Let's see. If people liked shoving a cheese grater up their rear end to get the graphical effects they wanted but didn't like the bleeding after each production, but it got the job done... a significant percentage would live with the butt bleeding rather than learn yet another crappy tool.
I hear there is medical salve you can get to help the bleeding.
I've tried Blender, Max, etc... and it's like they hired a five year old to design the interface, and then brought in a three year old as a contractor to do revisions. I for the live of me can't figure out how people are productive with this crap and given how much you pay for most of these programs, it's extra unforgivable. To date, the only 3-D program I can tolerate is AC3D. It's got a straight forward, intuitive interface and it's friggin' cheap. The only draw backs are you have to install POV for rendering, and it doesn't do animations.
Ok, for the sake of simplicity we're using simple numbers...
Let's say in fantasy land we currently get cable with a premium movie channel for $50 a month.
Once this plays out, I expect we will see (based on % of original fee rate):
$10-$15 ala cart premium channels (HBO, etc...) $7 ala cart mid-tier channels (Discovery Channel, MTV, Nick, etc...) $5 ala cart niche channels (Food Channel, Travel Channel, etc...)
And the price for standard cable service like you used to get at $50 a month will go up to $60 a month due to some lame story about scarcity. Or, better yet, they'll say that because of infrastructure changes made to accommodate this, it's more costly for them to also deliver cable the classic way.
We'll see alot of subsidized and bottom feeder channels drop off. Noodle knows where all the home shopping and religious zealot programming will end up... oh wait I know...
Special God Channel bundle of channels for the ignorant, intolerants among us who want to make sure their home schooled kids don't get exposed to any messaging about the world being round. Only $29.99 with the slogan "If you see a nipple, it's on us!" [sic]
I dropped cable in the late 90's and never looked back. I've found if something is that good to watch, a friend will dub it for me, it will eventually be on DVD, or I will find it someplace on-line.
PMView -- http://www.pmview.com/ Absolutely hands down, the best image conversion/management program ever written. It originally started out over a decade ago for OS/2 and as it moved to Windows, it has only gotten better. And they just went Vista compatible to boot!
and
AC3D -- http://www.inivis.com/ When it comes to 3-D modeling tools, AC3D is cheap, fast, simple to use, with an easy to understand interface right from first launch... none of this spending a billion dollars on a program and then needing to take a year of classes just to make a friggin' cube. Added bonus, built in support for exporting 3-D models to Second Life sculpties format without all the stupid limitations found in *every* other modeler.
Now go check'em out! [/ravingfanboyhat="off"]...whew, glad I got that out of my system.
Aside from that, the whole premise is stupid and just a fluff piece to drive traffic. Like people are going to not want faster electronic devices? Just because today somebody can't imagine that they would want something, doesn't mean that when they get it they will soon grow to not being able to live without it. Sheesh!
Argghhh. All this article was, was a press releases for the Millions of Us/Gia Online partnership to try and drive users to sign up for Gia off of the Millions name. What BS.
And I love the concurrent logins "dropped 2.5%" crap. Gee it's an Internet thing. Pretty much everything on the Internet has traffic drops of 2%-10% every summer. I'd like to see a follow up on this showing the the 2.5% increase come September.
His e-Machines laptop that he had purchase 3 years ago had the motherboard go out on him (I think he was running it overheated. So in a panic he came by my house to see what we could do to get it working. When we concluded that it was dead he wanted to drive immediately over to Fry's Electronics to buy a new machine right then and there as he had art commissions he needed to get finished. We looked over all the systems and found the best value vs. performance in his price range and the only option was Vista Home. I told him at the time I would #1 perfer he buy a Dell with XP pre-installed, or from some other online retailer if we could find it, but he didn't have a week to wait for delivery and couldn't afford the extra shipping cost for rush delivery, so I told him up front that for good or bad he was going to have to run Vista for the initial warranty period. If it worked great, but if not I would help him migrate back to XP. The last thing I want to do is deal with HP on a warranty support issue where we've changed the OS from what was shipped on it.
I was dead against him doing this from the get go and warned him every step of the way that this was not the best plan.
As for doing it for free. Like you charge bench fees to family and people that have been friends for 20 years? I make them buy the parts and when I do a scratch build I'll pad a few dollars of overhead to cover my time but please.
