Exact same situation happened to me, hydroplaning on an interstate.
I'd also like to claim that everything I needed to know in life about economics, competition, time management, and human behavior... I learned from M.U.L.E.; but that game rightly deserves its own topic.
If Best Buy's display* were all one had to go on, one might be inclined to wonder aloud about what the big deal is with this newfangled high def that everyone's talking about.
Maybe my BB was an exception, but their big screen TV displays were excellent. They had a demo running on Blu-ray on most of the screens, with frequent comparisons between regular and blu-ray picture quality, and even the difference between 720, 1080i, and 1080p.
I also went to Circuit City at the time, which didn't have the demo but was running Transformers in Blu-ray across all the TVs, which made for an easy picture quality comparison between the 2 models I was considering. Plus more of their TVs were at eye level, so I didn't have to crane my neck to see certain models 15 feet above me like at BB.
It's just too bad their prices weren't as good as their store displays, but therein lies a whole macroeconomic story beyond the scope of this post.
I don't know about best-buy's version of this, but in general I'd go for it. Depending on the model, a lot of the adjustments aren't even exposed through the menu system, and the test pattern generators I've seen for HD are stupidly expensive. (stupid, because with HDMI, every player should be able to push a perfect test pattern off a cheap mass-produced BD).
Store-bought configuration? And you're suggesting that on Slashdot?!? Sacrilege!
Besides which, I had already researched all the individual settings on my particular TV, and spent 30 min doing it myself on a Saturday using a handful of my own DVDs for calibration. Turned out just fine and I saved $100.
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan.
Hobbes wasn't making alarmist predictions or forecasts. He was explaining the utility of the sovereign state by comparing life under civil authority to life without any government. The "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was used to describe the lives of people living in a natural state of anarchy, without a governing social structure. Mankind started in the "war of all against all", and through social contract was constantly improving his lot. (Obligatory Wikipedia link, since I'm too lazy to fully source it)
Furthermore, Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the context of the great political upheaval around the English Civil War. Although there were competing sides claiming legitimacy of government, Leviathan wasn't a prediction of ultimate doom, it was an argument against the frequent revolutions and uprisings that were relatively in common in Europe at the time. Contemporarily, Hobbes wasn't being a doomsday alarmist.
So unless you feel all governments everywhere are on the brink of collapse, or the natural right of rebellion is due for a 100% global re-assertion, I think you can remove Hobbes from your list of failed prognosticators.
It would also allow consumers with expired coupons, available from the government to offset the cost of a $40 converter box, to request new coupons.
Wait a second... why wouldn't you print all such coupons to expire the day after the planned switchover? What possible reason is there to have them expire early?
Vis-à-vis Wal-Mart, Best Buy can't really compete on price, but its value-added service offerings -- professional home installation of flat-screen TVs, for instance -- can be a significant differentiator, especially considering the coming digital TV transition.
Well OK, but will these services be available for linking/displaying/reviews through this API? Will anyone actually link directly to these services, even if they are available?
I'm sure there will be a hard upsell attempt once the customer clicks to buy the actual product, but how will they translate this services "advantage" into inducing people to link Best Buy products instead of the same product through, say, Amazon?
When I went in to Best Buy to look at plasma TV's (nothing on the web beats a real-world viewing of a potential purchase), the salespeople were pitching all kinds of installation, delivery, warranties, and even an in-room color setting tuning. Amazon, where I eventually bought the TV from, had a handful of additional services, but got the purchase because they were $400 cheaper.
How will directly linking to a virtual pitch of the same "differentiators" change decisions like mine?
Again, please inform us where it ONLY applies to citizens?
I always thought that was covered pretty handily at the very beginning:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union...
But let's turn it around. So you think that the various rights in the Constitution apply to everyone? Well, we have a very famous Second Amendment over here, which (almost) absolutely guarantees the right to carry firearms. Try exercising that right as a non-citizen over to the UK or Japan or various other countries. How nicely do you think that will work out for ya?
