This has been my experience with Huff - the last time I had the patience to wait for the front page to load, I was struck by the resemblance to USA Today. Just as tabloid, just as buzzword, just as bland - buckling under one of the most over-loaded information "designs" I've seen since the 90s.
That the site design seems contrived to make the "good stuff" hard to find., that the visual clutter is a significant majority of any loaded page, that you can get a "liberal opinion" elsewhere with a bit of effort and the celebrity drivel of your choice just by looking out the window... Huff's a perfect fit for AOL!
As a graphics and media guy who's passionately hated flash since its first release in the late 90s, I'm not frowning at Apple's disdain for flash. Point of fact, I'm giggling at all of the people shrieking and moaning about the lack of "support" for it on the iPhone - after years of Flash running like lukewarm shit on the PPC and additional years of it running like microwaved shit on Intel macs (running like greased butter on the PC all the while), with flashblock being one of the few firefox plugins I use, I can't say I care one way or the other. For me, Flash is little more than an annoyance, long since filtered out.
And if Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia to get Flash, I wouldn't care.
Adobe's had a love/hate relationship with Apple for decades - they love that graphics nerds buy macs to use photoshop, they HATE Apple for consistently kicking APIs and architectures out from under them. They've owned Flash for awhile now - with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, the Flash and artist-friendly media tools acquired through the Macromedia acquisition... Adobe's the ONLY non-Apple ISV you need on your machine if you're a Creative Professional.*
Apple can live without Flash. They could certainly survive without Adobe, but could they take the publicity (and userbase) hit of losing the Creative Suite? Would Adobe threaten to pull their Mac apps to pressure Apple into supporting Flash? Will they? They certainly could, if they felt like it. Maybe they already have - it would certainly explain Apple's de-emphasis of Pro Anything over the past few years.
* It's an old argument, but screw Office. Ten years in media design and I've used openoffice on one project, to deal with an excel spreadsheet.
One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?
One's a pointy-haired emo whiner, the other is a heavy metal astronaut.
Seriously. Anyone else try to download Alien Swarm on Monday?
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Let the "cloud" be an opt-in, "use THIS much of my up/down" defined thing so that anyone either downloading a game or willing to serve as a content node for a game is then using their bandwidth to - effectively - make the "It's FREE AND YOU CAN GET IT NOW!" statement from Valve actually MEAN "get it now" and not "you can watch Steam poop itself every time you try for it until you magically without any explanation get a slot!"
In certain circumstances, BT is potentially a Damned Handy thing for content distribution.
(In other circumstances, it's a damned aggravating thing that makes lawyers salivate, but that's not what I'm talking about here)
If this ever happened to me, there wouldn't be much of a decision-making process. I'd either roll back the OS to a version that actually works (eg doesn't have the ad shit), disable the ad thing somehow (even if it means going crazy with the hosts file), or, failing all of that, just install Windows on my mini.
I did the same thing with tynt.com - That it's an ad/analytics thing is one thing. That the assholes break twenty-plus years of clipboard DWIM in the process, however.... unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. Fortunately, you can add tcr.tynt.com to your hosts file - problem solved.
Apple's been cutting corners on hardware since the beginning - on the desktop side, they've always made up for it in software. Here, not so much. This isn't a new thing - you're having the same experience that Power Mac, Newton, Apple III and Performa owners the world over have had... the difference is that since it's happening to YOU it's NEW and SPECIAL and MUST BE FIXED NOW DAMMIT!!!
Yeah, get in line. Behind the Apple III owners, the eMate owners, anyone who's ever heard of a Pippen, and the rest of us who were sick of using Apple hardware BEFORE it was "cool."
I own an iPhone. It works, the battery life is a joke, and the keyboard is Fawlty Towers incarnated as software.
Talk about irritating - a few months ago (maybe longer), Google decided my handle is a plural. So now if I want to googlebate, I have to search for "solios -solio" (and throw in a few other minuses to weed out Matrox, etceteras). Google's first hit for 'solios' is not solios (there's a shock), whereas the first hit on Bing is something me-related. There's also this - a case example of Bing coming back with DWIM and Google sticking its thumb up its ass and getting drool on the floor.
