While it may be years before any such model is put in place and it's hard to say how the end result will look, a consensus is emerging that some channels would suffer -- if not fall away altogether. Content providers now compel cable operators to offer their niche channels by bundling them with must-haves like ESPN or MTV. Without being bundled into a bigger package, less popular channels such as ESPN Classic and MTV2 could struggle to garner a large enough audience to survive.
So while the consumer can choose what channels he or she wants, the cable company still has to pay for it. It's kind of like if the Grocery Store (cable company) forced you (the consumer) to buy the fruit salad because they bought all their fruit from the same company (TV station) who charges them the same regardless of how many individual pineapples or watermelons they bought. Oh, and noone else is making these varieties of pineapples or watermelons. Now, if you want Papaya (specialty station) you can go to the Grocery Store down the street (Satellite) but they make their fruit salad without the Pineapples which you want.
So the consumer's best option is to get his tropical fruit off someone selling out of his van (P2P), which has it's own set of risks entirely.
I have to say, one of the best companies to adapt to digital distribution so far has been ABC
They stream the entire current season of their episodes via their own web page, with a 1 minute commercial at regular commercial breaks.
For many of their shows, such as Lost, their entire back catalogue is available via iTunes, to watch on your PC, TV (if you have AppleTV) or portable device (if you have an iPod).
It's not perfect, but compared to the other broadcasters they've really shown some initiative. I don't feel the need to hoard shows en masse; I just want a way to access them whenever I want quickly under reasonable terms. $1.99 an episode or 1 minute commercials is (compared to NBC) INSANELY reasonable.
Whatever else you can say about the moral objections to the design of these systems, the bottom line is it works. That, above all else, is what should matter.
What can I say? Team 17 made it a fun, accessible, simple yet requiring thought and strategy. The later 3D versions had problems with the camera, and the humor never matched up to the original.
This is either the funniest or the saddest things I've ever read.
Just so the less technically savvy people who don't get the joke don't get confused: a compressed image file can be opened as many times as you'd like without losing any quality. It's only when editing and recompressing the image do you take the detail hit.
So don't be afraid to run those slideshows of your kids on your desktop. Go ahead and print out as many copies as you like. As long as you're not doing touchup work after every iteration, you're cool.
There's something to be said about the fine motor control that the fingers are capable of that can't be easily replicated by the entire arm. Joysticks require a steady hand and a working surface you can rest your arms on so they don't tire, while the smaller analog sticks of today only require the thumbs to rest on them. They're best used in situations that simulate Joysticks in real life, such as in flying simulators. They don't translate nearly as well to the (mostly) 2D movement in an FPS as a simple crosspad does because most movement in those environments don't require analog sensitivity. A joystick requires much more of a response to achieve the same results.
That being said, the immersive qualities of holding the joystick while leading an enemy target is much greater than the simple twitch movements that most games rely on today, as well as improved dexterity when using both large and small muscle groups at the same time (see also: autoaim). If anything replaced the joystick it's the mouse, not the analog stick. It's much more comfortable to use, requires less effort to achieve the same sensitivity, and is much more ubiquitous (imagine trying to use a joystick to move the Windows mouse).
I love the Wii, but you can't use Wii Play as any kind of reliable metric for the popularity of that kind of game. It's essentially a $10 game bundled with a $40 remote that most console owners were intending to buy anyway.
Like any genre, the Minigame phenomenon is only as strong as the title itself. Raving Rabbids was actually pretty solid; Carnival Games is utter garbage. Unfortunately, publishers see the unintentional success of games like Wii Play and assume that's what people want.
Mario Party is a classic, so that's going to be popular. Raving Rabbids is a solid enough game that makes good use of the controller. Wario Ware is goofy and fun, but is becoming tired and cliche.
Frankly, the less party games we see, the better off the few that remain will be. Otherwise it all becomes shovelware at some point.
The summary makes it sound like AMD passed on buying AGEIA because they felt that GPU-Based physics acceleration was "dead".
