You're spot on target. This wasn't treason, it was standard political quid pro quo. Admittedly, it's sometimes hard to tell the two apart....
Dems may call it treason because she turned her back on the party line. But that's personal. IANAL, but to me, this looks like obstruction, maybe tampering with evidence. Not treason.
Are you sure about that? Doing AIPAC's bidding directly puts the US in conflict with the people we get a large portion of our oil from. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the US is supposed to be the welfare provider for the entire world. I find it curious that we'll have conservatives who rail against welfare to American citizens but are more than happy to send the money overseas. I know that this is a liberal who just got caught here but the liberal platform isn't anti-welfare which is what makes the conservative stance hypocritical. What part of giving handouts to Israel serves America's interests? This does nothing to enhance America's security. If we are talking about humanitarian concerns, giving no-strings-attached aid to Israel just makes it more certain the Palestinians will take it in the shorts.
This scandal is going to get the neo-nazis out in droves hooting and hollering about the evil joo's controlling the gubmint. Ignore them. I'm pissed about AIPAC but I'd be just as pissed if we had the Irish PAC leading the government around by the nose and demanding concessions to Ireland and asking us to take sides in the Troubles.
Don't you watch the movies? They would've backtraced his IP address through their firewall with a Visual Basic program within seconds. You need to bounce around the world through at LEAST 15 anonymizing proxies for that to work and give you a minute or two of time to taunt them before you disconnect at the last minute just as the blue blipping blob on their VB.Net trace program is about to pinpoint your location in North America as the program starts zooming in on your location with Google Maps.
Click! All they know is you're in the northeast, but you told them that already right before you disconnected when you said you were calling them from a payphone across the street. When they rush out of their building all they find is an empty payphone with an acoustic coupler attached to the handset and interfaced to some kind of prepaid cell phone. You put down your binoculars that you've been using to watch the situation from the 5th floor of your hotel down the street and press a button on your computer which detonates the C4 conveniently hidden behind the payphone. Did they really think a silly god damn Windows spyware program was going to take you down so easily?
And you were getting a blowjob from Halle Berry the whole time! Add in some more titty and I think we have a blockbuster.
Did you read a different book than I did? One of the important plot threads is Mandella's fragmented-by-interstellar-travel romance.
If all you remember was the battles on remote planets and the clone armies and whatnot, you did not get the point of the book at all - it's Haldeman's Vietnam-era rebuttal to the largely pro-war stance of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The human dimension is important.
I wouldn't exactly say that Troopers was pro-war, but it was pro civil service and seeing the needs of the society as every bit as important as the needs of the individual. This sort of "greater good" thinking can be wonderful if applied lightly or twisted into an authoritarian nightmare state if done with a heavy hand. The movie Starship Troopers was filmed with the assumption that Heinlein endorsed fascism and was a rebuttal to it. I'm a huge fan of satire but nothing makes you look so ignorant as trying to make fun of something you don't fully understand. The movie failed on all counts.
Now Haldeman expressly stated his book was a rebuttal to Troopers. And this I think is the most satisfying way to have a real literary debate. I think both books are excellent and make good points. Troopers is a proposal of how society ought to be and and Forever War shows what happens when that kind of thinking goes sour.
I don't really tear up with most fiction but something got in my eye by the time I got to the end of the story.
The 3D I've seen is more distraction than enhancement. I don't want to have to wear stupid 3D glasses every time I watch a movie. I saw Beowulf in 3D and the effect was sometimes neat, sometimes disorienting.
Have they made any improvements or is this just more of the same?
[quote]I truthfully don't care about music. What I care about is when textbooks start becoming free. It will be a revolution in education. This will be especially the case when people write things like,"The comprehensive guide to calculus as to be learned by anyone who knows how to count" The computer means it can be an advanced and interactive media session. The free distribution will mean anyone can have it in their hands.[/quote]
College textbooks in America suck thick, veiny donkey cock. Math books in particular fail us utterly. I had trouble with anything beyond addition and subtraction until I got a computer and started fiddling around with BASIC. Algebra would have been impossible without it.
I think the worst part about these books is that they're written by academic math jocks in order to impress other academic math jocks. The student isn't even part of the equation. Kids don't learn through dry, pointless, abstract textbooks. Make a game out of it, kids will be having so much fun they won't even know they're learning. D&D and similar games have done more to promote math education for kids than any hundred craptastic textbooks.
