Besides the insane rants by the staff of "Aint it cool news," I have yet to meet anyone who has seen the new Battlestar series who was "Jizzing" on themselves about how great it is. American Sci-Fi is absolutely horrible these days, bar none and Sci-Fi channel is flooding the market with even more crappieness.
Why does American Sci-Fi HAVE to always have incredibly good looking people that can only half-ass act? Why does there ALWAYS have to be romance involved between the main characters?
Everyone and their grandmother has been going on about "FireFly" and how great it was. Granted I have only seen a few episodes, and those were out of order, but what I saw never inticed me to continue.
Why does every series have to have supermodels as actors that look like they just stepped out of a salon?
Shame that Sci-Fi passed on the new Dr. Who, they are going to miss out on a goldmine.
"This constant ignorant whining of the "the UN is a worthless piece of garbage" kind, is getting on my nerves"
Yeah, tell that to the two million Christians that were brutally slaughtered -by hand- by the lovely, peace-loving muslim north in the Sudan: the U.N. Did nothing. Sure, they may have set up some standards of trade/deplomacy, FOURTY YEARS ago, but have remained constantly corrupt and useless since.
"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on 'Lord of the Rings,' " this lawyer said. "But there's a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it's still not enough for him."
I like how the author of the article uses anonymous sources to slam PJ without any merit. PJ not only made 1.5 Billion for New Line he finally made New Line a major player and he deserves every penny due.
"Yeah, and I'd like a toilet made out of solid gold." The Author of the article lives in a dreamland. Distributed computing on a gaming platform will never, ever, happen. Why? To create some program that would harness the power of a game system would be an incredible security risk for the manufacturers as any distributed processing program would have to access the core of game system. If such a program were to be made available the games systems would be totally hacked in an extremely short period of time. It makes no sense for the game system manufacturers to open their systems up for distributed processing when almost nobody would use it and it would only invite "dead sales" of their games systems by organizations, or individuals that have no interest in games and only want to set up a makeshift supercomputer.
A game system is for playing games, that's it. 99% of the persons buying a game system do not want to cure cancer with their game system, they want to blow things up and that's fine, that's what game systems are made for. All of the game companies are going to lose a lot of money on the hardware for several years and for the game companies to slit their own necks for a function that NOBODY will use, sans hackers, is INSANE.
Lasty, is SETI going to reimburse anyone for burning out their brand new PS3 or XBox 360 because the distributed processing software pushed the hardware a little too hard? What about the wear and tear on the components from running at 100% for 8 hours while the owner sleeps? The author of this article should work for spyware company with his comment "A better method of delivery to the consumer would be to build the client as an update to firmware." Translated: "A better method would to be to put the DC software automatically, or part of the EULA." Sounds like spyware to me. Also the whole article seems to be written so the author can sound like a pompass ass, "I would never use my game system to play games, pish, posh! I am curing cancer with my PS3, therefore I am better than you."
If the cure to Cancer is reliant on the buyers of videogame systems to burn out their systems "for the greater good" then I'm afraid we are all doomed.
All of the new console makers are going to be losing mega cash for each console sold, so why would they make any incentive for anyone to buy their consoles and use them as computers? The manufacturers lose money on the console and lose any possible revenue from game sales.
If the console manufacturers provide software that somehow taps the raw horsepower of the new consoles what would stop organizations, legal or not, from buying large quantities of game systems just to make a supercomputer for very cheap? Fuck that.
If I had not preordered my PS2 a year in advance I would have had to wait NINE months to be able to get one in the states. The demand for the new systems is going to be even greater. The last thing consumers need to hear is that there is a shortage of their favorite game system because Nerd University bought 10,000 systems for their new supercomputer project.
Shared computing is all fine and good for PC/Mac users, but honestly, for a manufacturer to open the floodgates of their OS to satisfy the wants of.01% of the uber-nerd population is insanity.
One of the main reasons that we have cheap PC's can be traced back to the company "Emachines." God knows how many people bought an Emachines PC before they were bought by Dell and paid for their cheap PC with their hard earned cash, only for them to just plain die due to shitty-ass components. Emachines made HP and Compaq go "Oh shit, somebody finally figured us out; that it does not cost anything near the $3,000 we have been charging for a shitty-ass PC" Oh, and fuck Linux. If you hate Microsoft, just buy a Mactel now.:)
This Volcano story was on Fark yesterday, or even two days ago. I have noticed a trend over the past two years of sluggish posting of cool stories on/. I don't know what the problem is, and I know for certain this story was submitted to/. immediately after it became news, so why the delay?