They would also prevent the sale of any new technology if it were very inefficient, but that is a good thing surely?
Surely not. How efficient were automobiles when they first rolled off the block ~100 years ago? How efficient was the first computer display monitor? How efficient was Edison's light bulb?
Looks all good to me.... another "EU bans xxxxx" which turns out a) they are not and b) it is a sensible decision....
Banning should only happened when there is a demonstrable harm. "Driving other people's prices up" is a natural function of supply and demand, not an evil force that necessitates government intervention. Why should the market constrict to fit energy infrastructure, instead of forcing the expansion of the demonstably insufficient existing capacity?
If the EU doesn't like its inability to scale with growing power demands, and will just ban new things that force it beyond status quo, then they should explicitly state its intention to halt progress of all kinds instead of doing piecemeal bans.
So... you're saying Slashdot grew up a bit? Started thinking beyond the classic engineer's trap of shouting "everything is POSSIBLE" while ignoring the "is it plausible" question?
There might still be tigers. Just because YOU can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there. Just that they haven't gotten to you yet.
The analogy holds for Homeland Security debates, too.
And hell, for all you know, you might actually have a magic rock. But it keeps poisonous cobras away instead. If you don't know all the possibilities, then who are you to say?
It's about time CN got another good anime series on. Can't go much better than Trigun, considering its target audience.
Though after watching the Japanese subbed version, I think it'll lose a bit. . .
Ah, quite possibly my favorite arcade game ever. I used to go to arcades solely to play S.T.U.N. Runner, blow 10 bucks at a time on it and not play anything else.
I'm just glad they never tried to remake it or kill it through lame sequels. I know that with today's hardware it would be easy to recreate it with ultra-smooth polygons and stupidly fast speeds, but I doubt it would be the same. There are just some games that achieve perfection in their first run out, and it can never be repeated; any "update", no matter how much you'd like to see one, would be blasphemy. (My list of these games includes S.T.U.N. Runner, Blackthorne, and Ehrgeiz, all of which I'd love more of, but I know they wouldn't get it right.)
I doubt there will be any extra profits floating around as a result of this deal. Even though using Linux reduces the software cost to $0, other costs rise to make it a 0-sum game - training costs for employees, extra tech support costs, the actual "downtime" cost of installing Linux on so many machines, etc. In economics, these things are called switching costs, and they're the reason companies usually don't want to commit to major OS changes; if Linux was truly free for businesses, i.e. "economically free", everyone would use it.
Although Telstra will proably realize some small long term gains from the switch, since they won't be buying any more MS OS upgrades, these gains are opportunity cost profits, and they're small enough to be relatively insignificant to such a large company. They won't show up on the bottom line (read: nothing trickles back to consumers or shareholders).
Sure that may be a secure setup, but how are you going to force 1000+ (estimated) users to download SP3 and buy McAfee 7.0? I seriously doubt too many college users have the savy to know they need these additional things. Ain't gonna happen.
Since the Internet was designed to be a communications system that would stay up no matter how much of it went down, it will be interesting to see what happens if/when a good chunk of it does go down. Of course no one wants to believe that anything will happen to the existing system (I call this "social inertia" - people are resistant to ideas that radically change the world as they know it), so CNN's tech analysts may just be in denial.
And naturally, ANY drop in service will be hyped up and broadcast all over the media as "the result of corporate greed". . . completely ignoring the fact that only a small part of a fraction of a percent of the Net went down. Because apparently, the American media doesn't know that there are Internet users outside the US. ..
Isn't the general idea of any career to start at the bottom and work your way up? In coding, you start as a basic coder, and work all the way up to. . . Senior Programmer. Anything beyond that involves management. If you view management as evil, then you've locked yourself into a dead end; but personally, I'd rather more programmers went into management - I'd literally take a pay cut to work under management composed entirely of senior/ace/older programmers.
So maybe "pure" coding is slightly dead-endish as a career. But if/when your skills start to become obsolete, or you're old enough to reminisce about "yon good 'ole days" to the 19 yr. old newbies, you may want to consider shooting for IT head, CIO or something. Don't give up coding, necessarily - just help get the Pointy Haired Bosses out of there. ..
