at the amount of free or paid books available for the PDA / PC, it becomes clear that e-books aren't a failure, e-book hardware is.
That was strung together from actual quotes from the two villans. It's interesting that they are the two most beloved Final Fantasy villans, yet they have such distinctly different styles and emotional levels. Kefka is a paper think lover of destruction and mayhem, who loves what he does and wouldn't think twice about kicking an inferior if it would scrape mud off his shoes. Sephiroth is an emotional bundle of contradictions, fleshed out in a confused man with delusions of grandeur. Both are evil, of course, but besides attempting to destroy the world, they're very different characters.
Sephiroth: I will be in this game, will I? Maybe that's what you think. Maybe that's what you've thought all along. In my veins courses the blood of the ancients. I am the rightful heir to this game. This game is not about me. This game is me. You stupid fools. This game is my mother. I am my mother. Mother, I shall return...
[Meanwhile]
Kefka: Ahem. There's SAND on my boots. Mook #1: Kefka, what are you doing? Kefka: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! I'm poisioning Sephiroth's lunch. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Mook #1: But that's the catering cart! If you do that, you'll kill the entire production team! Kefka: Out of the way, Mook. Nothing can stop me now. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
[Production team collapses on the floor]
Kefka: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! I will destroy everything! I will create a monument to non-existence! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Die! Die!
[Sephiroth falls to his knees]
Sephiroth: Death awaits you all. But do not fear... for it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon, we will live again as a part of me.
Kefka: This is sickening! You sound like a chapter from a self-help booklet! Prepare yourself! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Sephiroth: You stupid fool. You have never even thought about it. All the spirit energy of this Planet. All its wisdom... knowledge...I will meld with it all. I will become one with it... It will become one with me.
Kefka: I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate you!
Sephiroth: Ha, ha, ha...... Stop acting as if you were happy. There's no need to act as though you're angry either. Because, Kefka. You are...
[Sephiroth falls over dead]
Kefka: Poor old...oh well, what a worthless excuse of a villan!
Despite how terrible The Spirits Within really was, the other people at the company who greenlighted and went along with the project deserve blame too. Hironobu Sakaguchi played a pivotal role in their resurrection from total bankruptcy, eventually having a hand in everything good Square put out from the Final Fantasy series to Einhander, Parasite Eve to Bushido Blade. He interrupted the streak of great games to focus on making movies, a tragic mistake which nearly cost the company it's existence (again). But this is the man who shaped Japan's premier RPG series while it was still Japan's premier RPG series. While I wouldn't give him an extra large Christmas Bonus for The Spirits Within, he does deserve a second chance, with a little oversight and the promise that he will never try to turn square into something other than a videogame company again.
There was more than one guy involved with Microsoft Bob. There was more than one guy who approved Clippy. There was more than one person who looked at the specs and decided that a 64 bit password on a wireless network would be secure enough. Why, then, is the man who was at the forefront of Square's shared delusion suddenly the sole heir of the blame? Do you want to be led into battle by a general who believes himself to be infalliable, or do you want to be led by someone who has had some experience and hard-learned lessons under his belt?
Play Time was introduced by Role Playing Games. When Final Fantasy II had 20 hours of story straight through, it was a big deal. When Final Fantasy 7 took 40 hours to beat, it was a very big deal. These are games that are played once, maybe twice, and if it takes 20 hours to beat, then 20 hours is all you will get.
A lot of RPG's at the time were suffering from being too short to satiate the player. I remember beating Dragon's Quest in about 4 hours. I also remember the week that I dedicated to beating the original XenoGears in one sitting. I slept on the couch, through 70 hours of gameplay... and the game they shipped wasn't even finished. I could see a fully implemented version of Xenogears reaching near to the 150 mark, and it would have been a damned good ride too.
Furthermore, play time is a metric that all video game developers must use. If you are creating an FPS with 10 levels, each level being 5 sections long and each section taking 5 minutes to complete, if the player has to restart every level once, how much gameplay are you really providing them? In this case, 500 minutes, or about 8 hours. Add in another two hours for setup, cinematics, and (sigh) loading, and you have a 10 hour game. You had better think seriously about your lead programmer's suggestion for implementing cooperative multiplayer, because you're going to need the meat.
That's not to say that the metric has gotten out of hand. I can SAY that the game I'm developing has about 1,200 hours of gameplay, but the fact of the matter is that's just a lie. The problem is that the metric is A: unverifiable and B: linear. Hence, if someone else says "40 hours of gameplay," I must say "50 hours of gameplay," or I'll be second-string. Just ratchet that puppy up: nobody will know the difference.
