As this action by Japan illustrates, apparently not. Microsoft just ran with their typical US arrogance and got caught breaking the rules.
As a former resident of Japan, I think this whole issue is being framed the wrong way. Monopolies are part & parcel of Japanese business practices. It's more likely, they didn't pay off the right officials, plus they happen to be a foreign company.
It took them god knows how many years before they released the GB advanced.
Actually, I was a little annoyed - it came out just a couple years after the Game Boy color.
More competition is indeed a good thing. But the Game Boy has had its competitors over the years - none of which could match the quality of the Game Boy. It earned its near 100% share, it itsn't just a humbug product that won its popularity through monopolistic practices.
The music was a rip off of Stevie Wonder, Stevie Wonder wasn't being financially ripped off. Stealing money from Stevie Wonder would be bad publicity, to say the least!
And yeah, it's a pretty blatant rip off of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish."
Sci-fi can be a lot of fun to read or see in a movie. But taking concepts out of "Star Trek" and assuming they hold true for real life is false logic.
Getting in a boat doesn't compare to the difficulty of going to another planet. Life on another planet could never be as an effective a getaway, as moving to a shack in Idaho or Montana. When/if Mars is finally colonized far the in the future, it will be a highly regimented lifestyle - you really think dissaffected weirdos would be the idea type for such a life?
Missings to space are not leading advances in energy sources & robots. As far as micro-mechanization goes, they're sending IBM laptops into space. And who cares about advances in hydroponics or closed ecosystems?
I've been to Japan a number of times, and while I'm no gamer, I've had a look at arcades (which often have signs saying children aren't allowed past certain hours).
Japanese arcades are dominated by rhythm-based games - for instance DDR, except maybe you scratch a pad, hit a drum, or whatever. These games aren't popular enough in the US to anchor arcades, as they do in Japan. Also, in places where they serve alcohol (and the US equivalent might have Golden Tee or those touch-screen games), lightly pornographic mahjong games are common, where cartoon characters strip depending on the progress of the game.
The other arcade games (half fighting, half wacky shit) will get brought over to the US if they're popular enough, maybe half a year or a year after it comes out in Japan.
Are you suggesting I was unaware that space goes on (more or less) infinitely? If I really thought that, I would have said that the chances of being hit by space junk would be 0. If you define altitude as the distance from the earth's surface (which many people do), satellites & space junk fall within a more limited range.
All that hostility because I speak in normal conversational terms? Calculating the area of a sphere would be trivial, but it wouldn't change my argument.
Given the current state of debris in orbit, I wonder how long it will be until a capsule is struck by a dangerously large piece of matter, scattering ashes throughout low earth orbit.
About the same chances as winning $100 million in the lottery, I'd imagine. Maybe less. Space is huge. Just the surface of the Earth is huge, and that's essentially 2-dimensional, while people go to a large variety of altitudes in space.
During the musician's strike last year, Broadway used computer music instead of normal music for a number of shows. It wasn't popular with either critics or the crowd, ticket sales went down, and eventually they reached a compromise with the musician's union.
It's all business, but when the business is art, people do care about such things.
Does this myth only pertain to the United States perhaps?
I live in the US, and it's the first I've ever heard of it - and I was recently offered a job there to teach computers there, and my sister went to school there.
Not sure about the UK (which of course has closer ties to India), but moving to India would be like moving to Samoa for most people - they wouldn't really consider it, and don't have any impression about how hard or not it is to work there. I don't know how that gets elevated to "myth."
You have to drive to the video store and back to drop off the DVD. The environment isn't winning a round when you burn half a gallon of gas to return your DVD.
The first version of the IBM PC was introduced in August 1981. Apple responded by running an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." Even though he was usually tight with money, Steve Jobs allowed the Mac team to buy an early unit to dissect and evaluate. The day it became available, we ran to the store and purchased one to take back to the lab.
Needless to say, we were not very impressed with it. From the perspective of the Macintosh that we were already in the midst of bringing to life, it seemed like ancient history the day it came out. There was little, if any, Woz-like cleverness in the hardware design, using dozens of extraneous chips without having any cool features. The 8088 was a decent processor compared to the 6502, but it paled next to the 68000 we were using in the Mac.
