They want to take their content and move it off to an ALREADY troubled subsidiary venture? And they want to cut into their online readership HOW much?
Do they actually think they're going to make or save ANYTHING from this kind of move?
The fact remains that AOL, as big as it is, is the leper colony of the internet. Sure, for people who know DICK about computers and the internet, it's barely acceptable. For serious usage, you need a real ISP.
Now if Time-Warner wants to do missionary work, fine. Cool. I won't miss them.
AOL/Time-Warner: "Uhh. Hello?"
Reality: "This is a huge fucking clue-by-four. Please prepare for application."
He was talking about how the blood of Numenor was all but spent...
I kept hearing "Agent Smith" there.
"Do you know what I realized Morpheus^H^H^H^Gandalf? Humans are a disease! They've spent the blood of Numenor. And now we, the Elves, are the cure...."
The first part the problem comes when these companies set completely unrealistic goals for themselves.
I mean, look at Daikatana!
The second is when they lose the balance between skill, knowledge of the platform, and enthusiasm for the product.
IE:
For the skill and knowledge, it's usually either they don't have enough, or go ultra-anally in the opposite direction, to the detriment of the gameplay.
For the enthusiasm portion, it's much the same. They're either so OD'ed on their own hype that they lose perspective, or they simply lose interest and are only going through the motions of creating a game.
Now take a look at Rock Star Games and see what they're doing RIGHT in the console arena!
GTA3 was absoloutely INCREDIBLE!
GTA:VC is even fscking BETTER!
You can tell that they're putting out product they'd actually want to play! And I don't think anyone can fault the skill with which they're doing it.
And while the game is not completely new or horrendously revolutionary, it's still kicked up at LEAST a couple notches from it's already excellent predecessor. In multiple ways no less!
It's unlike UT2K3. While UT2K3 is visually quite nice, when I first began playing it, I could have sworn I was playing a game of Q3 for the way the gameplay reacted. It no longer FEELS like UT.
So, basically, the game is prettier, but less playable. And MUCH less replayable.
What's the Skaarj term for "fuck that noise"?
Well, I'd been waiting on UT2K3 for a while now. Too bad it's such crap. Ah well. At least I didn't pre-order it. So I won't waste my money on it.
Was at a LAN party about a year or so ago. A guy crashed, hard, out of Giants. The thing spat an error message that took up 2/3 of his screen. And he was running at 1600x1200.
And before we could get a screenie of it, the dumbass closed it!
The death of banner advertising (it's dead, the popups, pop-unders, etc, are just the last few involuntary muscle contractions) has show us the following:
99% of people simply ignore them and do not click through.
Adding pop-ups or pop-unders to force views doesn't work either. People stop coming to your site, or institute ad-blocking software.
The returns on banner views (not banner click-throughs) is abysmal. You could push thousands or millions of pages and never even come close to recouping the cost of the bandwidth.
The only place banners actually work is for internal usage. (Hey! If you liked PageX.html, take a look over here at PageZ.html!) Of course, for your purposes, internal banners would be a waste of time and bandwidth.
You're simply better off going the commercial route and selling access at a nominal fee.
The 2.2Ghz are $280. The P4 2.2 is $225.
The CPU's aren't are obscenely priced as they used to be. What's obscenely priced in those systems are the motherboard and more to the point, the RAM. 4GB of RAM in a single system is disgustingly expensive.
PC2100 DDR 1GByte sticks are running $319 (Costs more than the CPU!)
PC800 RDRAM 1GB modules are running approximately 5x that ($1533 and can only find it from one vendor).
Granted, they may be using a motherboard with more than 4 DIMM/RIMM slots....
But even still. The prices don't skew THAT much for DDR (though they skew a lot more highly for RDRAM).
Seriously. Unless you're pushing quad-digit node-counts or are sharing streaming video all over the place (or just have lots of 0-day servers), 10Gb isn't going to really provide you with any appreciable performance gain over 100Mb.
In most cases, small files are sucked down well before your bandwidth usage ramps up that far. And even larger files would probably only be sucked down a few seconds faster (mainly because of the speed of the storage medium on your system).
The REAL problem is that all of these people have a split set of expectations from this film.
FIRST:
They expect to be overtaken with the same sense of awe that they did when they sat down to the originals 25 years ago.
NEWS FLASH! Ain't gonna happen! It's ridiculous to expect a 25-35 year-old adult to react the same way to this material that a 5-10 year-old might. Let's face it. Adults are much more jaded than children are. They've had a lot more experience and exposure to things.bright flashes and explosions all over the place simply don't hold an adult's attention the way they do for a child.
Plus. How many kids ACTUALLY paid attention to most of the dialog? Not many. Absorption of that stuff came later on. Bright flashes and explosions all over the place simply don't hold an adult's attention the way they do for a child.
