Does every "Macintosh I've ever used" only count your Performa? As far as I can tell, the whole "megahertz myth" thing is in reference to the G4. My G4-450 easily blows away my sister's PII-550 (bought three months after).
Could have something to do with Windoze cruft on her system, tho.:)
I got my dreamcast long before the "Boot Disk" came out, and to play jap games i needed a region selectable mod chip.
You do this, and then you have the audacity to complain that you couldn't read the Japanese games? What were you expecting, a babel fish with the box?!
I think other posters covered your other points far better than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
In America, maybe... but in my experience, Asia and Australia have high consumer awareness of modchips and piracy.
It's really big in Australia. Being the only PAL area in Australasia with excellent connections to Asian countries, people get frustrated with having to wait for conversions of games to arrive. Some games don't arrive at all. (We probably get about 50-60% of all RPGs - PS, PS2, N64, GBA, Dreamcast- translated/released in the US, and as a complete console RPG freak I can tell you that is very painful indeed!) Once they realise they can get them quicker and cheaper (A$100 is a horrible psychological threshhold for a game, but that's where many are priced) it's pretty easy to justify a modchip and buying pirated games.
That aside, I know plenty of people (myself included) who buy legitimate imported games. I know the games companies would rather we bought a console for each region, but do you know anyone with a DVD player for each region? I'd go buy a different console if I had that much money!
Game region coding and DVD region coding are on par with each other, IMHO. You can potentially play pirated HK DVDs on a region-free player, but who's going to hunt who down over that one?
I don't have keyword and description metatags on my site at the moment (just PICS and generator) and I suspect my ranking on several non-Google search engines is suffering because of it. You can no longer hit my main art site by searching for my name at Google since I removed them.
Different search engines operate in different ways, whether it's through link text (search Google for "pit of voles" and you'll get fanfiction.net, thanks to the efforts of a good friend), the title tag, the body text or keywords/description. A good combination of all four will get you an honest ranking... maybe they should be calling for general metatag honesty rather than the death of metatags? (Like that'd happen...)
The porn sites don't just use metatags, by the way... until recently they were into placing lots of tiny/background-coloured text on the page to skew hits in their direction.
it's about a guy called Tom Woolston, not Bill Simon. The latter happens to be the subject of an apparently related headline, where Bill Simon is being sued by eBay and not the reverse.
Heck, the article itself is littered with typos and misspellings... sometimes in the same paragraph. (Steven King? WTF?)
Even if you're confident in your spell-checker and your own proofreading skills, do try to get someone else to read it through. If they haven't looked at the document half as much as you have, they're way more likely to pick out mistakes.
It's about getting people to buy the damn album - pure and simple sales. If that means less people pirate it, all the better.
Working in a promotional company has exposed me to a fair bit of how marketing and sales operate, and "new and innovative" is what every client always wants, no matter how much or how little they're willing to pay for the resulting premiums (ie. toys) or services.
Most of you would be physically sick if you saw some of the promotions that are being planned in the name of kids (and their parents) maintaining the market share of certain fast food and cereal companies. Sony Ericsson phones and POX were advertised in unique and innocuous ways that increased their "cool" factor.
These promotions are ways to add perceived value to a product, which are a big part of increasing sales. We all complain about the price of CDs, whether we choose to buy them or not. Don't you think it's about time we started to at least feel like we got more value out of them?
People who solely download music are being conceited if they think approaches like this have been generated in direct retaliation to piracy. It may be one of many reasons to carry out a promotion like this, but gathering valuable market research data and generating sales full stop are far more lucrative reasons to do it.
(Regarding market research: a large company will probably keep your under lock and key for themselves so they know how to target future promotions. A company that provides free services is far more likely to sell information about you to others without asking you.)
All that said, the first value-added CD I ever bought was a Pitch Shifter album. Not only did it have two small multimedia clips on it, the last two tracks of the album were made up of royalty-free samples they'd created of the album itself. They were full stereo, neatly separated, there to be ripped and used however the buyer pleased. The only "condition" of their use was that you sent the band what you'd done with it later. I think I bought it in about 1995...
Well, dang. There go the whiny victim weblogs by spoiled, sexually confused 14-year-old girls who only design for IE on 1024x768 res...:)
I do see your point, but a lot of the IE-specific websites out there at the moment are by people who do not care that you don't use Windows, or don't know that people out there don't use Windows. In a way it might almost be amusing...
I think it's aiming at the printing, design and artistic industries at large. A lot of companies are still running Quark 3.3/4, Photoshop 5.5/6 and Illustrator 9, none of which will run under OS X.
The costs involved in migrating are considerable - you'll either have to buy new software that runs under OS X, or more RAM to compensate for the fact that your older software is running in Classic mode. (Quark upgrades in particular are notorious for their cost, explaining why a significant group of newspapers and publishers are still on 3.3.) This doesn't even take into account the man hours you lose in migrating to the new OS/software and training your staff to maintain productivity levels.