Google was fantastic when there weren't any real alternatives - now, Bing is (largely) Better, and intertia is the only thing that's keeping me using it. Inertia, and Bing's UI doesn't feel quite as 'clean.'
Combine with the clunkiness of Analytics and GMail's refusal to sort by name or date (yes, you can SEARCH but sometimes you need a SORT, it's FASTER), and Google isn't particularly good at anything these days - they just happen to serve up a useable array of related services. They're more convenient than higher quality (and supported) alternatives, and some cases (iPhone, for example - at least for now), there is no alternative.
If Google's threatened 'socializing' of GMail goes through, it had better be opt-in. Not opt-out.
The ultimate monetary advantage of using OpenGL for games (imo and ime) is it makes Mac porting a hell of a lot easier.
The ultimate monetary downside of making Mac games is that only a small fraction of the install base can upgrade their video cards - the one constantly-moving PC gaming component.
You can build a useable gaming PC for under $700 - the buy-in for a Mac with an upgradeable video card is presently $2499. With the vast majority of PC gamers using wintendos, Windows/DirectX is the LCD. It's where most (or all) of the money is.
I think it's fantastic that iD uses OpenGL and makes all of their games cross platform. I also think it's unfortunate that iD is the exception to the rule... but I also vote with my wallet, and I use a $600 non-upgradeable (video, anyway) Mac Mini for all of my Mac-oriented needs, and a massively-upgradeable, equally-priced Shuttle PC for everything else. Which includes a long list of games that haven't been released on the Mac - and even if they had been, wouldn't be playable on the GMA-950 video chipset. It's shite for games, fine for Photoshop... and Windows is the reverse for me.
If I need a wintendo to play Orange Box or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., does it really matter if the game uses DirectX or OpenGL?
The only FPS game I've come across in recent memory that offers the pleasures of Tetris With Guns - eschewing Story in its entirety - is Team Fortress 2. On the right server, that game is more fun I've had with a computer since I first discovered porn on the internet.
I got TF2 with the rest of The Orange Box - and while Half-Life 2 and its episodes were beautiful and mostly entertaining (occasionally irritating) to play through, and while Portal kicked all the ass in the world, both games have, for me, extremely limited replay value. I'll play HL2 Episode 3 when it comes out so I can Find Out What Happens Next, and I may try some Portal Advanced Maps one of these days... but for me, TF2 is all the potential of the FPS, realized. I would have payed the full Orange Box price for just TF2 and considered it money well spent. $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most? Okay... $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most and a game I've played at least an hour a day for the past three weeks, just for the fun of it? That's value for money.
Being a subsistence-level wage slave, I need value for money - $30 or $50 for a game needs to pay off in hundreds of hours, not the typical 5-35 of Portal or Halo or your average Final Fantasy.... and that's ultimately the issue with story-based games for me - you get a few hours out of them, and that's it... if you want to play it again just to enjoy the gameplay, well... tough noogies.
Eh. They're no more of an inconvenience than any other ISP, and are far, far less evil than Comcast or Verizon when it comes to what they'll let you do with the connectivity they're selling you.
Seriously. Speakeasy has been doing this for at least the last five or six years, at least with their home service, and nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.
After all, that photographer or 'shopper deserves to be compensated for the time they spent getting that shot or creating that image... and every time you - yes YOU, you ungrateful bastard! - load that web page, you're starving their families!
News flash : the creators are (in non-internet cases, anyway) paid to Create. Once the work Exists, where it goes after that is ultimately up to the fans of that work - not the cartels that have taken control of music, television and film. You think the actors and musicians will see a penny of any money the cartels extort in the form of media taxes, lawsuits, etceteras?
Yeah, musicians and authors do make royalties on their works - and one day, somebody will figure out a meaningful, useful way to extend that concept to the internet so that the content creators get paid. Until then, BS like the.ca "media tax" is as much a solution as the present (see timestamp) state of the proposed US "health care reform" legislation.
We've had The Web for, like, more than fifteen years - economies have risen and fallen, wars fought and won (or lost).. innumerable cultural and technological milestones and yet nobody has figured out a way to make money over the internet? What gives?