[quote]File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it.[/quote]
I'm a huge fan of European metal. I discovered this stuff back in the days of Napster when I could browse the music selection of other users. Once I had a name to search for, I could find other people who had material by that band, then I could see what else they had sitting there. Searching for a track by name would give me all the bands that ever covered it and wow, that was great so now I download stuff by that band.
My CD purchasing habit exploded due to Napster. There was so much less risk in trying new things. When the RIAA started with the gestapo tactics, I stopped buying CD's.
The torrent sites are pretty awful for branching out and exploring, you really need to know what you're looking for. Wikipedia has become a better resource for me because I can get names, look up a track on Youtube to see if it's good, then download the torrent.
As far as I'm concerned, there's some accounts that'll need settling up once we get to a fair system of remuneration for the artists. I'll be damned if I'm going to throw my bucks into a big money funnel just so the artist can get 6 cents on the CD. I'll be damned if I'm going to screw with DRM-laden crap. With the storage capacity of drives these days and the sheer space the old crap takes up, there's no more room in my life for physical media.
Probably the least fucked up system on the net is rifftracks. I donwload the movies with the riffs pre-loaded that are on the torrent sites and then toss some bucks in their tip jar they have on the site. I gave them $100, of which I'll bet they see far more of than when I bought VHS tapes of the old episodes from Rhino.
Giving money to charity, or volunteer work, doesn't put a roof over my head, or put food on the table. People do all kinds of things for the warm fuzzy feeling.
Without software copyright, people will still write software. It does useful stuff.
Without art copyright, people will still create art, to show their skill and for pleasure. What is produced would probably be different.
When talking about physical distribution, I'm paying for the CD, the book, etc. The six cents that makes it back to the artist is chickenfeed. When talking about downloading stuff, it's barely taking any money away from the creator at all. But there are some things I've directly purchased and I'll tell you why: it's a vote to get more made. That's the way I look at it. If I throw money at the artist I like, I'll get more stuff. It's patronage in the oldest sense of the word. And it's really the correct way to look at it in the digital age. Once something is created, it's all bits that can be copied for virtually no cost at all. Pass all the laws you want and the genie will stay out of the lamp, the toothpaste will remain out of the tube. But no amount of copying will make the artist create something new. That's the power the artist has, to withhold work, and that's the power the fans have, to support it.
The beautiful thing about online distribution is that the middle-men who eat up all the profits are gone. Want a nice album? Pay for musicians, an engineer and studio time. Label? What label? Fuck those fucking fuckers. Overpaid execs living large off the sweat of someone more talented? They're defenestrated from the 50th floor, baby.
I don't know what the right term would be. It looks like I'll be inheriting managing my company's site. In looking through the documentation, it should be fairly easy for me because I'm familiar with all of it. But this stuff had been originally handed to a marketing guy who didn't know anything about web stuff. I mean yeah, we joke about the conceited pricks who were glorified web monkeys making $70k for being able to write a hyperlink but there's actually a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that would be lost on non-techs.
The biggest mistake I see companies make is putting people in charge of things they should have no business going near. It's an obvious mistake to put a computer guy like me in charge of a sales department, I wouldn't know schmoozing from wingtips. If that's so obvious, why isn't it obvious putting a soft skills sales and marketing type in charge of a web project is a bad idea? And I'm not talking about being an executive and delegating the technical work, I mean he's chief cook and bottle washer on the project. This isn't a matter of copping egos and attitudes, it's just recognizing proper fits for certain job functions!
The bean-counters decided it was better to operate off a relatively fixed cost like fuel and have a dependable schedule. The whole story of the 20th century has been "Yeah, you could do this or that but it's just simpler and cheaper to use fossil fuels." Environmentalism won't drive alternative fuels, economics will. If it becomes cheaper to use sail, we'll go back to sail. The cost of fuel will only rise from this point, peak oil is here, so the economics we need for sail should be here now.
When I see "used" games for sale for $54, is it time to ask if they're charging too much for new games? Hell, yes. I don't pick them up until they're $20 or less.
I picked up Civ Revolutions. The DLC they have is ok but nowhere near like what you end up getting, fan and professional-made for the PC versions. Sadly, PC remains the king for modding. I think the issue is that the console companies and the publishers on console just don't feel comfortable giving up that level of control.
As I understand it, Oblivion needed the fan tweaks to make it the perfect game it could have been -- plain vanilla as it came from the publisher it was lacking on both PC and console. Unfortunately, you can't install those tweaks on the console. There's no technical reason like back in the day with the PSX, Sony and Microsoft could allow it if they wanted to -- it's obvious that they don't.
