This isn't uncommon. I take for example, my perennial example in such instances, the Digital/Compaq merger and the HP/Compaq merger. When Digital was bought by Compaq, there was some low key but intense infighting in which many of the former Digital management people gained the upper hand, making many at Compaq HQ that I knew when I was working as a consultant there joke that Digital bought Compaq with Compaq's money.
As well with HP, many of those in HP were none too please about the atmosphere that was coming into HP with all the merger talk and post-merger layoffs. From everything I've seen, it sounds much more like Compaq than HP these days.
Square took a HUGE blow after the Final Fantasy movie. They sunk millions into Square Studios and the movie just didn't make any real money (though I'm quite fond of it... one of the greatest pieces of computer animation ever in my opinion and it'll change the way that kind of thing is done). Sony had to come in and bail them out, and in doing so gained a hefty share of Square, so in actuality, Sony may have had a larger hand in this merger than anyone may have realized, seeing as they would get a much firmer hand on one of the best game development houses in Japan (even though we don't see much of it over here...Dragon Quest 7, I believe, is still the largest selling game ever in Japan). With Sony's backing of Square, I'm not surprised to see a Square executive at the top.
I have several clients who might as well have had their PDAs surgically grafted onto them. The first thing they need installed whenever they get a new machine is Palm Desktop.
I had a PDA for awhile, and there were a lot of neat things you could do with it, but it never really stuck with me. Toward the end of my use of my PDA (an older Palm) all I basically used it for was to play chess in the bathroom. Addresses I keep on my laptop, which is almost always on (or closed and asleep for quick access). It's much easier to take notes on my laptop than my Palm. Syching was always a pain in the rear.
Guess it just depends on the person. Some people just love them. Some people can't stand them. Different strokes for different folks. *shrugs*
Well, depends on the gamer, really. I'm chugging along on an old 1Ghz AMD with 384MB RAM just fine. Got a spiffy new GeForce 4 Ti, but that's only because I have generally horrible luck with video cards, and they fry on me often. *shrugs* I pretty much use that machine to play one game, Dark Age of Camelot, and I have a backlog of more old PC games that I haven't yet finished than I could possible go through ever, so I'm pretty much done with the PC game race. It's too damn expensive for what you get out of it. Consoles are where the interesting stuff is for me, and they generally aren't the bug-ridden pieces of crap that the majority of PC games are upon release. Whe, in my gaming time, I'm not playing DAoC, I have much fun with my GameCube and PS2.
For actual computing tasks? I don't even go near that thing unless it's trying to replicate a problem for a client. Most of my home and work computing is done on my 500mhz iBook (which isn't a game machine in the least), or on my 266mhz old iMac running Linux. My next computing purchase won't be new gaming hardware (the games I play run fine on what I have, PC and console). It'll be either another old iMac, or a new iBook so I can get some better performance out of the graphical apps I run on it (mostly OmniGraffle and a bit of Photoshop). Even then I plan on waiting a bit. I can still get everything I need to get done, done. May just put it all off for another year and buy an iPod instead. It would be much more useful.
Limiting who can use your stuff = recuding sales by definition. If they make it impossible to use it, people aren't going to buy it. Music piracy has nothing to do with it.
I play DAoC as well and I'm actively looking forward to SWG's release, but not because I want to play it at all. I'm not at all interested in playing with the vast majority of Star Wars geeks who'll nitpick every little detail and be even more hardwired into the game than Everquest addicts. I want SWG to come out, because I want all the whining idiots that play DAoC, who constantly proclaim that "SWG will roxors over this supid game!!@!!!," to either leave and leave the rest of us the hell alone or shut the hell up about it and play the game.
The subject line I agree with. Everything else in your message is silly and is evidence that you haven't thought this all through a whole lot.
The cable companies that introduce this aren't idiots. They know that people like you are going to leave, and in their opinion your leaving is good riddance to bad rubbish. Every company has a target market, and you sir, are not the target market of the cable service provider. They want low volume users because they're cheap to support, and have a high profit margin. These new plans will attract these high profit customers and drive off the costly customers like you. You think they're going to feel sorry that they lost you? They'll just smile and wave, and after you're gone they'll have a nice chuckle about it. No one will care. All you'll be doing is prolonging your own pain by waiting through all the crap you hate on your old service.