I think Seumas has overestimated the number of "code-monkeys" out there that have the talent to make "videogames." Sure an Pakistani programmer could probably make a good spreadsheet/database program, but would he be able to make a good videogame, let alone a commercial videogame? Not it a million years.
Hollywood is has finally woken up and realized that the videogame industry is almost as big as them, and will surpass them very soon and they want to apply their flawed, old, outdated, business model to the game industry and it simply won't stick.
So the fuck what if we can't use Wil Wheaton's awesome voice over talent anymore? There are a million and one more talents actors out there that would kill for any opportunity to make a buck and get noticed.
Patrick Stewart is in the new morrowind game, and that's great, but there are a lot of talented actors out there from the stage and screen who could have filled the same shoes. I am not knocking voice over actors; they truly have talent, but they should not be compensated more than the poor bastards working 60 hour weeks to make the game in the first place.
In five years I can only assume that this arguement will be moot as games by then will have budgets on the line with movies anyway.
I bought a high resolution projector for $1200 and I have my computer AND game systems hooked up to it. Half-Life 2 looks fantastic on a 10ft wide screen in HD. Don't think that "HD" monitors/projectors are going to stay expensive. Right now you can buy a 34 inch HD widescreen set at Wal-Mart for less than $700. And before you complaint that is still too much money, the top of the line Sony WEGA series, non-HD, in a 27 inch model would have set you back close to the same amount just less than seven years ago.
Gee, Bush just gave them and their buddies $50 million dollars FOR NOTHING. "Hi, thanks for being a terrorist organization, blowing up babies, here's $50 Million dollars." Fuck piracy.
Every few months or so a "story" pops up that Fox is thinking about renewing Futurama or doing the straight to dvd thing. This is usually drummed up by some Futurama Fan site that is Jealous of Family Guy's success and thinks that because "crappy Family Guy" was renewed that Futurama should be renewed also. Discounting the fact that Family Guy is one of highest rated shows on Adult Swim and the second highest selling dvd-t.v. show of all time.
Problem is, Fox does NOT OWN FUTURAMA, Matt Groining does. The main reason Fox let Futurama die in the firtt place is because of that very reason. Dvd sales of Futurama have not been a barn burner and given the very high cost of producing a Futurama episode I doubt even if Cartoon Network picked up some of the bill it would even be profitable.
Everyone seems to forget that Fox was contractually obligated to the four seasons that aired, and sneakily pre-empted Futurama so that there would be a backlog of episodes so they could tell M.G. "Sorry Matt, there is a backlog of episodes, so we don't need a fifth season," without upsetting the Goose that laid the Golden egg (Simpsons being that egg).
The ONLY way Futurama would see the light of day is if M.G. paid for it himself. End of Story.
Every showing (on three screens) at my local theater is sold out till next week. That's 800 people per showing. This is the last Star Wars ever, people want to see it in the theater, not a crappy xvid file.
Well, there already was a company that up until last year was making vitual pinball machine games with a large flat panel monitor mounted vertically. It failed and now the company has retrofitted the machines to play other games.
The only way pinball would work, outside a real pinball machine, is to have spot on physics and force feedback to match and to be almost holographic. Pinball is a visceral experience, you hit the ball and it goes where you hit it. No computers to cheat you of that.
What's worse is that the stupid producer of Dr. Who thought it would be so cool to blow up the Doctor's homeworld of Gallifrey in episode 2 of the new season, so the doctor has no real way getting more regenerations. They should just say that there were complications with the doctor's ninth regeneration and have Tennant and Ecclastion share the title of the ninth doctor.
Last year Best Buy also came to the conclusion that their Reward Zone members actually liked getting less "rewards" and cut the reward program back so it now takes twice as many points to get rewards as it did before.
Sigh, almost every major local phone service provider is required to keep every hardline connected capable of dialing 911, even if normal service has been disconnected.
