This is hardly a "complete" history of format wars. Dolby Noise Reduction on audio cassettes? DivX discs? Flash memory cards? Windows Media Player vs Real Player? MP3 vs everything else? DVD-R vs DVD+R? Sure, UMD isn't entirely dead yeat, and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray is still going, but there are a lot of other interesting battles that have been fought and won.
Government is the only remaining bullwark between the thugs who run industry and the people they use up as labour resource and then destroy as a product. [...] And given how collusive government is with industry, it is NOT a pretty or welcoming picture - as government has, for the past several thousand years, proven itself to be little more than the means of protecting and projecting the interests of the ruling classes. [...] And it is only through a re-imagined and re-energised public sector will our species have any hope of surviving the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population reduction.
I appreciate your sentiment, but I couldn't help noticing your naivety.
If the government is "collusive with industry", and has been "for the past several thousand years", what makes you think it's any different today? It's easier nowadays for private companies to buy and sell government officials than it ever was.
You mention "the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population Reduction", if only to give me a good example of something you don't seem to understand. People care about these things. Companies do not care about these things. A representative government would side with the people - that is, the voters - and try to fix the problems. However, they would do this at the expense of the companies that contribute far more to both the economy and the political process than ordinary citizens do. It's very clear why things don't work this way: while governments and corporations make excuses blame each other for not solving the problems, they all feed from the same trough by stealing from you.
By rights, yes, governments should be able to impose checks and balances on industry. In reality, the world is not ruled by governments but by money. Until you realise this, you should be careful who you accuse of being "politically ignorant".
We won't be running out of space just like we didn't run out of food. New technology will allow us to store ever more data.
I remember when software came on cassettes and when food came from close to where you live.
When floppy disks were too small, we made higher-density floppy disks, and we still needed a whole box of them.
When there wasn't enough of a particular food, we got it shipped from further away.
When CD-ROMs came out, we still ended up not only filling them but spreading things over multiple CDs.
When the imported food got too expensive, we started using chemical fertilisers to grow more of them closer to home and more cheaply.
We had to invent bigger CDs. DVD became HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. People are already complaining that they're not big enough.
We got bigger trucks and bigger boats to cover food with more preservatives and ship it here from further away, and the more of this we bought, the cheaper it got.
You got that bigger hard disk, so you could amass data and store it forever. Remember how you said you'd never fill it up? Then broadband happened, and P2P happened, and fill it up you did.
You didn't worry about it, though, the same way you didn't worry about not having enough food, either. Your supermarket is awash with thousands of varieties of food, from wherever it's cheap, and you can eat as much as you want of whatever you want.
Because everything is more available, more quickly and more easily, you now have more stuff than you could ever use. Nowadays, people don't think twice about Tivo-ing or downloading something that they're never even going to watch. As the technology gets better - as disks get bigger, and as networking gets faster - this is only going to become more prevalent.
But there is a physical limit to what can be done. Do you need a new hard drive, or a new router? What metals and chemicals are required to make them? How much energy is required? Where are they built, and how do they get to you? There's only a finite amount of this stuff in the ground, and none of this is invincible to exponential growth. The people who think this can go on forever, or even for the rest of their natural lives, are kidding themselves.
Eventually, these materials will be harder to get, things will start to become more difficult to make and more expensive, and everyone will be complaining about how expensive their last computer was. Really, though, I don't even want to know these people. They've gotten their priorities all wrong.
The parent poster says we won't be running out of anything. All that's really happened is that we haven't run out yet. The planet simply can't sustain the 6.5 billion of us there are now, let alone the billions more to be born in the next few decades. The problem is that when there isn't enough to go around, some of us will be lining up for new video games and iPods, and some of us will be lining up for food, water and fuel.
I should warn you to choose wisely, but really, what do I care? Choose unwisely, and leave more for the rest of us.
We're already doing this, though again, it's in an uncontrolled way. It's called "global dimming", and it's already an environmental disaster in some parts of the world.
I can't believe I haven't seen a single reply here talking about publishers.