But the most clunky part of the system was the software. MS-DOS seemed like a clone of an earlier system, CP/M, and even the demo programs lacked flair. It came with some games written in BASIC that were especially embarrassing.
The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called "Donkey". The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered "road", and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn't hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.
We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.
Macs are so much better than PCs. That's because Macs are for an elite cadre of artists and creative people.
Wow, at those prices it's surprising that Element Computers (manufacturer of the ubiquitous Plutonium 1000 computer) can maintain their dominant position in the computer market.
Engineers tend to think of practical benefits. And I'm not convinced the space program is anything more than a massive PR effort. I think scientific efforts on Mars are a big waste of money until more advanced forms of propulsion and energy generation are developed, and that these Mars missions don't contribute to their development in the slightest.
It's easy to be negative about Mars, in the wake of Bush announcing a program to use Apollo-type rockets to put men on Mars. It's not "great science," - in fact, it's diverting money from legitimate scientific programs. A greater knowledge of physics is more vital to any future space exploration, than using proven 60's tech to get a good photo op. on Mars.
- There's nothing to gain from going to Mars [and so forth...]
I think your reasoning is too inspired by science-fiction. With current technologies, space-mining is impractically expensive, even if Mars was made purely of refined cocaine. Also, with current technologies, there's no way a Martian space colony could be made self-sufficient.
In addition, I don't think the answers to these problems lie in refining the Apollo program. An exotic new form of propulsion would be needed, as would an exotic new method of generating large amounts of electricity. Using rockets to send people to Mars would make good propoganda, but it isn't going to help in these more practical concerns.
Ever seen a Bollywood movie in a theater in the US?
Currently, in its 4th week in the theatres, "Kal Ho Naa Ho" is #31 in the US box office (comparable to "Timeline, which is #29 after 4 weeks). It's listed as playing at 37 U.S. theaters ("Timeline" is listed as being in 620 theaters) - which implies that the theaters that do exist are quite heavily used.
Any Indian area will have numberous stores renting out Bollywood videos and DVD's.
There are numerous U.S. websites which sell Indian DVDs.
Netflix and Greencine both rent out sizeable Bollywood DVD collections.
Okies shouldn't make presumptions about cosmopolitan areas.
Here's an article - the body of the article is good, although the final movie recommendations at the end are poorly chosen. "Koi..Mil Gaya" is the first Bollywood Sci-Fi ever, and while it's incredibly derivative (mostly of E.T.), it's interesting to see the narrator have to explain what galaxies and aliens are. In addition, Naz cinemas around CA (or there's others in CA, TX, or NY) are showing a movie called "Kal Ho Naa Ho" that I think is very good, particularly for those new to the genre. Its opening week, it was in the top 20 for US box office.
Many of these movies can be rented from NetFlix of the aforementioned Greencine. Check it out!
I love Bollywood movies, but they're probably not for the typical slashdot crowd. They're often based around a love story, their plot is often an excuse for lengthy expositions (running times commonly reach 3 and a half hours), they're firmly rooted in Indian culture, and there's no sense of irony or detached cool endemic to Western or Chinese movies.
Still I think Bollywood, along with Korean films, are currently the most interesting alternative to US movies.
Let's take your comments apart, and explain to the dimwitted (or the jaded film students who are currently working in retail), exactly why he deserves an award for Best Director:[...]
Your arguments apply equally well to George Lucas, who with his new "Star Wars" trilogy is making three long movies, with huge special effects budgets, and unprecedented use of CGI. Plus, the theme music is great!
However, popcorn movies don't get the awards. The first two Lord of the Rings movies are grand, but they're brainless action movies in a fantasy setting. They're getting good money in return (I'm sure Peter Jackson won't complain) but they're disposable entertainment in the manner of "Independence Day" or "Terminator 3."
Why don't you just say "I hate fucking Muslims" instead of so strongly implying it? If you were concerned with the truth, you'd be at least be willing to Google up the information.
For all the "Morocco has lots of terrorism" posts such as yours, I haven't seen one which mentions that Spain has a history much more tainted by terrorism and repressive governments than Morocco - mostly revolving around the struggles and subsequent political supression of sometimes-violent Basque separatists, by the far-right government (and before that, Franco's).
