Joi Ito's opinion: "fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series." I'm really tired of seeing this sort of thinking repeated over and over as if it were to suddenly make the act of sharing copyrighted materials legal. I won't disagree that in some cases piracy can be a good thing, but that still doesn't make it any less illegal no matter what spin you put on it.
I don't think his point is that it's legal or moral. His point is, "Why the Hell aren't the content creators making these torrents themselves?"
Naruto fansubs were responsible for making Naruto moderately popular in North America, which created the market for the licensed Naruto manga in North America, which created the market for the Naruto anime airing on Cartoon Network, which will probably create the market for the Naruto toys, movies, DVDs, etc. in North America. The makers of all the assorted Naruto products are going to profit off the word-of-mouth that these fansubs created, but instead of openly embracing this kind of distribution, the reaction of most content creators (though notably, not the Japanese or domestic anime industry) is to get pissed and sue everybody.
This is an entrepreneur looking at an industry that says, "We don't care if we can profit off it, it's just WRONG!" and asking, "WTF?"
I'm not sure what universe you live in, but the vast majority of those pirating materials on the Internet aren't doing so because of the lack of a well-thought-out legal distribution model.
This would make perfect sense if it weren't for the fact that the fastest torrents I've ever seen are Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and Doctor Who. In the case of BSG and Stargate, the episodes are available on American television, but only several months after they air in the UK, and only in a non-HD format with some of the most horrendous commercial breaks on Earth. In Doctor Who's case, the show is only available in the UK right now, so there's no distribution model at all for everyone in the rest of the world. The same goes for Naruto, Mai Hime, Maria-sama ga Miteru, and all of the other anime cult hits that have lightning fast torrents.
There are lots of people downloading stuff on the internet because it's free, but the most popular pirated content is definitely the stuff that people can't have access to otherwise.
The other two may be prerendered, but this one isn't. In the E3 trailer, it's really kind of obvious that there's a human being controlling Link during those scenes, and quite a bit of non-cutscene action takes place during them. That shot is actually a direct rip from the E3 trailer.
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Right now I'm playing Metal Gear Acid for the PSP. Whenever I turn the console on, I'm right where I am when I turned it off. No loading screens, no time wasted on waiting for the game to boot up and show all the corporate logos, no clicking endlessly through the opening movie to get to the load screen, no time wasted selecting my save, and no time wasted getting from the non-existent "save point" to where I left off. In fact, the only reason why there's a "save" option is so multiple people can play the same game on the same memory card, such as family members.
Why is this not a PERFECT solution for every single game system? The only possible drawback I can see is that it forces every game's developers to make sure that there's no way to complete screw your save. That's it.
I'm really curious about that. Didn't the first CD-based games have Space Invaders to play while they loaded or something? (Hell, I kinda wish Warcraft III did, and I play that off my hard drive.
The creators of one of Crash Bandicoot games that was released in the last couple of years had an interview with EGM awhile ago. They asked what happened to the cool loading screen minigames that were present in every single preview copy of the game, but were suddenly absent when the game went gold. They told EGM that their lawyers had found that someone had recently patented the use of minigames during load screens, so they were legally obligated to remove them.
And I believe there have been numerous Slashdot articles about a small, relatively unknown company suing Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for "stealing" their force feedback "idea". I'm pretty sure Sony has to pay a royalty to them now.
"Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?"
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
I beg to differ. One of my favorite parts of the original Half-Life was the two scenes where you're faced with government assassins in a fairly dark room. In the first room, there are only two of them, but their AI and their movement speed are so perfect that the game initially fools you into thinking that they're "cheating" by teleporting around the room, only to soon let you realize that they're actually running around just like you are. And thanks to the fact that they're using light weapons and armor and you're using the exact opposite, you have plenty of chances to get hit in the back, turn around and figure out where they are, and then head them off and shoot them.
I don't think I've ever had that much fun fighting only two enemies in a video game, let alone two enemies that can only take one hit each from a powerful-but-limited weapon like the six-shot Magnum. It was an awesome little break from the standard Half-Life "crawling around and getting surprised by headcrabs" action.
Like Apple ( well, at least Apple before the Mac mini ), they're marketing to People With Money.
They're marketing to people who buy their _kids_ iPods and color-screen cell phones. People who buy their kids new cars the second they get their learner's permit. If you're worried about how much it'll cost... they're not marketing it to you, at least not for the first few years.
It's also worth noting that there's an equally large segment that they're marketing to: Gamers. Most people spend a significant amount of money on entertainment, even if they aren't technically "People With Money". They spend it on books, CDs, movies, going out to dinner, a new MP3 Player or cellphone, etc. Gamers, with a big G, spend their money on GAMES. They will swear off absolutely everything else in the months both preceeding and proceeding the launch of the new console that they're interested in because gaming is their main hobby, just like baseball is the main hobby of the fans who drive two hours each way every other weekend during the summer just to get to Fenway Park, and go there wearing Red Sox caps and jerseys.
Between People With Money and the devoted fans who are willing to pool their cash, there will be quite a market for these systems when they launch. The rest of us can pick them up a year later.