Really, I think the whole point of DLC should be about maintaining fan interest between major releases. When it comes to strategy games, version number releases should be five years apart and be built around significant revisions in the graphics engine. Point releases would be balancing and bug fixes with DLC to keep the game fresh and exciting, more scenarios, varying maps, new units, etc. This keeps the game fresh and vibrant until the new version comes out, keeps people interested. If we're talking shooters, the DLC should be new episodes. I don't know how Half-Life fell apart and really don't care since the storylines in HF2 sucked. But if we look at Half-Life 1, that had a great storyline. The expansion packs were less interesting but could have been great. An episodic model should have worked there. Release main game, then start making new episodes that build upon the existing engine and models. In a few more years, release sequel with revamped engine, keep building on the storyline.
I've been a fan of the RPG formula for years while not liking most of the RPG's I've seen. When I really like the storyline in the game, it's fantastic fun to keep playing. When the storyline sucks, why bother? I found Betrayal at Krondor to be engaging. (Yeah, I go way back.) Oblivion had great graphics but a snoozer storyline. Two Worlds had graphics that would have been amazing years ago but had crappy acting, crappy writing, and was a worthless experience.
DLC will have to vary depending on the kind of game. Strategy games typically don't have stories but could have accessories sold out the wazoo, just like pencil and paper games. Story-driven games should be able to keep selling more content so long as they deliver on the storytelling. But we'll likely see all of this gamed for the highest return for least effort.
Land toilet -> crapper, ship's toilet -> head, space toilet -> colbert
Let's start a campaign. From now on a space toilet shall be a "colbert".
That really does fit. Space toilets are odd machines to begin with. They actually use an impeller to move the waste into the collection unit since there's no gravity to rely on. So in other words, the shit hits the fan by design! If that doesn't sound like a Colbert device, I don't know what does.
This is probably the first time in 10 years news about NASA has stuck in my mind. Sure some scientific stuff is interesting to read... sure I hear press releases and news tidbits, but those go in one ear out the other. This is the best "stick to your ribs" news (aka marketing) NASA has made with the post baby boomers.
This says something sad about you but if you are representative of the rest of the population as well, it says something sad about all of us.
Personally, I've been luvin' me some NASA news for ages. Between Hubble, the mars landers, greater internet access to space imagery, the ISS... Shit, losing a shuttle didn't garner your attention?
I will agree that huffing some goof-balls and going on the Colbert Report is good PR but I'd be sad to think that circus antics is the only way we could interest people in space. If that's the case, may as well rent the module out to Vivid and shoot some zero-g porn to get funding for the new moonbase.
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft's FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. "We're also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven."
I'm having difficulty telling the difference between satire and the news these days. Doesn't seem too far off here.
why upgrade when the current software provides everything you need
1. What you said. 2. Nobody has the money to upgrade anyway. 3. Nobody's coming up with anything new to justify throwing everything out. 4. Netbook phenomenon is finally putting emphasis back on getting more for your dollar rather than writing bloaty code and throwing horsepower at it. 5. Repeat point 2, nobody has the money to throw out perfectly good hardware just to get a new OS that does pretty much what the previous one did.
I know predicting the death of Microsoft is good fun and we've been doing it for years. I won't say this is the death knell but this is certainly a bit of a pickle. The plural of anecdote ain't data but a lot of people I know are going Mac out of frustration. Those who haven't are still adamant about keeping XP.
There are several reasons why Google Update runs all the time that you're missing, but the crucial assumption you seem to be making is that the process is "constantly running using up resources".
Google Update was coded pretty carefully to sleep nearly all the time and have as minimal a footprint as possible. I challenge you to detect any degredation of system performance with it running, especially since its CPU and memory load is less than any of several dozen always-running services that come with the OS.
Doesn't matter. Just have it run once a week on startup like most apps do and we're fine.
As far as Windows goes, it'd be nice if third parties could register with Windows update. You install app X, it now gets to be polled on Windows update at whatever schedule you use. Update available, there you go. It'd be like what the Linux distros do with their lovely updaters.
I just hate extraneous shit that gets installed and harshes your computer's well-being. Perfect example are the shitty printer TSR's that just sit there in the corner hogging up resources waiting for you to print. Why? Unnecessary! And when you uninstall them it's like your computer gets a needle of adrenaline right in the heart, it's ten times faster than you're used to.
About only half of what sucks about Windows can be directly blamed on Microsoft. The rest of it has to be blamed on the third party apps.
Well I feel much safer now knowing that the updater is open source. I have for one have no worries about the code actually being updated... that of course is completely kosher.
Don't worry, I checked. Has the little (u) and everything for Passover. Dunno how it'll be after the holiday's over, though.