Just idly wondering, if they/some other companies posted some of their AI research online (not anything proprietary), and let the world take a look at it and comment, would it result in better AI development? Or just a million people saying "Duh, I don't think like that!" a million different times?
How about this: post a "quick reaction" test, where you have to read the question and reply within 5-10 seconds. Since we don't know how humans think, we could at least pool together the end-results of a million people's first thoughts on certain subjects/arrangements/pattern learning/etc. and mine the data for any interesting trends. Perhaps having such a large sample would help in certain aspects of AI research?
Agreed - his replacement comes close to ruining the legal side of show for me.
And did you see the episode when he "left"? No big important/exciting episode for Schiff (one of my favorites is the one where Hennessey's character dies; incredibly well written and directed), just Giuliani coming in and mumbling that Schiff, for whatever reason, decided to head up a JCC. ???
(For the record, McCoy's flawed hero is way better than Stone's moral outrage.)
"If many people in an economy steal it, yes it does. Does anyone remember that economies are to serve the interests of a society? What good does it do to hold a society hostage to the interests of an economy?"
Just a note, economies aren't meant to serve the interests of society; they simply evolve under a set of rules/regulations imposed on them by the participants. The exception to this is when economies are designed by Man (in the form of some kind of powerful government) to accomplish some outside goal - equality, Socialism, absolute State power, etc. And historically, these kind of structured economies fail miserably.
Some basic economic theory: supply meets demand at the "equilibrium price". But if the price imposed by Suppliers is forced above the equilibrium price, a Black Market will form. Actually, this happens anytime Demand exceeds Supply for a certain price point, but the black market tends to form only when there is an excessively large demand for the product over the amount suppliers are willing at that price.
Hence the Napster situation - people were willing to pay some lower price for an increased selection of songs; if they only like 1 song off an album, it's likely they'd pay something like $0.50 to $1.00 for that one song, rather than $15 for a CD that has another 10 songs they don't want. However, no one was supplying this "1 song for $1" demand segment; the music monopoly refused to allow it. Then Napster came along, letting you "buy" whatever single song you want for $0.00; and since Napster's illegal "price" was closer to what people would be willing to pay for a song than the legal alternative of $15, Napster became the black market for music.
(I personally believe that if Napster had implemented a $0.50 per-download charge from the start, then roughly the same revolution would have happened. Maybe not on the quite the same scale, since there's more demand between $0 and $0.50, but definitely a huge impact.)
There was excessive demand for a product. The industry didn't supply that demand. A black market formed. Simple high school level economics. Anyone in the music industry who was taken by surprise either failed some important courses, or is a first class idiot.
Sad to see someone taking advantage of/violating the GPL, especially in a project with such high visibility. NOT the exposure open source software needs at this point in its life.
Morpheus programmers, show some decency and give credit, or write your own code - don't go messing around with code someone else wrote for everyone's benefit.
DVDs are supposed to have all the stuff that VHS does not; in other words, everything you can't experience by just watching the movie alone.
In this vein of thought, if Scott is going to do a re-release of Blade Runner, it should be some kind of mega consolidation, with everything you could possible want for BR: audio tracks with Deckard's voice-over AND without; deleted scenes, commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, etc.
If Ridley Scott is releasing a new DVD, it had better be because he wants to include/improve all these things, not just because he feels "some scenes are too long" and wants to second-guess a great movie 20 years later. Personally, I love BR, and I like the scenes at their current pacing (without the voice-over). And no amount of promotion is going to make me buy a DVD just to see some random artistic air-brushing without the previously mentioned additional features.
But then again, some people will buy just about anything, as long as it has a sticker that says "NEW!!!!" on it. ..
It's not uncommon for publishers to release sequels of old games long after the fact - a personal favorite of mine was the orginal System Shock; I was fortunate enough to buy the enhanced version when it first came out, and it's still in my top 5 list of games. SS has a devoted fan following online, who occassionally provide.zip files of the hard-to-find CD version to any one who asks - simply out of love for the game.
