I'll tell you what misconception annoys me the most. It's the idea that you need to agree to the GPL in order to use the software. I find it highly irritating to be asked to click-through a EULA window containing the GPL when I install a piece of software. The GPL is not a EULA, and you don't really have to agree to the GPL if you only intend to use the software. The GPL gives you rights to modify and redistribute the software; if you don't agree to the GPL, there is nothing else that would give you such rights. The right to use the software is implicit in the fact that it was legally distributed to you.
Not only that, but the Canon cartridges contain about three times as much ink for a comparable price (16 mL as opposed to 5 mL --- I checked). Granted, there probably isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the absolute ink usage of the two brands, but I'd expect the Canon doesn't use three times the amount of ink per page.
None of the inks are truly inexpensive, but in my experience Canon does a pretty decent job at a pretty decent price.
Actually, if you make it harder for pornographers to get porn-related domain names, what are they going to do? They're still going to set up shop, but they're going to get domain names that are not obviously pornographic. That makes it harder for people who want to avoid the porn to do so, and makes it more likely that people who don't want to see it will stumble across it by accident. The porn is going to be out there no matter what you do; you might as well adopt policies that encourage it to carve out its own niche that people who don't want to see it can avoid.
It's none of my business if someone wants to download porn. I just don't want to have to see it when I don't want to.
"Actually, in some of the deer infested portions of the world (like Northern Minnesota, where I'm from), it isn't unheard of for the traffic accident to involve the deer hitting you... not you hitting the deer."
We have that here in Mississippi too. We call it fast food.
People who are "on call" a lot usually wish they didn't have them. Nothing's more fun than spending two hours after midnight looking through log files only to find out that there wasn't a bug in the code after all and that the problem was an idiot user who simply didn't know how to use the tools of his job.
I know there's a significant physical component to the release process, but I'm thinking more along the lines of the artificial roadblocks the distributors set up. You can't eliminated the delay, but if the pirates cause the distributors to minimize it as much as possible, then the effect has been positive.
For my part, too, I like having a physical copy of a game. I may want to pull it out and play it again ten years down the road. Or I may not. Either way, I enjoy having a physical item to show for my money. I like to have an actual physical copy of the game, not just some nebulous "license" and a downloaded file. The problem I have with Steam and other online delivery mechanisms is that, since there's no physical item being exchanged, their license model is a lot stronger. They have a stronger right to restrict how you use the game, and they're not at all hesitant to use that right. If you buy a physical copy, you can at least argue that the sale gives you basic rights to use that copy as you see fit, save only for the restrictions of copyright law. If you buy a download, however, they can impose whatever conditions they want on that download before you make the transaction. In that situation you really have no standing to dispute the restrictions they enforce.
I doubt I'm the only one who likes to have a physical copy. I think that's really the best way for developers to fight piracy: provide additional value in the physical package that pirates can't provide.
If pirates can beat the official product to market, why can't the developers just speed up their release process to match them? If the game is ready there's no real reason not to go ahead and release it, except perhaps to try to create artificial anticipation for it. I consider that a below-the-belt marketing tactic anyway; if one of the side-effects of piracy is to undermine its usefulness, that would be a good thing.
I don't think graphical quality is any impediment to making good adventure games that can compete. I can certainly imagine a Monkey Island game in beautiful 32-bit color at 1280x1024 resolution, with smooth professional animation. Far from being obsolete, I think computers are at a point where it's possible to do adventure games with very high-quality artwork. Realtime-rendered 3D games might be the fad right now, but realtime 3D rendering still has some visual limitations. A 2D adventure game could very well look better and handle better than most 3D games if done properly.
Hmm, perhaps, but when telegrams charged people on a per-character basis, they had a legitimate financial interest in abbreviating things. AIM slang is, in my opinion, nothing more than pure sloth.
Any piece of software capable of running executable code is vulnerable to trojans. Anyone can write an executable program to do nasty stuff, and there's no reasonable way for an application to tell the difference. Firefox can't figure out on its own that an extension which deletes files or sends email is malicious, because such functionality can conceivably be useful. The only real solution is to educate people about running untrusted executable code, and Firefox already takes every reasonable precaution to do so. So much so, in fact, that it's a bit annoying when you really do want to install an extension. Trojans are a form of social engineering; with enough effort you can convince most people you're trustworthy, and there's very little that can be done to prevent that sort of activity, except perhaps educating people about the possibility.