Ah, the olde fansub argument. Actually, it's not legal. There's a treaty, Japan and the U.S. signed it... Berne I think is the name. Anyway, maybe you've noticed the Japanese companies are starting to take offense to fansubs? Because it's becoming increasingly obvious that fansubs are hurting sales a lot, and the U.S. anime companies aren't exactly rolling in dough. The U.S. anime companies would do more about fansubs, but they really don't like to piss off the fans, even though the companies are hurting because of it.
As far as I know, the only company that has taken offense to fansubs in the last few months is Media Works, who sent a cease and desist to pretty much anyone who ever translated or distributed any of their anime or manga. Otherwise, the Japanese companies still don't care.
I highly doubt the submitter's genes would be alive today, if not for the hunting of "innocent" animals, whatever the hell that means.
I think the submitter was probably cricitizing the concept of killing an animal with a high-powered rifle from a hundred feet away when it has no hope of ever killing you as a "sport", let alone one that could be disgraced. It's kind of like saying that long range deployment systems "disgrace the sport" of pressing a big red button that launches a nuclear missile. The concept of "disgracing the sport" is sort of dubious because there isn't really a "sport" to begin with. You press the "I Win" button and you're done.
Episode 3 - Quinneth mentions the "Big bad wolf" and pulls away from Rose, terrified.
I'm pretty positive that the Gelth just randomly says the words "Bad Wolf" while crying out during the seance. I didn't even notice the whole "Bad Wolf" thing until I heard that and then noticed the kid painting "Bad Wolf" on the TARDIS in the preview for episode 4.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Nestine Consciousness in the first episode also said it, because it seems like most people didn't catch the Gelth saying it.
The thing is, if you see the "rewards" of playing as anything other than the fun you have while you play it, then it's time to step away and do something else for a while.
Nonsense. Almost every video game has a system of rewards that entice you to play them more. You enjoy the act of playing them, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is an even better way to enjoy them as a reward for completing certain objectives. If you beat Devil May Cry 3 on both Normal and Hard modes, you get to play as Sparda, and Sparda kicks all kinds of ass. And if you beat the game as three specific characters in Samurai Warriors, you unlock Kunoichi (the ninja girl), and playing as a bubbly little Asian girl who assassinates people is just plain great.
The things that come before the rewards are fun, but the rewards are a way of structuring your play and creating artificial rules (such as "play as this character, then this one, then this one...") that not only make the game more enjoyable for you, but give you an enjoyable experience that's tailored toward exactly what you want. WoW's new PvP system is a way of taking the people that really love the PvP aspect of the game and saying, "Okay, here's some even better PvP for you: PvP with kickass weapons!"
And what this guy is complaining about isn't that he's "lacking a reward", but rather that the fact that he enjoys PvP and puts time into it should entitle him to the same "advanced PvP" that the weapons give you.
So could we drop the crusade now please? all this useless bad press is giving me a headache. for console flash toons of diverse qualities go to newgrounds.com thank you.
And p.s. before saying anything else about the PSP (or the DS for that matter) buy one or ask a friend to lend you one, you cant possibly review acurately any article you've never used.
Have you ever considered that maybe this flash animation is, y'know...
Anyway, I'll have the full movie in about 28 hours. BT sucks.
That's better than getting it after the site is Slashdotted, the poor bastards running the site desperately try to find a different server to host it, and then when they finally do find one, it is subsequently either Slashdotted, linked to by TheForce.net, or linked to by any of a hundred different huge-ass blogs.
Also, you should never be getting 9kB/s with BitTorrent. I've seen torrents with 1 seed and 135 leechers that gave me more than 9kB/s. If it's that low, then something is obviously wrong with your settings. That's like saying "Comcast sucks, my cable modem never goes faster than 33K!" There comes a time when you have to realize that if what you're experiencing is so much worse than what everyone else experiences, then the problem is probably on your end.
I want to see how they can make another game where you roll a giant ball around, and manage to make it fresh again... it's like making Tetris 2. How much different can you make it without crippling what makes it fun?
Personally, and I think this actually speaks for a lot of Katamari Damacy fans, I don't think they have to change anything at all. Katamari Damacy itself was so good and so short that what I really, really want is the Katamari Damacy equivalent of a Blizzard expansion pack -- just more levels, please. Not a whole new game engine, not a new objective, nothing like that at all. Just more levels.
When I finally stopped playing Katamari Damacy, I just kept flipping through the levels for a few minutes, realizing that I had replayed all of the interesting ones two or three times, and that I'd found all of the interesting presents. What was left? To spend hours getting a perfect 10m North Star instead of my current 10m32cm North Star? To add another one or two more comets to my already robust collection of comets? I just sort of sat there waiting to find SOMETHING to do, but there was nothing there.
I don't think I'm alone in thinking that there's a lot more left to do with Katamari Damacy's basic gameplay. I, for one, would like a lot more hilarious levels like Virgo/"Find the Maidens" with the King of All Cosmos laughing at the poor humans the whole time.