Okay yeah we've had the wheel for over five thousand years and we still can't build a shopping cart that rolls straight, but that's neither here nor there...
Anyone who's boggling about this deal overlooks the one thing both companies have in common: They're ridiculously good about creating a Franchise and hammering them, hammering them, slamming them, pulverizing them.... doing everything juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust short of driving them into the ground.
Though... Disney has Touchstone and DC (owned by Warner Brothers) has Vertigo... maybe there's a ghost of a chance that Marvel will grow a For Adults imprint? O.o
They're a good fit from the standpoint that each company comes up with A Character and then proceeds to flog it for thirty years, squeezing every possible nickel out of it. Their characters never die (and when Marvel characters do, you can bet that if they're first-stringers it was done for sales and they won't stay that way for long).
Outside of Pixar, The Black Hole and Tron, Disney hasn't done much of interest to me - at least not in the sense in which they're being compared to Marvel.
Marvel is very good at the super hero thing - so good, in fact, that their business practices (rotating talent around books, no perma-death for major characters, etc) drove me over to DC's Vertigo books and independent comics with static, unchanging creative teams.
I've been out of the target demos of both companies for almost two decades, and while I'll keep a casually interested eye on the acquisition to see how (or if) things change on Marvel's end, I really doubt this will have an impact on the comics I buy.
I'm not saying go easy on the drunks. Once you're drunk, you're drunk - decision made, try not to do anything stupid. But texting, chatting on the phone, etc. when you're otherwise stone cold sober is a form of driving impairment you can turn on and off at will - no cold shower, aspirin and big pot of coffee required. Your judgement wasn't impaired when you got in the car and you didn't have to answer the phone.
It's reckless endangerment in either case - the difference is there's no breathalizer or "touch your nose and say the alphabet backwards*" test for chronic texters.
Why shouldn't malicious and willful ignorance be punished harshly?
You know better than to get behind the wheel after ten or twelve beers, but some people do it anyway. Driving drunk, driving while texting, driving while playing a gameboy.... frankly, I don't see much of a difference.
Beyond the fact you can turn off the phone or the gameboy in a snap, whereas sobering up takes time. Given that, I'd figure the penalty would be harsher!
I'd love to know where the "will go quickly obsolete" thing is coming from. It's FUD of the highest order.
Hell, I'm still using a G4 dual 450 (with a SATA PCI card) as my primary media machine. It sucks for HD (more due to bus limitations than anything else, I think), but rocks SD like there's no tomorrow. The machine is nine years old and is used daily, playing video or music almost all day, every day.
Yeah, I can't run modern games on it. And I haven't bothered to hack 10.5 onto it - 10.4 is more than enough. Hell, the machine has gigabit ethernet, which is still considered a Bleeding Edge Luxury in some corners of the PC world.
The only thing that will "quickly obsolete" a mac is video games - which is why anyone who's Really Serious about PC gaming owns a wintendo... and why they hold Macs in such low regard. Those of us that don't need to upgrade our video cards every six months in order to get 60fps out of whatever game has been released this week can happily get years of life out of modern equipment.
Windows has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, and a huge pile of big-name games from big-name vendors.
MacOS has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, Final Cut Studio, and a (very, very) few of the big-name games from the big-name vendors.
Linux (Ubuntu, Chrome, etc) has OpenOffice, web browsing and email.
Not intentionally trolling here, but the fact is that not everybody is a web or software developer. Every modern OS has a basic suite of internet access and media playback apps, but the fact is that people buy windows machines for a few reasons - it's What They Know, They Don't Know Any Better, and Their Game Or Application Doesn't Run On Anything Else* being the most common.
Bottom line, if all you need is a browser, a mail client, media software and a text editor... you can be OS Agnostic. You can choose whatever works best for you. Chrome could work for you as well as Mac OS X or Ubuntu or whatever.
If you're a gamer, a graphic artist, or do any sort of 3d modeling, Linux isn't on the table... and neither is the idea of running your application in a web browser.