Of course play time is not a good indicator of quality... Metal Gear Solid was just 10 hours long.
It's 4% of the total market, but it represents a 12% loss within their customer base. Further the Cell phone market base is increasing at a fairly brisk pace, so it represents quite alot in terms of revenue $$$.
Is the cell phone market base increasing at such a brisk pace that the number may not represent a loss for Nokia, but a gain for the other cellular companies? In other words, does this mean that Nokia's numbers are flat in a growing market rather than declining in a flat market?
I agree. Anytime *I* have to take anything out of production for our 1500-odd users at the company I work at, they require *AT LEAST* 12 hours notice, if not more. Usually, we give 24.
Do you have any idea how much of a disruption to the workflow at my company Slashdot going down is? If we don't keep the engineers distracted, they'll start interacting with the customers! The customers will be speaking to someone who knows something. Then the customer will know something. Then our business is ruined.
Thanks Slashdot. Thanks a lot. I hope you like your prescious backend update. In Japan.
Apple made a bad, but completely honest, business decision. If they thought they were being scammed, they would not have signed the contract. And they had the resources to reasonably have known whether or not they were being scammed.
Not true. Actually, as has been revealed before, Microsoft misrepresented the contract, saying that it was something quite limited whereas it was actually tremendously broad in scope. "Hi sign here whoops is that what it said."
Apple should have practiced due dilligence, and known what they were signing. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft's hands are clean for misrepresenting the contract. If someone explained to you the terms of your morgage, then gave you a contract to sign, and you sign it without noticing that the APR was one hundred times higher than you were told, the person who gave you the contract and misrepresented the contents is an asshat.
You should practice due dilligence to protect yourself from the asshats of the world, but they're still asshats.
While I agree that microsoft is rather underhanded in their buisness practices, the accusation of them stealing the windows concept from apple isn't true. Both apple and ms got the idea from xerox...
True, but Apple engineers took what they saw at Xerox and expanded upon it into a fully-fledged OS. Microsoft added a clause into a product for the Macintosh which Apple believed was giving a license for UI use on just Windows 1.0 as a cooling off period, but instead gave away the look and feel of the Macintosh to Microsoft entirely, which MS then proceeded to plunder in legendary fashion.
Ironically, Either Apple or Microsoft could theoretically have sued many of the Xwindows systems out of existence, but once the (legally protected) Windows prescident was set, the (non-legally protected) flood of similar Operating Systems with similar looks and feels was released upon the world.
Theoretically, this has allowed Operating System creators to learn freely from eachother, which should allow us to reach a state of computing Nirvana. Freeflow of ideas, yadda yadda. Sadly, in many ways it allows the dominant OS vendor to stay "good enough" at all times, freely stealing the fruits of other people's software when it becomes important, and allowing them to fail with their own experiments without contributing to the pot.
So yes, while Apple was inspired by the work at Xerox, Microsoft's arrangement with Apple more directly resembles contract theft.
An omnipotent dictator with a god complex from thousands of years ago is back to take over the world. And only one man can stop him!
You are Pontius Pilate. You must fight to save the empire from this madman. But he is not alone. He has resurrected Peter, Paul, and Luke, and 9 other henchmen and has created an army of thousands of half-living zombie followers. Your job is not going to be an easy one.
Fight through 12 levels of pulse pounding action! Fight through thousands of zombies, 12 henchmen, 4 horsemen, and the big man himself. Enjoy amazing atmospheric effects such as snow and rain of frogs. Only for the Game Cube.
Are you Ro-MAN enough?
[gratuitous picture of an underdressed Mary Magdalene removed]
But after I've shelled out hard cash and pop in the disk, the MPAA informs me that this movie is licensed for home viewing... Wait a minute? - I thought I was buying the DVD, as in, I NOW OWN THE MOVIE. How can the MPAA impose terms on the use of something they no longer own?
Actually, there are a few copyright clauses that fall under most people's radars. One is the public performance clause... I.E. you can't charge admission to a packed house of 100 other people, or for that matter even show it to a small company for free. This is effectively the same as copying, so the idea goes, and would have a detrimental effect on the value of the item in question. The movie is NOT "licensed for private performance", it just isn't licensed for a public performance. You don't need their permission to watch the movie, in other words, they just choose to phrase it that way.