I know I sound like the ultimate troll, but this guy's rocket "empire" was built via paypal's "dirty" years, when paypal froze (i.e. stole money) accounts for no reason to make it seem like they had more money on hand to lure poetential investors. Also don't forget the money laundering and federal investigations which Ebay had to buy themselves out of.
Paypal ruined a lot of honest people's lives during the time period when this guy was in charge.
Thermal Cd/Dvd printers have been around forever and since this new device uses specially coated discs, you might as well just buy an Epson Printer (with dvd tray) and Inkjet printable discs. You get a printer that can print cds/dvds and (gasp) can print on regular paper. This for the same price as one of these new "laser" burners.
I was not making fun of the phishing scams, I was making fun of the real horrorshow that paypal is and the fact that they have ruined countless businesses because of overzealous "fraud" screening.
What is going to be funny is when Apple gets the standard Paypal "HA,HA, we just suspended your account and hijacked your money for six months." -form letter that paypal seems to send to just about everyone these days.
"Dear Paypal user APPLEITUNES INC.
We have noticed some unusual activity regarding your paypal account. For your saftey, we have limited your account access. To restore access, please complete checklist below and your account will be reviewed in 7-30 business days, when we will simply ask you for more extremely personal info, even though we have already made the decision to limit your account access indefinately, even though you have done nothing wrong.
Please complete the following steps to restore access:
1. Provide proof of inventory and invoices for all 1.2 million songs you provide.
2. Provide the names and phone numbers of all companies that provide you with your 'inventory'
3. Provide us with your Social Security number.
4. Provide us with copies of your utility bills at 101 Apple Ln.
5. Provide us with copies of your bank statements for the past year.
6. Change your password and password hints
7. Confirm your credit card
8. Confirm your bank account
Once this checklist is complete, we will still ask you for the same info over and over again, with no valid reason, and we will hold all funds in your paypal account for 180 days and then release them to you.
Thanks for choosing Paypal Sincerely Mark Paypal "Investigations"
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the insane rants by the staff of "Aint it cool news," I have yet to meet anyone who has seen the new Battlestar series who was "Jizzing" on themselves about how great it is. American Sci-Fi is absolutely horrible these days, bar none and Sci-Fi channel is flooding the market with even more crappieness. Why does American Sci-Fi HAVE to always have incredibly good looking people that can only half-ass act? Why does there ALWAYS have to be romance involved between the main characters? Everyone and their grandmother has been going on about "FireFly" and how great it was. Granted I have only seen a few episodes, and those were out of order, but what I saw never inticed me to continue. Why does every series have to have supermodels as actors that look like they just stepped out of a salon? Shame that Sci-Fi passed on the new Dr. Who, they are going to miss out on a goldmine.
"This constant ignorant whining of the "the UN is a worthless piece of garbage" kind, is getting on my nerves" Yeah, tell that to the two million Christians that were brutally slaughtered -by hand- by the lovely, peace-loving muslim north in the Sudan: the U.N. Did nothing. Sure, they may have set up some standards of trade/deplomacy, FOURTY YEARS ago, but have remained constantly corrupt and useless since.
"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on 'Lord of the Rings,' " this lawyer said. "But there's a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it's still not enough for him."
I like how the author of the article uses anonymous sources to slam PJ without any merit. PJ not only made 1.5 Billion for New Line he finally made New Line a major player and he deserves every penny due.
"Yeah, and I'd like a toilet made out of solid gold." The Author of the article lives in a dreamland. Distributed computing on a gaming platform will never, ever, happen. Why? To create some program that would harness the power of a game system would be an incredible security risk for the manufacturers as any distributed processing program would have to access the core of game system. If such a program were to be made available the games systems would be totally hacked in an extremely short period of time. It makes no sense for the game system manufacturers to open their systems up for distributed processing when almost nobody would use it and it would only invite "dead sales" of their games systems by organizations, or individuals that have no interest in games and only want to set up a makeshift supercomputer. A game system is for playing games, that's it. 99% of the persons buying a game system do not want to cure cancer with their game system, they want to blow things up and that's fine, that's what game systems are made for. All of the game companies are going to lose a lot of money on the hardware for several years and for the game companies to slit their own necks for a function that NOBODY will use, sans hackers, is INSANE. Lasty, is SETI going to reimburse anyone for burning out their brand new PS3 or XBox 360 because the distributed processing software pushed the hardware a little too hard? What about the wear and tear on the components from running at 100% for 8 hours while the owner sleeps? The author of this article should work for spyware company with his comment "A better method of delivery to the consumer would be to build the client as an update to firmware." Translated: "A better method would to be to put the DC software automatically, or part of the EULA." Sounds like spyware to me. Also the whole article seems to be written so the author can sound like a pompass ass, "I would never use my game system to play games, pish, posh! I am curing cancer with my PS3, therefore I am better than you." If the cure to Cancer is reliant on the buyers of videogame systems to burn out their systems "for the greater good" then I'm afraid we are all doomed.