Eventually, the publisher answered years of petitions for a sequel, and released SS2 - another incredible game, which came out against Half-Life and other insanely popular games, hurting its sales a good bit. Not to mention less than stellar advertising. HOWEVER. ..
The longtime fans of SS1 started telling everyone they knew to buy the sequel. They distributed copies of the original to everyone who would take it, and sales of SS2 began to pick up. Unfortunately, the publisher had already gone out of business due to some other problems, so the benefits of the abandonware upswell were rather lost.
Companies should be glad people are picking up their old games that aren't making them money any more. Worst case scenario, it's retroactively establishing their reputation for good, solid games; at best, it's giving them an increased fan base for possible sequels.
So no, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong for leeching Gauntlet II or Blackthorne, since I can't purchase them directly from their publishers. I'm showing my support for them, and their sequels should they be ever be released. If you can't support them with money via direct purchases, abadonware is your only choice.
>The ZoneAlarm warning is probably reporting >Media Player downloading the CD data from >Gracenote or whoever.
Nope, I've checked my logs on the few times I've used Media Player. It is making OUTBOUND connections, and once I tracked the request to a Microsoft server.
And Microsoft has acknowledged that Media Player does it, they simply deny they're using the info for marketing or selling it. Not yet, at least. ..
I hate to use a terrorism analogy, but this is classic sleeper strategy: join a community, establish your reputation, and after a while you become immune from suspicion simply because people "know you". eBay users know to be suspicious of people with 0 feedback, and they're told by eBay management that people with high (~1000) feedback are "reliable".
If you're considering making a significant purchase over the Net, think about who you're dealing with. Even if they do have thousands of people shouting their praises in positive feedback, you should ask yourself - how much can you really trust an abstract online handle?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, /. is about as good a hotbed of OSS nerds, devs, and evangelists as you'll ever find. How about it, then? Did they succeed?
Anyone here have more respect for Sun now that they own the MySQL brand?
I'd also like to claim that everything I needed to know in life about economics, competition, time management, and human behavior... I learned from M.U.L.E.; but that game rightly deserves its own topic.
If Best Buy's display* were all one had to go on, one might be inclined to wonder aloud about what the big deal is with this newfangled high def that everyone's talking about.
Maybe my BB was an exception, but their big screen TV displays were excellent. They had a demo running on Blu-ray on most of the screens, with frequent comparisons between regular and blu-ray picture quality, and even the difference between 720, 1080i, and 1080p.
I also went to Circuit City at the time, which didn't have the demo but was running Transformers in Blu-ray across all the TVs, which made for an easy picture quality comparison between the 2 models I was considering. Plus more of their TVs were at eye level, so I didn't have to crane my neck to see certain models 15 feet above me like at BB.
It's just too bad their prices weren't as good as their store displays, but therein lies a whole macroeconomic story beyond the scope of this post.
I don't know about best-buy's version of this, but in general I'd go for it. Depending on the model, a lot of the adjustments aren't even exposed through the menu system, and the test pattern generators I've seen for HD are stupidly expensive. (stupid, because with HDMI, every player should be able to push a perfect test pattern off a cheap mass-produced BD).
Store-bought configuration? And you're suggesting that on Slashdot?!? Sacrilege!
Besides which, I had already researched all the individual settings on my particular TV, and spent 30 min doing it myself on a Saturday using a handful of my own DVDs for calibration. Turned out just fine and I saved $100.
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan.
Hobbes wasn't making alarmist predictions or forecasts. He was explaining the utility of the sovereign state by comparing life under civil authority to life without any government. The "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was used to describe the lives of people living in a natural state of anarchy, without a governing social structure. Mankind started in the "war of all against all", and through social contract was constantly improving his lot. (Obligatory Wikipedia link, since I'm too lazy to fully source it)
Furthermore, Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the context of the great political upheaval around the English Civil War. Although there were competing sides claiming legitimacy of government, Leviathan wasn't a prediction of ultimate doom, it was an argument against the frequent revolutions and uprisings that were relatively in common in Europe at the time. Contemporarily, Hobbes wasn't being a doomsday alarmist.