Do it just like Google image search -- everyone defaults to safe mode and you can then turn it off if you don't want to be mollycoddled. As for what goes on the list, just categorize the books properly and allow them to be on your exclusion list. Do you want romance, g-rated, r-rated, x-rated, or none of the above?
I have no problem with giving individuals the means to filter their results so long as their views aren't imposed upon the majority. I personally have no use for religion but it would be rather rude of me to demand that all religious books be made 18+ saying they're not suitable for young, impressionable minds. I happen to believe that's the case but it's my choice to not expose kids to that kind of material and I can impose my standards on kids I'm responsible for, not the entire world.
Too big to fail = too big to risk leaving whole. Too much concentration of power leads to abuses. When mergers happen and the CEO's gloat about efficiencies of scale, they're talking about putting Americans out of work. And where do all those savings go? Fat CEO paychecks. Keeping those jobs in pay ain't inefficiency, it's redundancy in the engineering sense, like "let's have redundant control cables on the airplane so if one set goes out, we won't fall out of the sky. Let's have lots of banks so if a couple fail, we don't lose the whole industry." When Republicans bleat about class warfare and wealth redistribution, they forget to mention that they threw the first punch.
This Time-Warner BS is no different from GE buying up a news network so they can create more favorable coverage of their business interests. Propaganda is wrong; propagandists are liars and should be treated as such.
You want to be innovative instead of trying to build the biggest epeen how about trying to build the most fun FPS? Serious Sam? fun. SoF I&II? fun. NOLF I&II? VERY fun. Deus Ex? FUN. See a connection here? None of these games were top of the graphics charts when they were released, yet folks still keep talking about them and coming back for another round because they were F.U.N. with a capital F.
Games are becoming more and more like movies in this regard. Back in the day, just showing a train coming into a station was enough to wow the audience. But as the audience got more sophisticated, more was required to impress them. Then you ended up with market segmentation. There's the people who want tits and splosions, there's the people who like Woody Allen movies, there's the people who like screwball british comedies, etc. But even within those genres there's good work and bad. Everyone can do explosions, everyone can do costume dramas, but not everyone can do those genres well. And that's the difference between a good movie and by the numbers crap -- giving a shit and doing it right.
These days pretty much every game can look pretty. The ones in the past that always impressed me were the ones that either took what we've seen to a new level or did the same stuff better than anyone else. And much of that comes down to storytelling. I'm attracted to RPG play mechanics but am usually bored out of my mind by the derivative and uninspired storytelling. Shooters tend to have poor storylines as well but man, when they're done right it's engrossing. I enjoy the gameplay and I'm also wanting to see what happens next.
What I find interesting is that there's been a resurgence in the development of games that feel a bit more old school. The name used for them is casual gaming but it's really about making a game that's not quite modern -- modern games are $20 million epic events that suck up a ton of time. The casual games are more built like the old atari ones -- you pick them up, have some fun, can set them down whenever. Doesn't take a million bucks to put one together, doesn't take a hundred thousand units sold to break even. And with the electronic distribution available on consoles, it's easier to take a chance with them.
I can think of a couple of great examples of this.
Back in the early days of the RTS, the formula was that you had one resource to harvest. In order to create complexity, games started adding more resource types. This ultimately made the game more cumbersome to play without adding as much material benefit. The counter to this is what newer games like Dawn of War does with adding strategic locations to the map, hold the location and you get request points for more units.
The original Master of Orion was an excellent 4x game. The sequel sought to add more depth by giving each star planets and you now had to build things on each planet. Instead of adding depth, it just made the game more tedious. This same problem could be seen in typical 4x games like Civ where it was great fun to tweak the cities in the early stages but became increasingly monotonous as empires grew. The problem here was driven home to me when I played an ultra-minimal space game on my Palm. You have one type of planet, one type of ship. You can invest in ship production, factory production, and research. Research will put your ships up to the next tech level. Combat consists of a stack of your ship and a stack of their ships going at it one on one. The tech is weighed between your ship and the enemy's and it does a coin toss. God is on the side with more ships and higher tech. A map on this game that would have taken hours in Master of Orion can be swept in 20 minutes. The core elements of the game are there, just stripped down to the most minimal.
It's very easy to add more crap to a game and far more difficult to add something useful. And sadly, it can be rather subjective as to what truly adds depth and what's simple tedium.
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You're spot on target. This wasn't treason, it was standard political quid pro quo. Admittedly, it's sometimes hard to tell the two apart....