From what I've read, I'd be able to do with Chrome what I can do with every other current OS on the market. And there's a LOT I won't be able to do with it.
So. What's the killer app? What compelling reason is there to use Chrome when everything out there already does web and email while giving me productivity ability that still doesn't exist on linux?
Disclaimer : I was seriously thinking on getting a netbook until I got my iPhone, at which point a netbook seemed pretty irrelevant. I was looking at Hackintoshing a Dell Mini 9, as the price is right and it would give me the applications I want to be able to use on the fly - stuff I can't do with the iPhone, but stuff I wouldn't be able to do with ChromeOS, either.
* File format tie-in is a big one here - I can't move to linux even if I wanted to thanks to my productivity hinging on (literally) hundreds of gigs of.psd and.max files. Switching to a 3d app that isn't Max or a pixel-pusher that isn't Photoshop would incur hundreds of hours of work cleaning up and retexturing models, environments and source documents for the new app, to say nothing of the learning curve.
Wake me up when I can drive home to visit my parents (250 miles, one way) without having to stop two or three times to recharge.
Range is only reason I'd ever have to get a car, and it's the one thing the electrics refuse to deliver. I don't care what it looks like - I want to be able to drive from Pittsburgh to Corning or Virginia Beach or Jersey (yes, Jersey) on one charge.
Hell, I can do it on one tank of gas. And the batteries are just as bad for the environment as the fuel emissions.... and gas cars are generally cheaper.
Oh, and another point - how does one charge an electric car in a metro area where on street parking is iffy and unreliable at best and a driveway is one of those little luxuries that quintuples your mortgage?
Hardly a commercial failure. Nintendo still gets your money for the hardware, and the vendors still get your money for the rom cart and micro SD card.:P
That a lot of DS games are gimicky crap, front-ends for a collection of gimicky minigames, or just plain shovelware is another matter. I'll gladly pay money for a good DS game that I'm guaranteed to get 25+ hours out of... that's a list of maybe three or four titles a year, none of which are produced by Ubisoft.
I was forced to use cursive. I sucked at it and had to teach myself how to print.
My elementary school taught cursive. Period. Students transferring in from other districts who knew how to print had their grades docked until they learned cursive - no matter how awful it looked. While my elementary school was quite insistent, my high school (no middle school, district was too small) didn't care either way... and because my cursive was hideously illegible and years of forced "practice" hadn't improved it at all, I spent all of seventh grade and most of eighth teaching myself how to print.
Almost two decades later and my self-taught handwriting style is still legible. Early samples are a bit weird (the cursive "I" took a long time to shake, for example), and if I'm rushed you can't tell my 5s from my Ss, my e's from my c's from my g's from my l's, but it works extremely well for me - I print faster than I was ever able to write in cursive, my writing is more legible, and most importantly, it was self taught. The public education system was absolutely no help in this regard, and for the first six years of my public school career the system offered no help or support - and in fact penalized - students who wanted to write but just couldn't deal with cursive.
Good penmanship is certainly an art form, but I really think the majority of society will happily settle for a lettered populace that can simply write legibly. Print, in my experience, is a hell of a lot more legible than cursive - there's a reason that every post-it note or hand-written message that lands on my desk at work is printed - so I can read it.
Make "penmanship" an elective. Teach the kids print - everything - everything - we read is printed or displayed that way... why should we be forced to learn an antiquated writing system that bears only the vaguest of relations to the type we read every day... unless we want to?
Screw cursive - that's six years of docked grades, extra coursework, and being GROUNDED and forced to practice for hours and hours in the parental and school district-al hopes that operant conditioning will produce their demanded assembly-line results. Six years I could have spent learning hand printing and how to type - both of which are things I had to teach myself later in life.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been my experience with Huff - the last time I had the patience to wait for the front page to load, I was struck by the resemblance to USA Today. Just as tabloid, just as buzzword, just as bland - buckling under one of the most over-loaded information "designs" I've seen since the 90s.
That the site design seems contrived to make the "good stuff" hard to find., that the visual clutter is a significant majority of any loaded page, that you can get a "liberal opinion" elsewhere with a bit of effort and the celebrity drivel of your choice just by looking out the window... Huff's a perfect fit for AOL!