Not that you shouldn't leave and go to a better service if more bandwidth is what you want. You may have to pay more for it, but low bandwidth prices aren't listed in the Constitution as an inalienable right, last I checked. Either suck it up and pay for it, deal with the lower bandwidth, or get used to being laughed at/ignored for whining about something so stupid.
I saw the writing on the wall and spent alot of time pricing out several alternatives to the ATTBI service I've been using. This article just means I start those plans into motion. Yeah, I'm going to have to pay extra for commercial DSL connectivity, but it's worth it with no download/upload caps, no extra restrictions on how I can use the service (aside from legal restrictions), decent technical support and a SLA I can hold over their heads if their service goes down. All worth the extra cost.
I've been a fan of BBEdit since I first touched BBEdit Lite in...what was it...1997? Even when I stopped using Macs for awhile (because I couldn't stand OS 8/9 and I wanted games) the one thing I really missed about MacOS was BBEdit, and version 6.5 was the first piece of software I bought when I got my iBook with OS X. I use BBEdit for everything text related, rom coding to word processing (I so much prefer it to MS Office). Nothing else compares. Emacs is a overly complicated, bloated, ugly piece of crap. vi is nice enough, but only if strictly necessary, and it doesn't have all the little features that BBEdit has. Pico is actually my preferred console text editor because it's nice and simple, and doesn't require a manual to learn how to use. But none of them stand up to BBEdit in my humble view. More than worth the money I paid for it. Worth double what I paid for it. Hell, I like BBEdit so much, I bought Mailsmith so I could use a BBEdit style interface for e-mail.
I decided not to go to the theatres to see Attack of the Clones because I knew it was going to suck, and the people I know who've seen it didn't say anyhting that would convince me otherwise. Still haven't seen it, downloaded or otherwise.
Downloading it now. I've been very dissapointed with both the instability and slowness of Chimera. It crashes all the time on me, and is at least as sluggish as Mozilla for OS X, which is too slow, so I'm mostly using OmniWeb. I use Phoenix on all my other machines (Windows, x86 Linux, and PPC Linux) and I couldn't be happier with it. Great, fast browser. Hopefully Phoenix-on-OSX will gain some momentum, or they'll fix the problems that seem to be continually plaguing Chimera so that it will be somewhat usable.
So get out there and vote Green, or Libertarian, or whatever. Hell, if it wasn't for the Greens, Al Gore would be President. That's power. Show your dissatisfaction by voting third party. The more people do it, the more power they have, either by influencing the debate, forcing the Republicrats to actually campaign on principles so they don't get votes taken from them, or maybe even have to share power with them when at some point the Greens, Libertatians, or whatever party gets a few seats. Sure, only the blind would believe that they have a chance at taking control, but they do have power, nonetheless, and I bet that they'll get more as this national deadlock wends on.
And people wonder why coders who work long hours on free software projects don't want to deal with end users.
People also wonder why coders who work long hours on free software projects which are licensed in a manner that allows people to do whatever they want with any part of the code as long as the changes are released, would give a damn about the branding someone else wants or doesn't want on it.
What he really should do if he doesn't like the branding is to go through the KDE code and make all the de-branding changes he wishes. Hell, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to get on that bandwagon with him. However, as was mentioned in the interview this was all about in the first place, people like to talk about this stuff far more than to do it.
Games very rarely find audiences later in the same way films do. They require more time to get back into, and generally you can find a more improved game in the same genre with improved graphics, etc, that more people are playing now. Most bombed games have a hardcore community around them of people that really love the game for whatever reason, and will continue to play it until their media degrades, but most people won't.