A little more information can be found at this site.
Wow, trite stereotypes with obvious counter-examples! They're all "inner-city" too, right?
If our culture is really totally unrelated to our actions, why do governments (and companies) even bother with PR & propoganda? Obviously there isn't a 100% correlation between violence and our culture. But just as obviously, there is a relation. A lot of people got lynched after "Birth of a Nation."
1. Elf
2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
3. Matrix: Revolutions
4. Brother Bear
5. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
6. Love Actually
7. Scary Movie 3
8. Radio
9. Tupac: Resurrection
10. Mystic River
Some of the best movies out there are Chinese. Check out Wong Kar Wai's movies, Jet Li's movies, Sammi Cheng's movies - different genres but great shit. In addition, Chinese audiences are more open to foreign movies than Americans - VCD shops will sell top American, Korean, and Japanese stuff as well.
Slashdot Mirror
As a former resident of Japan, I think this whole issue is being framed the wrong way. Monopolies are part & parcel of Japanese business practices. It's more likely, they didn't pay off the right officials, plus they happen to be a foreign company.
Actually, I was a little annoyed - it came out just a couple years after the Game Boy color.
More competition is indeed a good thing. But the Game Boy has had its competitors over the years - none of which could match the quality of the Game Boy. It earned its near 100% share, it itsn't just a humbug product that won its popularity through monopolistic practices.
And yeah, it's a pretty blatant rip off of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish."
Getting in a boat doesn't compare to the difficulty of going to another planet. Life on another planet could never be as an effective a getaway, as moving to a shack in Idaho or Montana. When/if Mars is finally colonized far the in the future, it will be a highly regimented lifestyle - you really think dissaffected weirdos would be the idea type for such a life?
Missings to space are not leading advances in energy sources & robots. As far as micro-mechanization goes, they're sending IBM laptops into space. And who cares about advances in hydroponics or closed ecosystems?
Japanese arcades are dominated by rhythm-based games - for instance DDR, except maybe you scratch a pad, hit a drum, or whatever. These games aren't popular enough in the US to anchor arcades, as they do in Japan. Also, in places where they serve alcohol (and the US equivalent might have Golden Tee or those touch-screen games), lightly pornographic mahjong games are common, where cartoon characters strip depending on the progress of the game.
The other arcade games (half fighting, half wacky shit) will get brought over to the US if they're popular enough, maybe half a year or a year after it comes out in Japan.
All that hostility because I speak in normal conversational terms? Calculating the area of a sphere would be trivial, but it wouldn't change my argument.
About the same chances as winning $100 million in the lottery, I'd imagine. Maybe less. Space is huge. Just the surface of the Earth is huge, and that's essentially 2-dimensional, while people go to a large variety of altitudes in space.
It's all business, but when the business is art, people do care about such things.
May I ask, why does WMP suck at playback compared to Winamp and the others? Just that it's a bit of a resource hog?
May I suggest, that neither the SETI@Home, nor Chessbrain.net, is the best place where one can find a Mate.
I live in the US, and it's the first I've ever heard of it - and I was recently offered a job there to teach computers there, and my sister went to school there.
Not sure about the UK (which of course has closer ties to India), but moving to India would be like moving to Samoa for most people - they wouldn't really consider it, and don't have any impression about how hard or not it is to work there. I don't know how that gets elevated to "myth."
You have to drive to the video store and back to drop off the DVD. The environment isn't winning a round when you burn half a gallon of gas to return your DVD.
The first version of the IBM PC was introduced in August 1981. Apple responded by running an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." Even though he was usually tight with money, Steve Jobs allowed the Mac team to buy an early unit to dissect and evaluate. The day it became available, we ran to the store and purchased one to take back to the lab.
Needless to say, we were not very impressed with it. From the perspective of the Macintosh that we were already in the midst of bringing to life, it seemed like ancient history the day it came out. There was little, if any, Woz-like cleverness in the hardware design, using dozens of extraneous chips without having any cool features. The 8088 was a decent processor compared to the 6502, but it paled next to the 68000 we were using in the Mac.