You do own the media. That silly license that says you must return this disk upon request carries no more weight in law than the tooth fairy. I don't think it's ever been challenged in court because I don't think anyone has been delusional enough to think they could enforce that. However, just because you own it doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it, just like in other parts of law. You may own the fertilizer and the ammonia, but you may not reconfigure it into something that might explode. You may own the car, but you may not drive it without a catalytic converter. You may own your dog, but you may not torture it. You may own your pornography collection, but you may not show it to my kids. You may own your DVD collection, but you may not duplicate them.
What it comes down to is this: If the MPAA can impose terms on me after I've bought something, I don't really own it.
They can't. That doesn't stop them from flapping their mouths, but just because they say something doesn't mean it has the force of law. However, there are some things which have the force of law which are not explicitly delineated before purchase.
Do more than just know your rights. Learn your rights.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice to be sent an e-reminder when the street cleaning day is, so that they don't keep towing my car. Plus contruction, street or area relevent to me, etc would be very nice... Like a community newsletter but in more convienient, relevant form, flitered for my personal location.
It was much more convienient when the major form of currency was coon skins. I'd say, "how many coon skins is that them thar server?" And 'Packard say, "how many coon skins you got?" And I'd say "I gots me 2000 coon skins, tho haf of 'em be rotten, on account a I been saving for this here server" And Hewlet Packard say "Is they rotten on the inside or the furry part?" And I say "The inside. The furry part is as soft and furry as my granma's chin." And then I gets me a server, yupserrie.
Sorry, but if you haven't figured out yet that value is a human perception, and that currency (whatever form it may take) is just a way exchanging value due to rigorously controlled perceptions, then you have a lot of economics classes left to go. Look up what DeBeers did to the diamond markets in the past 100 years, and how their most effective marketing campaign in history changed the humble diamond from an OK jewel on par with rubys and emralds into the defacto expression of love and permanence it has become, not to mention generating tremendous money for themselves.
Stores and exchanges of value are necessary because of the sheer improbability of finding mutual needs and satisfactions in a given interchange. Hewlett Packard doesn't need coonskins, they need fab plants and chips and designs. Money allows that. The belief in and protection of the monetary supply is not lunacy, but a sign of a mature culture which can erect and enforce abstract but grounded rules for the betterment of all. It's a cultural construction, like adoption, property ownership, and history, much less solid than stone but no less real.
This sounds like the "click of death" that zip drives started developing a few years back. First one drive would click and fail. Then any drive that had a disk from the clicking drive would click and fail. Turns out the read heads were ripping off, which was tearing up the disks, which would then be put in other drives and rip off the read heads, and so on.
Keep your important papers on a couple of floppy disks that you keep in your bag at all times.
It helps if there is a clean separation between work space and play space, and your laptop will quickly become your play space. Use your floppies to work at labs, where you can print things out or fall asleep without worrying about someone stealing your gear. Or you can type up your papers on the campus lawn on your laptop, but working with floppies gives you the freedom of choice.
As for protecting expensive gear... good luck. The only thing truly sacred in a college environment is your backpack. Keep your laptop in this at all times. If you are going to sleep in a lab or at the library, use the bag as a pillow so nobody can steal it. If your dorm is at all worth living in, your door will be open at essentially all times. And even when it's not, it takes approximately 15 minutes to figure out how to pick most college dorm locks using coathangers and string (hint: those easy-to-use disabled latches pull downward!), or a bit longer to learn to pick locks the traditional way. But if it's with you, it's basically safe.
If you don't want to go cutting into the LED's heat them until they die. Of course you could just wire in extra voltage until the LED's fail. Either way you're likely to damage your electronics in the process, and are better off just using black tape.
Nope. FHS.
I had used the pins from a 486, as well as 640 K of really old ram, as little staples to connect the chips to my backpack.
It was pretty cute, though scratchy inside.
>More like just rumors until the SGI machine boots up.
Don't you mean it's just rumors until the script is written?
Wait. Nevermind.
If you're running at a good clip per second, that's several frames per second that you're giving it animation information. As the microsoft researcher says, it's interpolating between keyframes, smoothing for trajectory. It's probably also taking averages of color inbetween the frames, and running it through a natural media highlight algorithim. Think those oldfangled "morph" programs mixed with a photoshop filter.
It should be doing some edge detection for the inbetween frames, but it probably isn't. I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Oops.
Today, the only the electronic music most of us hear is the repetitive, simplistic beat of dance or industrial music piped into clubs and dubbed over with offensive lyrics and banter.