But I still feel like I've lost a very good friend. Zelda was never about giving the vocal fans what they wanted. It was about taking a journey through the very imaginative mind of Shigeru Miyamoto. To remember what it was like to be that child walking through the forest and finding a lake. To be the child who overcomes all perils and finds buried treasure and saves the princess. For me, Wind Waker captured that perfectly and completely.
Where was I when the vocal fans didn't like the original Zelda, Link's Awakening, any of the GB/GBA Zeldas, or either of the N64 Zeldas? The only ones that have been met with shock or disapproval are Zelda II and Wind Waker. Not exactly a long tradition of Miyamoto balking at the expectations of "vocal fans" and offering his imaginative vision of what Zelda should be.
I don't understand this trend of people assuming that the lead-up to every new Zelda game was just like Wind Waker, as if the fans ALWAYS balked at the direction new Zelda games took, and that this has apparently been a nearly two decade long tradition. Besides Zelda II, which most people still don't like, the only Zelda game that hasn't been met with nearly universal approval is Wind Waker.
Mobile Cinema isn't going to work, I don't want to sound like Steve Jobs, but watching Jack Bauer say "Dammit" on a 4,5" screen is not quite as good as on a HDTV plasma(or something more modest), even though the screen is fabulous..
Ofcourse as a PornStation Portable it will do just fine..
See, the porn thing is a good point, though. If you're a big fan of 24, then watching it on a PSP isn't going to be enough for you. For watching crap-that-I-sort-of-like shows (porn included), it's worth it, though. I wouldn't watch 24 or Battlestar Galactica on it, but would I watch Enterprise? Or Monk? Or any other show that I download and watch every once and awhile, but don't really follow religiously? Yeah.
If you're in a situation where you're out of the house for awhile and are in a situation where you can watch a half hour of TV, this is sort of useful. For the rest of us, who don't commute by train or anything like that, it's just a fun novelty.
Modchips are supposed to make PS2s play homebrew software, demos and applications. Like what? The PS2Reality player, whos development was stopped when it managed to play about 60-70% of movies, at low quality and stuttering framerate? That's the best known app requiring a Modchip, and it's not any more developed.
SONY, and all of us, know that modchips are used, as far as PS2 goes, in 99,9% of the cases for piracy. Although, yeah, I've got a modded console -for obvious reasons- we shouldn't hide behind our finger.
In some of the gaming forums I visit, more than half the people there had played Devil May Cry 3 a month before it came out in the United States, and not because they downloaded it, but because they legitimately bought it from places like PlayAsia.com and took advantage of the fact that the game was in English. Just because importing isn't very big in your social circles online doesn't mean that it's only 00.1% of the cases of mod chip use. Among hardcore fans of fighting games, shooters, action games, and puzzle games, there's a fairly large import community, certainly large enough to service many different English language import sites like PlayAsia.com and Lik-Sang.com, just to name the most popular. This would be one reason why there's a lot less demand for piracy tools for handheld gaming systems like the Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP. Because there are no region restrictions on those systems, the entire import community has no interest in buying mod chips or flash carts for them. Instead of finding mod chips or carts from six or seven different manufacturers on import sites like you do for the PS2, GameCube, or Xbox, there's generally only a couple of GBA flash carts from one or two manufacturers.
According to the article, their laptop processor beat out the intel processor only by a 'small margin'. They have to release benchmark press releases, so, being a business interested in profit, they stack things.
They make some of the best chips on the market. Doesn't keep them from being 'just another business'.
The problem is that when they stack things, it backfires. If they just presented the benchmarks as they really should be, everyone would be fine with the fact that the Turion has slightly better performance than the Pentium M, and been cool with that, if not overly enthusiastic about it. Now that we know that the benchmarks were screwed with, we don't really know anything about the performance of the chip, other than the fact that it was apparently poor enough to lie about it instead of telling the truth.
When people find out that someone lied, they automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion. It's kind of like when a murder suspect lies about where he was when the murder took place. When everyone finds out that he was lying about his whereabouts, they don't think, "Well, maybe he was just having an affair or doing something slightly illegal (which is often the case). He's not necessarily the killer." Of course not. They immediately assume that if he lied about it, he's probably the murderer, because that's the worst case scenario, and people like the worst case scenario. It's definitely the most interesting conclusion.
So now, because of AMD's marketing, the perception isn't "The Turion has slightly better performance than the Pentium M". The perception is "The Turion sucks enough to lie about its performance."
Oddly, the register article reads like an opinion piece, focusing on how AMD should care more about battery life.
If you prefer Intel processors, then the real reason to buy a Pentium M is because you want better battery life than a Pentium 4. You respect the fact that you're taking a performance hit (though not a colossal one) in order to get better battery life. There are other advantages to a Pentium M, but the real one is battery life. If you're gonna be off the cord a lot, then you want a Pentium M.