All of the new console makers are going to be losing mega cash for each console sold, so why would they make any incentive for anyone to buy their consoles and use them as computers? The manufacturers lose money on the console and lose any possible revenue from game sales.
.01% of the uber-nerd population is insanity.
If the console manufacturers provide software that somehow taps the raw horsepower of the new consoles what would stop organizations, legal or not, from buying large quantities of game systems just to make a supercomputer for very cheap? Fuck that.
If I had not preordered my PS2 a year in advance I would have had to wait NINE months to be able to get one in the states. The demand for the new systems is going to be even greater. The last thing consumers need to hear is that there is a shortage of their favorite game system because Nerd University bought 10,000 systems for their new supercomputer project.
Shared computing is all fine and good for PC/Mac users, but honestly, for a manufacturer to open the floodgates of their OS to satisfy the wants of
For creating an innovative TAX WRITEOFF, disguised as a party for your employees and customers.
One of the main reasons that we have cheap PC's can be traced back to the company "Emachines." God knows how many people bought an Emachines PC before they were bought by Dell and paid for their cheap PC with their hard earned cash, only for them to just plain die due to shitty-ass components. Emachines made HP and Compaq go "Oh shit, somebody finally figured us out; that it does not cost anything near the $3,000 we have been charging for a shitty-ass PC" Oh, and fuck Linux. If you hate Microsoft, just buy a Mactel now. :)
This Volcano story was on Fark yesterday, or even two days ago. I have noticed a trend over the past two years of sluggish posting of cool stories on /. I don't know what the problem is, and I know for certain this story was submitted to /. immediately after it became news, so why the delay?
I think Seumas has overestimated the number of "code-monkeys" out there that have the talent to make "videogames." Sure an Pakistani programmer could probably make a good spreadsheet/database program, but would he be able to make a good videogame, let alone a commercial videogame? Not it a million years.
Hollywood is has finally woken up and realized that the videogame industry is almost as big as them, and will surpass them very soon and they want to apply their flawed, old, outdated, business model to the game industry and it simply won't stick.
So the fuck what if we can't use Wil Wheaton's awesome voice over talent anymore? There are a million and one more talents actors out there that would kill for any opportunity to make a buck and get noticed.
Patrick Stewart is in the new morrowind game, and that's great, but there are a lot of talented actors out there from the stage and screen who could have filled the same shoes. I am not knocking voice over actors; they truly have talent, but they should not be compensated more than the poor bastards working 60 hour weeks to make the game in the first place.
In five years I can only assume that this arguement will be moot as games by then will have budgets on the line with movies anyway.
How odd, Microsoft uses apple dv kits for the xbox 360 and IBM power pc chips and now apple drops IBM for Intel, how freakin' strange is that?
I bought a high resolution projector for $1200 and I have my computer AND game systems hooked up to it. Half-Life 2 looks fantastic on a 10ft wide screen in HD. Don't think that "HD" monitors/projectors are going to stay expensive. Right now you can buy a 34 inch HD widescreen set at Wal-Mart for less than $700. And before you complaint that is still too much money, the top of the line Sony WEGA series, non-HD, in a 27 inch model would have set you back close to the same amount just less than seven years ago.
Gee, Bush just gave them and their buddies $50 million dollars FOR NOTHING. "Hi, thanks for being a terrorist organization, blowing up babies, here's $50 Million dollars." Fuck piracy.