SECOND:
These adults, while they want to recapture the same sense of magic they experienced in the first one, want the film to conform to what they've already come to see and know in science, sci-fi, and space opera. If something doesn't jibe with the way THEY want things to be, they have a problem.
Face it. Star Wars has NEVER been Science Fiction. It's been a fairly blunt philosophical play (because the kids Lucas targets his SW films at would have been completely lost with something more subtle) in the form of Space Opera, where the sci-fi underpinnings were really no more than a means to move the plot along.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to take their content and move it off to an ALREADY troubled subsidiary venture? And they want to cut into their online readership HOW much?
Do they actually think they're going to make or save ANYTHING from this kind of move?
The fact remains that AOL, as big as it is, is the leper colony of the internet. Sure, for people who know DICK about computers and the internet, it's barely acceptable. For serious usage, you need a real ISP.
Now if Time-Warner wants to do missionary work, fine. Cool. I won't miss them.
AOL/Time-Warner: "Uhh. Hello?"
Reality: "This is a huge fucking clue-by-four. Please prepare for application."
**WHAM!**
*Rinse*
*Repeat*
Fuck them, and fuck the whores they rode in on.
He was talking about how the blood of Numenor was all but spent...
I kept hearing "Agent Smith" there.
"Do you know what I realized Morpheus^H^H^H^Gandalf? Humans are a disease! They've spent the blood of Numenor. And now we, the Elves, are the cure...."
"Dait! Dammit! Which movie am I doing again?"
$50 to the person who gets a picture of CmdrTaco standing out in front of a theater in his "wizard robes" waiting for the movie.
$100 if they can get it after he's been standing there about 3 months.
But I sure as hell won't!
*Sets Zayin on fire.*
Tell me about Beowulfs NOW!
;)
Quadruple the processor speed, octuple the RAM, and widen the FSB by a factor of 100.
Then the OS shouldn't be slow anymore.
Has the fact that the open source project can be more portable, and thus, enjoy an extended lifetime of usage been taken into consideration?
Hey!
The first part the problem comes when these companies set completely unrealistic goals for themselves.
I mean, look at Daikatana!
The second is when they lose the balance between skill, knowledge of the platform, and enthusiasm for the product.
IE:
For the skill and knowledge, it's usually either they don't have enough, or go ultra-anally in the opposite direction, to the detriment of the gameplay.
For the enthusiasm portion, it's much the same. They're either so OD'ed on their own hype that they lose perspective, or they simply lose interest and are only going through the motions of creating a game.
Now take a look at Rock Star Games and see what they're doing RIGHT in the console arena!
GTA3 was absoloutely INCREDIBLE!
GTA:VC is even fscking BETTER!
You can tell that they're putting out product they'd actually want to play! And I don't think anyone can fault the skill with which they're doing it.
And while the game is not completely new or horrendously revolutionary, it's still kicked up at LEAST a couple notches from it's already excellent predecessor. In multiple ways no less!
It's unlike UT2K3. While UT2K3 is visually quite nice, when I first began playing it, I could have sworn I was playing a game of Q3 for the way the gameplay reacted. It no longer FEELS like UT.
So, basically, the game is prettier, but less playable. And MUCH less replayable.
What's the Skaarj term for "fuck that noise"?
Well, I'd been waiting on UT2K3 for a while now. Too bad it's such crap. Ah well. At least I didn't pre-order it. So I won't waste my money on it.
Not necessarily.
They can take the tried and true path of a cop-out.
Remember that there was pair Peter Cushing films that aren't, strictly, part of the canon.
If they simply choose to ignore the McGann film, they still have a whole regeneration.
Even though they DID use Sylvester McCoy there for the regeneration.
Was at a LAN party about a year or so ago. A guy crashed, hard, out of Giants. The thing spat an error message that took up 2/3 of his screen. And he was running at 1600x1200.
And before we could get a screenie of it, the dumbass closed it!
You never know.
Jackson might have decided to go the "Behind the Green Bushes" route with this one.
The Fellowship wonders where Gimli is when they see a large thicket bobbing around most dangeously.
What's this? An Ent? They're not supposed to show up until the next movie!
Suddenly, out of the thicket walks Gimli, hitching up his britches. Grinning from ear to ear.
A few moments later, a heavily mussed Galadriel follows, pulling down her robes and trying to straighten her hair.
Crude? A little. Just be glad I didn't decide to get crude-ER!
[Right Hand] Hey Lefty!
[Left Hand] Yeah?
[Right Hand] What'cha doin'?
[Left Hand] ......
[Right Hand] Well?
[Left Hand] Well, what?
[Right Hand] What are you doing?