As a graphics and media guy who's passionately hated flash since its first release in the late 90s, I'm not frowning at Apple's disdain for flash. Point of fact, I'm giggling at all of the people shrieking and moaning about the lack of "support" for it on the iPhone - after years of Flash running like lukewarm shit on the PPC and additional years of it running like microwaved shit on Intel macs (running like greased butter on the PC all the while), with flashblock being one of the few firefox plugins I use, I can't say I care one way or the other. For me, Flash is little more than an annoyance, long since filtered out.
And if Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia to get Flash, I wouldn't care.
Adobe's had a love/hate relationship with Apple for decades - they love that graphics nerds buy macs to use photoshop, they HATE Apple for consistently kicking APIs and architectures out from under them. They've owned Flash for awhile now - with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, the Flash and artist-friendly media tools acquired through the Macromedia acquisition... Adobe's the ONLY non-Apple ISV you need on your machine if you're a Creative Professional.*
Apple can live without Flash. They could certainly survive without Adobe, but could they take the publicity (and userbase) hit of losing the Creative Suite? Would Adobe threaten to pull their Mac apps to pressure Apple into supporting Flash? Will they? They certainly could, if they felt like it. Maybe they already have - it would certainly explain Apple's de-emphasis of Pro Anything over the past few years.
* It's an old argument, but screw Office. Ten years in media design and I've used openoffice on one project, to deal with an excel spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, for those of us in the graphics biz, the only remotely-useable alternative is Windows.
Mobile devices, etc. is fortunately a different story.
One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?
One's a pointy-haired emo whiner, the other is a heavy metal astronaut.
Now, which character would you rather play?
Seriously. Anyone else try to download Alien Swarm on Monday?
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Let the "cloud" be an opt-in, "use THIS much of my up/down" defined thing so that anyone either downloading a game or willing to serve as a content node for a game is then using their bandwidth to - effectively - make the "It's FREE AND YOU CAN GET IT NOW!" statement from Valve actually MEAN "get it now" and not "you can watch Steam poop itself every time you try for it until you magically without any explanation get a slot!"
In certain circumstances, BT is potentially a Damned Handy thing for content distribution.
(In other circumstances, it's a damned aggravating thing that makes lawyers salivate, but that's not what I'm talking about here)
If this ever happened to me, there wouldn't be much of a decision-making process. I'd either roll back the OS to a version that actually works (eg doesn't have the ad shit), disable the ad thing somehow (even if it means going crazy with the hosts file), or, failing all of that, just install Windows on my mini.
I did the same thing with tynt.com - That it's an ad/analytics thing is one thing. That the assholes break twenty-plus years of clipboard DWIM in the process, however.... unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. Fortunately, you can add tcr.tynt.com to your hosts file - problem solved.
Apple's been cutting corners on hardware since the beginning - on the desktop side, they've always made up for it in software. Here, not so much. This isn't a new thing - you're having the same experience that Power Mac, Newton, Apple III and Performa owners the world over have had... the difference is that since it's happening to YOU it's NEW and SPECIAL and MUST BE FIXED NOW DAMMIT!!!
Yeah, get in line. Behind the Apple III owners, the eMate owners, anyone who's ever heard of a Pippen, and the rest of us who were sick of using Apple hardware BEFORE it was "cool."
I own an iPhone. It works, the battery life is a joke, and the keyboard is Fawlty Towers incarnated as software.
But it's COOL, dammit!
Talk about irritating - a few months ago (maybe longer), Google decided my handle is a plural. So now if I want to googlebate, I have to search for "solios -solio" (and throw in a few other minuses to weed out Matrox, etceteras). Google's first hit for 'solios' is not solios (there's a shock), whereas the first hit on Bing is something me-related. There's also this - a case example of Bing coming back with DWIM and Google sticking its thumb up its ass and getting drool on the floor.
Google was fantastic when there weren't any real alternatives - now, Bing is (largely) Better, and intertia is the only thing that's keeping me using it. Inertia, and Bing's UI doesn't feel quite as 'clean.'