So unless you feel all governments everywhere are on the brink of collapse, or the natural right of rebellion is due for a 100% global re-assertion, I think you can remove Hobbes from your list of failed prognosticators.
It would also allow consumers with expired coupons, available from the government to offset the cost of a $40 converter box, to request new coupons.
Wait a second... why wouldn't you print all such coupons to expire the day after the planned switchover? What possible reason is there to have them expire early?
Vis-à-vis Wal-Mart, Best Buy can't really compete on price, but its value-added service offerings -- professional home installation of flat-screen TVs, for instance -- can be a significant differentiator, especially considering the coming digital TV transition.
Well OK, but will these services be available for linking/displaying/reviews through this API? Will anyone actually link directly to these services, even if they are available?
I'm sure there will be a hard upsell attempt once the customer clicks to buy the actual product, but how will they translate this services "advantage" into inducing people to link Best Buy products instead of the same product through, say, Amazon?
When I went in to Best Buy to look at plasma TV's (nothing on the web beats a real-world viewing of a potential purchase), the salespeople were pitching all kinds of installation, delivery, warranties, and even an in-room color setting tuning. Amazon, where I eventually bought the TV from, had a handful of additional services, but got the purchase because they were $400 cheaper.
How will directly linking to a virtual pitch of the same "differentiators" change decisions like mine?
Again, please inform us where it ONLY applies to citizens?
I always thought that was covered pretty handily at the very beginning:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union...
But let's turn it around. So you think that the various rights in the Constitution apply to everyone? Well, we have a very famous Second Amendment over here, which (almost) absolutely guarantees the right to carry firearms. Try exercising that right as a non-citizen over to the UK or Japan or various other countries. How nicely do you think that will work out for ya?
Surely not. How efficient were automobiles when they first rolled off the block ~100 years ago? How efficient was the first computer display monitor? How efficient was Edison's light bulb?
Banning should only happened when there is a demonstrable harm. "Driving other people's prices up" is a natural function of supply and demand, not an evil force that necessitates government intervention. Why should the market constrict to fit energy infrastructure, instead of forcing the expansion of the demonstably insufficient existing capacity?
If the EU doesn't like its inability to scale with growing power demands, and will just ban new things that force it beyond status quo, then they should explicitly state its intention to halt progress of all kinds instead of doing piecemeal bans.
The media has been doing and wonderful job of either making Kucinich look like a nutcase
How, exactly? By quoting him and examining his record/past statements? How DARE they!
So... you're saying Slashdot grew up a bit? Started thinking beyond the classic engineer's trap of shouting "everything is POSSIBLE" while ignoring the "is it plausible" question?
Perish the thought.
There might still be tigers. Just because YOU can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there. Just that they haven't gotten to you yet.
The analogy holds for Homeland Security debates, too.
And hell, for all you know, you might actually have a magic rock. But it keeps poisonous cobras away instead. If you don't know all the possibilities, then who are you to say?
It's about time CN got another good anime series on. Can't go much better than Trigun, considering its target audience. Though after watching the Japanese subbed version, I think it'll lose a bit. . .
Ah, quite possibly my favorite arcade game ever. I used to go to arcades solely to play S.T.U.N. Runner, blow 10 bucks at a time on it and not play anything else.
.
I'm just glad they never tried to remake it or kill it through lame sequels. I know that with today's hardware it would be easy to recreate it with ultra-smooth polygons and stupidly fast speeds, but I doubt it would be the same. There are just some games that achieve perfection in their first run out, and it can never be repeated; any "update", no matter how much you'd like to see one, would be blasphemy. (My list of these games includes S.T.U.N. Runner, Blackthorne, and Ehrgeiz, all of which I'd love more of, but I know they wouldn't get it right.)