Only a rare few games achieve success after they bombed on release, if any. I can't think of any offhand. Most of the old games that make comebacks were hits in their time (like the rereleases of old gold-box SSI AD&D games, and the myriad re-releases of old games for newer platforms like the Final Fantasy Anthology for PS2, and all the old SNES games released for the Gameboy Advance). If something bombed, few except the terminally bored, collectors, or bargain bin hunters will ever get into them. I'm one of the bargain bin hunters so I have a lot of also-ran games in my collection. Some of them were diamonds in the rough, but the vast majority of them bombed for one of two good reasons. They either were too buggy to play upon release (Pool of Radiance 2 being one of the more visible and worst offenders) or were just plain not great games.
Cable provider propaganda? Huh? Have you ever actually worked in the telecom/IT industries? Have you any idea of the costs necessary to maintain reliable high speed networking services on that kind of scale? Let me clue you in: a lot. Apparently more than you are willing to pay a cable company, or one of the telcos offering DSL or dedicated real data connections.
Please, go to another country. Don't believe for an instant that I give a damn whether you're in the US, Japan, China, or Zimbabwe. If unlimited bandwidth is all you care about, soldier on in your quest for it. Just don't blame me for your crusade or deludsions of grandeur, thinking that I or anyone else aside from your personal friends and family gives a damn if you leave the US or not. More companies without computer people I can charge consulting fees to for the time it takes to brig the back from the brink after idiots like you, who believe that the world owes them something, fuck them over. Thanks for bringing me more business. I appreciate it.
This is for people who don't want people "deep linking" to material within their sites. As an example www.gamefaqs.com allows people to link to some of the pages within their site, but not directly to the FAQs they host (which are merely sumbitted text files) by using the refer info. This stops people from bypassing the ads which pay for the site.
If you cannot deal with a hands free set, then you should never drive, period, because you probably can't drive and talk to a passenger at the same time, or change the radio station while driving, or anything else.
Except that ads will become less prevalent, because there will actually be a way to pay for the content. For-pay ad-free services will be able to both find customers (who will likely find that the fee is cheaper than watching the ads). It may also usher in a golden age of website "alliances" where traffic to certain partner sites doesn't get counted against your bandwidth.
A vehicle is not a service. A connection to the internet is a service. Sorry, bub, no cookie.
And I wouldn't be too sure of what you were sold. Check that fine print. It's a wonder what people actually believe that they are paying money for these days.
This has been talked about and talked about and talked about to death. The mainstream media will never cover this, because there's nothing for them to cover. Anyone who cares about this kind of stuff already knows about this. They keep up on the technology, and likely come by here every so often.
The sky isn't falling. This won't kill the Internet, it will just make it more responsible, for once. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource. DEAL WITH IT. If you don't like it, start your own ISP and try to give everyone 2Mbit unrestricted connections, reliably, for $40/month. You won't be able to do it. Get all the venture capital funding you ask for and you still won't be able to do it. Look what happened to Excite@Home. If stuff like this ever happens, it'll be a blessing to networks everywhere. Maybe people will actually take some responsibility and secure their machines when their bandwidth is all used up 'cause someone zombified their machines and used them in a DDoS attack, or the next Internet worm uses it all up. That would make the neighborhood a whole lot safer, let me tell you.
People claim that restricting bandwidth in this manner will kill off the Internet economy. Bah, I say. It will save the internet economy. It will make people realize that this stuff costs something. It will make them at least be aware of how they use it. If they want to use it alot, they're going to have to pay for the privilidge. If they don't want to use it alot, they're going to be able to pay less, to only use it when they need to.
I'm all for it. Of course this is all hot air until the cable companies really crack down on it, so I guess let the good times roll as long as they can. That will only make the hangover longer I suppose. I did fine at 56K, I can do it again. No big.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that will save Salon is if more people subscribe to their service, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
This isn't uncommon. I take for example, my perennial example in such instances, the Digital/Compaq merger and the HP/Compaq merger. When Digital was bought by Compaq, there was some low key but intense infighting in which many of the former Digital management people gained the upper hand, making many at Compaq HQ that I knew when I was working as a consultant there joke that Digital bought Compaq with Compaq's money.