Actually, AMD designed this whole Hyper Transport bus with dedicated hardware acceleration co-processors in mind. In their world, you wouldn't need a dedicated add-in board, just an open HT socket on the motherboard. Then if you want to add the physics acceleration, just pop in the chip. Putting the accelerator on the GPU card would increase the costs of an already expensive board, not to mention throttle the bandwidth over the PCI bus to the video card(s, if SLI) where there's already a major hit because of ever-increasing texture sizes.
What AMD SHOULD be doing is leveraging this technology with their ATI hardware to integrate the graphics into the system, but I guess their OEM partners like selling new cards every 18 months too much to consider going it alone.
AMD should be aiming to take the whole PC platform back to the Amiga days with dedicated co-processors for each multimedia task. HT would allow them to integrate all the hardware seamlessly to the user. Audio, for the most part, has already made the leap onto the chipset (and MSFT did their part by killing off hardware audio acceleration in Vista). But business being what it is, I doubt it'll ever really happen for video. For physics, which is still new and too expensive to be mainstream, it should be less of a risk.
As someone who finds the "Dark Ages" romantic and exciting, I think this is a great idea. With the US so far behind the rest of the world already, it's time to just give up competing all together.
And some day, when we do decide to make a come back... well, everyone loved the first Renaissance. I'm sure we'll do it even better the second time around, because this is the US of Fuckin A!
I'm looking forward to living a 22nd century stone age. Aren't you?
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale.
When I try to read this article without logging in, it's arranged in the most eye-gougingly, randomly erratic, and thoroughly god awful manner possible. What the hell?!
At first I was dazzled by the bullshit, but after an hour's contemplation I realized that nothing they've announced today is either revolutionary or exciting.
#1 - The Time Capsule. Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard? I've got a USB-2 external drive that does my backups now. This announcement does absolutely nothing for me.
#2 - The iPhone/iPod touch updates. I was really hoping to hear an announcement regarding the hardware. More memory. Smaller form factor. Lower price. Open network. Instead we see a few lousy software upgrades (woo, quasi-GPS that's been in the system for a week now). And, a nice F-U to the early adopters in a 20$ upgrade for the Touch. Glad noone bought me one of those for xmas. Anyone who did get one in the last 30 days should immediately return it and get one of the "new" ones with the additional features for free. And take a crap in the box, before they do.
#3 - The AppleTV/Movie Rental Service. Exciting, if the XBox360 hasn't been serving this capacity for over TWO YEARS. Wow, all the major labels, eh? Are they suddenly going to cut ties with all their other distribution partners? I didn't think so. And the price cut on the AppleTV was okay, but they *really* couldn't go just a bit further to put it below the $200 mark? Really, they must want this device to fail.
#4 - The MacBook Air. It's really just a masturbation toy for the rich gadget hound -- it does nothing new besides be smaller, and it does it slower and more expensively to boot. Wow, it fits in an envelope. Unless you're mailing me one, I'm not interested. Multitouch pad? Give it a month, they'll be on all the MacBooks. The size factor will very quickly be copied by Sony/Dell/et al, so Windows fanbois can rest easy. What would have made it revolutionary? If it were JUST a screen, no Keyboard, no fancy touchpad. Or, if it were under a thousand dollars. THAT would have been impressive. Made of Aluminum? And you thought the last generation MacBooks broke easily! Remote Disk? I've been sharing my CD-ROM drive via windows networking since 1996. It even works over wireless!
What WOULD have been impressive: - A new headless Mac Desktop that fits between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro. - An iPhone Nano, about the size of the old iPod Nano with 1-2gb of memory for $99-$149. - A Mac tablet running full Leopard with multitouch. Bonus points if it's under $1500. - An iMac with a curved monitor like what's been shown at CES. - Price drops on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac Mini.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why Guitar Hero qualifies the artists associated with the song by saying "As Made Famous By..."
Just remember how great it was to have a Doctor in Congress.
All it has to do is ask the user about their dreams with the unicorn in them.
IIRC, the reason why the cable companies don't want A-La Carte pricing is because the law only applies to consumers.
Businesweek 12/7/05
While it may be years before any such model is put in place and it's hard to say how the end result will look, a consensus is emerging that some channels would suffer -- if not fall away altogether. Content providers now compel cable operators to offer their niche channels by bundling them with must-haves like ESPN or MTV. Without being bundled into a bigger package, less popular channels such as ESPN Classic and MTV2 could struggle to garner a large enough audience to survive.