Man, I feel old just thinking about that game. .
I doubt there will be any extra profits floating around as a result of this deal. Even though using Linux reduces the software cost to $0, other costs rise to make it a 0-sum game - training costs for employees, extra tech support costs, the actual "downtime" cost of installing Linux on so many machines, etc. In economics, these things are called switching costs, and they're the reason companies usually don't want to commit to major OS changes; if Linux was truly free for businesses, i.e. "economically free", everyone would use it.
Although Telstra will proably realize some small long term gains from the switch, since they won't be buying any more MS OS upgrades, these gains are opportunity cost profits, and they're small enough to be relatively insignificant to such a large company. They won't show up on the bottom line (read: nothing trickles back to consumers or shareholders).
Sure that may be a secure setup, but how are you going to force 1000+ (estimated) users to download SP3 and buy McAfee 7.0? I seriously doubt too many college users have the savy to know they need these additional things. Ain't gonna happen.
Since the Internet was designed to be a communications system that would stay up no matter how much of it went down, it will be interesting to see what happens if/when a good chunk of it does go down. Of course no one wants to believe that anything will happen to the existing system (I call this "social inertia" - people are resistant to ideas that radically change the world as they know it), so CNN's tech analysts may just be in denial.
.
And naturally, ANY drop in service will be hyped up and broadcast all over the media as "the result of corporate greed". . . completely ignoring the fact that only a small part of a fraction of a percent of the Net went down. Because apparently, the American media doesn't know that there are Internet users outside the US. .
Isn't the general idea of any career to start at the bottom and work your way up? In coding, you start as a basic coder, and work all the way up to. . . Senior Programmer. Anything beyond that involves management. If you view management as evil, then you've locked yourself into a dead end; but personally, I'd rather more programmers went into management - I'd literally take a pay cut to work under management composed entirely of senior/ace/older programmers.
.
So maybe "pure" coding is slightly dead-endish as a career. But if/when your skills start to become obsolete, or you're old enough to reminisce about "yon good 'ole days" to the 19 yr. old newbies, you may want to consider shooting for IT head, CIO or something. Don't give up coding, necessarily - just help get the Pointy Haired Bosses out of there. .
Just idly wondering, if they/some other companies posted some of their AI research online (not anything proprietary), and let the world take a look at it and comment, would it result in better AI development? Or just a million people saying "Duh, I don't think like that!" a million different times?
How about this: post a "quick reaction" test, where you have to read the question and reply within 5-10 seconds. Since we don't know how humans think, we could at least pool together the end-results of a million people's first thoughts on certain subjects/arrangements/pattern learning/etc. and mine the data for any interesting trends. Perhaps having such a large sample would help in certain aspects of AI research?
Agreed - his replacement comes close to ruining the legal side of show for me.
And did you see the episode when he "left"? No big important/exciting episode for Schiff (one of my favorites is the one where Hennessey's character dies; incredibly well written and directed), just Giuliani coming in and mumbling that Schiff, for whatever reason, decided to head up a JCC. ???
(For the record, McCoy's flawed hero is way better than Stone's moral outrage.)
"If many people in an economy steal it, yes it does. Does anyone remember that economies are to serve the interests of a society? What good does it do to hold a society hostage to the interests of an economy?"
Just a note, economies aren't meant to serve the interests of society; they simply evolve under a set of rules/regulations imposed on them by the participants. The exception to this is when economies are designed by Man (in the form of some kind of powerful government) to accomplish some outside goal - equality, Socialism, absolute State power, etc. And historically, these kind of structured economies fail miserably.
Some basic economic theory: supply meets demand at the "equilibrium price". But if the price imposed by Suppliers is forced above the equilibrium price, a Black Market will form. Actually, this happens anytime Demand exceeds Supply for a certain price point, but the black market tends to form only when there is an excessively large demand for the product over the amount suppliers are willing at that price.