Dems may call it treason because she turned her back on the party line. But that's personal. IANAL, but to me, this looks like obstruction, maybe tampering with evidence. Not treason.
Are you sure about that? Doing AIPAC's bidding directly puts the US in conflict with the people we get a large portion of our oil from. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the US is supposed to be the welfare provider for the entire world. I find it curious that we'll have conservatives who rail against welfare to American citizens but are more than happy to send the money overseas. I know that this is a liberal who just got caught here but the liberal platform isn't anti-welfare which is what makes the conservative stance hypocritical. What part of giving handouts to Israel serves America's interests? This does nothing to enhance America's security. If we are talking about humanitarian concerns, giving no-strings-attached aid to Israel just makes it more certain the Palestinians will take it in the shorts.
This scandal is going to get the neo-nazis out in droves hooting and hollering about the evil joo's controlling the gubmint. Ignore them. I'm pissed about AIPAC but I'd be just as pissed if we had the Irish PAC leading the government around by the nose and demanding concessions to Ireland and asking us to take sides in the Troubles.
Don't you watch the movies? They would've backtraced his IP address through their firewall with a Visual Basic program within seconds. You need to bounce around the world through at LEAST 15 anonymizing proxies for that to work and give you a minute or two of time to taunt them before you disconnect at the last minute just as the blue blipping blob on their VB.Net trace program is about to pinpoint your location in North America as the program starts zooming in on your location with Google Maps.
Click! All they know is you're in the northeast, but you told them that already right before you disconnected when you said you were calling them from a payphone across the street. When they rush out of their building all they find is an empty payphone with an acoustic coupler attached to the handset and interfaced to some kind of prepaid cell phone. You put down your binoculars that you've been using to watch the situation from the 5th floor of your hotel down the street and press a button on your computer which detonates the C4 conveniently hidden behind the payphone. Did they really think a silly god damn Windows spyware program was going to take you down so easily?
And you were getting a blowjob from Halle Berry the whole time! Add in some more titty and I think we have a blockbuster.
Did you read a different book than I did? One of the important plot threads is Mandella's fragmented-by-interstellar-travel romance.
If all you remember was the battles on remote planets and the clone armies and whatnot, you did not get the point of the book at all - it's Haldeman's Vietnam-era rebuttal to the largely pro-war stance of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The human dimension is important.
I wouldn't exactly say that Troopers was pro-war, but it was pro civil service and seeing the needs of the society as every bit as important as the needs of the individual. This sort of "greater good" thinking can be wonderful if applied lightly or twisted into an authoritarian nightmare state if done with a heavy hand. The movie Starship Troopers was filmed with the assumption that Heinlein endorsed fascism and was a rebuttal to it. I'm a huge fan of satire but nothing makes you look so ignorant as trying to make fun of something you don't fully understand. The movie failed on all counts.
Now Haldeman expressly stated his book was a rebuttal to Troopers. And this I think is the most satisfying way to have a real literary debate. I think both books are excellent and make good points. Troopers is a proposal of how society ought to be and and Forever War shows what happens when that kind of thinking goes sour.
I don't really tear up with most fiction but something got in my eye by the time I got to the end of the story.
The 3D I've seen is more distraction than enhancement. I don't want to have to wear stupid 3D glasses every time I watch a movie. I saw Beowulf in 3D and the effect was sometimes neat, sometimes disorienting.
Have they made any improvements or is this just more of the same?
[quote]I truthfully don't care about music. What I care about is when textbooks start becoming free. It will be a revolution in education. This will be especially the case when people write things like,"The comprehensive guide to calculus as to be learned by anyone who knows how to count" The computer means it can be an advanced and interactive media session. The free distribution will mean anyone can have it in their hands.[/quote]
College textbooks in America suck thick, veiny donkey cock. Math books in particular fail us utterly. I had trouble with anything beyond addition and subtraction until I got a computer and started fiddling around with BASIC. Algebra would have been impossible without it.
I think the worst part about these books is that they're written by academic math jocks in order to impress other academic math jocks. The student isn't even part of the equation. Kids don't learn through dry, pointless, abstract textbooks. Make a game out of it, kids will be having so much fun they won't even know they're learning. D&D and similar games have done more to promote math education for kids than any hundred craptastic textbooks.
[quote]File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it.[/quote]
I'm a huge fan of European metal. I discovered this stuff back in the days of Napster when I could browse the music selection of other users. Once I had a name to search for, I could find other people who had material by that band, then I could see what else they had sitting there. Searching for a track by name would give me all the bands that ever covered it and wow, that was great so now I download stuff by that band.