[Left Hand] I do not know such information. Nor could I pass along said information if I did know such information.
The thing you're forgetting is that this is NOT aimed at you.
You CAN edit it back. But you won't. Because it's "too hard". And you're "sure" that some stuff would remain broken.
In other words, we have smoke being blown from a nether oriface.
This isn't about Gnome or KDE. This is about providing a unified end-user experience to those who are using the OS for the first time.
Experienced users are still more than free to hack it to whatever they wish.
Note: They aren't aiming this at people who can go in and simply reset the configuration the way they want.
This is little more than an elaborate theme and a default set of applications.
It has nothing to do with "slowing down" KDE or "removing choice". It has to do with delivering a common user experience across both desktops.
If you don't like it, don't use it!
If you don't like it, and have to use it, change the config to something YOU can live with.
I don't get what the hell is so hard to understand about this relatively straightforward concept.
BUT, it IS okay for the company to simply whip up characters out of a random generator (see "Nothing", with no development at all, and sell them?
Yeah. I can see it. ***wait for it*** I can see how a company would be stupid and greedy enough to stick their heads up the output oriface for this.
And idiocies like this are why I don't play games like UO or Evercrack.
The death of banner advertising (it's dead, the popups, pop-unders, etc, are just the last few involuntary muscle contractions) has show us the following:
You're simply better off going the commercial route and selling access at a nominal fee.
All they did was create a uniform theme for KDE and Gnome.
So the default install looks, more or less, identical, for both desktops.
How does this remove your ability to change the theme?
(Hint: No)
How does this remove your ability to go in and turn features back on?
(Hint: No)
All it means is that, immediately after install, everything has a uniform look.
B
O
O
H
O
O
!
Now get over it already.
How much of your system RAM is running at 5-600Mhz and dual-ported?
GeForce4 MX 420 PCI.
OR
Radeon 7000 PCI.
Both 64MB cards. And both with RAM that's considerably faster than EDO/FP (or even PC100 SDR SDRAM)
Granted, they may be using a motherboard with more than 4 DIMM/RIMM slots....
But even still. The prices don't skew THAT much for DDR (though they skew a lot more highly for RDRAM).
Let's start with a base of 1000 users.
5% of them are Apple users.
50 people
Out of that 5%, 70% of them have college degrees.
35 people.
Out of the same 1000 people, 89.4% are PC users
894 people.
Out of that 89.4%, 54.2% of them have college degrees.
484 people.
Let's see.
50 Mac users
894 PC users
35 Mac users with college degrees
484 PC users with college degrees
Higher percentages of college education in a smaller group != a smarter group.
Seriously. Unless you're pushing quad-digit node-counts or are sharing streaming video all over the place (or just have lots of 0-day servers), 10Gb isn't going to really provide you with any appreciable performance gain over 100Mb.
In most cases, small files are sucked down well before your bandwidth usage ramps up that far. And even larger files would probably only be sucked down a few seconds faster (mainly because of the speed of the storage medium on your system).
The REAL problem is that all of these people have a split set of expectations from this film.
FIRST:
They expect to be overtaken with the same sense of awe that they did when they sat down to the originals 25 years ago.
NEWS FLASH! Ain't gonna happen! It's ridiculous to expect a 25-35 year-old adult to react the same way to this material that a 5-10 year-old might. Let's face it. Adults are much more jaded than children are. They've had a lot more experience and exposure to things.bright flashes and explosions all over the place simply don't hold an adult's attention the way they do for a child.
Plus. How many kids ACTUALLY paid attention to most of the dialog? Not many. Absorption of that stuff came later on. Bright flashes and explosions all over the place simply don't hold an adult's attention the way they do for a child.
SECOND:
These adults, while they want to recapture the same sense of magic they experienced in the first one, want the film to conform to what they've already come to see and know in science, sci-fi, and space opera. If something doesn't jibe with the way THEY want things to be, they have a problem.
Face it. Star Wars has NEVER been Science Fiction. It's been a fairly blunt philosophical play (because the kids Lucas targets his SW films at would have been completely lost with something more subtle) in the form of Space Opera, where the sci-fi underpinnings were really no more than a means to move the plot along.
Egads! I don't think ANYONE could call that one.
Piggy could probably channel more than enough of the Dark Side (hell, she damn near DEFINES rage) than ANY of these puny Sith Lords.
Yes. Yoda has some heavy-duty Force skills himself. But Piggy has a spinning right hook that makes the Death Star look like a popgun!
Well, this is only semi-true.
I know of at LEAST one guy who has stayed with the newest, fastest cards on the market for the last 2-3 years.
Every time a new "fastest" card comes out, he sells buys it, and then EBays off his old card.
So most of the upgrades only cost him maybe $80-100 after all is said and done.