The thing that people in the tech/video game blog-world don't seem to realize is that way less people are pissed about Sony than you would think. I work in a building full of bill collectors, and I know a ton of PS3 owners here. None are what I would consider "hard core" gamers --- there are two types: home theater enthusiasts (that want a cheap Blu-Ray player and HDMI) and people who want a new console that also plays the ton of PS2 games they still have.
That's all there is to it for most people --- most people don't care about how forthcoming they are to the gaming press, how the launch titles aren't as good as current-gen 360 titles, etc. A TON of people associate gaming with "Sony Playstation," and that's that. My friends (who, like me, play a TON of videogames) spew endless Sony hate, but everyone else I talk to can't wait to get one.
Also, the PS2 just had FF12, Okami, and has God of War 2 on the horizon... I think Sony is putting out this machine for enthusiasts and to take press away from rivals, but is still making so much cash from the PS2 that they don't care that much right now that it's being "trounced" by the Wii. If it's not the best-selling console in the 07 Christmas season, I'd be shocked.
I work in a company of under 300 people, and most every department is almost wholly ignorant of the goings-on of the others. I'm sure Sony is the same way.
The majority of these groups stop subbing as soon as someone buys the rights to distribute the anime in whatever countries the fansubbers work in (US, for example). Nowadays, with anime a much larger business than it used to be, series are being licensed for US and European distribution much faster. In the old days, it was typical for a show to run all 26 episodes, then be licensed a year or so after it had finished on Japanese TV. Now, companies can spot a hit quickly, often licensing shows while STILL airing in Japan. There have been numerous shows that I watched fansubbed, only to have the series be licensed a few episodes in. By then, I was hooked on the show, and I gladly purchased the DVDs when they became available.
I don't know what the legality is of it all, but I was told (back in the pre-internet fansub days of tape-trading) that it was actually LEGAL under Japanese law, so long as no one had licensed the show in the country it was being subbed in (and so long as the country didn't have someone legally broadcasting the original Japanese show). Is that true, or is that an anime club urban legend? Or maybe it was true then and isn't anymore.
While it's obvious the world is getting warmer, my main problem with Warming science (that I've read) is all the computer modeling involved. I've been looking for an instance of computer models being "black boxed" --- ie, the model is set to computer what'll happen in, say, 5 years, then the results are put away, and we see how accurate they are in 5 years' time. Until this happens, computer models that say everything's fine AND models that say we're going to be scorched have a voodoo quality to them that I'm not willing to buy.
Anyone know if this has been done? And where? I'd like to read about it.
If you have an old Game Genie, you'll never have to blow on carts again. The connectors in the Genie are of high quality. I use mine on previously unplayable carts and they work great. Just bypass the Game Genie code-entry screen, and you're ready to go!
Quote from the Slate piece: "I hoped they were making no unnecessary changes in the plot or to the characters--a dangerous thing to do, since the books have been known to millions of people for decades." Like message boards aren't filled with nerds bitching about how Spider-man should have mechanical web-slingers like in the comic, but they still go see it. And Le Guin fans will still watch Earthsea, if only to have something to bitch about to fellow fans.
I love the "dangerous" thing, though. Oh, no, run and hide SciFi execs! Earthsea fans with pitchforks and torches!
What do you expect when you sell the rights to your book to a channel that made Boa vs. Python?
I play chess at Gameknot.com... it's not exactly PBEM, but it's not real-time either, and if you get e-mail notifications on when it's your turn to move --- well, I guess it's similar.
Unions are negotiating tactics. If I know how to operate machine X in a factory, and I'm getting paid nothing, I can join up with everyone who can run Machine X and threaten to leave. It's probably better to negotiate with us, as we have proven experience using Machine X and finding and training new people would be more costly than accommodating us.
A lot of libertarians dis unions, because unions today aren't like this. They are not bargaining tools --- they are seen as ways to pursue political agendas.