AMD already has a competitor to the Pentium 4 in the Athlon 64 line of laptop chips. Generally, if you want power over battery life and you don't have a brand preference, then it's between a P4 or an Athlon 64. What AMD wants in the Turion is a competitor to the Pentium M - a processor with less pure processor performance and more battery life. So if the main attraction of a chip is better battery life at the cost of performance, but they won't tell us what the average battery life is, what does that tell us? Nothing good. At best, it tells us that its battery life isn't as good as the Pentium M's, even though they have similar performance. At worst, it tells us that it's just a low-end Athlon 64 with a different name, more of a competitor for the Celeron M than the Pentium M.
But it just reads like an opinion piece 'cause it's The Register. They're more interested in making a point and presenting their facts than in appearing unbiased and full of integrity. It's just their writing style. Same facts, different commentary.
Knoppix 3.7 couldn't detect my computer's onboard sound, so I couldn't really play around with it for most of the things that I usually do with my PC. Are there any changes or anything that could make this worth downloading and installing, either in Knoppix or in Linux (I believe 3.8 has a newer kernel than 3.7?), or is there possibly anything more I could do with Knoppix 3.7 to get it to work? I tried configuring the sound drivers, but the automatic configuration failed every time and I wasn't willing to check each individual driver to see what might hit the spot.
Anyway, I would rather have gone to the ABC site, paid like a $1 or something, and downloaded it from them. I want to support stuff I find interesting but there is no way to do that with TV episodes.
The problem is, it's highly unlikely that any TV company is going to let you download a copy of the show that's just like what you get with a pirate copy. When you download a show from BitTorrent, you get a small, high quality file that can transferred, burned, and shared at your leisure, and looks almost, but not quite, as good as an actual HDTV feed on my HDTV. Chances are that whatever they eventually decide to give you, you'll find that you would've just been better off dusting off your VCR and setting it to record in good old totally-crap VHS quality.
The reason is actually, they know it is stupid to make suicide illegal -- but if it weren't illegal -- then when you tried to commit suicide, there would be no crime taking place, so they couldn't send anyone to try and save you.
Yes, this is exactly why so many countries made it illegal to have accidents. If accidentally cutting yourself with a knife, shooting yourself in the foot, or swerving on a patch of ice and hitting another car weren't punishable by strict fines or incarceration under the law, they wouldn't be able to send an ambulance to help you, and you would die. After all, being deemed a felon is a small price to pay for falling into the acceptable guidelines for emergency medical or long-term psychiatric assistance, which strictly prohibit helping law-abiding citizens.
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.
The word "blog" has existed for years now and has become so ubiquitous that most news channels, TV shows, magazines, and newspapers don't even feel the need to define it, let alone pick apart a word that practically everyone already knows the root of by now. This is like a radio DJ ranting about MTV in the '80s and starting his speech off by defining the term "television".
If you're just now learning what the word "blog" means and believe that the people around you have no clue what it could mean or where it comes from, you're at least a couple of years behind the times, and are far less qualified than the average American to speak about the subject. If Tom Brokaw could regularly use it during the news coverage the presidential election a few months ago without even bothering to define it, it's pretty damn mainstream.
I think both of these articles are a little off the mark. Rather than one type of gamer or another being "the best reviewer", I think the best reviewer is someone who is as much like the reader as possible.
The Adrenaline Vault article scoffs at the player who "brags" that they beat the game in a few hours and that they always play games in Hard Mode. Well, you know what? Unless I know a game is already very hard, I usually set the game to Hard Mode before I start playing. I also like a good, long game, because when I like a game system, I like to actually spend some time with it. So if, for instance, a reviewer says that he almost always plays games in Hard Mode, that his favorite games are Shinobi and Devil May Cry, and that the action game he's reviewing is too easy, too short, and generally sucks, then I'll probably think it sucks too. And if you generally like a short, easy game that you can just kind of relax to for a few hours, someone that likes those sorts of games is probably your perfect reviewer. That sort of reviewer would be useless to me, but then again, my kind of reviewer would be useless to you. Different views for different audiences, no different than getting your movie reviews from a daytime talk show or SlashersBloodDen.com.
Another poster under this story really hit the mark. The best type of review is the Penny Arcade style review: Here's what I'm playing, here's what I liked or didn't like about it, and these are the other games I liked. Rather than having three writers print three very generic, sterile reviews that are nearly identical to each other and make the readers wonder what terms like "too easy", "too hard", "too long", or "too short" mean for them, maybe gaming magazines should get three reviewers that actually like completely different kinds of games review the game from their own perspective.
I kinda like the way we got it setup here in Canada. If you want an education based in theory, understanding of key concepts and the like then go to University. If you want to learn how to do things, get a basic understanding of the "whys" then go to college. Generally the University people understand more, but can do less.
(NOTE: This is an honest true story) Me and a friend of mine in college made money doing the "practical" assignments for friends from university. They understood the principles of software engineering, but however, could not write a line of code.
It's the same way in the United States, but rather than calling it "University" and "college", we call it "college" and "vocational/technical school". I went to a technical school last year and there were several people there who had gone to college and immediately went to the technical school afterwards because while their colleges had taught them interesting concepts, they didn't actually teach them anything they could apply on a day-to-day basis in their chosen field.