Combine with the clunkiness of Analytics and GMail's refusal to sort by name or date (yes, you can SEARCH but sometimes you need a SORT, it's FASTER), and Google isn't particularly good at anything these days - they just happen to serve up a useable array of related services. They're more convenient than higher quality (and supported) alternatives, and some cases (iPhone, for example - at least for now), there is no alternative.
If Google's threatened 'socializing' of GMail goes through, it had better be opt-in. Not opt-out.
The ultimate monetary advantage of using OpenGL for games (imo and ime) is it makes Mac porting a hell of a lot easier.
The ultimate monetary downside of making Mac games is that only a small fraction of the install base can upgrade their video cards - the one constantly-moving PC gaming component.
You can build a useable gaming PC for under $700 - the buy-in for a Mac with an upgradeable video card is presently $2499. With the vast majority of PC gamers using wintendos, Windows/DirectX is the LCD. It's where most (or all) of the money is.
I think it's fantastic that iD uses OpenGL and makes all of their games cross platform. I also think it's unfortunate that iD is the exception to the rule... but I also vote with my wallet, and I use a $600 non-upgradeable (video, anyway) Mac Mini for all of my Mac-oriented needs, and a massively-upgradeable, equally-priced Shuttle PC for everything else. Which includes a long list of games that haven't been released on the Mac - and even if they had been, wouldn't be playable on the GMA-950 video chipset. It's shite for games, fine for Photoshop... and Windows is the reverse for me.
If I need a wintendo to play Orange Box or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., does it really matter if the game uses DirectX or OpenGL?
Not really. :-|
The only FPS game I've come across in recent memory that offers the pleasures of Tetris With Guns - eschewing Story in its entirety - is Team Fortress 2. On the right server, that game is more fun I've had with a computer since I first discovered porn on the internet.
I got TF2 with the rest of The Orange Box - and while Half-Life 2 and its episodes were beautiful and mostly entertaining (occasionally irritating) to play through, and while Portal kicked all the ass in the world, both games have, for me, extremely limited replay value. I'll play HL2 Episode 3 when it comes out so I can Find Out What Happens Next, and I may try some Portal Advanced Maps one of these days... but for me, TF2 is all the potential of the FPS, realized. I would have payed the full Orange Box price for just TF2 and considered it money well spent. $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most? Okay... $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most and a game I've played at least an hour a day for the past three weeks, just for the fun of it? That's value for money.
Being a subsistence-level wage slave, I need value for money - $30 or $50 for a game needs to pay off in hundreds of hours, not the typical 5-35 of Portal or Halo or your average Final Fantasy.... and that's ultimately the issue with story-based games for me - you get a few hours out of them, and that's it... if you want to play it again just to enjoy the gameplay, well... tough noogies.
Eh. They're no more of an inconvenience than any other ISP, and are far, far less evil than Comcast or Verizon when it comes to what they'll let you do with the connectivity they're selling you.
Seriously. Speakeasy has been doing this for at least the last five or six years, at least with their home service, and nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.
After all, that photographer or 'shopper deserves to be compensated for the time they spent getting that shot or creating that image... and every time you - yes YOU, you ungrateful bastard! - load that web page, you're starving their families!
News flash : the creators are (in non-internet cases, anyway) paid to Create. Once the work Exists, where it goes after that is ultimately up to the fans of that work - not the cartels that have taken control of music, television and film. You think the actors and musicians will see a penny of any money the cartels extort in the form of media taxes, lawsuits, etceteras?
Yeah, musicians and authors do make royalties on their works - and one day, somebody will figure out a meaningful, useful way to extend that concept to the internet so that the content creators get paid. Until then, BS like the .ca "media tax" is as much a solution as the present (see timestamp) state of the proposed US "health care reform" legislation.
We've had The Web for, like, more than fifteen years - economies have risen and fallen, wars fought and won (or lost).. innumerable cultural and technological milestones and yet nobody has figured out a way to make money over the internet? What gives?
Okay yeah we've had the wheel for over five thousand years and we still can't build a shopping cart that rolls straight, but that's neither here nor there...
Looks like he could be related to Stan Lee.