Going with my above definition of a union (a bargaining tool for skilled workers, for whom there is not a clear substitute), why do people advocate unionizing of WalMart employees? I've worked at WalMart in the past, and it does not require a degree in rocket science. Unions for WalMart are idiotic, 'cause unless every high school graduate in the USA joins the union, WalMart will have an infinite pool of replacement cashiers, stockers, greeters, etc.
In the WalMart example, you see why a libertarian would think the union a stupid idea. I think talented game programmers are probably unique enough to unionize successfully.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but SomethingAwful did a pretty dead-on parody of Pitchfork a few months ago. It should, indoubtedly, be checked out.
The only thing that bugs me about the current success of SRPGs, a genre I've always enjoyed, is that I fear that a great series has gone by the wayside --- OGRE BATTLE. Ogre Battle 64 was, to me, the perfect SRPG. True, you had less direct control over your combat, but exploration was a hoot and having a HUGE army to manage is right up my alley. Ogre Battle 64 is the only reason my N64 hasn't been sold or junked at this point.
Does anyone have any info about Ogre Battle? Are there any more OB games planned, or is Atlus going with Tactics Ogre and Disgaea type games in the near future?
I loved Knights of the Old Republic --- I grabbed it as soon as the PC version came out. However, I felt the "Big Evil Corporation" thing was a bit lame; it was like the plot to a Captain Planet episode in a galaxy far, far away. You know, where the evil corporate barons are polluting the environment just for the sake of doing it and being evil? I half expected the kid with "Heart!" and his monkey to show up.
I loved T2 so much, but after a few months of play (and I got into the game a few months after it came out), I could find no unmodded servers. Some mods just altered the way scores were kept and reported, but most did bizarre things with gravity and weapons, the most egregious (and, for some reason, popular) making sniper-rifle-turrets that never failed to get a headshot. Not really sure what the point of that was, but one or two official Sierra (or VU or whoever) servers running the latest patches and nothing else would have kept me playing to this very day!
Attention VU / Sierra / Tribes people --- pay attention when you release Tribes Vengeance!!!
Starting with Wordperfect Office 2002, I think it was, they stopped with the Mac support, which was a shame, as 2002 had some really cool new features, including the best built-in pdf maker I've used in a word processor, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.
I'm a Wordperfect loyalist from way back, just because I find it so much more intuitive than Office (at least, it is on Windows). For instance --- want to change the margins to a specific number? In WP, if you never used a word processor before, you may think to click "format / margins". On Word, where is it? "file / page setup"
My Filipino friend told me once that it's proper (at least in the US) to use "Asian" for people and "Oriental" for inanimate objects; in your usage, I meant "Oriental."
Why must they use such pretentious blurbs?
on
Robot Stories Movie
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· Score: 1
Hahahahah! Hilarious!
Just another note about the film --- it's far better than its art-house PR blurbs (such as the above) make it out to be. That's the one thing about festivals --- everyone tries to be artier-than-thou. I overheard a guy at one festival describe his film as "a triumph of the human spirit" to a local news crew... AND HE WASN'T JOKING. Please, people of Robot Stories (and all budding artists), just let the movie stand on its own. Don't try to impress us with your poetic description of your own film. If it is about utterly human characters struggling to connect, we'll know it when we watch it.
I saw this movie at the 2003 Slamdance festival (while helping an old high school buddy promote a documentary he'd made), and I can say it's great. The 4 vignettes are a touch uneven, but all are good. He cast the movie primarily with Asian folk, and it kind of makes you think about how rare it is to see Asians in popular entertainment that aren't just cast to play an "Asian" style character, if that makes sense. Plus, there are robots GALORE, and who doesn't like that?
I spoke with the director about the way some webcomics and other online media outlets were giving away content to make $$$. For instance, I bought the Small Stories book, even though I'd already read Same Difference for free online. I thought giving away one of the vignettes from the website would be a do-able notion (especially with advance promtion somewhere like/., followed with a Bit Torrent to ease his bandwidth bills), which could then fuel direct DVD sales of some kind.
