While it can be said it's sometimes "surprisingly effective", it's certainly not "the best" if reaching and influencing as large a possible an audience is your goal (as often is with advertising).
TV commercials featuring well-endowed women diving in kegs of beer and by accident finding huge penises, followed by flashing logos to the blaring tune of elevator rock seem to be somewhat better.
So, it only took two pages in their own newspaper to make them realize that something is out there called "Firefox" - from there, it was a snap googling out how it seems to be a web-thingie of some kind that is locked in a clinch of sorts with Microsoft's web thingie. By God, write it up! It's a story come to us!
I exaggarate, I know.
Music, for me, is a social phenomenon - when I pay for music, I want to share it with my friends, let them hear it and decide for themselves if they want to pay for it, too. No matter what anyone can says about the legality of it, for me it's simply unnatural for music to be something that separates people (I have a certain new CD, you don't) - music should bond people.
So yes, I'm a criminal and will continue to be one under current laws.
B) Trillian does it's thing a fair bit better than anything the OSS community has been able to produce as of yet.
Seriously, was that a troll? Haven't seen the last version, but the Trillian I knew from 2.x was a bloated piece of crap with confusing UI sacrificing usability for eye-candy. Miranda is infinitely superior as an IM client and can be extended just fine. It's also open source, not that I'm biased.
Exactly. But that is the content producer's real problem. As it is now (with the TV), media conglomerates can push politically correct, sterile, badly written crap into people's homes and garnish it with marketing brainwashing. Obviously, if there was a system of distribution that allows people more choice, a lot would have to change.
If you're like me, I bet you hate moments when you're in a hurry and all the traffic lights seem to intentionally switch to red just in front of your car.
Yes, I am like you - and I can't wait for traffic lights that will know the two of us are in a hurry.
...with Gmail's thread structure and a notifier, I have found we (me and the people I correspond with) are beginning much more like IM - rapid responses and oft nonsensical posts piling up in threads.
But IM is not quite the same medium as e-mail - when you have a strongly defined subject and want to elaborate, IM is somehow just not right. It is, perhaps, too fast and things said are taken too lightly, people are jumping into each others' sentences - it's a bit like having a conversation vs. writing a letter.
Another way to look at this is not that e-mail inferior technology, is becoming outdated and will be replaced by IM once those old people die; but that those kids will gradually learn the value of writing a letter instead of having a vapid conversation on nothing as they grow up.
Well, he did say it was a girl - and that was probably the last time he met one of her kind. How is a man to get over it, by playing D&D and correcting typos in books on D&D?
While I tend to take Valve's side in this (since no one is forcing those who don't like the system to buy the game), it's still notably schizophrenic in some respects.
I mean, the physical media are protected with Securom - but if you buy & download the game via Steam, you can give free copies to all your friends and Valve tells you how to do that on Steam support pages. (You can just copy your entire Steam dir to all your friends' computers, activate each one and they can play in offline mode. After that, you can even change your Steam password to prevent them from accidentaly damaging your account). So, what use is having Securom on the media in this situation?
If consumers accept this, we're going to see more and more software subject to cancellation on the whim of corporations.
So what? Do we need the games to live? Open source software is, still, not outlawed. As for corporate proprietary software, you either choose to accept their terms and pay them, or you choose not to. There is no God-given right in this situation.
All reviews are positive to the extreme...
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
While I agree on Half-Life 2 being a masterpiece, there are some problems almost all reviews fail to mention - all seem to be positive to the point of being uncritical, as if it's a crime to say anything negative about the game.
Firstly, while everyone talks about the graphics, no one mentions how the engine is not really the best one there is currently. Both Doom 3 and Far Cry seem to me more impressive from a purely technological standpoint - but since Source is so well used in HL2, with beautiful textures, a nice water shader and brilliant visual design, this can be forgiven.
Secondly, HL2 is still very much on a rail shooter - the beautiful backdrop of City 17 is there for a minor part of the game and most of it is strictly ornamental; virtually no exploration is possible. Again, this is not a major problem since it is an integral part of the game's design - I just wish it were mentioned in the reviews.
Thirdly (and this is my biggest gripe) - enemy A.I. is not up to the level. Enemies often face the wrong way, sometimes take decidedly stupid paths and this, for me, often ruins suspention of disbelief - not so much with animalesque alien thingies such as headcrabs, but one would expect more from human soldiers.
And last (but not least irritating) - you often get stuck on pieces of debris and climbing the ladders can be frustrating.
Also, there is the well-documented stuttering bug - which brings me to another thing. Why could it be that, after half a decade of waiting, everyone wants to play the game right away? Isn't it more prudent to wait a few weeks for the patch to come out and have a better experience?