Anyone who's boggling about this deal overlooks the one thing both companies have in common: They're ridiculously good about creating a Franchise and hammering them, hammering them, slamming them, pulverizing them.... doing everything juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust short of driving them into the ground.
Though... Disney has Touchstone and DC (owned by Warner Brothers) has Vertigo... maybe there's a ghost of a chance that Marvel will grow a For Adults imprint? O.o
They're a good fit from the standpoint that each company comes up with A Character and then proceeds to flog it for thirty years, squeezing every possible nickel out of it. Their characters never die (and when Marvel characters do, you can bet that if they're first-stringers it was done for sales and they won't stay that way for long).
Outside of Pixar, The Black Hole and Tron, Disney hasn't done much of interest to me - at least not in the sense in which they're being compared to Marvel.
Marvel is very good at the super hero thing - so good, in fact, that their business practices (rotating talent around books, no perma-death for major characters, etc) drove me over to DC's Vertigo books and independent comics with static, unchanging creative teams.
I've been out of the target demos of both companies for almost two decades, and while I'll keep a casually interested eye on the acquisition to see how (or if) things change on Marvel's end, I really doubt this will have an impact on the comics I buy.
I'm not saying go easy on the drunks. Once you're drunk, you're drunk - decision made, try not to do anything stupid. But texting, chatting on the phone, etc. when you're otherwise stone cold sober is a form of driving impairment you can turn on and off at will - no cold shower, aspirin and big pot of coffee required. Your judgement wasn't impaired when you got in the car and you didn't have to answer the phone.
It's reckless endangerment in either case - the difference is there's no breathalizer or "touch your nose and say the alphabet backwards*" test for chronic texters.
* I still can't do that sober (or drunk).
Why shouldn't malicious and willful ignorance be punished harshly?
You know better than to get behind the wheel after ten or twelve beers, but some people do it anyway. Driving drunk, driving while texting, driving while playing a gameboy.... frankly, I don't see much of a difference.
Beyond the fact you can turn off the phone or the gameboy in a snap, whereas sobering up takes time. Given that, I'd figure the penalty would be harsher!
Or weed whacking...
... Type One Autonomous Mobile Swords.
Eep!
One of the reasons I stopped taking the Mac even remotely seriously as a games platform - the butchered ports of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
BG lost multiplayer and voice sample customization, required all four CDs and swapped continually, even on fast-for-the-time hardware.
Bioware or whatever company was subcontracted to do the dirty work couldn't be bothered to port the DM toolset.
iD and Blizzard games are feature-complete between platforms. The problem is obviously on the developer (or the porting company's) end.
If you won't take the time, you're not worth my money.
I'd love to know where the "will go quickly obsolete" thing is coming from. It's FUD of the highest order.
Hell, I'm still using a G4 dual 450 (with a SATA PCI card) as my primary media machine. It sucks for HD (more due to bus limitations than anything else, I think), but rocks SD like there's no tomorrow. The machine is nine years old and is used daily, playing video or music almost all day, every day.
Yeah, I can't run modern games on it. And I haven't bothered to hack 10.5 onto it - 10.4 is more than enough. Hell, the machine has gigabit ethernet, which is still considered a Bleeding Edge Luxury in some corners of the PC world.
The only thing that will "quickly obsolete" a mac is video games - which is why anyone who's Really Serious about PC gaming owns a wintendo... and why they hold Macs in such low regard. Those of us that don't need to upgrade our video cards every six months in order to get 60fps out of whatever game has been released this week can happily get years of life out of modern equipment.
Windows has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, and a huge pile of big-name games from big-name vendors.
MacOS has Office, Photoshop, web browsing and email, Final Cut Studio, and a (very, very) few of the big-name games from the big-name vendors.
Linux (Ubuntu, Chrome, etc) has OpenOffice, web browsing and email.
Not intentionally trolling here, but the fact is that not everybody is a web or software developer. Every modern OS has a basic suite of internet access and media playback apps, but the fact is that people buy windows machines for a few reasons - it's What They Know, They Don't Know Any Better, and Their Game Or Application Doesn't Run On Anything Else* being the most common.