Every few months or so a "story" pops up that Fox is thinking about renewing Futurama or doing the straight to dvd thing. This is usually drummed up by some Futurama Fan site that is Jealous of Family Guy's success and thinks that because "crappy Family Guy" was renewed that Futurama should be renewed also. Discounting the fact that Family Guy is one of highest rated shows on Adult Swim and the second highest selling dvd-t.v. show of all time.
Problem is, Fox does NOT OWN FUTURAMA, Matt Groining does. The main reason Fox let Futurama die in the firtt place is because of that very reason. Dvd sales of Futurama have not been a barn burner and given the very high cost of producing a Futurama episode I doubt even if Cartoon Network picked up some of the bill it would even be profitable.
Everyone seems to forget that Fox was contractually obligated to the four seasons that aired, and sneakily pre-empted Futurama so that there would be a backlog of episodes so they could tell M.G. "Sorry Matt, there is a backlog of episodes, so we don't need a fifth season," without upsetting the Goose that laid the Golden egg (Simpsons being that egg).
The ONLY way Futurama would see the light of day is if M.G. paid for it himself. End of Story.
Every showing (on three screens) at my local theater is sold out till next week. That's 800 people per showing. This is the last Star Wars ever, people want to see it in the theater, not a crappy xvid file.
except....EXTERMINATE!!
Well, there already was a company that up until last year was making vitual pinball machine games with a large flat panel monitor mounted vertically. It failed and now the company has retrofitted the machines to play other games. The only way pinball would work, outside a real pinball machine, is to have spot on physics and force feedback to match and to be almost holographic. Pinball is a visceral experience, you hit the ball and it goes where you hit it. No computers to cheat you of that.
What's worse is that the stupid producer of Dr. Who thought it would be so cool to blow up the Doctor's homeworld of Gallifrey in episode 2 of the new season, so the doctor has no real way getting more regenerations. They should just say that there were complications with the doctor's ninth regeneration and have Tennant and Ecclastion share the title of the ninth doctor.
Last year Best Buy also came to the conclusion that their Reward Zone members actually liked getting less "rewards" and cut the reward program back so it now takes twice as many points to get rewards as it did before.
The funny thing is that someone out there would have bought the "executive pong".
Sigh, almost every major local phone service provider is required to keep every hardline connected capable of dialing 911, even if normal service has been disconnected.
They need to do a Next "next" generation. Put Star Trek 500 years in the future.
I know I sound like the ultimate troll, but this guy's rocket "empire" was built via paypal's "dirty" years, when paypal froze (i.e. stole money) accounts for no reason to make it seem like they had more money on hand to lure poetential investors. Also don't forget the money laundering and federal investigations which Ebay had to buy themselves out of. Paypal ruined a lot of honest people's lives during the time period when this guy was in charge.
Thermal Cd/Dvd printers have been around forever and since this new device uses specially coated discs, you might as well just buy an Epson Printer (with dvd tray) and Inkjet printable discs. You get a printer that can print cds/dvds and (gasp) can print on regular paper. This for the same price as one of these new "laser" burners.
I was not making fun of the phishing scams, I was making fun of the real horrorshow that paypal is and the fact that they have ruined countless businesses because of overzealous "fraud" screening.
What is going to be funny is when Apple gets the standard Paypal "HA,HA, we just suspended your account and hijacked your money for six months." -form letter that paypal seems to send to just about everyone these days.
"Dear Paypal user APPLEITUNES INC.
We have noticed some unusual activity regarding your paypal account. For your saftey, we have limited your account access. To restore access, please complete checklist below and your account will be reviewed in 7-30 business days, when we will simply ask you for more extremely personal info, even though we have already made the decision to limit your account access indefinately, even though you have done nothing wrong.
Please complete the following steps to restore access:
1. Provide proof of inventory and invoices for all 1.2 million songs you provide.
2. Provide the names and phone numbers of all companies that provide you with your 'inventory'
3. Provide us with your Social Security number.
4. Provide us with copies of your utility bills at 101 Apple Ln.
5. Provide us with copies of your bank statements for the past year.
6. Change your password and password hints
7. Confirm your credit card
8. Confirm your bank account
Once this checklist is complete, we will still ask you for the same info over and over again, with no valid reason, and we will hold all funds in your paypal account for 180 days and then release them to you.
Thanks for choosing Paypal
Sincerely
Mark
Paypal "Investigations"