I think someone needs to check out ishkur's guide to electronic music. There is a pretty wide variation between the intricate beats of Drum 'n Base and the repetitive, simplistic beat of House. Of course, if you want more experimental electronica, look for IDM, Aka intelligent (unintelligible) dance music. None of these would be possible without using computers carefully as instruments, and none of them fit into mainstream musical categorization.
I must also argue with the idea that game artists haven't evolved the craft. Most games now feature dynamically adjusting music based at bare minimum on character states. They adjust for boss encounters without interrupting musical lines, and can dynamically increase or decrease instrumentation based upon on-screen action. While most game audio creators do focus on sounding like traditional recordings, this is probably because most are traditional recording artists these days.
Some of the best game soundtracks are traditional recordings. Final Fantasy, Xenogears, and Wipeout all spring to mind as great soundtracks involving "dumped-in" music. Even Street Sk8er, with it's off-kilter collection of grungy tunes, was a great listen.
That's not to say that the article doesn't have it's points. But to say that videogame composers should be at the forefront of experimentation just because they used to need to be is erroneous. Of course, if everyone were as original and good as The Fat Man (no lie, he's one of the greats) game audio would be far better off. But that combination of original sound and skill is rare in any medium... and The Fat Man's genius is not so easily replicated.
Game audio should be convincing, engaging without being detracting, and should heighten enjoyment the first time heard without getting annoying the 10th. It should dynamically change based upon the character's situation, and should contain an original artistic spark. Game audio shouldn't be the tunes you hear in your car... Nor should they be the buzzes and blips of yesteryear. While certain composers pioneer original genres (Tommy Tallerico springs to mind), this shouldn't be the defining feature.
All artists should be creative, game or no.
What's going to motivate my kids to play more games," says Reggie, "are things like [marketspeak] and [marketspeak] and [marketspeak]."
Actually, what Reggie said was this: [marketspeak]
Yes, Reggie really did say that, at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition (a.k.a. E3) in May, as he introduced Nintendo's new game platform -- an innovative dual-screen, wireless handheld, code-named Nintendo DS, and scheduled to hit stores in time for the holidays.
Reggie's high-voltage verbs sent shockwaves of anticipation -- and adulation -- through the Nintendo community. You know, all he really meant was [marketspeak]. But the way he said it -- man-oh-man-- internet bulletin boards and chat rooms just went bonkers. "Reggie is the [marketspeak]!" posted one true believer. Another wrote: [marketspeak].
Feeling the itch to get back to his roots in consumer marketing, Reggie became Nintendo's chief marketing officer last November. "For me," says Reggie, "the opportunity here at Nintendo really was to get back to my market speak, apply what I've done in the teen market speaking space for the last ten, twelve years and really speak the market."
Why did you threaten to kick asses and take names at the E3 conference? You were just joking, right?
No, I actually wasn't joking. [he was joking]
Is Nintendo going to fail?
Nintendo is the greatest company ever!
is the DS going to fail?
No Nintendo product has ever failed
What about the Virtual Boy?
Enough! This interview is over!
To catch on, e-books will need to be neutral as to the medium they are read on, like MP3's. They should be readable on a PC, Mac, Laptop, PDA, Phone, e-book reader, or whatever you have handy. Right now the "official" e-book schemes tie text to hardware in a way that ensures the market stays fragmented. But if you look at the amount of free or paid books available for the PDA / PC, it becomes clear that e-books aren't a failure, e-book hardware is.
That was strung together from actual quotes from the two villans. It's interesting that they are the two most beloved Final Fantasy villans, yet they have such distinctly different styles and emotional levels. Kefka is a paper think lover of destruction and mayhem, who loves what he does and wouldn't think twice about kicking an inferior if it would scrape mud off his shoes. Sephiroth is an emotional bundle of contradictions, fleshed out in a confused man with delusions of grandeur. Both are evil, of course, but besides attempting to destroy the world, they're very different characters.
Sephiroth: I will be in this game, will I? Maybe that's what you think. Maybe that's what you've thought all along. In my veins courses the blood of the ancients. I am the rightful heir to this game. This game is not about me. This game is me. You stupid fools. This game is my mother. I am my mother. Mother, I shall return...
[Meanwhile]
Kefka: Ahem. There's SAND on my boots.
Mook #1: Kefka, what are you doing?
