"And that sentence doesn't give you ideas? You know, like using a third party application running on your PC so you can talk with those people you know?"
While playing a Nintendo Wii game in my living room/basement/game room, where my PC is not, will not be and even if it is, it'll be impossible for me to use, since I'm standing up wailing my arms around like a mad man?
Sure. Any other good ideas?
Think about the problem from Nintendo's perspective as well. If you were Nintendo, would you want people using a third party product on a separate platform? That makes no sense whatsoever for a number of reasons (which is why XBL does have voice chat).
That is if your idea of playing socially is doing so in an environment where everyone is deaf and mute. That's kinda like going for drinks with your buddies and communicate by passing notes. Wicked awesome!
If you are satisfied by communicating through text only, good for you. I'm not, and neither are the people I play online multiplayer video games with. That's why the ones who play WoW in the online gaming community I belong to use TeamSpeak.
All this is moot anyway, because on the Nintendo Wii, due to the design of the controller, voice chatting would be the only reasonable way to communicate with other players anyway. I'd like to see you type 'gg' while holding the controller and the nunchuk, nevermind something more complicated like discussing tactics during a multiplayer match of a squad-based FPS.
"Navigating menus is actually... fun, in an odd sort of way."
This is the same thing I said in my own mini-review on the online gaming community I belong to. The Mii Channel in particular is amazing.
I've played video games for a long time, more than 25 years, and the Nintendo Wii is just the most fun platform I've ever played with. I've had some great gaming moments on other platforms in the past, but not one as fun as playing Wii Sports with a friend or two. There really is nothing that compares. The controllers just work. I'm particularly fond of how the Wii Sports Bowling uses the controller.
It's a great machine and it's a BIG mistake to think the graphical advantage the XBox 360 and PS3 have over the Wii has anything to do with how much you actually enjoy playing with the console system. I own an XBox 360 (recently deceased thanks to three red lights) and will most likely get the PS3 as well once they're more readily available, but the Wii has already impressed me.
That's right, just because I play video games, everything that I do is defined by that one activity. I have no life, I don't live in the reality.
I wonder what Bill O'Reilly would think, if everyone defined everything that he does now, in the past or in the future by his actions towards his female staff members. He'd probably accuse such persons of being in the liberal conspiracy against him.
As a software engineer I'm constantly amazed at how incompetent Diebold and other companies making e-voting applications appear to be. This stuff is not rocket science at all, but fairly uncomplicated, basic software engineering.
Why do you think it's so hard for Diebold and other companies to come up with solutions that work well? Is it a stubborn unwillingness to listen and learn from critics, shere incompetence, or something else?
Removing the ability for users to save their own searches is not exactly the same as retaining user searches.
I betcha the latter is still very much happening. If I were Amazon, I'd retain the data just to have it available for analysis. That sort of stuff has tremendous business value.
"When you fly into a country that is under threat of suicidal hijackers and other evildoers"
So you won't object too much then when the Russian officials demand all your data then? You do know that they've had a bit of a terrorist problem there for quite some time, right?
Or China. See, they claim the same thing. Falun Gong, all those Tibetan monks and any other organization fighting to topple the Communists. All terrorists. And that's why the Chinese Government needs to know the addresses of all the Taiwanese people you've ever been in contact with. Funny how the ones living in China keep dissappearing right after you flew in...
Let's see what kind of loopholes the honest and hard working people in Washington put in to make sure they don't have to submit pork barrel project expenses or any other expenses they don't think we should really see onto that website.
Thanks for the lesson. I think I learned that in the Economics 101 about 15 years ago. But it was a great refresher. Thanks again.
I wasn't, however, complaining about the record profits. I was complaining, just like the post I was responding to, about the government subsidies given to these companies with record profits. They don't need the subsidies, people in Katrina's wake do.
"Am I the only person wondering what is going on here?"
No, you're not.
The US Government gave oil companies a multi-billion dollar subsidy just after the Katrina hurricane. The oil company lobbyists claimed the hurricane had had a disastrous affect on the oil companies. The next quarter the oil companies, all of them, announced record profits. Profits that were bigger than any other company in the history had ever made in a quarter.
That's roughly $100M every single month. That's $1.2B per year.
And since it's subscriptions revenue, it's ALL going to Blizzard/Vivendi unlike revenue from copies sold, where the publisher/developer has to give a cut to the retailers and others involved in selling the game.
Mario might've sold 40 million copies. At $30 a pop that's about the same amount of money WoW makes in a year. At $40 a pop, 15 months worth of revenue. At $50 a pop 20 months.
I'd love to have a position at Blizzard that receives performance based bonuses. I think I'd be driving several of my dream cars by now.
I used to work for a company that had pretty serious Internet filters, and they monitored the Internet access at the company in real-time. It was not unknown to get a call from the people monitoring security at the company if they noticed something funky going on your computer. They had good reason though...the former management team had been found in some serious ethics violations costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and almost landed the execs in jail.