Slashdot Mirror
Joi Ito's opinion: "fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series." I'm really tired of seeing this sort of thinking repeated over and over as if it were to suddenly make the act of sharing copyrighted materials legal. I won't disagree that in some cases piracy can be a good thing, but that still doesn't make it any less illegal no matter what spin you put on it.
I don't think his point is that it's legal or moral. His point is, "Why the Hell aren't the content creators making these torrents themselves?"
Naruto fansubs were responsible for making Naruto moderately popular in North America, which created the market for the licensed Naruto manga in North America, which created the market for the Naruto anime airing on Cartoon Network, which will probably create the market for the Naruto toys, movies, DVDs, etc. in North America. The makers of all the assorted Naruto products are going to profit off the word-of-mouth that these fansubs created, but instead of openly embracing this kind of distribution, the reaction of most content creators (though notably, not the Japanese or domestic anime industry) is to get pissed and sue everybody.
This is an entrepreneur looking at an industry that says, "We don't care if we can profit off it, it's just WRONG!" and asking, "WTF?"
I'm not sure what universe you live in, but the vast majority of those pirating materials on the Internet aren't doing so because of the lack of a well-thought-out legal distribution model.
This would make perfect sense if it weren't for the fact that the fastest torrents I've ever seen are Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and Doctor Who. In the case of BSG and Stargate, the episodes are available on American television, but only several months after they air in the UK, and only in a non-HD format with some of the most horrendous commercial breaks on Earth. In Doctor Who's case, the show is only available in the UK right now, so there's no distribution model at all for everyone in the rest of the world. The same goes for Naruto, Mai Hime, Maria-sama ga Miteru, and all of the other anime cult hits that have lightning fast torrents.
There are lots of people downloading stuff on the internet because it's free, but the most popular pirated content is definitely the stuff that people can't have access to otherwise.
The other two may be prerendered, but this one isn't. In the E3 trailer, it's really kind of obvious that there's a human being controlling Link during those scenes, and quite a bit of non-cutscene action takes place during them. That shot is actually a direct rip from the E3 trailer.
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Right now I'm playing Metal Gear Acid for the PSP. Whenever I turn the console on, I'm right where I am when I turned it off. No loading screens, no time wasted on waiting for the game to boot up and show all the corporate logos, no clicking endlessly through the opening movie to get to the load screen, no time wasted selecting my save, and no time wasted getting from the non-existent "save point" to where I left off. In fact, the only reason why there's a "save" option is so multiple people can play the same game on the same memory card, such as family members.
Why is this not a PERFECT solution for every single game system? The only possible drawback I can see is that it forces every game's developers to make sure that there's no way to complete screw your save. That's it.
I'm really curious about that. Didn't the first CD-based games have Space Invaders to play while they loaded or something? (Hell, I kinda wish Warcraft III did, and I play that off my hard drive.
The creators of one of Crash Bandicoot games that was released in the last couple of years had an interview with EGM awhile ago. They asked what happened to the cool loading screen minigames that were present in every single preview copy of the game, but were suddenly absent when the game went gold. They told EGM that their lawyers had found that someone had recently patented the use of minigames during load screens, so they were legally obligated to remove them.
And I believe there have been numerous Slashdot articles about a small, relatively unknown company suing Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for "stealing" their force feedback "idea". I'm pretty sure Sony has to pay a royalty to them now.
"Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?"
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
I beg to differ. One of my favorite parts of the original Half-Life was the two scenes where you're faced with government assassins in a fairly dark room. In the first room, there are only two of them, but their AI and their movement speed are so perfect that the game initially fools you into thinking that they're "cheating" by teleporting around the room, only to soon let you realize that they're actually running around just like you are. And thanks to the fact that they're using light weapons and armor and you're using the exact opposite, you have plenty of chances to get hit in the back, turn around and figure out where they are, and then head them off and shoot them.
I don't think I've ever had that much fun fighting only two enemies in a video game, let alone two enemies that can only take one hit each from a powerful-but-limited weapon like the six-shot Magnum. It was an awesome little break from the standard Half-Life "crawling around and getting surprised by headcrabs" action.
Who are they marketing to? Not you.
Like Apple ( well, at least Apple before the Mac mini ), they're marketing to People With Money.
They're marketing to people who buy their _kids_ iPods and color-screen cell phones. People who buy their kids new cars the second they get their learner's permit. If you're worried about how much it'll cost... they're not marketing it to you, at least not for the first few years.
It's also worth noting that there's an equally large segment that they're marketing to: Gamers. Most people spend a significant amount of money on entertainment, even if they aren't technically "People With Money". They spend it on books, CDs, movies, going out to dinner, a new MP3 Player or cellphone, etc. Gamers, with a big G, spend their money on GAMES. They will swear off absolutely everything else in the months both preceeding and proceeding the launch of the new console that they're interested in because gaming is their main hobby, just like baseball is the main hobby of the fans who drive two hours each way every other weekend during the summer just to get to Fenway Park, and go there wearing Red Sox caps and jerseys.
Between People With Money and the devoted fans who are willing to pool their cash, there will be quite a market for these systems when they launch. The rest of us can pick them up a year later.