Kefka: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! I'm poisioning Sephiroth's lunch. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Mook #1: But that's the catering cart! If you do that, you'll kill the entire production team!
Kefka: Out of the way, Mook. Nothing can stop me now. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
[Production team collapses on the floor]
Kefka: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! I will destroy everything! I will create a monument to non-existence! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Die! Die!
[Sephiroth falls to his knees]
Sephiroth: Death awaits you all. But do not fear... for it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon, we will live again as a part of me.
Kefka: This is sickening! You sound like a chapter from a self-help booklet! Prepare yourself! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Sephiroth: You stupid fool. You have never even thought about it. All the spirit energy of this Planet. All its wisdom... knowledge...I will meld with it all. I will become one with it... It will become one with me.
Kefka: I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate you!
Sephiroth: Ha, ha, ha...... Stop acting as if you were happy. There's no need to act as though you're angry either. Because, Kefka. You are...
[Sephiroth falls over dead]
Kefka: Poor old...oh well, what a worthless excuse of a villan!
Despite how terrible The Spirits Within really was, the other people at the company who greenlighted and went along with the project deserve blame too. Hironobu Sakaguchi played a pivotal role in their resurrection from total bankruptcy, eventually having a hand in everything good Square put out from the Final Fantasy series to Einhander, Parasite Eve to Bushido Blade. He interrupted the streak of great games to focus on making movies, a tragic mistake which nearly cost the company it's existence (again). But this is the man who shaped Japan's premier RPG series while it was still Japan's premier RPG series. While I wouldn't give him an extra large Christmas Bonus for The Spirits Within, he does deserve a second chance, with a little oversight and the promise that he will never try to turn square into something other than a videogame company again.
There was more than one guy involved with Microsoft Bob. There was more than one guy who approved Clippy. There was more than one person who looked at the specs and decided that a 64 bit password on a wireless network would be secure enough. Why, then, is the man who was at the forefront of Square's shared delusion suddenly the sole heir of the blame? Do you want to be led into battle by a general who believes himself to be infalliable, or do you want to be led by someone who has had some experience and hard-learned lessons under his belt?
Play Time was introduced by Role Playing Games. When Final Fantasy II had 20 hours of story straight through, it was a big deal. When Final Fantasy 7 took 40 hours to beat, it was a very big deal. These are games that are played once, maybe twice, and if it takes 20 hours to beat, then 20 hours is all you will get.
A lot of RPG's at the time were suffering from being too short to satiate the player. I remember beating Dragon's Quest in about 4 hours. I also remember the week that I dedicated to beating the original XenoGears in one sitting. I slept on the couch, through 70 hours of gameplay... and the game they shipped wasn't even finished. I could see a fully implemented version of Xenogears reaching near to the 150 mark, and it would have been a damned good ride too.
Furthermore, play time is a metric that all video game developers must use. If you are creating an FPS with 10 levels, each level being 5 sections long and each section taking 5 minutes to complete, if the player has to restart every level once, how much gameplay are you really providing them? In this case, 500 minutes, or about 8 hours. Add in another two hours for setup, cinematics, and (sigh) loading, and you have a 10 hour game. You had better think seriously about your lead programmer's suggestion for implementing cooperative multiplayer, because you're going to need the meat.
That's not to say that the metric has gotten out of hand. I can SAY that the game I'm developing has about 1,200 hours of gameplay, but the fact of the matter is that's just a lie. The problem is that the metric is A: unverifiable and B: linear. Hence, if someone else says "40 hours of gameplay," I must say "50 hours of gameplay," or I'll be second-string. Just ratchet that puppy up: nobody will know the difference.
Of course play time is not a good indicator of quality... Metal Gear Solid was just 10 hours long.
Welcome to the world of Minimum System Requirements as determined by the Marketers.
Don't upgrade your systems until you find out how much stuff you really need.
It's 4% of the total market, but it represents a 12% loss within their customer base. Further the Cell phone market base is increasing at a fairly brisk pace, so it represents quite alot in terms of revenue $$$.
Is the cell phone market base increasing at such a brisk pace that the number may not represent a loss for Nokia, but a gain for the other cellular companies? In other words, does this mean that Nokia's numbers are flat in a growing market rather than declining in a flat market?
I agree. Anytime *I* have to take anything out of production for our 1500-odd users at the company I work at, they require *AT LEAST* 12 hours notice, if not more. Usually, we give 24.