Publishers love sequels far more than your average gamer, because they're a safe investment. This is particularly telling nowadays, with the cost of game development going through the roof. I read a few years ago that one of the Final Fantasy games would need to sell nearly two million copies just to turn a profit; very few games have that kind of brand recognition.
In fact, not many developers have that kind of brand recognition, either. Developers often don't understand why publishers won't take a chance, just as publishers don't want to foot the bill for something that they can't guarantee will be successful. If you can't use an existing game engine, or existing characters, or existing storyboards, that bill just gets bigger, and so does the risk. Even Nintendo at E3 2006 were talking about some of their new Wii and DS titles as "franchises", surely in preparation for long series of follow-ups to each.
Hopefully, we will soon see a trend towards cheaper game development coming into the mainstream. I've already seen the light with Nintendo treating the DS as a first-class platform, and this will only improve as services such as Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade start racking up good libraries of killer apps. We might even see all those Flash game developers join in, tapping into an established audience and a proven business model that isn't entirely sustained by advertising. Not everything can be Geometry Wars, of course, but with the barrier to entry considerably lowered, we might see a bit more freshness in the games industry.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time and he will forget to eat for a day while his on-screen avatar goes fishing.
Thought I'd reply to both of your posts. I'll start with this bit, which I thought was interesting:
Greenwald, in particular, mixed opinion programming on Fox with factual news. As a resullt, idiots like O'Rielly took center-stage while real news programming was ignored.
It's been a while since I've seen Outfoxed, but I'm inclined to agree. Now that I've seen more of the actual station for myself - I'm in Australia, where you only get Fox as part of a pay-TV service - I'm more concerned with how bad a job they do with their actual news broadcasts, since I still believe that their main news anchors also show a distinct right-wing bias. (Regarding O'Reilly, Hannity and such, it's hard to know what else could be said about them. While we do, in part, have Greenwald to thank for this, it's the easier of the aspects to attack.) However, as you mentioned in your other post:
I can't change Fox News. But I can say that they appear to act within the realm of accepted journalistic standards.
This is one of those things that I'm as glad that somebody mentioned as I am disgusted that I agree with it. Fox News may take the credit for setting the standard nowadays, but the major US news outlets are getting closer together by the day. What's worse is that when they disagree with each other, they label each other as "liberal" - which is only true in relative terms.
How did it come to this? I don't think it's as simple as ratings, government favouritism, or even the corporate interests of the gigantic companies that control the media; but I do think that all three, perhaps among others, play a part. (We have the same problems in Australia, although there aren't quite as many digits after the dollar signs.)
Oh, and if anyone else is still reading, thanks for moderating my original post (the grandparent of this one) as 40% Troll and 30% Overrated. Your loyalty will not go unappreciated. Now, go back to sleep.
Fox News is a legitimate news organization... [W]atch the news and -- while it's most definitely slanted toward the administration and Republicans -- it's also factually accurate news. *shrug* Like all TV news it's watered down and of little factual value.
How can it be "factually accurate" and "of little factual value" at the same time? Maybe that's what "fair and balanced" means.
Fox News is not a legitimate news organisation by any stretch of the imagination. I've seen Outfoxed, and I recommend it, but I think the reality is even worse than Greenwald has portrayed.
It's virtually impossible to watch Fox News for more than about ten minutes without seeing some conservative bias. You can make examples of non-news-reporters like O'Reilly, Geraldo or Hannity & Other all you want, but for each of those, there's a Brit Hume or a John Gibson who looks and sounds like a newsreader but is really just another right-wing pundit. That's why Fox News is such a dangerous thing to watch: not because it's partisan hackery disguised as news, but moreover because they deliberately make it difficult to tell the difference.
The only reason it's not more obvious is that Fox News is only slightly more ridiculously biased towards the government than the other major US news outlets. It's scary that the other major media outlets have followed in Fox's footsteps towards news-tainment. At least not all of them are so insecure that they need to attack Comedy Central's "news" programming to feel good about themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly a "complete" history of format wars. Dolby Noise Reduction on audio cassettes? DivX discs? Flash memory cards? Windows Media Player vs Real Player? MP3 vs everything else? DVD-R vs DVD+R? Sure, UMD isn't entirely dead yeat, and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray is still going, but there are a lot of other interesting battles that have been fought and won.