I really had no problem with the "normal" filters they had on most of the time, but once in a while, they put the Uber-Super-Anal filters on that would restrict your access to basically read-only Internet. During these "outages" you couldn't go to any online shops, incl. tech bookstores like Bookpool.com (Amazon.com was blocked as well). Some tech resources were also restricted for some reason. The "super siikrit probations" were never announced in advance, nor were we told when they ended. You just noticed, all of a sudden, that half the Internet is gone. And then hours or days later, it was back.
It was definitely one of the reasons why I quit that job.
Yes, but if that SSN doesn't belong to the AOL user who performed the search, AOL is not LEGALLY required to do anything about it, as AOL's customer data was not leaked.
Yes, just like EVERY other company, incl. the oh-so-great Google. That's never been in dispute, and if you really can't deal with that, I suggest you log off the Internet and never use it again.
However, what AOL will NEVER do again, is expose that information to the public. That's why she would be safer at AOL.
They may release it to a corrupt Government, of course, but so will every other company faced with a "polite" request from the nice people from NSA.
At the end of the article, she says she's cancelling her AOL account as a result.
She shouldn't. There's absolutely no way AOL will ever do anything like that again. On the other hand, if she switches to another online provider, who still hasn't been burned, it's a quite a bit more likely they'll screw up like this as well. She'd be "safer" staying at AOL.
Slashdot Mirror
"And that sentence doesn't give you ideas? You know, like using a third party application running on your PC so you can talk with those people you know?"
While playing a Nintendo Wii game in my living room/basement/game room, where my PC is not, will not be and even if it is, it'll be impossible for me to use, since I'm standing up wailing my arms around like a mad man?
Sure. Any other good ideas?
Think about the problem from Nintendo's perspective as well. If you were Nintendo, would you want people using a third party product on a separate platform? That makes no sense whatsoever for a number of reasons (which is why XBL does have voice chat).
"Why are you so driven to hear squeaky pre-teen voices?"
I'm not. None of my friends have squeaky pre-teen voices.
No problem at all.
That is if your idea of playing socially is doing so in an environment where everyone is deaf and mute. That's kinda like going for drinks with your buddies and communicate by passing notes. Wicked awesome!
If you are satisfied by communicating through text only, good for you. I'm not, and neither are the people I play online multiplayer video games with. That's why the ones who play WoW in the online gaming community I belong to use TeamSpeak.
All this is moot anyway, because on the Nintendo Wii, due to the design of the controller, voice chatting would be the only reasonable way to communicate with other players anyway. I'd like to see you type 'gg' while holding the controller and the nunchuk, nevermind something more complicated like discussing tactics during a multiplayer match of a squad-based FPS.
That's why you don't play with random people. I haven't played matchmaking ranked or unranked games on XBL for ages.
I belong to a large adult online gaming community. We play custom games amongst each other. There's nothing like it.
Without voice chat, however, it'd just be like playing against a CPU with AI that actually works.
Nintendo Wii won't have an online killer app unless they develop voice chatting capabilities first.
Without that feature it'll always play second fiddle to the XBox 360 in the online multiplayer gaming arena.
That being said, Wii Sports Bowling with voice chat and online multiplay tournaments would totally take names and kick ass.
"Navigating menus is actually ... fun, in an odd sort of way."
This is the same thing I said in my own mini-review on the online gaming community I belong to. The Mii Channel in particular is amazing.
I've played video games for a long time, more than 25 years, and the Nintendo Wii is just the most fun platform I've ever played with. I've had some great gaming moments on other platforms in the past, but not one as fun as playing Wii Sports with a friend or two. There really is nothing that compares. The controllers just work. I'm particularly fond of how the Wii Sports Bowling uses the controller.
It's a great machine and it's a BIG mistake to think the graphical advantage the XBox 360 and PS3 have over the Wii has anything to do with how much you actually enjoy playing with the console system. I own an XBox 360 (recently deceased thanks to three red lights) and will most likely get the PS3 as well once they're more readily available, but the Wii has already impressed me.
I hope they roll this out nationwide.
That's right, just because I play video games, everything that I do is defined by that one activity. I have no life, I don't live in the reality.
I wonder what Bill O'Reilly would think, if everyone defined everything that he does now, in the past or in the future by his actions towards his female staff members. He'd probably accuse such persons of being in the liberal conspiracy against him.
What a goddamn idiot.
As a software engineer I'm constantly amazed at how incompetent Diebold and other companies making e-voting applications appear to be. This stuff is not rocket science at all, but fairly uncomplicated, basic software engineering.
Why do you think it's so hard for Diebold and other companies to come up with solutions that work well? Is it a stubborn unwillingness to listen and learn from critics, shere incompetence, or something else?