I've wasted several weekends and evenings now purging both Vista off of peoples brand new computers and moving them back to XP or wasting hours trying to turn off every single UI effect in order to eep out a 1% performance increase to make the computer usable trying to put off the reinstall until I have the time to deal with it.
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
4 of these games are nothing to be ashamed of. Ninety-Nine Nights and Stretch Panic were pretty good games, granted they both had a few play control issues but no show stoppers. 18 Wheeler did very good in the arcade, so no shame there, it just never translated to the home market. The inclusion of Stunt Race FX really blows me away. This game sold very well, and was a damn good game, it had a great sense of speed. Great play control. A really well done game. If there was one thing I would say bad about it, is the graphics have not held up with age and now it's a very difficult game to try and watch. If I was trying to play it now on the Wii for the first time, I might slam it. But having played it when it was released originally on the SNES, that game was hot shit at the time, and put to shame Virtual Racing on the Genesis (it's competition at the time).
I think this just goes to show that Nintendo is teetering on the precipice if insignificance and failure. With this many sales, it's clear that they will quickly saturate the market and everyone will own all the Nintendo games they can possibly buy. Then we'll see the true market situation as gamers looking to spend their hard earned money have to go out and by products from Microsoft and Sony just to be able to keep playing new games!!!
I see lots of Chinese in Second Life these days and they're in world to talk, exchange ideas, and get information about the rest of the world because the SL grid is outside of censor controls. Short of blocking SL right out, or co-oping Linden Labs to parse every chat/IM/and image I don't see this changing anytime soon. This isn't just special to SL, I'm sure many of the international MMO's and Metaverses that Chinese access by pass censorship as well.
I also think the common person there is about fed up with this crap. Did anyone see the news today about the huge wave of forced abortions in one of the provinces that they government mandated in order to preserve birth quotas? Pretty much anyone that was pregnant and had any kind of discrepancy in what's allowed with a pregnancy was hauled in and give shots that aborted the fetus (even in some cases 9 months along!). ref, NPR story the morning of April 23, 2007.
Because I didn't get any sleep last night doing work building a PHP based video repository system front end that I'm hoping to tie into LDAP at somepoint for a security layer.... in the last hour I've finally hit my silly zone though and I really I should go home and get some sleep but then I would be missing my 9-5 work hours. Blah!
This is a seriously valid complaint. The number of arguments I've had with various groups over the years regarding stupid product/version names makes my head hurt. The most recent brilliance I would like to highlight was SeaMonkey. Where the use the name along with the image of a brine shrimp. Given that the term Sea Monkey was created specifically to identify a branded package of brine shrimp, it seems like this is a pretty poor idea for a name and is just asking for a lawsuit. One of the devs got in my face about it and told me I was just wrong. "SeaMonkey" is a browser and the brine shrimp are called "Sea Monkeys" so they can do what ever the hell they want.
My jaw was on the floor. What a douche....and back to the subject at hand, one of the top rules of branding!
Make sure people can pronounce your damn product name. How the hell do you say Umnbutooo?!? Is that an African word? What does it mean?!?!
Know your audience... ok seriously is there a single geek here that wants to go around saying, "Gee boys I'm running Fiesty Fawn!" with gusto? Hell no, and what geek is going to suggest it to their friends and family...
"Hey guys, you should run the new Umbboobto, Fiesty Fawn"... which get the response of "Gee fella, is there something you're trying to tell us? We'll still love you. It's ok. Do you need a hug?"
Start off by calling something other than one of the stupid code names that have become the fashion for Linux builds.
What's up with that. It's bad enough I can't get my parents over the interface differences enough to use it. Now I have to also tell them they're running an OS called Feisty Fawn?!?!
Ok, so I apparently must have jumped the gun on the update I downloaded or the server I pulled it from hadn't been updated yet? What I downloaded last night was a newer trial edition (the blues were darker than the initial release). Today what I pulled was the final version. Weird.
I look at it again when I get home. I ran the update last night before going to bed, but I did delete the older one before hand so I wouldn't mix anything up. Hmmm....