Hence the Napster situation - people were willing to pay some lower price for an increased selection of songs; if they only like 1 song off an album, it's likely they'd pay something like $0.50 to $1.00 for that one song, rather than $15 for a CD that has another 10 songs they don't want. However, no one was supplying this "1 song for $1" demand segment; the music monopoly refused to allow it. Then Napster came along, letting you "buy" whatever single song you want for $0.00; and since Napster's illegal "price" was closer to what people would be willing to pay for a song than the legal alternative of $15, Napster became the black market for music.
(I personally believe that if Napster had implemented a $0.50 per-download charge from the start, then roughly the same revolution would have happened. Maybe not on the quite the same scale, since there's more demand between $0 and $0.50, but definitely a huge impact.)
There was excessive demand for a product. The industry didn't supply that demand. A black market formed. Simple high school level economics. Anyone in the music industry who was taken by surprise either failed some important courses, or is a first class idiot.
Sad to see someone taking advantage of/violating the GPL, especially in a project with such high visibility. NOT the exposure open source software needs at this point in its life.
Morpheus programmers, show some decency and give credit, or write your own code - don't go messing around with code someone else wrote for everyone's benefit.
DVDs are supposed to have all the stuff that VHS does not; in other words, everything you can't experience by just watching the movie alone.
.
In this vein of thought, if Scott is going to do a re-release of Blade Runner, it should be some kind of mega consolidation, with everything you could possible want for BR: audio tracks with Deckard's voice-over AND without; deleted scenes, commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, etc.
If Ridley Scott is releasing a new DVD, it had better be because he wants to include/improve all these things, not just because he feels "some scenes are too long" and wants to second-guess a great movie 20 years later. Personally, I love BR, and I like the scenes at their current pacing (without the voice-over). And no amount of promotion is going to make me buy a DVD just to see some random artistic air-brushing without the previously mentioned additional features.
But then again, some people will buy just about anything, as long as it has a sticker that says "NEW!!!!" on it. .
It's not uncommon for publishers to release sequels of old games long after the fact - a personal favorite of mine was the orginal System Shock; I was fortunate enough to buy the enhanced version when it first came out, and it's still in my top 5 list of games. SS has a devoted fan following online, who occassionally provide .zip files of the hard-to-find CD version to any one who asks - simply out of love for the game.
.
Eventually, the publisher answered years of petitions for a sequel, and released SS2 - another incredible game, which came out against Half-Life and other insanely popular games, hurting its sales a good bit. Not to mention less than stellar advertising. HOWEVER. .
The longtime fans of SS1 started telling everyone they knew to buy the sequel. They distributed copies of the original to everyone who would take it, and sales of SS2 began to pick up. Unfortunately, the publisher had already gone out of business due to some other problems, so the benefits of the abandonware upswell were rather lost.
Companies should be glad people are picking up their old games that aren't making them money any more. Worst case scenario, it's retroactively establishing their reputation for good, solid games; at best, it's giving them an increased fan base for possible sequels.
So no, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong for leeching Gauntlet II or Blackthorne, since I can't purchase them directly from their publishers. I'm showing my support for them, and their sequels should they be ever be released. If you can't support them with money via direct purchases, abadonware is your only choice.
>The ZoneAlarm warning is probably reporting
.
>Media Player downloading the CD data from
>Gracenote or whoever.
Nope, I've checked my logs on the few times I've used Media Player. It is making OUTBOUND connections, and once I tracked the request to a Microsoft server.
And Microsoft has acknowledged that Media Player does it, they simply deny they're using the info for marketing or selling it. Not yet, at least. .
Man, now I wish I had kept those logs.
I hate to use a terrorism analogy, but this is classic sleeper strategy: join a community, establish your reputation, and after a while you become immune from suspicion simply because people "know you". eBay users know to be suspicious of people with 0 feedback, and they're told by eBay management that people with high (~1000) feedback are "reliable".
If you're considering making a significant purchase over the Net, think about who you're dealing with. Even if they do have thousands of people shouting their praises in positive feedback, you should ask yourself - how much can you really trust an abstract online handle?