So the problem isn't the software. It's the people using the software. As more people learn about Firefox, we'll just have to accept that some of them are going to be stupid. It's a statistical inevitability. You can fix security holes all day, but you can't fix stupid.
Talk to him? If you can make it do that, why not come up with a way to make it silently alert you to the fact that it detected an intruder? That way you can decide whether or not it's really a burglar, and if so, kill him. No sense in letting ambulatory garbage like that get away to rob someone else.
I would tend to think that if some games get simplified a bit for the U.S. release, it just means that after releasing the game in one market and getting feedback from reviewers and customers and what not, they decided that some things really were just too hard or tedious. Not because they thought Americans were dumber, but because they realized after they released the game that some aspects were too hard or too boring. If Final Fantasy II/IV was "dumbed down" or "made easier" primarily by taking out a lot of repetitive level grinding, I consider that a significant improvement. I always hated having to run back and forth in a field fighting random enemies for about an hour for no reason other than that the enemies in the next area were too strong for my current level. Getting rid of that sort of grind makes the game more fun, and isn't that the main point? Harder isn't always better, especially if the "challenge" comes from something really cheap like making you backtrack further after you die or limiting the number of times you can continue.
So I expect the designers decided after they released SMB2 in Japan that it was just too dang hard, period. They probably didn't realize that before they released it, and it's easy to see why. The designers and testers would be so familiar with the gameplay mechanics that the game would seem easier to them than it would to an average game player.
Culture might be part of it too, but I expect the primary reason is plain old experience and hindsight.
Interesting Fact:
* Honestly, Doki Doki Panic is just a bad name. Nobody likes it. It sounds better as Mario 2.:)
Besides that, he's judging the name based on how it sounds to English-speaking ears. In Japanese, the phrase "Doki Doki" is a reference to the sound of a heart beating. So a more appropriate English phrase might be "Heart-pounding panic" --- still a cheesy-sounding title in English, but I'd be willing to bet it doesn't seem nearly so cheesy in Japanese, to someone who's familiar with the nuances of that language.
But then, this is the same company that named their new console "Wii", so maybe I'm just grossly overestimating their taste in names.
Excellent idea. I recently noticed I had a couple Netflix envelopes from out-of-state distribution centers, and was wondering if it would work to redirect them to the one that's actually near me.
In fact, the article states that ATI are working with DirectX 10 under windows XP (with a few modifications to make it fit Vista). So the question is - if they can, and it's obviously possible, why can't we we?
Microsoft simply doesn't have much incentive for DX10 to be available on Windows XP, even though it might be very easy to port it. They want to do everything they can to get people to buy Vista. If you want to run a DX10 game, you either have to buy Vista or an XBox360 --- either of which is a good outcome for Microsoft. I guess they figure the profit from people giving in and buying Vista will exceed the loss from people deciding just to forgo buying a game or two they want, plus the installed base of Vista goes up.
Re:This is why I don't use GIMP
on
Beginning GIMP
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"Photoshop has a really great interface. When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "open source" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completeing that job. Not the tool that best suites my techno ideology."
Personally, I want the one I don't have to pay for. Yes, I'm very selfish. Disgusting, isn't it?
Of course you have to make changes when you adapt a story to the big screen. The problem, though, is that the powers-that-be tend to make fundamental changes to the nature of the story, or to the personalities of the characters, for reasons that most fans would consider unjustified. For example: the changes to Faramir's character in Lord of the Rings didn't really serve any constructive purpose. They're explained away as increasing the dramatic tension of the movie by leaving Faramir's motives ambiguous until near the end of the second movie. Most fans consider that a fundamental change to the way Tolkien originally wrote the character, which is something not to be done frivolously. On the other hand, the decision to remove Tom Bombadil and otherwise streamline the first part of the Fellowship movie has very real justification, in that you have a limited amount of time in which to tell the story. You simply cannot include everything; therefore things that don't contribute directly to the Main Quest are legitimate candidates for deletion. (Tom Bombadil, it's argued, serves an important purpose in the book, but it's not one that contributes very much to the downfall of Sauron).
So, to my way of thinking, if you're adapting a book or a game to the movies, you need to try to preserve the fundamental character of the story as much as possible and not make changes that frivolously undermine it. Nearly all adaptations I've seen have failed in this to one degree or another. Sometimes the end result can overcome these flaws (as in LOTR, which was a very good set of movies in its own right), but sometimes the failure is pretty much absolute (a vast array of movies I could name).