Not really, so why would we *NEED* HDTVs either.
But then, I want to play games and I want to play them on an HDTV.
Removing the ability for users to save their own searches is not exactly the same as retaining user searches.
I betcha the latter is still very much happening. If I were Amazon, I'd retain the data just to have it available for analysis. That sort of stuff has tremendous business value.
*sigh*
That's the sound of a clue flying right over your head.
"Either you trust the government or you don't visit that country."
What if you live in that country? I can not not visit the country I live in.
You suggest I move out? Abandon my family and friends? Leave my job? Sell all my assets at a loss?
Yea, that's gonna work just great.
"When you fly into a country that is under threat of suicidal hijackers and other evildoers"
So you won't object too much then when the Russian officials demand all your data then? You do know that they've had a bit of a terrorist problem there for quite some time, right?
Or China. See, they claim the same thing. Falun Gong, all those Tibetan monks and any other organization fighting to topple the Communists. All terrorists. And that's why the Chinese Government needs to know the addresses of all the Taiwanese people you've ever been in contact with. Funny how the ones living in China keep dissappearing right after you flew in...
I have a better solution.
In Soviet US you belong to the Government.
Let's see what kind of loopholes the honest and hard working people in Washington put in to make sure they don't have to submit pork barrel project expenses or any other expenses they don't think we should really see onto that website.
Online advertisers are increasingly moving from advertising on large portals to viral marketing and advertising on blogs.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, if that means Yahoo is seeing less ad revenue.
Thanks for the lesson. I think I learned that in the Economics 101 about 15 years ago. But it was a great refresher. Thanks again.
I wasn't, however, complaining about the record profits. I was complaining, just like the post I was responding to, about the government subsidies given to these companies with record profits. They don't need the subsidies, people in Katrina's wake do.
"Am I the only person wondering what is going on here?"
No, you're not.
The US Government gave oil companies a multi-billion dollar subsidy just after the Katrina hurricane. The oil company lobbyists claimed the hurricane had had a disastrous affect on the oil companies. The next quarter the oil companies, all of them, announced record profits. Profits that were bigger than any other company in the history had ever made in a quarter.
WoW has 7,000,000 active subscribers.
That's roughly $100M every single month. That's $1.2B per year.
And since it's subscriptions revenue, it's ALL going to Blizzard/Vivendi unlike revenue from copies sold, where the publisher/developer has to give a cut to the retailers and others involved in selling the game.
Mario might've sold 40 million copies. At $30 a pop that's about the same amount of money WoW makes in a year. At $40 a pop, 15 months worth of revenue. At $50 a pop 20 months.
I'd love to have a position at Blizzard that receives performance based bonuses. I think I'd be driving several of my dream cars by now.
I swear every time this clown opens his moouth, I feel the urge to punch things.
As clueless as he always is, I'm sure he is bound to have heard of World of Warcraft, the most successful video game on any platform, ever.
Niche my ass.
"TFA doesn't say anything about whether or not the music in question is DRM-encumbered. I see no reason at all to believe that it won't be."
My guess is that it'll be some sort of an audio stream embedded in a Flash app, just like YouTube or Google Video.
I used to work for a company that had pretty serious Internet filters, and they monitored the Internet access at the company in real-time. It was not unknown to get a call from the people monitoring security at the company if they noticed something funky going on your computer. They had good reason though...the former management team had been found in some serious ethics violations costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and almost landed the execs in jail.
I really had no problem with the "normal" filters they had on most of the time, but once in a while, they put the Uber-Super-Anal filters on that would restrict your access to basically read-only Internet. During these "outages" you couldn't go to any online shops, incl. tech bookstores like Bookpool.com (Amazon.com was blocked as well). Some tech resources were also restricted for some reason. The "super siikrit probations" were never announced in advance, nor were we told when they ended. You just noticed, all of a sudden, that half the Internet is gone. And then hours or days later, it was back.
It was definitely one of the reasons why I quit that job.
Yes, but if that SSN doesn't belong to the AOL user who performed the search, AOL is not LEGALLY required to do anything about it, as AOL's customer data was not leaked.
Tough nookies for Ivan Thompson, though.
"AOL will continue to datamine peoples searches."
Yes, just like EVERY other company, incl. the oh-so-great Google. That's never been in dispute, and if you really can't deal with that, I suggest you log off the Internet and never use it again.
However, what AOL will NEVER do again, is expose that information to the public. That's why she would be safer at AOL.
They may release it to a corrupt Government, of course, but so will every other company faced with a "polite" request from the nice people from NSA.
At the end of the article, she says she's cancelling her AOL account as a result.
She shouldn't. There's absolutely no way AOL will ever do anything like that again. On the other hand, if she switches to another online provider, who still hasn't been burned, it's a quite a bit more likely they'll screw up like this as well. She'd be "safer" staying at AOL.