Do you have any idea how much of a disruption to the workflow at my company Slashdot going down is? If we don't keep the engineers distracted, they'll start interacting with the customers! The customers will be speaking to someone who knows something. Then the customer will know something. Then our business is ruined.
Thanks Slashdot. Thanks a lot. I hope you like your prescious backend update. In Japan.
Apple made a bad, but completely honest, business decision. If they thought they were being scammed, they would not have signed the contract. And they had the resources to reasonably have known whether or not they were being scammed.
Not true. Actually, as has been revealed before, Microsoft misrepresented the contract, saying that it was something quite limited whereas it was actually tremendously broad in scope. "Hi sign here whoops is that what it said."
Apple should have practiced due dilligence, and known what they were signing. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft's hands are clean for misrepresenting the contract. If someone explained to you the terms of your morgage, then gave you a contract to sign, and you sign it without noticing that the APR was one hundred times higher than you were told, the person who gave you the contract and misrepresented the contents is an asshat.
You should practice due dilligence to protect yourself from the asshats of the world, but they're still asshats.
While I agree that microsoft is rather underhanded in their buisness practices, the accusation of them stealing the windows concept from apple isn't true. Both apple and ms got the idea from xerox...
True, but Apple engineers took what they saw at Xerox and expanded upon it into a fully-fledged OS. Microsoft added a clause into a product for the Macintosh which Apple believed was giving a license for UI use on just Windows 1.0 as a cooling off period, but instead gave away the look and feel of the Macintosh to Microsoft entirely, which MS then proceeded to plunder in legendary fashion.
Ironically, Either Apple or Microsoft could theoretically have sued many of the Xwindows systems out of existence, but once the (legally protected) Windows prescident was set, the (non-legally protected) flood of similar Operating Systems with similar looks and feels was released upon the world.
Theoretically, this has allowed Operating System creators to learn freely from eachother, which should allow us to reach a state of computing Nirvana. Freeflow of ideas, yadda yadda. Sadly, in many ways it allows the dominant OS vendor to stay "good enough" at all times, freely stealing the fruits of other people's software when it becomes important, and allowing them to fail with their own experiments without contributing to the pot.
So yes, while Apple was inspired by the work at Xerox, Microsoft's arrangement with Apple more directly resembles contract theft.
An omnipotent dictator with a god complex from thousands of years ago is back to take over the world. And only one man can stop him!
You are Pontius Pilate. You must fight to save the empire from this madman. But he is not alone. He has resurrected Peter, Paul, and Luke, and 9 other henchmen and has created an army of thousands of half-living zombie followers. Your job is not going to be an easy one.
Fight through 12 levels of pulse pounding action!
Fight through thousands of zombies, 12 henchmen, 4 horsemen, and the big man himself.
Enjoy amazing atmospheric effects such as snow and rain of frogs.
Only for the Game Cube.
Are you Ro-MAN enough?
[gratuitous picture of an underdressed Mary Magdalene removed]
But after I've shelled out hard cash and pop in the disk, the MPAA informs me that this movie is licensed for home viewing... Wait a minute? - I thought I was buying the DVD, as in, I NOW OWN THE MOVIE. How can the MPAA impose terms on the use of something they no longer own?
Actually, there are a few copyright clauses that fall under most people's radars. One is the public performance clause... I.E. you can't charge admission to a packed house of 100 other people, or for that matter even show it to a small company for free. This is effectively the same as copying, so the idea goes, and would have a detrimental effect on the value of the item in question. The movie is NOT "licensed for private performance", it just isn't licensed for a public performance. You don't need their permission to watch the movie, in other words, they just choose to phrase it that way.
You do own the media. That silly license that says you must return this disk upon request carries no more weight in law than the tooth fairy. I don't think it's ever been challenged in court because I don't think anyone has been delusional enough to think they could enforce that. However, just because you own it doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it, just like in other parts of law. You may own the fertilizer and the ammonia, but you may not reconfigure it into something that might explode. You may own the car, but you may not drive it without a catalytic converter. You may own your dog, but you may not torture it. You may own your pornography collection, but you may not show it to my kids. You may own your DVD collection, but you may not duplicate them.
What it comes down to is this: If the MPAA can impose terms on me after I've bought something, I don't really own it.
They can't. That doesn't stop them from flapping their mouths, but just because they say something doesn't mean it has the force of law. However, there are some things which have the force of law which are not explicitly delineated before purchase.
Do more than just know your rights. Learn your rights.
Yes, and what are the hardware requirements?
Not much... A couple of boards, some nails...