I bought an iBook last year and have been booting into OS9 from day two... despite it being the top of the line at the time, it simply didn't have enough RAM to handle running Photoshop in Classic mode. I am planning to upgrade to Jaguar soonish, but not without buying a 512mb chunk of RAM so I can run my three most important apps (Photoshop, Painter and Illustrator). I already paid for.mac and will be paying for Jaguar, but my dollar can't stretch much further...
You can find even more at http://www.bemanix.com/ - crazy stuff in the freestyle sections!
This should also convince those of you who insist DDR and dancing are mutually exclusive that you can play the game without looking like you're simply "mashing buttons".:P
Agreed, by the ABC's government-funded nature they are always careful not to display a political or commercial bias. Their national youth radio station kicks incredible arse, too.;)
Another channel in Australia, SBS, is a broadcaster with an extremely multicultural focus. They tend not to make much money, but occasionally they go out on a limb and pick up something like South Park or Evangelion. Their format for ads is interesting - shows and movies run uninterrupted, with about ten minutes of ads shown in between. The station closes for a few hours each night, presumably to keep costs down.
SBS also has quite an extensive radio network - maybe this integration of media could help TV stations as a source of revenue?
The TV series looks way more faithful to the manga at least in style... which already beats that Manga-Entertainment-fanboy-whore of a movie. Can't wait to see how it turns out!
At the moment I work in premium design, where confidentiality and IP are deemed pretty important. If your employee signed an NDA/confidentiality and property agreement for his last job, it should clearly answer any of those concerns. It should cover anything to do with copyrights, so-called "trade secrets" and even how long he has to wait before seeking employment with a potential competitor.
And if he didn't sign one, that company obviously didn't care enough. Open season in that case:)
As mentioned before though, you cannot copyright an idea or concept. To directly infringe the other company's IP would be to do a cut and paste job.
As mentioned before, you can use drag and drop to open the file in whatever application you want. In addition, if the application you want to use is already running and you double-click a document, it'll open in said application. Works great for opening PDF files in Acrobat instead of Acrobat Reader!
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Does every "Macintosh I've ever used" only count your Performa? As far as I can tell, the whole "megahertz myth" thing is in reference to the G4. My G4-450 easily blows away my sister's PII-550 (bought three months after).
:)
Could have something to do with Windoze cruft on her system, tho.
I got my dreamcast long before the "Boot Disk" came out, and to play jap games i needed a region selectable mod chip.
You do this, and then you have the audacity to complain that you couldn't read the Japanese games? What were you expecting, a babel fish with the box?!
I think other posters covered your other points far better than I could, so I'll leave it at that.
In America, maybe... but in my experience, Asia and Australia have high consumer awareness of modchips and piracy.
It's really big in Australia. Being the only PAL area in Australasia with excellent connections to Asian countries, people get frustrated with having to wait for conversions of games to arrive. Some games don't arrive at all. (We probably get about 50-60% of all RPGs - PS, PS2, N64, GBA, Dreamcast- translated/released in the US, and as a complete console RPG freak I can tell you that is very painful indeed!) Once they realise they can get them quicker and cheaper (A$100 is a horrible psychological threshhold for a game, but that's where many are priced) it's pretty easy to justify a modchip and buying pirated games.
That aside, I know plenty of people (myself included) who buy legitimate imported games. I know the games companies would rather we bought a console for each region, but do you know anyone with a DVD player for each region? I'd go buy a different console if I had that much money!
Game region coding and DVD region coding are on par with each other, IMHO. You can potentially play pirated HK DVDs on a region-free player, but who's going to hunt who down over that one?
I don't have keyword and description metatags on my site at the moment (just PICS and generator) and I suspect my ranking on several non-Google search engines is suffering because of it. You can no longer hit my main art site by searching for my name at Google since I removed them.
Different search engines operate in different ways, whether it's through link text (search Google for "pit of voles" and you'll get fanfiction.net, thanks to the efforts of a good friend), the title tag, the body text or keywords/description. A good combination of all four will get you an honest ranking... maybe they should be calling for general metatag honesty rather than the death of metatags? (Like that'd happen...)
The porn sites don't just use metatags, by the way... until recently they were into placing lots of tiny/background-coloured text on the page to skew hits in their direction.
it's about a guy called Tom Woolston, not Bill Simon. The latter happens to be the subject of an apparently related headline, where Bill Simon is being sued by eBay and not the reverse.
Heck, the article itself is littered with typos and misspellings... sometimes in the same paragraph. (Steven King? WTF?)
Even if you're confident in your spell-checker and your own proofreading skills, do try to get someone else to read it through. If they haven't looked at the document half as much as you have, they're way more likely to pick out mistakes.