Bottom line, if this comes by you, see it! I can't believe a movie like this has been making the festival rounds for so long and has not been picked up by a cable outlet or some type of distributor. Heck, if SciFi has money to waste on some of its crap-tacular originals, I'm sure it has the money to buy up something this small-scale. Maybe a grass-roots geek agitation could help this deserving flick out!
Plenty! My ideas for the PC: If you like real-time strategy, Warlords Battlecry 2 can be had for $10 and is a fun game -- fairly Warcraft-ish. For more original RTS, the Kohan series of games are VERY inexpensive and some of the best and most inventive RTS I've played in the past 5 years. The original Max Payne is a blast and quite cheap, as is Tribes 2 (excellent multiplayer, $10 game, if you can find unmodded servers to start out on anymore), and the Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale series are all inexpensive now and fun tactical RPGs (BG = more story, ID = more combat).
As for the GBA, I'd recommend ANY of the Super Mario Advance titles. There's an INCREDIBLE game out called Ninja Five-O, which combines the best elements of the old Shinobi and Bionic Commando games into one BLAST of a 2-D arcade beat-em-up. That one's on eBay for $10-15, and is also called "Ninja Cop" sometimes (maybe they re=released it?). Anyway, it's excellent. Speaking of Bionic Commando, they made a sequel for Game Boy Color that was fantastic, light-years ahead of the original, or any other GBC game at the time. That will probably be cheaper finding it used.
Wild Arms 3 has one of the best examples of cel shading I've ever seen, a nifty western setting, and a good mix of RPG gameplay, story, character, and puzzles, without too much of any. The boss fights can be brutal, and it's only $20 in most places! A super PS2 bargain.
I know what you mean. My parents, my friend in med school, my girlfriend, my sister. All of them gave me the "Why should I?" bit and griped when certain pages wouldn't load right. They suspected I was screwing them over with my personal techno-experimentation side. MOstly, they stayed for the popup blocking. Now, esp. with Tabbrowser Extensions installed, none of them would ever go back to IE in a million years. Similar success with Eudora, I must say.
But, I agree with you 100%! Keep turning people on to it!
It's as easy as unchecking the "Chatzilla" box on install, man. YOu can install the browser alone and, for my money, it rocks Pheonix. Phoenix is buggy, and many, many, many of the preferences still aren't available (except as manual hacks). Sure, I don't mind getting down and dirty with my software, but my parents and my girlfriend (whom I moved over to Mozilla) wouldn't be into that.
Besides, I'm sure most people have a system nowadays that will barely register the tiny fraction of a second or the small bit of RAM that Phoenix saves them.
If your looking for basic, layman's descriptions of Cosmology and astro-type stuff (up to the last few years), Timothy Ferris's THE WHOLE SHEBANG is an excellent book. I was a Physics major in college, with an astrophysics concentration, and I thought the book was superb. I read it before I got into the astro end of physics, but found its explanations of cosmology were very accurate, while being presented in an entertaining, very accessible manner. There's even a comprehensive glossary!
Slashdot Mirror
You guys are obviously forgetting to check the most useful site on the internet. http://www.isxkcdshittytoday.com/ The RSS feed is very, very handy.
That's all there is to it for most people --- most people don't care about how forthcoming they are to the gaming press, how the launch titles aren't as good as current-gen 360 titles, etc. A TON of people associate gaming with "Sony Playstation," and that's that. My friends (who, like me, play a TON of videogames) spew endless Sony hate, but everyone else I talk to can't wait to get one. Also, the PS2 just had FF12, Okami, and has God of War 2 on the horizon
I work in a company of under 300 people, and most every department is almost wholly ignorant of the goings-on of the others. I'm sure Sony is the same way.