But the most clunky part of the system was the software. MS-DOS seemed like a clone of an earlier system, CP/M, and even the demo programs lacked flair. It came with some games written in BASIC that were especially embarrassing.
The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called "Donkey". The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered "road", and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn't hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.
We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.
Macs are so much better than PCs. That's because Macs are for an elite cadre of artists and creative people.
Wind0wz is sux0rs!!!
Natalie Portman is Soviet Russia!!!
Wow, at those prices it's surprising that Element Computers (manufacturer of the ubiquitous Plutonium 1000 computer) can maintain their dominant position in the computer market.
You might find this - Bill Gates never made such a claim.
It's easy to be negative about Mars, in the wake of Bush announcing a program to use Apollo-type rockets to put men on Mars. It's not "great science," - in fact, it's diverting money from legitimate scientific programs. A greater knowledge of physics is more vital to any future space exploration, than using proven 60's tech to get a good photo op. on Mars.
N-E-K-O??? That's a funny way to spell "cocaine."
I think your reasoning is too inspired by science-fiction. With current technologies, space-mining is impractically expensive, even if Mars was made purely of refined cocaine. Also, with current technologies, there's no way a Martian space colony could be made self-sufficient.
In addition, I don't think the answers to these problems lie in refining the Apollo program. An exotic new form of propulsion would be needed, as would an exotic new method of generating large amounts of electricity. Using rockets to send people to Mars would make good propoganda, but it isn't going to help in these more practical concerns.
Currently, in its 4th week in the theatres, "Kal Ho Naa Ho" is #31 in the US box office (comparable to "Timeline, which is #29 after 4 weeks). It's listed as playing at 37 U.S. theaters ("Timeline" is listed as being in 620 theaters) - which implies that the theaters that do exist are quite heavily used.
Any Indian area will have numberous stores renting out Bollywood videos and DVD's.
There are numerous U.S. websites which sell Indian DVDs.
Netflix and Greencine both rent out sizeable Bollywood DVD collections.
Okies shouldn't make presumptions about cosmopolitan areas.
Many of these movies can be rented from NetFlix of the aforementioned Greencine. Check it out!
I love Bollywood movies, but they're probably not for the typical slashdot crowd. They're often based around a love story, their plot is often an excuse for lengthy expositions (running times commonly reach 3 and a half hours), they're firmly rooted in Indian culture, and there's no sense of irony or detached cool endemic to Western or Chinese movies.
Still I think Bollywood, along with Korean films, are currently the most interesting alternative to US movies.
Your arguments apply equally well to George Lucas, who with his new "Star Wars" trilogy is making three long movies, with huge special effects budgets, and unprecedented use of CGI. Plus, the theme music is great!
However, popcorn movies don't get the awards. The first two Lord of the Rings movies are grand, but they're brainless action movies in a fantasy setting. They're getting good money in return (I'm sure Peter Jackson won't complain) but they're disposable entertainment in the manner of "Independence Day" or "Terminator 3."
For all the "Morocco has lots of terrorism" posts such as yours, I haven't seen one which mentions that Spain has a history much more tainted by terrorism and repressive governments than Morocco - mostly revolving around the struggles and subsequent political supression of sometimes-violent Basque separatists, by the far-right government (and before that, Franco's). A little more information can be found at this site.
If Penny Arcade really feels in a generous holiday spirit, they'd quit posting their horrid comics at us. I go along with Jeff K on this.
If our culture is really totally unrelated to our actions, why do governments (and companies) even bother with PR & propoganda? Obviously there isn't a 100% correlation between violence and our culture. But just as obviously, there is a relation. A lot of people got lynched after "Birth of a Nation."
1. Elf
2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
3. Matrix: Revolutions
4. Brother Bear
5. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
6. Love Actually
7. Scary Movie 3
8. Radio
9. Tupac: Resurrection
10. Mystic River
Some of the best movies out there are Chinese. Check out Wong Kar Wai's movies, Jet Li's movies, Sammi Cheng's movies - different genres but great shit. In addition, Chinese audiences are more open to foreign movies than Americans - VCD shops will sell top American, Korean, and Japanese stuff as well.