Ah, the olde fansub argument. Actually, it's not legal. There's a treaty, Japan and the U.S. signed it... Berne I think is the name. Anyway, maybe you've noticed the Japanese companies are starting to take offense to fansubs? Because it's becoming increasingly obvious that fansubs are hurting sales a lot, and the U.S. anime companies aren't exactly rolling in dough. The U.S. anime companies would do more about fansubs, but they really don't like to piss off the fans, even though the companies are hurting because of it.
As far as I know, the only company that has taken offense to fansubs in the last few months is Media Works, who sent a cease and desist to pretty much anyone who ever translated or distributed any of their anime or manga. Otherwise, the Japanese companies still don't care.
I highly doubt the submitter's genes would be alive today, if not for the hunting of "innocent" animals, whatever the hell that means.
I think the submitter was probably cricitizing the concept of killing an animal with a high-powered rifle from a hundred feet away when it has no hope of ever killing you as a "sport", let alone one that could be disgraced. It's kind of like saying that long range deployment systems "disgrace the sport" of pressing a big red button that launches a nuclear missile. The concept of "disgracing the sport" is sort of dubious because there isn't really a "sport" to begin with. You press the "I Win" button and you're done.
Episode 3 - Quinneth mentions the "Big bad wolf" and pulls away from Rose, terrified.
I'm pretty positive that the Gelth just randomly says the words "Bad Wolf" while crying out during the seance. I didn't even notice the whole "Bad Wolf" thing until I heard that and then noticed the kid painting "Bad Wolf" on the TARDIS in the preview for episode 4.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Nestine Consciousness in the first episode also said it, because it seems like most people didn't catch the Gelth saying it.
The thing is, if you see the "rewards" of playing as anything other than the fun you have while you play it, then it's time to step away and do something else for a while.
Nonsense. Almost every video game has a system of rewards that entice you to play them more. You enjoy the act of playing them, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is an even better way to enjoy them as a reward for completing certain objectives. If you beat Devil May Cry 3 on both Normal and Hard modes, you get to play as Sparda, and Sparda kicks all kinds of ass. And if you beat the game as three specific characters in Samurai Warriors, you unlock Kunoichi (the ninja girl), and playing as a bubbly little Asian girl who assassinates people is just plain great.
The things that come before the rewards are fun, but the rewards are a way of structuring your play and creating artificial rules (such as "play as this character, then this one, then this one...") that not only make the game more enjoyable for you, but give you an enjoyable experience that's tailored toward exactly what you want. WoW's new PvP system is a way of taking the people that really love the PvP aspect of the game and saying, "Okay, here's some even better PvP for you: PvP with kickass weapons!"
And what this guy is complaining about isn't that he's "lacking a reward", but rather that the fact that he enjoys PvP and puts time into it should entitle him to the same "advanced PvP" that the weapons give you.
So could we drop the crusade now please? all this useless bad press is giving me a headache. for console flash toons of diverse qualities go to newgrounds.com thank you.
And p.s. before saying anything else about the PSP (or the DS for that matter) buy one or ask a friend to lend you one, you cant possibly review acurately any article you've never used.
Have you ever considered that maybe this flash animation is, y'know...
A JOKE?
Anyway, I'll have the full movie in about 28 hours. BT sucks.
That's better than getting it after the site is Slashdotted, the poor bastards running the site desperately try to find a different server to host it, and then when they finally do find one, it is subsequently either Slashdotted, linked to by TheForce.net, or linked to by any of a hundred different huge-ass blogs.
Also, you should never be getting 9kB/s with BitTorrent. I've seen torrents with 1 seed and 135 leechers that gave me more than 9kB/s. If it's that low, then something is obviously wrong with your settings. That's like saying "Comcast sucks, my cable modem never goes faster than 33K!" There comes a time when you have to realize that if what you're experiencing is so much worse than what everyone else experiences, then the problem is probably on your end.
I want to see how they can make another game where you roll a giant ball around, and manage to make it fresh again... it's like making Tetris 2. How much different can you make it without crippling what makes it fun?
Personally, and I think this actually speaks for a lot of Katamari Damacy fans, I don't think they have to change anything at all. Katamari Damacy itself was so good and so short that what I really, really want is the Katamari Damacy equivalent of a Blizzard expansion pack -- just more levels, please. Not a whole new game engine, not a new objective, nothing like that at all. Just more levels.
When I finally stopped playing Katamari Damacy, I just kept flipping through the levels for a few minutes, realizing that I had replayed all of the interesting ones two or three times, and that I'd found all of the interesting presents. What was left? To spend hours getting a perfect 10m North Star instead of my current 10m32cm North Star? To add another one or two more comets to my already robust collection of comets? I just sort of sat there waiting to find SOMETHING to do, but there was nothing there.
I don't think I'm alone in thinking that there's a lot more left to do with Katamari Damacy's basic gameplay. I, for one, would like a lot more hilarious levels like Virgo/"Find the Maidens" with the King of All Cosmos laughing at the poor humans the whole time.