The majority of these groups stop subbing as soon as someone buys the rights to distribute the anime in whatever countries the fansubbers work in (US, for example). Nowadays, with anime a much larger business than it used to be, series are being licensed for US and European distribution much faster. In the old days, it was typical for a show to run all 26 episodes, then be licensed a year or so after it had finished on Japanese TV. Now, companies can spot a hit quickly, often licensing shows while STILL airing in Japan. There have been numerous shows that I watched fansubbed, only to have the series be licensed a few episodes in. By then, I was hooked on the show, and I gladly purchased the DVDs when they became available. I don't know what the legality is of it all, but I was told (back in the pre-internet fansub days of tape-trading) that it was actually LEGAL under Japanese law, so long as no one had licensed the show in the country it was being subbed in (and so long as the country didn't have someone legally broadcasting the original Japanese show). Is that true, or is that an anime club urban legend? Or maybe it was true then and isn't anymore.
While it's obvious the world is getting warmer, my main problem with Warming science (that I've read) is all the computer modeling involved. I've been looking for an instance of computer models being "black boxed" --- ie, the model is set to computer what'll happen in, say, 5 years, then the results are put away, and we see how accurate they are in 5 years' time. Until this happens, computer models that say everything's fine AND models that say we're going to be scorched have a voodoo quality to them that I'm not willing to buy. Anyone know if this has been done? And where? I'd like to read about it.
If you have an old Game Genie, you'll never have to blow on carts again. The connectors in the Genie are of high quality. I use mine on previously unplayable carts and they work great. Just bypass the Game Genie code-entry screen, and you're ready to go!
I love the "dangerous" thing, though. Oh, no, run and hide SciFi execs! Earthsea fans with pitchforks and torches!
What do you expect when you sell the rights to your book to a channel that made Boa vs. Python?
I play chess at Gameknot.com ... it's not exactly PBEM, but it's not real-time either, and if you get e-mail notifications on when it's your turn to move --- well, I guess it's similar.
Unions are negotiating tactics. If I know how to operate machine X in a factory, and I'm getting paid nothing, I can join up with everyone who can run Machine X and threaten to leave. It's probably better to negotiate with us, as we have proven experience using Machine X and finding and training new people would be more costly than accommodating us.
A lot of libertarians dis unions, because unions today aren't like this. They are not bargaining tools --- they are seen as ways to pursue political agendas.
Going with my above definition of a union (a bargaining tool for skilled workers, for whom there is not a clear substitute), why do people advocate unionizing of WalMart employees? I've worked at WalMart in the past, and it does not require a degree in rocket science. Unions for WalMart are idiotic, 'cause unless every high school graduate in the USA joins the union, WalMart will have an infinite pool of replacement cashiers, stockers, greeters, etc.
In the WalMart example, you see why a libertarian would think the union a stupid idea. I think talented game programmers are probably unique enough to unionize successfully.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but SomethingAwful did a pretty dead-on parody of Pitchfork a few months ago. It should, indoubtedly, be checked out.
The only thing that bugs me about the current success of SRPGs, a genre I've always enjoyed, is that I fear that a great series has gone by the wayside --- OGRE BATTLE. Ogre Battle 64 was, to me, the perfect SRPG. True, you had less direct control over your combat, but exploration was a hoot and having a HUGE army to manage is right up my alley. Ogre Battle 64 is the only reason my N64 hasn't been sold or junked at this point.
Does anyone have any info about Ogre Battle? Are there any more OB games planned, or is Atlus going with Tactics Ogre and Disgaea type games in the near future?
I loved Knights of the Old Republic --- I grabbed it as soon as the PC version came out. However, I felt the "Big Evil Corporation" thing was a bit lame; it was like the plot to a Captain Planet episode in a galaxy far, far away. You know, where the evil corporate barons are polluting the environment just for the sake of doing it and being evil? I half expected the kid with "Heart!" and his monkey to show up.
1) Firefox 2) Eudora 3) Winamp 4) PowerArchiver (my personal fave alternative to WinRAR and WinZIP) 5) AdAware 6) Wordperfect 7) Irfanview 8) Trillian 9) Filezilla 10) Azureus
Attention VU / Sierra / Tribes people --- pay attention when you release Tribes Vengeance!!!
