This is because none of the sources were proven to be made up.
It's impossible (or at least very difficult) to prove a negative. You would literally have to go through the entire population of the planet to prove that these people didn't exist, and check death records over the past several years for every country on earth. If she's quoting someone, and her answer when somebody asks about them is "well, they were a friend of a friend, I don't know where they're from" (as she did say about several of these people), that's almost impossible to disprove.
It would be naive, though, to think that she didn't make these people up. There's a disturbing pattern here; this is not a few isolated cases, and it's interesting that she can provide contact info for some sources easily but cannot verify others at all (including some she supposedly contacted the very week this investigation was going on). If you read through the actual report, she did, for example, provide a source list for everyone but the sources that couldn't be found by others, and the few bits of info she did provide for these sources turned out to be fake (of course, she made up some new excuses for why the email addresses and phone numbers didn't work). So she was actively trying to cover for herself; this was not all just a big coincidence.
(As a side note, I have read entire articles on Wired that turned out to be fake for one reason or another, the most obvious examples being the "Toothing" article and the article about iPods on the Microsoft campus [which was filled with quotes from anonymous sources and was refuted pretty strongly by Microsoft employees after it ran]. Wired Online has some serious credibility problems right now, and the only reason nobody seems to much care is that the expectations of them seem to be so low to begin with.)
I say, if you're a news organization and you can't verify the source of a quote, you treat it as a fake source and you in turn treat the entire article as suspect. These articles should all be pulled and her career should be over. She should get no "second" chance - her second chance was the first article she wrote after her first made-up source. She continued to make up sources for subsequent articles, so she has more than used up her "second" chances if you ask me.
He did not merely say "nine." He said that the original trilogy was the middle one of three trilogies.
He had originally "planned" nine films - and I put "planned" in quotes because I don't believe he ever actually thought he'd get to make all nine. Then sometime during the filming of the original trilogy, he said "screw it" and condensed the plot of the last four films in the saga into Return of the Jedi. There is no story after Return of the Jedi as Lucas originally envisioned it. (Sure, there are some obvious story continuations you can make, and I'm not a Star Wars geek so I'm just guessing books have been written post-Jedi, but Lucas' original story only extends to the end of that film.)
Seriously - I don't think most westerners can really appreciate the situation in Japan. Apartments of 50 square feet in size are not unheard of (that's 5' by 10' if you're not good at math).
There are reasons why Sony was successful in Japan while MS wasn't, and why even the GameCube has outsold the Xbox by a significant amount there. It has nothing to do with xenophobia, either - they love their Levi's jeans and their Coke and their McDonald's. They just did not specifically like the Xbox, and two of the reasons were a) it was ugly, and b) it was too big.
I'm not sure MS has fixed the ugly issue (I personally think they made it worse), but standing the thing upright really saves on shelf space. Even for me, in a New York apartment, with four consoles on my console shelf I'd never be able to fit them all if two weren't standing upright (a US and an import PS2) and one wasn't a tiny GameCube. For the Japanese, size matters even that much more.
No doubt you can stand the Xbox 360 either horizontally or vertically, so if you don't like the vertical you're not going to be locked into it. But making it an option is something MS had to do at this point to compete with Sony and Nintendo in Japan.
Wow, that's great news, but isn't it coming a little late in the timeline? If sets on sale in July were supposed to have BF support, you'd think that they would already be being manufactured that way.
Not necessarily, because a lot of HDTV's aren't even really TV's at all - they're monitors. It's up to you to decide what tuner to use, be it a PC tuner or a set-top box.
No PC tuner in existence right now respects the broadcast flag, and the way the flag is implemented, it is not something that can just be "turned on" in new drivers or firmware. It requires another chip on the board. So if you buy a piece of hardware that does not respect the BF, it will never respect the BF, and because tuners are relatively cheap to make and ship, tuner manufacturers were all sitting on the sidelines waiting this out and producing non-BF hardware in the meantime. (No doubt they had updated designs in the wings, but there was no reason to produce them yet.)
It's also worth noting that, AFAIK, equipment couldn't be made after July 1 without respecting the broadcast flag. So manufacturers could have, if they wanted, made sets and tuners right up to June 31 that did not respect it, and then switched over on July 1.
The courts didn't say that the broadcast flag was illegal because it interfered with fair use rights.
And this is important because what the court in essence did was throw the issue back to Congress - where copyright issues constitutionally belong. If you think the broadcast flag is dead, think again - all the court said was "this is unenforceable as an FCC rule - only Congress can make such a rule."