If it's just Gmail you're worried about, then you can just change your bookmark from http://gmailblahblah to https://gmailblahblah. Then it's not just the login that's encrypted, but all traffic to the end of session.
Now it's just an accepted part of using software to the point where Valve takes no blame even though they made the decision to exert total control over even the single player HL2 installations?
It's been said and said and said: they will - and can't - exert total control. They can merely decide at which point the levee breaks. There is some code missing, you see, and as soon as the cracker groups have it, the cracks will begin to appear which bypass the activation. This is actually a very smart way from Valve to reduce both real piracy and people warezing the game. Usually a game appears earlier in the USA - gamers in the rest of the world are then supposed to read the reviews and the discussions, while waiting for the game to become available locally, which is frustrating and gives them some moral justification for warezing the game (I wanted to buy it, they don't want to sell it to me). And we all know how the incentive to buy the game is considerably lessened once you've player through.
As for you people who are up in arms over how activation servers one day may be offline and - gasp - how will we play then? There is this thing called patch and it's a perfectly fine way to remove this feature.
We are experiencing a Renaissance of locally-produced music, from street performers to small bands. Music is no longer the exclusive domain of a handful of mega-conglomerates, but is being taken back and revitalized on the micro scale. Seattle/Portland (near me) support a thriving community of small indepenent musicans producing truly excellent music. It's like the 60's all over again. Not so much "new" sounds, but new takes on the folk/rock/celtic traditions and a resurgence of interest in vocals and acoustic instrumentation rather than synthesized, reprocessed top-40. Complex, muti-layered arrangements that depend on real musicians, not 20 year old pinups with digitally-enhanced vocals supporting their silicon-enhanced figures.
Now if only we could find a way to swap selected locally produced music that would be reliable and not attempt to fuck us up over time for money, music could actually become free. Something... like a big network of music-swapping machines that do not broadcast or preach, but that filter a large number of opinions from real, participating people.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, the Japanese gaming community has made a huge deal about making fun of the PSP.
Some links (preferrably to grapical content) would be much appreciated.
Well, I did think of that scenario, but I would like to think NYT still has some journalistic integrity.
Word of mouth advertising is the best.
While it can be said it's sometimes "surprisingly effective", it's certainly not "the best" if reaching and influencing as large a possible an audience is your goal (as often is with advertising).
TV commercials featuring well-endowed women diving in kegs of beer and by accident finding huge penises, followed by flashing logos to the blaring tune of elevator rock seem to be somewhat better.
So, it only took two pages in their own newspaper to make them realize that something is out there called "Firefox" - from there, it was a snap googling out how it seems to be a web-thingie of some kind that is locked in a clinch of sorts with Microsoft's web thingie. By God, write it up! It's a story come to us!
I exaggarate, I know.
Music, for me, is a social phenomenon - when I pay for music, I want to share it with my friends, let them hear it and decide for themselves if they want to pay for it, too. No matter what anyone can says about the legality of it, for me it's simply unnatural for music to be something that separates people (I have a certain new CD, you don't) - music should bond people.
So yes, I'm a criminal and will continue to be one under current laws.
B) Trillian does it's thing a fair bit better than anything the OSS community has been able to produce as of yet.
Seriously, was that a troll? Haven't seen the last version, but the Trillian I knew from 2.x was a bloated piece of crap with confusing UI sacrificing usability for eye-candy. Miranda is infinitely superior as an IM client and can be extended just fine. It's also open source, not that I'm biased.
Exactly. But that is the content producer's real problem. As it is now (with the TV), media conglomerates can push politically correct, sterile, badly written crap into people's homes and garnish it with marketing brainwashing. Obviously, if there was a system of distribution that allows people more choice, a lot would have to change.
I can't wait till IBM hands me my award for outstanding achievements in the field of excellence.
If you're like me, I bet you hate moments when you're in a hurry and all the traffic lights seem to intentionally switch to red just in front of your car.
Yes, I am like you - and I can't wait for traffic lights that will know the two of us are in a hurry.
It just can't rid you of responsibility for your free time the way TV does.
But they use "u" in color and... stuff.
...with Gmail's thread structure and a notifier, I have found we (me and the people I correspond with) are beginning much more like IM - rapid responses and oft nonsensical posts piling up in threads.
But IM is not quite the same medium as e-mail - when you have a strongly defined subject and want to elaborate, IM is somehow just not right. It is, perhaps, too fast and things said are taken too lightly, people are jumping into each others' sentences - it's a bit like having a conversation vs. writing a letter.
Another way to look at this is not that e-mail inferior technology, is becoming outdated and will be replaced by IM once those old people die; but that those kids will gradually learn the value of writing a letter instead of having a vapid conversation on nothing as they grow up.