I'm a Wordperfect loyalist from way back, just because I find it so much more intuitive than Office (at least, it is on Windows). For instance --- want to change the margins to a specific number? In WP, if you never used a word processor before, you may think to click "format / margins". On Word, where is it? "file / page setup"
My Filipino friend told me once that it's proper (at least in the US) to use "Asian" for people and "Oriental" for inanimate objects; in your usage, I meant "Oriental."
Just another note about the film --- it's far better than its art-house PR blurbs (such as the above) make it out to be. That's the one thing about festivals --- everyone tries to be artier-than-thou. I overheard a guy at one festival describe his film as "a triumph of the human spirit" to a local news crew ... AND HE WASN'T JOKING. Please, people of Robot Stories (and all budding artists), just let the movie stand on its own. Don't try to impress us with your poetic description of your own film. If it is about utterly human characters struggling to connect, we'll know it when we watch it.
I spoke with the director about the way some webcomics and other online media outlets were giving away content to make $$$. For instance, I bought the Small Stories book, even though I'd already read Same Difference for free online. I thought giving away one of the vignettes from the website would be a do-able notion (especially with advance promtion somewhere like /., followed with a Bit Torrent to ease his bandwidth bills), which could then fuel direct DVD sales of some kind.
Bottom line, if this comes by you, see it! I can't believe a movie like this has been making the festival rounds for so long and has not been picked up by a cable outlet or some type of distributor. Heck, if SciFi has money to waste on some of its crap-tacular originals, I'm sure it has the money to buy up something this small-scale. Maybe a grass-roots geek agitation could help this deserving flick out!
Plenty! My ideas for the PC: If you like real-time strategy, Warlords Battlecry 2 can be had for $10 and is a fun game -- fairly Warcraft-ish. For more original RTS, the Kohan series of games are VERY inexpensive and some of the best and most inventive RTS I've played in the past 5 years. The original Max Payne is a blast and quite cheap, as is Tribes 2 (excellent multiplayer, $10 game, if you can find unmodded servers to start out on anymore), and the Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale series are all inexpensive now and fun tactical RPGs (BG = more story, ID = more combat).
As for the GBA, I'd recommend ANY of the Super Mario Advance titles. There's an INCREDIBLE game out called Ninja Five-O, which combines the best elements of the old Shinobi and Bionic Commando games into one BLAST of a 2-D arcade beat-em-up. That one's on eBay for $10-15, and is also called "Ninja Cop" sometimes (maybe they re=released it?). Anyway, it's excellent. Speaking of Bionic Commando, they made a sequel for Game Boy Color that was fantastic, light-years ahead of the original, or any other GBC game at the time. That will probably be cheaper finding it used.
Wild Arms 3 has one of the best examples of cel shading I've ever seen, a nifty western setting, and a good mix of RPG gameplay, story, character, and puzzles, without too much of any. The boss fights can be brutal, and it's only $20 in most places! A super PS2 bargain.
I was going to point this out too. Make sure you read what you're doing! No one wants to up their subscription accidentally.
But, I agree with you 100%! Keep turning people on to it!
It's as easy as unchecking the "Chatzilla" box on install, man. YOu can install the browser alone and, for my money, it rocks Pheonix. Phoenix is buggy, and many, many, many of the preferences still aren't available (except as manual hacks). Sure, I don't mind getting down and dirty with my software, but my parents and my girlfriend (whom I moved over to Mozilla) wouldn't be into that.
Besides, I'm sure most people have a system nowadays that will barely register the tiny fraction of a second or the small bit of RAM that Phoenix saves them.
If your looking for basic, layman's descriptions of Cosmology and astro-type stuff (up to the last few years), Timothy Ferris's THE WHOLE SHEBANG is an excellent book. I was a Physics major in college, with an astrophysics concentration, and I thought the book was superb. I read it before I got into the astro end of physics, but found its explanations of cosmology were very accurate, while being presented in an entertaining, very accessible manner. There's even a comprehensive glossary!