You wouldn't get hundreds of "M$ sucks" messages in response to either of those, so god knows how would that qualify as a worthy /. story... ;)
Yup. They also made the brilliant Snake Rattle 'N' Roll, a sequel to which would be the only reason I would shell out for an X-Box. ;)
It's about getting people to buy the damn album - pure and simple sales. If that means less people pirate it, all the better.
Working in a promotional company has exposed me to a fair bit of how marketing and sales operate, and "new and innovative" is what every client always wants, no matter how much or how little they're willing to pay for the resulting premiums (ie. toys) or services.
Most of you would be physically sick if you saw some of the promotions that are being planned in the name of kids (and their parents) maintaining the market share of certain fast food and cereal companies. Sony Ericsson phones and POX were advertised in unique and innocuous ways that increased their "cool" factor.
These promotions are ways to add perceived value to a product, which are a big part of increasing sales. We all complain about the price of CDs, whether we choose to buy them or not. Don't you think it's about time we started to at least feel like we got more value out of them?
People who solely download music are being conceited if they think approaches like this have been generated in direct retaliation to piracy. It may be one of many reasons to carry out a promotion like this, but gathering valuable market research data and generating sales full stop are far more lucrative reasons to do it.
(Regarding market research: a large company will probably keep your under lock and key for themselves so they know how to target future promotions. A company that provides free services is far more likely to sell information about you to others without asking you.)
All that said, the first value-added CD I ever bought was a Pitch Shifter album. Not only did it have two small multimedia clips on it, the last two tracks of the album were made up of royalty-free samples they'd created of the album itself. They were full stereo, neatly separated, there to be ripped and used however the buyer pleased. The only "condition" of their use was that you sent the band what you'd done with it later. I think I bought it in about 1995...
Well, dang. There go the whiny victim weblogs by spoiled, sexually confused 14-year-old girls who only design for IE on 1024x768 res... :)
I do see your point, but a lot of the IE-specific websites out there at the moment are by people who do not care that you don't use Windows, or don't know that people out there don't use Windows. In a way it might almost be amusing...
I think it's aiming at the printing, design and artistic industries at large. A lot of companies are still running Quark 3.3/4, Photoshop 5.5/6 and Illustrator 9, none of which will run under OS X.
.mac and will be paying for Jaguar, but my dollar can't stretch much further...
The costs involved in migrating are considerable - you'll either have to buy new software that runs under OS X, or more RAM to compensate for the fact that your older software is running in Classic mode. (Quark upgrades in particular are notorious for their cost, explaining why a significant group of newspapers and publishers are still on 3.3.) This doesn't even take into account the man hours you lose in migrating to the new OS/software and training your staff to maintain productivity levels.
I bought an iBook last year and have been booting into OS9 from day two... despite it being the top of the line at the time, it simply didn't have enough RAM to handle running Photoshop in Classic mode. I am planning to upgrade to Jaguar soonish, but not without buying a 512mb chunk of RAM so I can run my three most important apps (Photoshop, Painter and Illustrator). I already paid for
Warezing because you're so poooor isn't much better... how'd you get the computer? The broadband connection? Housing?
;P
$20 wouldn't get you far for hookers and/or blow anyway.
You can find even more at http://www.bemanix.com/ - crazy stuff in the freestyle sections!
:P
This should also convince those of you who insist DDR and dancing are mutually exclusive that you can play the game without looking like you're simply "mashing buttons".
Agreed, by the ABC's government-funded nature they are always careful not to display a political or commercial bias. Their national youth radio station kicks incredible arse, too. ;)
Another channel in Australia, SBS, is a broadcaster with an extremely multicultural focus. They tend not to make much money, but occasionally they go out on a limb and pick up something like South Park or Evangelion. Their format for ads is interesting - shows and movies run uninterrupted, with about ten minutes of ads shown in between. The station closes for a few hours each night, presumably to keep costs down.
SBS also has quite an extensive radio network - maybe this integration of media could help TV stations as a source of revenue?
The TV series looks way more faithful to the manga at least in style... which already beats that Manga-Entertainment-fanboy-whore of a movie. Can't wait to see how it turns out!
eBay Australia already has a Passport login function. Scary.
At the moment I work in premium design, where confidentiality and IP are deemed pretty important. If your employee signed an NDA/confidentiality and property agreement for his last job, it should clearly answer any of those concerns. It should cover anything to do with copyrights, so-called "trade secrets" and even how long he has to wait before seeking employment with a potential competitor.
:)
And if he didn't sign one, that company obviously didn't care enough. Open season in that case
As mentioned before though, you cannot copyright an idea or concept. To directly infringe the other company's IP would be to do a cut and paste job.
As mentioned before, you can use drag and drop to open the file in whatever application you want. In addition, if the application you want to use is already running and you double-click a document, it'll open in said application. Works great for opening PDF files in Acrobat instead of Acrobat Reader!
Exsqueeze me? Diablo II is also out for the Mac, and that doesn't have WMA support. The game itself doesn't appear to use WMA, either.