My CD purchasing habit exploded due to Napster. There was so much less risk in trying new things. When the RIAA started with the gestapo tactics, I stopped buying CD's.
The torrent sites are pretty awful for branching out and exploring, you really need to know what you're looking for. Wikipedia has become a better resource for me because I can get names, look up a track on Youtube to see if it's good, then download the torrent.
As far as I'm concerned, there's some accounts that'll need settling up once we get to a fair system of remuneration for the artists. I'll be damned if I'm going to throw my bucks into a big money funnel just so the artist can get 6 cents on the CD. I'll be damned if I'm going to screw with DRM-laden crap. With the storage capacity of drives these days and the sheer space the old crap takes up, there's no more room in my life for physical media.
Probably the least fucked up system on the net is rifftracks. I donwload the movies with the riffs pre-loaded that are on the torrent sites and then toss some bucks in their tip jar they have on the site. I gave them $100, of which I'll bet they see far more of than when I bought VHS tapes of the old episodes from Rhino.
I'd give the museum props if it was still plugged in and serving data.
Giving money to charity, or volunteer work, doesn't put a roof over my head, or put food on the table. People do all kinds of things for the warm fuzzy feeling.
Without software copyright, people will still write software. It does useful stuff.
Without art copyright, people will still create art, to show their skill and for pleasure. What is produced would probably be different.
When talking about physical distribution, I'm paying for the CD, the book, etc. The six cents that makes it back to the artist is chickenfeed. When talking about downloading stuff, it's barely taking any money away from the creator at all. But there are some things I've directly purchased and I'll tell you why: it's a vote to get more made. That's the way I look at it. If I throw money at the artist I like, I'll get more stuff. It's patronage in the oldest sense of the word. And it's really the correct way to look at it in the digital age. Once something is created, it's all bits that can be copied for virtually no cost at all. Pass all the laws you want and the genie will stay out of the lamp, the toothpaste will remain out of the tube. But no amount of copying will make the artist create something new. That's the power the artist has, to withhold work, and that's the power the fans have, to support it.
The beautiful thing about online distribution is that the middle-men who eat up all the profits are gone. Want a nice album? Pay for musicians, an engineer and studio time. Label? What label? Fuck those fucking fuckers. Overpaid execs living large off the sweat of someone more talented? They're defenestrated from the 50th floor, baby.
I don't know what the right term would be. It looks like I'll be inheriting managing my company's site. In looking through the documentation, it should be fairly easy for me because I'm familiar with all of it. But this stuff had been originally handed to a marketing guy who didn't know anything about web stuff. I mean yeah, we joke about the conceited pricks who were glorified web monkeys making $70k for being able to write a hyperlink but there's actually a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that would be lost on non-techs.
The biggest mistake I see companies make is putting people in charge of things they should have no business going near. It's an obvious mistake to put a computer guy like me in charge of a sales department, I wouldn't know schmoozing from wingtips. If that's so obvious, why isn't it obvious putting a soft skills sales and marketing type in charge of a web project is a bad idea? And I'm not talking about being an executive and delegating the technical work, I mean he's chief cook and bottle washer on the project. This isn't a matter of copping egos and attitudes, it's just recognizing proper fits for certain job functions!
(Someone, please, make a better "Tapping" joke then mine. I haven't touched Magic for over 10 years)
"I'd tape that!" Nixon leered.
Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards.
Checkmate.
You sunk my battleship! Pretty sneaky, sis.
The bean-counters decided it was better to operate off a relatively fixed cost like fuel and have a dependable schedule. The whole story of the 20th century has been "Yeah, you could do this or that but it's just simpler and cheaper to use fossil fuels." Environmentalism won't drive alternative fuels, economics will. If it becomes cheaper to use sail, we'll go back to sail. The cost of fuel will only rise from this point, peak oil is here, so the economics we need for sail should be here now.
When I see "used" games for sale for $54, is it time to ask if they're charging too much for new games? Hell, yes. I don't pick them up until they're $20 or less.
I picked up Civ Revolutions. The DLC they have is ok but nowhere near like what you end up getting, fan and professional-made for the PC versions. Sadly, PC remains the king for modding. I think the issue is that the console companies and the publishers on console just don't feel comfortable giving up that level of control.
As I understand it, Oblivion needed the fan tweaks to make it the perfect game it could have been -- plain vanilla as it came from the publisher it was lacking on both PC and console. Unfortunately, you can't install those tweaks on the console. There's no technical reason like back in the day with the PSX, Sony and Microsoft could allow it if they wanted to -- it's obvious that they don't.