As well with HP, many of those in HP were none too please about the atmosphere that was coming into HP with all the merger talk and post-merger layoffs. From everything I've seen, it sounds much more like Compaq than HP these days.
Square took a HUGE blow after the Final Fantasy movie. They sunk millions into Square Studios and the movie just didn't make any real money (though I'm quite fond of it... one of the greatest pieces of computer animation ever in my opinion and it'll change the way that kind of thing is done). Sony had to come in and bail them out, and in doing so gained a hefty share of Square, so in actuality, Sony may have had a larger hand in this merger than anyone may have realized, seeing as they would get a much firmer hand on one of the best game development houses in Japan (even though we don't see much of it over here...Dragon Quest 7, I believe, is still the largest selling game ever in Japan). With Sony's backing of Square, I'm not surprised to see a Square executive at the top.
I have several clients who might as well have had their PDAs surgically grafted onto them. The first thing they need installed whenever they get a new machine is Palm Desktop.
I had a PDA for awhile, and there were a lot of neat things you could do with it, but it never really stuck with me. Toward the end of my use of my PDA (an older Palm) all I basically used it for was to play chess in the bathroom. Addresses I keep on my laptop, which is almost always on (or closed and asleep for quick access). It's much easier to take notes on my laptop than my Palm. Syching was always a pain in the rear.
Guess it just depends on the person. Some people just love them. Some people can't stand them. Different strokes for different folks. *shrugs*
Well, depends on the gamer, really. I'm chugging along on an old 1Ghz AMD with 384MB RAM just fine. Got a spiffy new GeForce 4 Ti, but that's only because I have generally horrible luck with video cards, and they fry on me often. *shrugs* I pretty much use that machine to play one game, Dark Age of Camelot, and I have a backlog of more old PC games that I haven't yet finished than I could possible go through ever, so I'm pretty much done with the PC game race. It's too damn expensive for what you get out of it. Consoles are where the interesting stuff is for me, and they generally aren't the bug-ridden pieces of crap that the majority of PC games are upon release. Whe, in my gaming time, I'm not playing DAoC, I have much fun with my GameCube and PS2.
For actual computing tasks? I don't even go near that thing unless it's trying to replicate a problem for a client. Most of my home and work computing is done on my 500mhz iBook (which isn't a game machine in the least), or on my 266mhz old iMac running Linux. My next computing purchase won't be new gaming hardware (the games I play run fine on what I have, PC and console). It'll be either another old iMac, or a new iBook so I can get some better performance out of the graphical apps I run on it (mostly OmniGraffle and a bit of Photoshop). Even then I plan on waiting a bit. I can still get everything I need to get done, done. May just put it all off for another year and buy an iPod instead. It would be much more useful.
More like:
We're just not going to buy your shit at all.
Limiting who can use your stuff = recuding sales by definition. If they make it impossible to use it, people aren't going to buy it. Music piracy has nothing to do with it.
I play DAoC as well and I'm actively looking forward to SWG's release, but not because I want to play it at all. I'm not at all interested in playing with the vast majority of Star Wars geeks who'll nitpick every little detail and be even more hardwired into the game than Everquest addicts. I want SWG to come out, because I want all the whining idiots that play DAoC, who constantly proclaim that "SWG will roxors over this supid game!!@!!!," to either leave and leave the rest of us the hell alone or shut the hell up about it and play the game.
...that the only safe place to run a Microsoft browser is on an Apple Computer operating system.
The subject line I agree with. Everything else in your message is silly and is evidence that you haven't thought this all through a whole lot.
The cable companies that introduce this aren't idiots. They know that people like you are going to leave, and in their opinion your leaving is good riddance to bad rubbish. Every company has a target market, and you sir, are not the target market of the cable service provider. They want low volume users because they're cheap to support, and have a high profit margin. These new plans will attract these high profit customers and drive off the costly customers like you. You think they're going to feel sorry that they lost you? They'll just smile and wave, and after you're gone they'll have a nice chuckle about it. No one will care. All you'll be doing is prolonging your own pain by waiting through all the crap you hate on your old service.