Because most movies that are otherwise worth watching have a fairly low ratio of "naughty bits" to actual content. If you have a two-hour movie, from which you excise maybe five minutes, then you still have a movie worth watching. A lot of the time, these things are simply gratuitous --- they contribute nothing to the plot.
Granted, there are also quite a few movies that have very little aside from naughty bits, but not all of them. I can think of many movies I'd like better if the gratuitous spurting blood scene or sex scene weren't there.
These guys that are editing movies aren't doing anything to deprive anyone else of the right to see the unedited version, nor are they doing anything to deprive the studios of profit. I can't see where the law should have any say whatsoever here.
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I'll tell you what misconception annoys me the most. It's the idea that you need to agree to the GPL in order to use the software. I find it highly irritating to be asked to click-through a EULA window containing the GPL when I install a piece of software. The GPL is not a EULA, and you don't really have to agree to the GPL if you only intend to use the software. The GPL gives you rights to modify and redistribute the software; if you don't agree to the GPL, there is nothing else that would give you such rights. The right to use the software is implicit in the fact that it was legally distributed to you.
Not only that, but the Canon cartridges contain about three times as much ink for a comparable price (16 mL as opposed to 5 mL --- I checked). Granted, there probably isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the absolute ink usage of the two brands, but I'd expect the Canon doesn't use three times the amount of ink per page. None of the inks are truly inexpensive, but in my experience Canon does a pretty decent job at a pretty decent price.
No. Everyone knows that game designers never, ever, borrow ideas from other games.
Here's your sign.
Actually, if you make it harder for pornographers to get porn-related domain names, what are they going to do? They're still going to set up shop, but they're going to get domain names that are not obviously pornographic. That makes it harder for people who want to avoid the porn to do so, and makes it more likely that people who don't want to see it will stumble across it by accident. The porn is going to be out there no matter what you do; you might as well adopt policies that encourage it to carve out its own niche that people who don't want to see it can avoid.
It's none of my business if someone wants to download porn. I just don't want to have to see it when I don't want to.
"Actually, in some of the deer infested portions of the world (like Northern Minnesota, where I'm from), it isn't unheard of for the traffic accident to involve the deer hitting you... not you hitting the deer."
We have that here in Mississippi too. We call it fast food.
No. Highlander comes to mind. I expect there are others as well.
People who are "on call" a lot usually wish they didn't have them. Nothing's more fun than spending two hours after midnight looking through log files only to find out that there wasn't a bug in the code after all and that the problem was an idiot user who simply didn't know how to use the tools of his job.
Who, exactly, did you think wrote the Bible?
Hint: It wasn't King James.
I know there's a significant physical component to the release process, but I'm thinking more along the lines of the artificial roadblocks the distributors set up. You can't eliminated the delay, but if the pirates cause the distributors to minimize it as much as possible, then the effect has been positive.
For my part, too, I like having a physical copy of a game. I may want to pull it out and play it again ten years down the road. Or I may not. Either way, I enjoy having a physical item to show for my money. I like to have an actual physical copy of the game, not just some nebulous "license" and a downloaded file. The problem I have with Steam and other online delivery mechanisms is that, since there's no physical item being exchanged, their license model is a lot stronger. They have a stronger right to restrict how you use the game, and they're not at all hesitant to use that right. If you buy a physical copy, you can at least argue that the sale gives you basic rights to use that copy as you see fit, save only for the restrictions of copyright law. If you buy a download, however, they can impose whatever conditions they want on that download before you make the transaction. In that situation you really have no standing to dispute the restrictions they enforce.
I doubt I'm the only one who likes to have a physical copy. I think that's really the best way for developers to fight piracy: provide additional value in the physical package that pirates can't provide.
If pirates can beat the official product to market, why can't the developers just speed up their release process to match them? If the game is ready there's no real reason not to go ahead and release it, except perhaps to try to create artificial anticipation for it. I consider that a below-the-belt marketing tactic anyway; if one of the side-effects of piracy is to undermine its usefulness, that would be a good thing.