I pulled it down yesterday when Nintendo sent out the notice to Wii's using Connect24. They indicated it was a new version of the trial browser. Nowhere did I see it branded as the final release.
Well, when most of the first set failed, we were still doing reviews on the games. By the time the third ones were bought, the price had gotten to around $100 and everyone enjoy's playing games from their collected libraries. To be honest, two people just waited when their second ones died and bought PS2s when they came out.
Buying a second PS2? Personally, I have no intention of selling off my games, so it's helpful to have a system that can actually run them when I want to play.
That's the reason I replaced my 3DO FZ-10 in 2001 when a freak short out blew out the motherboard. I don't hold 3DO responsible for that failure, but then again, the system lasted me... what almost six years of heavy use before hand. If any of my PlayStations gave that kind of performance I wouldn't be complaining.
How is this flamebait? It is a fact, contrary to anything Sony likes to spin. EVERY SINGLE employee for our magazine who owned their own systems bought two and in some cases three PlayStations over the life of the original system. The system that Sony shipped to us to do reviews on featured BOTH the red line down the screen and skipping unless you stood the unit on it's side. Since most of us shared systems this accounts for six original systems, six repurchases due to failures, and three 3rd purchases due to failure of the second system.
THEN on the PS2, all of us that bought them have had to buy two of them because the CD drive eventually failed on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF the launch systems we bought.
Flamebait my ass. I'll be damned if I spend $600 on a system that's going to die in two years based on the past performance track record of Sony PS products.
You tax the money as it comes out of the system and is converted into a RL currency. Technically speaking if you're selling goods/services in world, value only becomes tangable when you extract it from the game and convert it out of the system. At that point it becomes income and you are already obligated under existing tax law (atleast in the U.S.) to claim it as earned income. We really don't need extra laws to cover this, just people not being dorks and trying to hide it under the table so that we all get penalized.
Slashdot Mirror
Happy with Blender...
Let's see. If people liked shoving a cheese grater up their rear end to get the graphical effects they wanted but didn't like the bleeding after each production, but it got the job done... a significant percentage would live with the butt bleeding rather than learn yet another crappy tool.
I hear there is medical salve you can get to help the bleeding.
I've tried Blender, Max, etc... and it's like they hired a five year old to design the interface, and then brought in a three year old as a contractor to do revisions. I for the live of me can't figure out how people are productive with this crap and given how much you pay for most of these programs, it's extra unforgivable. To date, the only 3-D program I can tolerate is AC3D. It's got a straight forward, intuitive interface and it's friggin' cheap. The only draw backs are you have to install POV for rendering, and it doesn't do animations.
Ok, for the sake of simplicity we're using simple numbers...
Let's say in fantasy land we currently get cable with a premium movie channel for $50 a month.
Once this plays out, I expect we will see (based on % of original fee rate):
$10-$15 ala cart premium channels (HBO, etc...)
$7 ala cart mid-tier channels (Discovery Channel, MTV, Nick, etc...)
$5 ala cart niche channels (Food Channel, Travel Channel, etc...)
And the price for standard cable service like you used to get at $50 a month will go up to $60 a month due to some lame story about scarcity. Or, better yet, they'll say that because of infrastructure changes made to accommodate this, it's more costly for them to also deliver cable the classic way.
We'll see alot of subsidized and bottom feeder channels drop off. Noodle knows where all the home shopping and religious zealot programming will end up... oh wait I know...
Special God Channel bundle of channels for the ignorant, intolerants among us who want to make sure their home schooled kids don't get exposed to any messaging about the world being round. Only $29.99 with the slogan "If you see a nipple, it's on us!" [sic]
I dropped cable in the late 90's and never looked back. I've found if something is that good to watch, a friend will dub it for me, it will eventually be on DVD, or I will find it someplace on-line.
Yawn... no story here, move along.
There aren't any games, so it's just sitting there doing nothing anyways. Might as well burn cycles on something useful.
Granted that could change once there is more compelling content around, but until then, fold away.
They're both already building initiatives. IBM internally and Sun with Project Darkstar.
[ravingfanboyhat="on"]
...whew, glad I got that out of my system.