Not that you shouldn't leave and go to a better service if more bandwidth is what you want. You may have to pay more for it, but low bandwidth prices aren't listed in the Constitution as an inalienable right, last I checked. Either suck it up and pay for it, deal with the lower bandwidth, or get used to being laughed at/ignored for whining about something so stupid.
I saw the writing on the wall and spent alot of time pricing out several alternatives to the ATTBI service I've been using. This article just means I start those plans into motion. Yeah, I'm going to have to pay extra for commercial DSL connectivity, but it's worth it with no download/upload caps, no extra restrictions on how I can use the service (aside from legal restrictions), decent technical support and a SLA I can hold over their heads if their service goes down. All worth the extra cost.
Or pay $80 for the educational discount.
I've been a fan of BBEdit since I first touched BBEdit Lite in...what was it...1997? Even when I stopped using Macs for awhile (because I couldn't stand OS 8/9 and I wanted games) the one thing I really missed about MacOS was BBEdit, and version 6.5 was the first piece of software I bought when I got my iBook with OS X. I use BBEdit for everything text related, rom coding to word processing (I so much prefer it to MS Office). Nothing else compares. Emacs is a overly complicated, bloated, ugly piece of crap. vi is nice enough, but only if strictly necessary, and it doesn't have all the little features that BBEdit has. Pico is actually my preferred console text editor because it's nice and simple, and doesn't require a manual to learn how to use. But none of them stand up to BBEdit in my humble view. More than worth the money I paid for it. Worth double what I paid for it. Hell, I like BBEdit so much, I bought Mailsmith so I could use a BBEdit style interface for e-mail.
BBEdit. It (Still) Doesn't Suck.
I decided not to go to the theatres to see Attack of the Clones because I knew it was going to suck, and the people I know who've seen it didn't say anyhting that would convince me otherwise. Still haven't seen it, downloaded or otherwise.
4. They learned japanese so they could watch original anime without dubbing or subtitles.
Double points if they're doing it to be able to play Japanese console RPGs without needing to wait for the translations.
Especially with the fact that I can just get single channels now, as the previous story says.
Downloading it now. I've been very dissapointed with both the instability and slowness of Chimera. It crashes all the time on me, and is at least as sluggish as Mozilla for OS X, which is too slow, so I'm mostly using OmniWeb. I use Phoenix on all my other machines (Windows, x86 Linux, and PPC Linux) and I couldn't be happier with it. Great, fast browser. Hopefully Phoenix-on-OSX will gain some momentum, or they'll fix the problems that seem to be continually plaguing Chimera so that it will be somewhat usable.
So get out there and vote Green, or Libertarian, or whatever. Hell, if it wasn't for the Greens, Al Gore would be President. That's power. Show your dissatisfaction by voting third party. The more people do it, the more power they have, either by influencing the debate, forcing the Republicrats to actually campaign on principles so they don't get votes taken from them, or maybe even have to share power with them when at some point the Greens, Libertatians, or whatever party gets a few seats. Sure, only the blind would believe that they have a chance at taking control, but they do have power, nonetheless, and I bet that they'll get more as this national deadlock wends on.
Yeah, it's one gigantic game of "Spot the Looney".
I'm not sure what're funnier, the article, or the people who either didn't read the article, or who didn't get that it was satire.
Because most of the people who read this site need to LIGHTEN UP FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!!!!
Yes, God. Please let them remove emacs altogether from the distribution, and all will be well with Red Hat as far as I'm concerned.
And people wonder why coders who work long hours on free software projects don't want to deal with end users.
People also wonder why coders who work long hours on free software projects which are licensed in a manner that allows people to do whatever they want with any part of the code as long as the changes are released, would give a damn about the branding someone else wants or doesn't want on it.
What he really should do if he doesn't like the branding is to go through the KDE code and make all the de-branding changes he wishes. Hell, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to get on that bandwagon with him. However, as was mentioned in the interview this was all about in the first place, people like to talk about this stuff far more than to do it.