Bottom line, if all you need is a browser, a mail client, media software and a text editor... you can be OS Agnostic. You can choose whatever works best for you. Chrome could work for you as well as Mac OS X or Ubuntu or whatever.
If you're a gamer, a graphic artist, or do any sort of 3d modeling, Linux isn't on the table... and neither is the idea of running your application in a web browser.
From what I've read, I'd be able to do with Chrome what I can do with every other current OS on the market. And there's a LOT I won't be able to do with it.
So. What's the killer app? What compelling reason is there to use Chrome when everything out there already does web and email while giving me productivity ability that still doesn't exist on linux?
Disclaimer : I was seriously thinking on getting a netbook until I got my iPhone, at which point a netbook seemed pretty irrelevant. I was looking at Hackintoshing a Dell Mini 9, as the price is right and it would give me the applications I want to be able to use on the fly - stuff I can't do with the iPhone, but stuff I wouldn't be able to do with ChromeOS, either.
* File format tie-in is a big one here - I can't move to linux even if I wanted to thanks to my productivity hinging on (literally) hundreds of gigs of .psd and .max files. Switching to a 3d app that isn't Max or a pixel-pusher that isn't Photoshop would incur hundreds of hours of work cleaning up and retexturing models, environments and source documents for the new app, to say nothing of the learning curve.
Wake me up when I can drive home to visit my parents (250 miles, one way) without having to stop two or three times to recharge.
Range is only reason I'd ever have to get a car, and it's the one thing the electrics refuse to deliver. I don't care what it looks like - I want to be able to drive from Pittsburgh to Corning or Virginia Beach or Jersey (yes, Jersey) on one charge.
Hell, I can do it on one tank of gas. And the batteries are just as bad for the environment as the fuel emissions.... and gas cars are generally cheaper.
Oh, and another point - how does one charge an electric car in a metro area where on street parking is iffy and unreliable at best and a driveway is one of those little luxuries that quintuples your mortgage?
Hardly a commercial failure. Nintendo still gets your money for the hardware, and the vendors still get your money for the rom cart and micro SD card. :P
That a lot of DS games are gimicky crap, front-ends for a collection of gimicky minigames, or just plain shovelware is another matter. I'll gladly pay money for a good DS game that I'm guaranteed to get 25+ hours out of... that's a list of maybe three or four titles a year, none of which are produced by Ubisoft.
I was forced to use cursive. I sucked at it and had to teach myself how to print.
My elementary school taught cursive. Period. Students transferring in from other districts who knew how to print had their grades docked until they learned cursive - no matter how awful it looked. While my elementary school was quite insistent, my high school (no middle school, district was too small) didn't care either way... and because my cursive was hideously illegible and years of forced "practice" hadn't improved it at all, I spent all of seventh grade and most of eighth teaching myself how to print.
Almost two decades later and my self-taught handwriting style is still legible. Early samples are a bit weird (the cursive "I" took a long time to shake, for example), and if I'm rushed you can't tell my 5s from my Ss, my e's from my c's from my g's from my l's, but it works extremely well for me - I print faster than I was ever able to write in cursive, my writing is more legible, and most importantly, it was self taught. The public education system was absolutely no help in this regard, and for the first six years of my public school career the system offered no help or support - and in fact penalized - students who wanted to write but just couldn't deal with cursive.
Good penmanship is certainly an art form, but I really think the majority of society will happily settle for a lettered populace that can simply write legibly. Print, in my experience, is a hell of a lot more legible than cursive - there's a reason that every post-it note or hand-written message that lands on my desk at work is printed - so I can read it.
Make "penmanship" an elective. Teach the kids print - everything - everything - we read is printed or displayed that way... why should we be forced to learn an antiquated writing system that bears only the vaguest of relations to the type we read every day... unless we want to?
Screw cursive - that's six years of docked grades, extra coursework, and being GROUNDED and forced to practice for hours and hours in the parental and school district-al hopes that operant conditioning will produce their demanded assembly-line results. Six years I could have spent learning hand printing and how to type - both of which are things I had to teach myself later in life.