Well, he did say it was a girl - and that was probably the last time he met one of her kind. How is a man to get over it, by playing D&D and correcting typos in books on D&D?
...NASA is lying. The comet is actually heading straight for Earth and the best plan they have is to launch a copper bathtub filled with Bruce Willis.
The only real antidote is going broke.
Shouldn't take long, with iPod socks available in so many colors.
While I tend to take Valve's side in this (since no one is forcing those who don't like the system to buy the game), it's still notably schizophrenic in some respects.
I mean, the physical media are protected with Securom - but if you buy & download the game via Steam, you can give free copies to all your friends and Valve tells you how to do that on Steam support pages. (You can just copy your entire Steam dir to all your friends' computers, activate each one and they can play in offline mode. After that, you can even change your Steam password to prevent them from accidentaly damaging your account). So, what use is having Securom on the media in this situation?
If consumers accept this, we're going to see more and more software subject to cancellation on the whim of corporations.
So what? Do we need the games to live? Open source software is, still, not outlawed. As for corporate proprietary software, you either choose to accept their terms and pay them, or you choose not to. There is no God-given right in this situation.
While I agree on Half-Life 2 being a masterpiece, there are some problems almost all reviews fail to mention - all seem to be positive to the point of being uncritical, as if it's a crime to say anything negative about the game.
Firstly, while everyone talks about the graphics, no one mentions how the engine is not really the best one there is currently. Both Doom 3 and Far Cry seem to me more impressive from a purely technological standpoint - but since Source is so well used in HL2, with beautiful textures, a nice water shader and brilliant visual design, this can be forgiven.
Secondly, HL2 is still very much on a rail shooter - the beautiful backdrop of City 17 is there for a minor part of the game and most of it is strictly ornamental; virtually no exploration is possible. Again, this is not a major problem since it is an integral part of the game's design - I just wish it were mentioned in the reviews.
Thirdly (and this is my biggest gripe) - enemy A.I. is not up to the level. Enemies often face the wrong way, sometimes take decidedly stupid paths and this, for me, often ruins suspention of disbelief - not so much with animalesque alien thingies such as headcrabs, but one would expect more from human soldiers.
And last (but not least irritating) - you often get stuck on pieces of debris and climbing the ladders can be frustrating.
Also, there is the well-documented stuttering bug - which brings me to another thing. Why could it be that, after half a decade of waiting, everyone wants to play the game right away? Isn't it more prudent to wait a few weeks for the patch to come out and have a better experience?
No, but it at least lets you sift through your porn spam in peace.
If it's just Gmail you're worried about, then you can just change your bookmark from http://gmailblahblah to https://gmailblahblah. Then it's not just the login that's encrypted, but all traffic to the end of session.
If you are a lawyer, you cannot use the software.... unless you work for groklaw.
So Microsoft buys Groklaw in that future.
Let's put an "e)" there with a painful reminder of how IBM is a corporation and therefore, by default, not to be trusted.
Now it's just an accepted part of using software to the point where Valve takes no blame even though they made the decision to exert total control over even the single player HL2 installations?
It's been said and said and said: they will - and can't - exert total control. They can merely decide at which point the levee breaks. There is some code missing, you see, and as soon as the cracker groups have it, the cracks will begin to appear which bypass the activation. This is actually a very smart way from Valve to reduce both real piracy and people warezing the game. Usually a game appears earlier in the USA - gamers in the rest of the world are then supposed to read the reviews and the discussions, while waiting for the game to become available locally, which is frustrating and gives them some moral justification for warezing the game (I wanted to buy it, they don't want to sell it to me). And we all know how the incentive to buy the game is considerably lessened once you've player through.
As for you people who are up in arms over how activation servers one day may be offline and - gasp - how will we play then? There is this thing called patch and it's a perfectly fine way to remove this feature.
We are experiencing a Renaissance of locally-produced music, from street performers to small bands. Music is no longer the exclusive domain of a handful of mega-conglomerates, but is being taken back and revitalized on the micro scale. Seattle/Portland (near me) support a thriving community of small indepenent musicans producing truly excellent music. It's like the 60's all over again. Not so much "new" sounds, but new takes on the folk/rock/celtic traditions and a resurgence of interest in vocals and acoustic instrumentation rather than synthesized, reprocessed top-40. Complex, muti-layered arrangements that depend on real musicians, not 20 year old pinups with digitally-enhanced vocals supporting their silicon-enhanced figures.
Now if only we could find a way to swap selected locally produced music that would be reliable and not attempt to fuck us up over time for money, music could actually become free. Something... like a big network of music-swapping machines that do not broadcast or preach, but that filter a large number of opinions from real, participating people.
I'll take you up on that and just say that you are not even trying.