Really, I think the whole point of DLC should be about maintaining fan interest between major releases. When it comes to strategy games, version number releases should be five years apart and be built around significant revisions in the graphics engine. Point releases would be balancing and bug fixes with DLC to keep the game fresh and exciting, more scenarios, varying maps, new units, etc. This keeps the game fresh and vibrant until the new version comes out, keeps people interested. If we're talking shooters, the DLC should be new episodes. I don't know how Half-Life fell apart and really don't care since the storylines in HF2 sucked. But if we look at Half-Life 1, that had a great storyline. The expansion packs were less interesting but could have been great. An episodic model should have worked there. Release main game, then start making new episodes that build upon the existing engine and models. In a few more years, release sequel with revamped engine, keep building on the storyline.
I've been a fan of the RPG formula for years while not liking most of the RPG's I've seen. When I really like the storyline in the game, it's fantastic fun to keep playing. When the storyline sucks, why bother? I found Betrayal at Krondor to be engaging. (Yeah, I go way back.) Oblivion had great graphics but a snoozer storyline. Two Worlds had graphics that would have been amazing years ago but had crappy acting, crappy writing, and was a worthless experience.
DLC will have to vary depending on the kind of game. Strategy games typically don't have stories but could have accessories sold out the wazoo, just like pencil and paper games. Story-driven games should be able to keep selling more content so long as they deliver on the storytelling. But we'll likely see all of this gamed for the highest return for least effort.
Land toilet -> crapper, ship's toilet -> head, space toilet -> colbert
Let's start a campaign. From now on a space toilet shall be a "colbert".
That really does fit. Space toilets are odd machines to begin with. They actually use an impeller to move the waste into the collection unit since there's no gravity to rely on. So in other words, the shit hits the fan by design! If that doesn't sound like a Colbert device, I don't know what does.
This is probably the first time in 10 years news about NASA has stuck in my mind. Sure some scientific stuff is interesting to read... sure I hear press releases and news tidbits, but those go in one ear out the other. This is the best "stick to your ribs" news (aka marketing) NASA has made with the post baby boomers.
This says something sad about you but if you are representative of the rest of the population as well, it says something sad about all of us.
Personally, I've been luvin' me some NASA news for ages. Between Hubble, the mars landers, greater internet access to space imagery, the ISS... Shit, losing a shuttle didn't garner your attention?
I will agree that huffing some goof-balls and going on the Colbert Report is good PR but I'd be sad to think that circus antics is the only way we could interest people in space. If that's the case, may as well rent the module out to Vivid and shoot some zero-g porn to get funding for the new moonbase.
Don't downmod if you disagree, write your own response.
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft's FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. "We're also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven."
I'm having difficulty telling the difference between satire and the news these days. Doesn't seem too far off here.
why upgrade when the current software provides everything you need
1. What you said.
2. Nobody has the money to upgrade anyway.
3. Nobody's coming up with anything new to justify throwing everything out.
4. Netbook phenomenon is finally putting emphasis back on getting more for your dollar rather than writing bloaty code and throwing horsepower at it.
5. Repeat point 2, nobody has the money to throw out perfectly good hardware just to get a new OS that does pretty much what the previous one did.
I know predicting the death of Microsoft is good fun and we've been doing it for years. I won't say this is the death knell but this is certainly a bit of a pickle. The plural of anecdote ain't data but a lot of people I know are going Mac out of frustration. Those who haven't are still adamant about keeping XP.
There are several reasons why Google Update runs all the time that you're missing, but the crucial assumption you seem to be making is that the process is "constantly running using up resources".
Google Update was coded pretty carefully to sleep nearly all the time and have as minimal a footprint as possible. I challenge you to detect any degredation of system performance with it running, especially since its CPU and memory load is less than any of several dozen always-running services that come with the OS.
Doesn't matter. Just have it run once a week on startup like most apps do and we're fine.
As far as Windows goes, it'd be nice if third parties could register with Windows update. You install app X, it now gets to be polled on Windows update at whatever schedule you use. Update available, there you go. It'd be like what the Linux distros do with their lovely updaters.
I just hate extraneous shit that gets installed and harshes your computer's well-being. Perfect example are the shitty printer TSR's that just sit there in the corner hogging up resources waiting for you to print. Why? Unnecessary! And when you uninstall them it's like your computer gets a needle of adrenaline right in the heart, it's ten times faster than you're used to.
About only half of what sucks about Windows can be directly blamed on Microsoft. The rest of it has to be blamed on the third party apps.