Games very rarely find audiences later in the same way films do. They require more time to get back into, and generally you can find a more improved game in the same genre with improved graphics, etc, that more people are playing now. Most bombed games have a hardcore community around them of people that really love the game for whatever reason, and will continue to play it until their media degrades, but most people won't.
Only a rare few games achieve success after they bombed on release, if any. I can't think of any offhand. Most of the old games that make comebacks were hits in their time (like the rereleases of old gold-box SSI AD&D games, and the myriad re-releases of old games for newer platforms like the Final Fantasy Anthology for PS2, and all the old SNES games released for the Gameboy Advance). If something bombed, few except the terminally bored, collectors, or bargain bin hunters will ever get into them. I'm one of the bargain bin hunters so I have a lot of also-ran games in my collection. Some of them were diamonds in the rough, but the vast majority of them bombed for one of two good reasons. They either were too buggy to play upon release (Pool of Radiance 2 being one of the more visible and worst offenders) or were just plain not great games.
Cable provider propaganda? Huh? Have you ever actually worked in the telecom/IT industries? Have you any idea of the costs necessary to maintain reliable high speed networking services on that kind of scale? Let me clue you in: a lot. Apparently more than you are willing to pay a cable company, or one of the telcos offering DSL or dedicated real data connections.
Please, go to another country. Don't believe for an instant that I give a damn whether you're in the US, Japan, China, or Zimbabwe. If unlimited bandwidth is all you care about, soldier on in your quest for it. Just don't blame me for your crusade or deludsions of grandeur, thinking that I or anyone else aside from your personal friends and family gives a damn if you leave the US or not. More companies without computer people I can charge consulting fees to for the time it takes to brig the back from the brink after idiots like you, who believe that the world owes them something, fuck them over. Thanks for bringing me more business. I appreciate it.
This isn't for authentication.
This is for people who don't want people "deep linking" to material within their sites. As an example www.gamefaqs.com allows people to link to some of the pages within their site, but not directly to the FAQs they host (which are merely sumbitted text files) by using the refer info. This stops people from bypassing the ads which pay for the site.
If you cannot deal with a hands free set, then you should never drive, period, because you probably can't drive and talk to a passenger at the same time, or change the radio station while driving, or anything else.
Except that ads will become less prevalent, because there will actually be a way to pay for the content. For-pay ad-free services will be able to both find customers (who will likely find that the fee is cheaper than watching the ads). It may also usher in a golden age of website "alliances" where traffic to certain partner sites doesn't get counted against your bandwidth.
A vehicle is not a service. A connection to the internet is a service. Sorry, bub, no cookie.
And I wouldn't be too sure of what you were sold. Check that fine print. It's a wonder what people actually believe that they are paying money for these days.
This has been talked about and talked about and talked about to death. The mainstream media will never cover this, because there's nothing for them to cover. Anyone who cares about this kind of stuff already knows about this. They keep up on the technology, and likely come by here every so often.
The sky isn't falling. This won't kill the Internet, it will just make it more responsible, for once. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource. DEAL WITH IT. If you don't like it, start your own ISP and try to give everyone 2Mbit unrestricted connections, reliably, for $40/month. You won't be able to do it. Get all the venture capital funding you ask for and you still won't be able to do it. Look what happened to Excite@Home. If stuff like this ever happens, it'll be a blessing to networks everywhere. Maybe people will actually take some responsibility and secure their machines when their bandwidth is all used up 'cause someone zombified their machines and used them in a DDoS attack, or the next Internet worm uses it all up. That would make the neighborhood a whole lot safer, let me tell you.
People claim that restricting bandwidth in this manner will kill off the Internet economy. Bah, I say. It will save the internet economy. It will make people realize that this stuff costs something. It will make them at least be aware of how they use it. If they want to use it alot, they're going to have to pay for the privilidge. If they don't want to use it alot, they're going to be able to pay less, to only use it when they need to.
I'm all for it. Of course this is all hot air until the cable companies really crack down on it, so I guess let the good times roll as long as they can. That will only make the hangover longer I suppose. I did fine at 56K, I can do it again. No big.