But I still feel like I've lost a very good friend. Zelda was never about giving the vocal fans what they wanted. It was about taking a journey through the very imaginative mind of Shigeru Miyamoto. To remember what it was like to be that child walking through the forest and finding a lake. To be the child who overcomes all perils and finds buried treasure and saves the princess. For me, Wind Waker captured that perfectly and completely.
Where was I when the vocal fans didn't like the original Zelda, Link's Awakening, any of the GB/GBA Zeldas, or either of the N64 Zeldas? The only ones that have been met with shock or disapproval are Zelda II and Wind Waker. Not exactly a long tradition of Miyamoto balking at the expectations of "vocal fans" and offering his imaginative vision of what Zelda should be.
I don't understand this trend of people assuming that the lead-up to every new Zelda game was just like Wind Waker, as if the fans ALWAYS balked at the direction new Zelda games took, and that this has apparently been a nearly two decade long tradition. Besides Zelda II, which most people still don't like, the only Zelda game that hasn't been met with nearly universal approval is Wind Waker.
Mobile Cinema isn't going to work, I don't want to sound like Steve Jobs, but watching Jack Bauer say "Dammit" on a 4,5" screen is not quite as good as on a HDTV plasma(or something more modest), even though the screen is fabulous..
Ofcourse as a PornStation Portable it will do just fine..
See, the porn thing is a good point, though. If you're a big fan of 24, then watching it on a PSP isn't going to be enough for you. For watching crap-that-I-sort-of-like shows (porn included), it's worth it, though. I wouldn't watch 24 or Battlestar Galactica on it, but would I watch Enterprise? Or Monk? Or any other show that I download and watch every once and awhile, but don't really follow religiously? Yeah.
If you're in a situation where you're out of the house for awhile and are in a situation where you can watch a half hour of TV, this is sort of useful. For the rest of us, who don't commute by train or anything like that, it's just a fun novelty.
Modchips are supposed to make PS2s play homebrew software, demos and applications. Like what? The PS2Reality player, whos development was stopped when it managed to play about 60-70% of movies, at low quality and stuttering framerate? That's the best known app requiring a Modchip, and it's not any more developed.
SONY, and all of us, know that modchips are used, as far as PS2 goes, in 99,9% of the cases for piracy. Although, yeah, I've got a modded console -for obvious reasons- we shouldn't hide behind our finger.
In some of the gaming forums I visit, more than half the people there had played Devil May Cry 3 a month before it came out in the United States, and not because they downloaded it, but because they legitimately bought it from places like PlayAsia.com and took advantage of the fact that the game was in English. Just because importing isn't very big in your social circles online doesn't mean that it's only 00.1% of the cases of mod chip use. Among hardcore fans of fighting games, shooters, action games, and puzzle games, there's a fairly large import community, certainly large enough to service many different English language import sites like PlayAsia.com and Lik-Sang.com, just to name the most popular. This would be one reason why there's a lot less demand for piracy tools for handheld gaming systems like the Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP. Because there are no region restrictions on those systems, the entire import community has no interest in buying mod chips or flash carts for them. Instead of finding mod chips or carts from six or seven different manufacturers on import sites like you do for the PS2, GameCube, or Xbox, there's generally only a couple of GBA flash carts from one or two manufacturers.
According to the article, their laptop processor beat out the intel processor only by a 'small margin'. They have to release benchmark press releases, so, being a business interested in profit, they stack things.
They make some of the best chips on the market. Doesn't keep them from being 'just another business'.
The problem is that when they stack things, it backfires. If they just presented the benchmarks as they really should be, everyone would be fine with the fact that the Turion has slightly better performance than the Pentium M, and been cool with that, if not overly enthusiastic about it. Now that we know that the benchmarks were screwed with, we don't really know anything about the performance of the chip, other than the fact that it was apparently poor enough to lie about it instead of telling the truth.
When people find out that someone lied, they automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion. It's kind of like when a murder suspect lies about where he was when the murder took place. When everyone finds out that he was lying about his whereabouts, they don't think, "Well, maybe he was just having an affair or doing something slightly illegal (which is often the case). He's not necessarily the killer." Of course not. They immediately assume that if he lied about it, he's probably the murderer, because that's the worst case scenario, and people like the worst case scenario. It's definitely the most interesting conclusion.
So now, because of AMD's marketing, the perception isn't "The Turion has slightly better performance than the Pentium M". The perception is "The Turion sucks enough to lie about its performance."
Oddly, the register article reads like an opinion piece, focusing on how AMD should care more about battery life.
If you prefer Intel processors, then the real reason to buy a Pentium M is because you want better battery life than a Pentium 4. You respect the fact that you're taking a performance hit (though not a colossal one) in order to get better battery life. There are other advantages to a Pentium M, but the real one is battery life. If you're gonna be off the cord a lot, then you want a Pentium M.