PMView -- http://www.pmview.com/
Absolutely hands down, the best image conversion/management program ever written. It originally started out over a decade ago for OS/2 and as it moved to Windows, it has only gotten better. And they just went Vista compatible to boot!
and
AC3D -- http://www.inivis.com/
When it comes to 3-D modeling tools, AC3D is cheap, fast, simple to use, with an easy to understand interface right from first launch... none of this spending a billion dollars on a program and then needing to take a year of classes just to make a friggin' cube. Added bonus, built in support for exporting 3-D models to Second Life sculpties format without all the stupid limitations found in *every* other modeler.
Now go check'em out!
[/ravingfanboyhat="off"]
Aside from that, the whole premise is stupid and just a fluff piece to drive traffic. Like people are going to not want faster electronic devices? Just because today somebody can't imagine that they would want something, doesn't mean that when they get it they will soon grow to not being able to live without it. Sheesh!
Argghhh. All this article was, was a press releases for the Millions of Us/Gia Online partnership to try and drive users to sign up for Gia off of the Millions name. What BS.
And I love the concurrent logins "dropped 2.5%" crap. Gee it's an Internet thing. Pretty much everything on the Internet has traffic drops of 2%-10% every summer. I'd like to see a follow up on this showing the the 2.5% increase come September.
Damn it, I hate crap like this.
His e-Machines laptop that he had purchase 3 years ago had the motherboard go out on him (I think he was running it overheated. So in a panic he came by my house to see what we could do to get it working. When we concluded that it was dead he wanted to drive immediately over to Fry's Electronics to buy a new machine right then and there as he had art commissions he needed to get finished. We looked over all the systems and found the best value vs. performance in his price range and the only option was Vista Home. I told him at the time I would #1 perfer he buy a Dell with XP pre-installed, or from some other online retailer if we could find it, but he didn't have a week to wait for delivery and couldn't afford the extra shipping cost for rush delivery, so I told him up front that for good or bad he was going to have to run Vista for the initial warranty period. If it worked great, but if not I would help him migrate back to XP. The last thing I want to do is deal with HP on a warranty support issue where we've changed the OS from what was shipped on it.
I was dead against him doing this from the get go and warned him every step of the way that this was not the best plan.
As for doing it for free. Like you charge bench fees to family and people that have been friends for 20 years? I make them buy the parts and when I do a scratch build I'll pad a few dollars of overhead to cover my time but please.
Does that answer your question?
I've wasted several weekends and evenings now purging both Vista off of peoples brand new computers and moving them back to XP or wasting hours trying to turn off every single UI effect in order to eep out a 1% performance increase to make the computer usable trying to put off the reinstall until I have the time to deal with it.
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
Grumble grumble grumble
4 of these games are nothing to be ashamed of. Ninety-Nine Nights and Stretch Panic were pretty good games, granted they both had a few play control issues but no show stoppers. 18 Wheeler did very good in the arcade, so no shame there, it just never translated to the home market. The inclusion of Stunt Race FX really blows me away. This game sold very well, and was a damn good game, it had a great sense of speed. Great play control. A really well done game. If there was one thing I would say bad about it, is the graphics have not held up with age and now it's a very difficult game to try and watch. If I was trying to play it now on the Wii for the first time, I might slam it. But having played it when it was released originally on the SNES, that game was hot shit at the time, and put to shame Virtual Racing on the Genesis (it's competition at the time).
Detachable Wii?
BTW, in case some of you missed it... that last post was sarcasm =)
I think this just goes to show that Nintendo is teetering on the precipice if insignificance and failure. With this many sales, it's clear that they will quickly saturate the market and everyone will own all the Nintendo games they can possibly buy. Then we'll see the
true market situation as gamers looking to spend their hard earned money have to go out and by products from Microsoft and Sony just to be able to keep playing new games!!!
Mod it up.
I see lots of Chinese in Second Life these days and they're in world to talk, exchange ideas, and get information about the rest of the world because the SL grid is outside of censor controls. Short of blocking SL right out, or co-oping Linden Labs to parse every chat/IM/and image I don't see this changing anytime soon. This isn't just special to SL, I'm sure many of the international MMO's and Metaverses that Chinese access by pass censorship as well.