So you can bet the MPAA is on the horn right about now to every senator and representative they've ever donated money to trying to call in a favor. And you can bet they'll get that favor, probably sooner rather than later. There are still almost two months before that July 1 deadline - it is not just possible, but probable that the broadcast flag will still take effect on that date, this time enacted by congress and signed into law by Bush himself.
Check this article out -- it is saying that Gates called it an entertainment hub, and also provides a picture of the next XBox that I have never seen...
Correction, he never called it an entertainment hub - the "news" sources doing the quoting put those words in his mouth. What he said is this:
"If you're used to that menu, when you use this Xenon you'll see a menu a lot like that that lets you get photos, TV, music and all those different things."
People in the press take that to mean it's a hub. But that's not what he said. He said it lets you "get" all those different things - meaning from your Media Center PC. MCE is the hub - Xbox 360 is the client.
This is the same way the current Xbox works, it sounds like they're just streamlining the interface for the 360. But it'll just act as an MCE Extender, which is a strategy MS is already using right now with Xbox 1. If you read the Engadget interview, Bill basically says as much there.
The problem is, much of the press knows absolutely nothing about MCE or MCE Extenders, so they hear quotes like the one above and assume he's saying the Xbox 360 itself will be a hub. But he never said that (in fact he says exactly and specifically the opposite on Engadget).
DLP on the other hand, gets you somewhat the best of both worlds. It is still CRT driven (quality) and makes headways into burn-in and size, as well as ambient lighting.
DLP is the way to go, if you can afford it.
DLP's can be had for well under $2,000 these days. CRT projection sets are still cheaper but the difference is not that great.
The "problem" some people have with DLP's is the rainbow effect. I've looked hard and I don't see it, but some people say they do to the point where it makes the set unwatchable. I don't disbelieve this - I'm sensitive to refresh rate to a point greater than most people, for example, so I know it's possible to see things that other people don't perceive - but I do think the issue is probably a little overblown.
Another problem with DLP's is viewing angle. I was just at the "Samsung Experience" store (or whatever you want to call it) in New York yesterday, and I got a nice look at their top-end DLP set. The picture on it was great, and they weren't even using an HD source (I think it was the Finding Nemo DVD), but from a bit off to the side and at standing height, it was almost completely black. I thought they'd set things up wrong until I leaned down and in a bit, and all of a sudden the picture "popped" into view. It was a major contrast to the plasma set they had set up ten feet away, which I could see fine even standing about 80 degrees off to the side.
Every display technology has its pros and cons. In projection sets, CRT is tried and true but it's big and heavy, they can suffer burn-in and the geometry is never quite right (which makes them less than ideal for dual-use as PC displays). CRT's also pretty much require professional calibration to bring out their best. DLP's do not suffer burn-in, they are light and have a picture rivaling CRT's (and are easier to calibrate on your own), but only if you don't see the rainbows and only if you're sitting dead-center. Plasmas are even lighter and thinner than DLP sets, with perfect geometry and no convergence issues, as well as tube-like viewing angles, but the resolution is lower, they often have a "screen-door" effect (though less so now than in the past), and they can suffer burn-in like a CRT. LCD's are smaller, generally, than sets based on the other technologies, and their black level is poor, but they are much higher resolution than plasma. (LCD-based projection sets can be as big as you want, but they still suffer from poor black level.)
There is no "perfect" HD display technology right now. I have heard that JVC's LCOS technology should solve some of DLP's issues while providing the same benefits, but supposedly it is still in need of further refinement. I'm keeping my eye on it, though.
Until then, you pick your poison. You need to determine what you can live with, and which issues will affect/bother you personally the least.
They have 3 million subscribers, not 1.5 million (I hate to link to such a dire-sounding headline, but the article does have a lot of hard info). And their subscriber base is growing rapidly.
Every day at my office you can see a bunch of those red envelopes in the office inbox. And a lot of us that subscribe get them at home, so clearly there are more where I work than I even know about.
This is a popular service and one that people really like. One of the first things I learned when picking stocks is that the bottom line is the product has to be something people want. The quick test of any stock is to look around at what people are saying about the company, not from a business perspective but as customers. I have honestly heard the words "I love Netflix" more times in one week than I've probably heard the words "I love Blockbuster" in my entire life.
That doesn't mean the company's on the road to success, but it does mean they have the basic building blocks right. Blockbuster's really got nowhere to go but down at this point.