I appreciate your sentiment, but I couldn't help noticing your naivety.
If the government is "collusive with industry", and has been "for the past several thousand years", what makes you think it's any different today? It's easier nowadays for private companies to buy and sell government officials than it ever was.
You mention "the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population Reduction", if only to give me a good example of something you don't seem to understand. People care about these things. Companies do not care about these things. A representative government would side with the people - that is, the voters - and try to fix the problems. However, they would do this at the expense of the companies that contribute far more to both the economy and the political process than ordinary citizens do. It's very clear why things don't work this way: while governments and corporations make excuses blame each other for not solving the problems, they all feed from the same trough by stealing from you.
By rights, yes, governments should be able to impose checks and balances on industry. In reality, the world is not ruled by governments but by money. Until you realise this, you should be careful who you accuse of being "politically ignorant".
Q. Are End Users to Blame for OS Flaws?
A. Yes. It's their own fault for buying a computer with a flawed OS, instead of a Mac.
[ducks]
The hackers only figured out how to get the old key. This is a new key. The hackers don't have the new key.
What are you, stupid?
I remember when software came on cassettes and when food came from close to where you live.
When floppy disks were too small, we made higher-density floppy disks, and we still needed a whole box of them.
When there wasn't enough of a particular food, we got it shipped from further away.
When CD-ROMs came out, we still ended up not only filling them but spreading things over multiple CDs.
When the imported food got too expensive, we started using chemical fertilisers to grow more of them closer to home and more cheaply.
We had to invent bigger CDs. DVD became HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. People are already complaining that they're not big enough.
We got bigger trucks and bigger boats to cover food with more preservatives and ship it here from further away, and the more of this we bought, the cheaper it got.
You got that bigger hard disk, so you could amass data and store it forever. Remember how you said you'd never fill it up? Then broadband happened, and P2P happened, and fill it up you did.
You didn't worry about it, though, the same way you didn't worry about not having enough food, either. Your supermarket is awash with thousands of varieties of food, from wherever it's cheap, and you can eat as much as you want of whatever you want.
Because everything is more available, more quickly and more easily, you now have more stuff than you could ever use. Nowadays, people don't think twice about Tivo-ing or downloading something that they're never even going to watch. As the technology gets better - as disks get bigger, and as networking gets faster - this is only going to become more prevalent.
But there is a physical limit to what can be done. Do you need a new hard drive, or a new router? What metals and chemicals are required to make them? How much energy is required? Where are they built, and how do they get to you? There's only a finite amount of this stuff in the ground, and none of this is invincible to exponential growth. The people who think this can go on forever, or even for the rest of their natural lives, are kidding themselves.
Eventually, these materials will be harder to get, things will start to become more difficult to make and more expensive, and everyone will be complaining about how expensive their last computer was. Really, though, I don't even want to know these people. They've gotten their priorities all wrong.
The parent poster says we won't be running out of anything. All that's really happened is that we haven't run out yet. The planet simply can't sustain the 6.5 billion of us there are now, let alone the billions more to be born in the next few decades. The problem is that when there isn't enough to go around, some of us will be lining up for new video games and iPods, and some of us will be lining up for food, water and fuel.
I should warn you to choose wisely, but really, what do I care? Choose unwisely, and leave more for the rest of us.
Why do you hate America?
Did you get your $1200 from Sony yet?
Don't feel bad if you didn't - you're not the only person waiting...
"Microscopic setae and Van der Waals' force! WOOOOOOOOOO!"
It's also going to be a place where everyone whinges about everything but does nothing about it. And nobody will be able to play cricket.
Like England.
We're already doing this, though again, it's in an uncontrolled way. It's called "global dimming", and it's already an environmental disaster in some parts of the world.
If you're looking for anagrams:
... although I do agree that "Plays For Maybe" sounds pretty good.
I can't believe I haven't seen a single reply here talking about publishers.