I also think the common person there is about fed up with this crap. Did anyone see the news today about the huge wave of forced abortions in one of the provinces that they government mandated in order to preserve birth quotas? Pretty much anyone that was pregnant and had any kind of discrepancy in what's allowed with a pregnancy was hauled in and give shots that aborted the fetus (even in some cases 9 months along!). ref, NPR story the morning of April 23, 2007.
Pretty screwed up if you ask me.
Because I didn't get any sleep last night doing work building a PHP based video repository system front end that I'm hoping to tie into LDAP at somepoint for a security layer.... in the last hour I've finally hit my silly zone though and I really I should go home and get some sleep but then I would be missing my 9-5 work hours. Blah!
This is a seriously valid complaint. The number of arguments I've had with various groups over the years regarding stupid product/version names makes my head hurt. The most recent brilliance I would like to highlight was SeaMonkey. Where the use the name along with the image of a brine shrimp. Given that the term Sea Monkey was created specifically to identify a branded package of brine shrimp, it seems like this is a pretty poor idea for a name and is just asking for a lawsuit. One of the devs got in my face about it and told me I was just wrong. "SeaMonkey" is a browser and the brine shrimp are called "Sea Monkeys" so they can do what ever the hell they want.
...and back to the subject at hand, one of the top rules of branding!
My jaw was on the floor. What a douche.
Make sure people can pronounce your damn product name. How the hell do you say Umnbutooo?!? Is that an African word? What does it mean?!?!
Know your audience... ok seriously is there a single geek here that wants to go around saying, "Gee boys I'm running Fiesty Fawn!" with gusto? Hell no, and what geek is going to suggest it to their friends and family...
"Hey guys, you should run the new Umbboobto, Fiesty Fawn"... which get the response of "Gee fella, is there something you're trying to tell us? We'll still love you. It's ok. Do you need a hug?"
I am sooo sorry. I just can't take it.
Start off by calling something other than one of the stupid code names that have become the fashion for Linux builds.
What's up with that. It's bad enough I can't get my parents over the interface differences enough to use it. Now I have to also tell them they're running an OS called Feisty Fawn?!?!
Pulease!
Ok, so I apparently must have jumped the gun on the update I downloaded or the server I pulled it from hadn't been updated yet? What I downloaded last night was a newer trial edition (the blues were darker than the initial release). Today what I pulled was the final version. Weird.
I look at it again when I get home. I ran the update last night before going to bed, but I did delete the older one before hand so I wouldn't mix anything up. Hmmm....
I pulled it down yesterday when Nintendo sent out the notice to Wii's using Connect24. They indicated it was a new version of the trial browser. Nowhere did I see it branded as the final release.
Well, when most of the first set failed, we were still doing reviews on the games. By the time the third ones were bought, the price had gotten to around $100 and everyone enjoy's playing games from their collected libraries. To be honest, two people just waited when their second ones died and bought PS2s when they came out.
Buying a second PS2? Personally, I have no intention of selling off my games, so it's helpful to have a system that can actually run them when I want to play.
That's the reason I replaced my 3DO FZ-10 in 2001 when a freak short out blew out the motherboard. I don't hold 3DO responsible for that failure, but then again, the system lasted me... what almost six years of heavy use before hand. If any of my PlayStations gave that kind of performance I wouldn't be complaining.
How is this flamebait? It is a fact, contrary to anything Sony likes to spin. EVERY SINGLE employee for our magazine who owned their own systems bought two and in some cases three PlayStations over the life of the original system. The system that Sony shipped to us to do reviews on featured BOTH the red line down the screen and skipping unless you stood the unit on it's side. Since most of us shared systems this accounts for six original systems, six repurchases due to failures, and three 3rd purchases due to failure of the second system.
THEN on the PS2, all of us that bought them have had to buy two of them because the CD drive eventually failed on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF the launch systems we bought.
Flamebait my ass. I'll be damned if I spend $600 on a system that's going to die in two years based on the past performance track record of Sony PS products.
You tax the money as it comes out of the system and is converted into a RL currency. Technically speaking if you're selling goods/services in world, value only becomes tangable when you extract it from the game and convert it out of the system. At that point it becomes income and you are already obligated under existing tax law (atleast in the U.S.) to claim it as earned income. We really don't need extra laws to cover this, just people not being dorks and trying to hide it under the table so that we all get penalized.