I don't think graphical quality is any impediment to making good adventure games that can compete. I can certainly imagine a Monkey Island game in beautiful 32-bit color at 1280x1024 resolution, with smooth professional animation. Far from being obsolete, I think computers are at a point where it's possible to do adventure games with very high-quality artwork. Realtime-rendered 3D games might be the fad right now, but realtime 3D rendering still has some visual limitations. A 2D adventure game could very well look better and handle better than most 3D games if done properly.
Hmm, perhaps, but when telegrams charged people on a per-character basis, they had a legitimate financial interest in abbreviating things. AIM slang is, in my opinion, nothing more than pure sloth.
"I can think of many other ways to use Jessica Alba but this is a family board."
You must be new here.
Any piece of software capable of running executable code is vulnerable to trojans. Anyone can write an executable program to do nasty stuff, and there's no reasonable way for an application to tell the difference. Firefox can't figure out on its own that an extension which deletes files or sends email is malicious, because such functionality can conceivably be useful. The only real solution is to educate people about running untrusted executable code, and Firefox already takes every reasonable precaution to do so. So much so, in fact, that it's a bit annoying when you really do want to install an extension. Trojans are a form of social engineering; with enough effort you can convince most people you're trustworthy, and there's very little that can be done to prevent that sort of activity, except perhaps educating people about the possibility.
So the problem isn't the software. It's the people using the software. As more people learn about Firefox, we'll just have to accept that some of them are going to be stupid. It's a statistical inevitability. You can fix security holes all day, but you can't fix stupid.
"everyone else who gets a letter can get a cheap lawyer to easily argue that point."
Or you could get Santa Claus to do it. Or maybe the Tooth Fairy. Such a personage would be more likely to exist.
It tastes just like chicken.
Talk to him? If you can make it do that, why not come up with a way to make it silently alert you to the fact that it detected an intruder? That way you can decide whether or not it's really a burglar, and if so, kill him. No sense in letting ambulatory garbage like that get away to rob someone else.
So I expect the designers decided after they released SMB2 in Japan that it was just too dang hard, period. They probably didn't realize that before they released it, and it's easy to see why. The designers and testers would be so familiar with the gameplay mechanics that the game would seem easier to them than it would to an average game player.
Culture might be part of it too, but I expect the primary reason is plain old experience and hindsight.
Besides that, he's judging the name based on how it sounds to English-speaking ears. In Japanese, the phrase "Doki Doki" is a reference to the sound of a heart beating. So a more appropriate English phrase might be "Heart-pounding panic" --- still a cheesy-sounding title in English, but I'd be willing to bet it doesn't seem nearly so cheesy in Japanese, to someone who's familiar with the nuances of that language.
But then, this is the same company that named their new console "Wii", so maybe I'm just grossly overestimating their taste in names.
Excellent idea. I recently noticed I had a couple Netflix envelopes from out-of-state distribution centers, and was wondering if it would work to redirect them to the one that's actually near me.
Microsoft simply doesn't have much incentive for DX10 to be available on Windows XP, even though it might be very easy to port it. They want to do everything they can to get people to buy Vista. If you want to run a DX10 game, you either have to buy Vista or an XBox360 --- either of which is a good outcome for Microsoft. I guess they figure the profit from people giving in and buying Vista will exceed the loss from people deciding just to forgo buying a game or two they want, plus the installed base of Vista goes up.
Personally, I want the one I don't have to pay for. Yes, I'm very selfish. Disgusting, isn't it?
So, to my way of thinking, if you're adapting a book or a game to the movies, you need to try to preserve the fundamental character of the story as much as possible and not make changes that frivolously undermine it. Nearly all adaptations I've seen have failed in this to one degree or another. Sometimes the end result can overcome these flaws (as in LOTR, which was a very good set of movies in its own right), but sometimes the failure is pretty much absolute (a vast array of movies I could name).
Because most movies that are otherwise worth watching have a fairly low ratio of "naughty bits" to actual content. If you have a two-hour movie, from which you excise maybe five minutes, then you still have a movie worth watching. A lot of the time, these things are simply gratuitous --- they contribute nothing to the plot.
Granted, there are also quite a few movies that have very little aside from naughty bits, but not all of them. I can think of many movies I'd like better if the gratuitous spurting blood scene or sex scene weren't there.
These guys that are editing movies aren't doing anything to deprive anyone else of the right to see the unedited version, nor are they doing anything to deprive the studios of profit. I can't see where the law should have any say whatsoever here.
Makes me wonder if the folks who made that list are LOST fans too, or if it's just one of those coincidences.