So while the consumer can choose what channels he or she wants, the cable company still has to pay for it. It's kind of like if the Grocery Store (cable company) forced you (the consumer) to buy the fruit salad because they bought all their fruit from the same company (TV station) who charges them the same regardless of how many individual pineapples or watermelons they bought. Oh, and noone else is making these varieties of pineapples or watermelons. Now, if you want Papaya (specialty station) you can go to the Grocery Store down the street (Satellite) but they make their fruit salad without the Pineapples which you want.
So the consumer's best option is to get his tropical fruit off someone selling out of his van (P2P), which has it's own set of risks entirely.
I have to say, one of the best companies to adapt to digital distribution so far has been ABC
They stream the entire current season of their episodes via their own web page, with a 1 minute commercial at regular commercial breaks.
For many of their shows, such as Lost, their entire back catalogue is available via iTunes, to watch on your PC, TV (if you have AppleTV) or portable device (if you have an iPod).
It's not perfect, but compared to the other broadcasters they've really shown some initiative. I don't feel the need to hoard shows en masse; I just want a way to access them whenever I want quickly under reasonable terms. $1.99 an episode or 1 minute commercials is (compared to NBC) INSANELY reasonable.
Whatever else you can say about the moral objections to the design of these systems, the bottom line is it works. That, above all else, is what should matter.
Interstellar Trade is my specialty!
What can I say? Team 17 made it a fun, accessible, simple yet requiring thought and strategy. The later 3D versions had problems with the camera, and the humor never matched up to the original.
This is either the funniest or the saddest things I've ever read.
Just so the less technically savvy people who don't get the joke don't get confused: a compressed image file can be opened as many times as you'd like without losing any quality. It's only when editing and recompressing the image do you take the detail hit.
So don't be afraid to run those slideshows of your kids on your desktop. Go ahead and print out as many copies as you like. As long as you're not doing touchup work after every iteration, you're cool.
This merger comes from the great minds who brought us Reese's Chocolate and Garlic Butter Cups.
The nukes are typically reserved for the last day of mankind.
There, fixed that for ya.
There's something to be said about the fine motor control that the fingers are capable of that can't be easily replicated by the entire arm. Joysticks require a steady hand and a working surface you can rest your arms on so they don't tire, while the smaller analog sticks of today only require the thumbs to rest on them. They're best used in situations that simulate Joysticks in real life, such as in flying simulators. They don't translate nearly as well to the (mostly) 2D movement in an FPS as a simple crosspad does because most movement in those environments don't require analog sensitivity. A joystick requires much more of a response to achieve the same results.
That being said, the immersive qualities of holding the joystick while leading an enemy target is much greater than the simple twitch movements that most games rely on today, as well as improved dexterity when using both large and small muscle groups at the same time (see also: autoaim). If anything replaced the joystick it's the mouse, not the analog stick. It's much more comfortable to use, requires less effort to achieve the same sensitivity, and is much more ubiquitous (imagine trying to use a joystick to move the Windows mouse).
I love the Wii, but you can't use Wii Play as any kind of reliable metric for the popularity of that kind of game. It's essentially a $10 game bundled with a $40 remote that most console owners were intending to buy anyway.
Like any genre, the Minigame phenomenon is only as strong as the title itself. Raving Rabbids was actually pretty solid; Carnival Games is utter garbage. Unfortunately, publishers see the unintentional success of games like Wii Play and assume that's what people want.
Mario Party is a classic, so that's going to be popular. Raving Rabbids is a solid enough game that makes good use of the controller. Wario Ware is goofy and fun, but is becoming tired and cliche.
Frankly, the less party games we see, the better off the few that remain will be. Otherwise it all becomes shovelware at some point.
It is if you're doing a study on Anecdotes.
The summary makes it sound like AMD passed on buying AGEIA because they felt that GPU-Based physics acceleration was "dead".