Well I feel much safer now knowing that the updater is open source. I have for one have no worries about the code actually being updated... that of course is completely kosher.
Don't worry, I checked. Has the little (u) and everything for Passover. Dunno how it'll be after the holiday's over, though.
Do it just like Google image search -- everyone defaults to safe mode and you can then turn it off if you don't want to be mollycoddled. As for what goes on the list, just categorize the books properly and allow them to be on your exclusion list. Do you want romance, g-rated, r-rated, x-rated, or none of the above?
I have no problem with giving individuals the means to filter their results so long as their views aren't imposed upon the majority. I personally have no use for religion but it would be rather rude of me to demand that all religious books be made 18+ saying they're not suitable for young, impressionable minds. I happen to believe that's the case but it's my choice to not expose kids to that kind of material and I can impose my standards on kids I'm responsible for, not the entire world.
Too big to fail = too big to risk leaving whole. Too much concentration of power leads to abuses. When mergers happen and the CEO's gloat about efficiencies of scale, they're talking about putting Americans out of work. And where do all those savings go? Fat CEO paychecks. Keeping those jobs in pay ain't inefficiency, it's redundancy in the engineering sense, like "let's have redundant control cables on the airplane so if one set goes out, we won't fall out of the sky. Let's have lots of banks so if a couple fail, we don't lose the whole industry." When Republicans bleat about class warfare and wealth redistribution, they forget to mention that they threw the first punch.
This Time-Warner BS is no different from GE buying up a news network so they can create more favorable coverage of their business interests. Propaganda is wrong; propagandists are liars and should be treated as such.
You want to be innovative instead of trying to build the biggest epeen how about trying to build the most fun FPS? Serious Sam? fun. SoF I&II? fun. NOLF I&II? VERY fun. Deus Ex? FUN. See a connection here? None of these games were top of the graphics charts when they were released, yet folks still keep talking about them and coming back for another round because they were F.U.N. with a capital F.
Games are becoming more and more like movies in this regard. Back in the day, just showing a train coming into a station was enough to wow the audience. But as the audience got more sophisticated, more was required to impress them. Then you ended up with market segmentation. There's the people who want tits and splosions, there's the people who like Woody Allen movies, there's the people who like screwball british comedies, etc. But even within those genres there's good work and bad. Everyone can do explosions, everyone can do costume dramas, but not everyone can do those genres well. And that's the difference between a good movie and by the numbers crap -- giving a shit and doing it right.
These days pretty much every game can look pretty. The ones in the past that always impressed me were the ones that either took what we've seen to a new level or did the same stuff better than anyone else. And much of that comes down to storytelling. I'm attracted to RPG play mechanics but am usually bored out of my mind by the derivative and uninspired storytelling. Shooters tend to have poor storylines as well but man, when they're done right it's engrossing. I enjoy the gameplay and I'm also wanting to see what happens next.
What I find interesting is that there's been a resurgence in the development of games that feel a bit more old school. The name used for them is casual gaming but it's really about making a game that's not quite modern -- modern games are $20 million epic events that suck up a ton of time. The casual games are more built like the old atari ones -- you pick them up, have some fun, can set them down whenever. Doesn't take a million bucks to put one together, doesn't take a hundred thousand units sold to break even. And with the electronic distribution available on consoles, it's easier to take a chance with them.
I can think of a couple of great examples of this.
Back in the early days of the RTS, the formula was that you had one resource to harvest. In order to create complexity, games started adding more resource types. This ultimately made the game more cumbersome to play without adding as much material benefit. The counter to this is what newer games like Dawn of War does with adding strategic locations to the map, hold the location and you get request points for more units.
The original Master of Orion was an excellent 4x game. The sequel sought to add more depth by giving each star planets and you now had to build things on each planet. Instead of adding depth, it just made the game more tedious. This same problem could be seen in typical 4x games like Civ where it was great fun to tweak the cities in the early stages but became increasingly monotonous as empires grew. The problem here was driven home to me when I played an ultra-minimal space game on my Palm. You have one type of planet, one type of ship. You can invest in ship production, factory production, and research. Research will put your ships up to the next tech level. Combat consists of a stack of your ship and a stack of their ships going at it one on one. The tech is weighed between your ship and the enemy's and it does a coin toss. God is on the side with more ships and higher tech. A map on this game that would have taken hours in Master of Orion can be swept in 20 minutes. The core elements of the game are there, just stripped down to the most minimal.
It's very easy to add more crap to a game and far more difficult to add something useful. And sadly, it can be rather subjective as to what truly adds depth and what's simple tedium.