Publishers love sequels far more than your average gamer, because they're a safe investment. This is particularly telling nowadays, with the cost of game development going through the roof. I read a few years ago that one of the Final Fantasy games would need to sell nearly two million copies just to turn a profit; very few games have that kind of brand recognition.
In fact, not many developers have that kind of brand recognition, either. Developers often don't understand why publishers won't take a chance, just as publishers don't want to foot the bill for something that they can't guarantee will be successful. If you can't use an existing game engine, or existing characters, or existing storyboards, that bill just gets bigger, and so does the risk. Even Nintendo at E3 2006 were talking about some of their new Wii and DS titles as "franchises", surely in preparation for long series of follow-ups to each.
Hopefully, we will soon see a trend towards cheaper game development coming into the mainstream. I've already seen the light with Nintendo treating the DS as a first-class platform, and this will only improve as services such as Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade start racking up good libraries of killer apps. We might even see all those Flash game developers join in, tapping into an established audience and a proven business model that isn't entirely sustained by advertising. Not everything can be Geometry Wars, of course, but with the barrier to entry considerably lowered, we might see a bit more freshness in the games industry.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time and he will forget to eat for a day while his on-screen avatar goes fishing.
I just imagine the CEOs of Sony and Matsushita yelling "I just hate you so much!!!"
Thought I'd reply to both of your posts. I'll start with this bit, which I thought was interesting:
It's been a while since I've seen Outfoxed, but I'm inclined to agree. Now that I've seen more of the actual station for myself - I'm in Australia, where you only get Fox as part of a pay-TV service - I'm more concerned with how bad a job they do with their actual news broadcasts, since I still believe that their main news anchors also show a distinct right-wing bias. (Regarding O'Reilly, Hannity and such, it's hard to know what else could be said about them. While we do, in part, have Greenwald to thank for this, it's the easier of the aspects to attack.) However, as you mentioned in your other post:
This is one of those things that I'm as glad that somebody mentioned as I am disgusted that I agree with it. Fox News may take the credit for setting the standard nowadays, but the major US news outlets are getting closer together by the day. What's worse is that when they disagree with each other, they label each other as "liberal" - which is only true in relative terms.
How did it come to this? I don't think it's as simple as ratings, government favouritism, or even the corporate interests of the gigantic companies that control the media; but I do think that all three, perhaps among others, play a part. (We have the same problems in Australia, although there aren't quite as many digits after the dollar signs.)
Oh, and if anyone else is still reading, thanks for moderating my original post (the grandparent of this one) as 40% Troll and 30% Overrated. Your loyalty will not go unappreciated. Now, go back to sleep.
How can it be "factually accurate" and "of little factual value" at the same time? Maybe that's what "fair and balanced" means.
Fox News is not a legitimate news organisation by any stretch of the imagination. I've seen Outfoxed , and I recommend it, but I think the reality is even worse than Greenwald has portrayed.
It's virtually impossible to watch Fox News for more than about ten minutes without seeing some conservative bias. You can make examples of non-news-reporters like O'Reilly, Geraldo or Hannity & Other all you want, but for each of those, there's a Brit Hume or a John Gibson who looks and sounds like a newsreader but is really just another right-wing pundit. That's why Fox News is such a dangerous thing to watch: not because it's partisan hackery disguised as news, but moreover because they deliberately make it difficult to tell the difference.
The only reason it's not more obvious is that Fox News is only slightly more ridiculously biased towards the government than the other major US news outlets. It's scary that the other major media outlets have followed in Fox's footsteps towards news-tainment. At least not all of them are so insecure that they need to attack Comedy Central's "news" programming to feel good about themselves.
Here's a training video to get you started. When you get a bit more advanced, you can move on to this.
Until Tux wins the election.
Hey, you could just use your laptop as a controller - though it's perhaps not quite as comfortable as this.
Even the US government knows that the internet is not a dump truck.
The series of tubes, however, is real.
You think that's bad? I've been playing the Triganic Edition. Where the hell am I supposed to put all those ningis?
Depending on the emails you get and the sites you visit, you may already have some of these IE "extensions" installed without realising it.
Not a fan of the Réport, I see...