Actually, AMD designed this whole Hyper Transport bus with dedicated hardware acceleration co-processors in mind. In their world, you wouldn't need a dedicated add-in board, just an open HT socket on the motherboard. Then if you want to add the physics acceleration, just pop in the chip. Putting the accelerator on the GPU card would increase the costs of an already expensive board, not to mention throttle the bandwidth over the PCI bus to the video card(s, if SLI) where there's already a major hit because of ever-increasing texture sizes.
What AMD SHOULD be doing is leveraging this technology with their ATI hardware to integrate the graphics into the system, but I guess their OEM partners like selling new cards every 18 months too much to consider going it alone.
AMD should be aiming to take the whole PC platform back to the Amiga days with dedicated co-processors for each multimedia task. HT would allow them to integrate all the hardware seamlessly to the user. Audio, for the most part, has already made the leap onto the chipset (and MSFT did their part by killing off hardware audio acceleration in Vista). But business being what it is, I doubt it'll ever really happen for video. For physics, which is still new and too expensive to be mainstream, it should be less of a risk.
As someone who finds the "Dark Ages" romantic and exciting, I think this is a great idea. With the US so far behind the rest of the world already, it's time to just give up competing all together.
... well, everyone loved the first Renaissance. I'm sure we'll do it even better the second time around, because this is the US of Fuckin A!
And some day, when we do decide to make a come back
I'm looking forward to living a 22nd century stone age. Aren't you?
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale.
*cough*Google*cough*
Great news!
Now quick, before I forget it, where do I sign up?
The tin foil hats are eating the color red. All frying goes noggin into the sea. Wash the green flamingo with utmost jump.
Over star to tape and grass. I like pie!
That will only work until they come up with some kind of Early Warning System.
Thirded.
When I try to read this article without logging in, it's arranged in the most eye-gougingly, randomly erratic, and thoroughly god awful manner possible. What the hell?!
AAPL has fallen from 180/sh at 11am to a current value of 166/sh, a drop of almost 7% in just four hours.
OUCH.
At first I was dazzled by the bullshit, but after an hour's contemplation I realized that nothing they've announced today is either revolutionary or exciting.
#1 - The Time Capsule. Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard? I've got a USB-2 external drive that does my backups now. This announcement does absolutely nothing for me.
#2 - The iPhone/iPod touch updates. I was really hoping to hear an announcement regarding the hardware. More memory. Smaller form factor. Lower price. Open network. Instead we see a few lousy software upgrades (woo, quasi-GPS that's been in the system for a week now). And, a nice F-U to the early adopters in a 20$ upgrade for the Touch. Glad noone bought me one of those for xmas. Anyone who did get one in the last 30 days should immediately return it and get one of the "new" ones with the additional features for free. And take a crap in the box, before they do.
#3 - The AppleTV/Movie Rental Service. Exciting, if the XBox360 hasn't been serving this capacity for over TWO YEARS. Wow, all the major labels, eh? Are they suddenly going to cut ties with all their other distribution partners? I didn't think so. And the price cut on the AppleTV was okay, but they *really* couldn't go just a bit further to put it below the $200 mark? Really, they must want this device to fail.
#4 - The MacBook Air. It's really just a masturbation toy for the rich gadget hound -- it does nothing new besides be smaller, and it does it slower and more expensively to boot. Wow, it fits in an envelope. Unless you're mailing me one, I'm not interested. Multitouch pad? Give it a month, they'll be on all the MacBooks. The size factor will very quickly be copied by Sony/Dell/et al, so Windows fanbois can rest easy. What would have made it revolutionary? If it were JUST a screen, no Keyboard, no fancy touchpad. Or, if it were under a thousand dollars. THAT would have been impressive. Made of Aluminum? And you thought the last generation MacBooks broke easily! Remote Disk? I've been sharing my CD-ROM drive via windows networking since 1996. It even works over wireless!
What WOULD have been impressive:
- A new headless Mac Desktop that fits between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
- An iPhone Nano, about the size of the old iPod Nano with 1-2gb of memory for $99-$149.
- A Mac tablet running full Leopard with multitouch. Bonus points if it's under $1500.
- An iMac with a curved monitor like what's been shown at CES.
- Price drops on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac Mini.
In a word: meh.
Apple m4p video.
Go watch the live MacWorld broadcast. *drool*
Movies that suck generally do poorly at the box office.
Film at 11!