AMD already has a competitor to the Pentium 4 in the Athlon 64 line of laptop chips. Generally, if you want power over battery life and you don't have a brand preference, then it's between a P4 or an Athlon 64. What AMD wants in the Turion is a competitor to the Pentium M - a processor with less pure processor performance and more battery life. So if the main attraction of a chip is better battery life at the cost of performance, but they won't tell us what the average battery life is, what does that tell us? Nothing good. At best, it tells us that its battery life isn't as good as the Pentium M's, even though they have similar performance. At worst, it tells us that it's just a low-end Athlon 64 with a different name, more of a competitor for the Celeron M than the Pentium M.
But it just reads like an opinion piece 'cause it's The Register. They're more interested in making a point and presenting their facts than in appearing unbiased and full of integrity. It's just their writing style. Same facts, different commentary.
Knoppix 3.7 couldn't detect my computer's onboard sound, so I couldn't really play around with it for most of the things that I usually do with my PC. Are there any changes or anything that could make this worth downloading and installing, either in Knoppix or in Linux (I believe 3.8 has a newer kernel than 3.7?), or is there possibly anything more I could do with Knoppix 3.7 to get it to work? I tried configuring the sound drivers, but the automatic configuration failed every time and I wasn't willing to check each individual driver to see what might hit the spot.
Anyway, I would rather have gone to the ABC site, paid like a $1 or something, and downloaded it from them. I want to support stuff I find interesting but there is no way to do that with TV episodes.
The problem is, it's highly unlikely that any TV company is going to let you download a copy of the show that's just like what you get with a pirate copy. When you download a show from BitTorrent, you get a small, high quality file that can transferred, burned, and shared at your leisure, and looks almost, but not quite, as good as an actual HDTV feed on my HDTV. Chances are that whatever they eventually decide to give you, you'll find that you would've just been better off dusting off your VCR and setting it to record in good old totally-crap VHS quality.
The reason is actually, they know it is stupid to make suicide illegal -- but if it weren't illegal -- then when you tried to commit suicide, there would be no crime taking place, so they couldn't send anyone to try and save you.
Yes, this is exactly why so many countries made it illegal to have accidents. If accidentally cutting yourself with a knife, shooting yourself in the foot, or swerving on a patch of ice and hitting another car weren't punishable by strict fines or incarceration under the law, they wouldn't be able to send an ambulance to help you, and you would die. After all, being deemed a felon is a small price to pay for falling into the acceptable guidelines for emergency medical or long-term psychiatric assistance, which strictly prohibit helping law-abiding citizens.
Wait... what?
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.
The word "blog" has existed for years now and has become so ubiquitous that most news channels, TV shows, magazines, and newspapers don't even feel the need to define it, let alone pick apart a word that practically everyone already knows the root of by now. This is like a radio DJ ranting about MTV in the '80s and starting his speech off by defining the term "television".
If you're just now learning what the word "blog" means and believe that the people around you have no clue what it could mean or where it comes from, you're at least a couple of years behind the times, and are far less qualified than the average American to speak about the subject. If Tom Brokaw could regularly use it during the news coverage the presidential election a few months ago without even bothering to define it, it's pretty damn mainstream.
I think both of these articles are a little off the mark. Rather than one type of gamer or another being "the best reviewer", I think the best reviewer is someone who is as much like the reader as possible.
The Adrenaline Vault article scoffs at the player who "brags" that they beat the game in a few hours and that they always play games in Hard Mode. Well, you know what? Unless I know a game is already very hard, I usually set the game to Hard Mode before I start playing. I also like a good, long game, because when I like a game system, I like to actually spend some time with it. So if, for instance, a reviewer says that he almost always plays games in Hard Mode, that his favorite games are Shinobi and Devil May Cry, and that the action game he's reviewing is too easy, too short, and generally sucks, then I'll probably think it sucks too. And if you generally like a short, easy game that you can just kind of relax to for a few hours, someone that likes those sorts of games is probably your perfect reviewer. That sort of reviewer would be useless to me, but then again, my kind of reviewer would be useless to you. Different views for different audiences, no different than getting your movie reviews from a daytime talk show or SlashersBloodDen.com.
Another poster under this story really hit the mark. The best type of review is the Penny Arcade style review: Here's what I'm playing, here's what I liked or didn't like about it, and these are the other games I liked. Rather than having three writers print three very generic, sterile reviews that are nearly identical to each other and make the readers wonder what terms like "too easy", "too hard", "too long", or "too short" mean for them, maybe gaming magazines should get three reviewers that actually like completely different kinds of games review the game from their own perspective.
I kinda like the way we got it setup here in Canada. If you want an education based in theory, understanding of key concepts and the like then go to University. If you want to learn how to do things, get a basic understanding of the "whys" then go to college. Generally the University people understand more, but can do less.
(NOTE: This is an honest true story)
Me and a friend of mine in college made money doing the "practical" assignments for friends from university. They understood the principles of software engineering, but however, could not write a line of code.
It's the same way in the United States, but rather than calling it "University" and "college", we call it "college" and "vocational/technical school". I went to a technical school last year and there were several people there who had gone to college and immediately went to the technical school afterwards because while their colleges had taught them interesting concepts, they didn't actually teach them anything they could apply on a day-to-day basis in their chosen field.