Might as well just use one of the many "theme" generators for XP to create a longhorn theme and call it identical.
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call. Longhorn can do that, and it's one of the big features I'm waiting for.
Seriously, I can't believe how many people here are focusing on the visuals. Who the hell cares? It looks fine to me, just as XP does. I don't fire up an OS to look at all the pretty colors, I fire up an OS to run applications. Longhorn has a whole mess of security improvements that make it more like Linux (i.e. non-root accounts are actually somewhat functional, so people might actually want to use them), it has smart folders that automatically look for documents matching parameters you specify, it has the aforementioned network auto-sync feature that is sorely needed for anyone who owns multiple PC's (useful for things like backup, media centers, etc.).
And those are just the features I'm personally excited about. Even without WinFS, this is a significant upgrade to Windows XP.
Before you start thinking I'm some sort of MS shill, look up my history for the last Longhorn-related post I made, wherein I bitched about MS trying to sell us something other than the desktop metaphor. I'm actually happy MS is not trying to reinvent the UI wheel after seeing these screens. XP works perfectly well enough for me from a UI standpoint; it is just missing some obvious features that a modern OS really has to have in this day and age.
People go nuts about a 0.1 incremental upgrade to the Mac OS, and are only too happy to pay $130 for it. Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger and all anyone can say about it is how much it sucks because it looks like Windows? Get over it. It is Windows - what the hell did you expect? If you buy your OS based on looks and you don't like the look of Longhorn, why do you even care anyway? I would think you'd already be using a different OS as it is.
Tabbed messaging has been in Trillian since 2.0. See here.
you still have to have an account with each service you want to use
For at least a couple of the services, you can do this right through Trillian (for the others, it loads up a web page just like the official client does). I don't see how this is any different than what you'd do with an official client.
Trillian is basically just an IM client aggregator- it doesn't provide any messaging capabilities itself
Well, being an IM client aggregator pretty much makes it a killer app in itself (yes, I know there are others, but that alone instantly puts it a rung above all "official" IM clients, as does the lack of ads).
Being nicely designed and skinnable puts it yet again a step above even most other aggregators. Trillian 3.0 is so far ahead of any other IM client in terms of clean visual presentation throughout that it's not even funny. All apps should look this good by default, and if by some remote chance you don't like it, you can just download a new skin. The entire UI is skinnable, not just the outer edges. It also supports all sorts of plugins, from RSS readers to IM forwarders to weather.
Having features like tabbed messaging and 128-bit encryption is yet another point in its favor. No other freely downloadable Windows-based IM clients have these features, that I know of.
In short, Trillian does a lot of things, does some things no other IM client does, and everything it does do, it does well. AOL is apparently copying many of the features of Trillian in Triton, which should tell you something - I don't personally know anyone who actually uses the regular AIM client anymore.
What "situation"? The point is that it's not really important whether we switch or not. It's just television.
The problem is it's not just television. This is about freeing up radio spectrum for other things (like wireless communications), which is the entire point in changing over to digital TV in the first place, and the reason why the change was mandated rather than allowed to "happen organically". TV stations were given the extra spectrum required for DTV OTA broadcasts with the understanding that they would switch off their analog broadcasts at a certain date. There is no good reason I can see for allowing TV stations to hog all that spectrum, duplicating channels, for an unspecified period of time.
Maybe not enough has been done to promote the switchover - obviously, there are some people even on Slashdot who don't understand why the switchover is even important. But it is, and it has to happen. I don't know what the solution is, but I wouldn't be averse to simply letting things go and seeing those "70 million" TV's go dark. (I doubt there are nearly that many analog-only sets receiving OTA broadcasts still in use anyway - are we counting analog sets hooked up to digital cable boxes like mine, as well as analog sets that are just sitting in a closet doing nothing? My guess is yes).
I'm a little sick of luddites deciding matters of technology policy for the entire country. This would be the equivalent of forcing our phone system to continue to support the telegraph at the expense of voice communications because a few people still used it. At some point, you say enough is enough and force an upgrade for the good of the rest of the world.
I could easily see this being a mock up unit made specifically for E3 and not necessarily close to what will be on shelves when the unit is released.
Nobody "unveils" a mock-up at E3 (or as an infomercial on MTV). Think about what you're saying - it doesn't make any sense. The whole point of an unveiling is to show people what to look for when the product starts appearing on shelves.
Any one remember the giant metal X that was shown when MS first started talking about the original Xbox?
Yes, when they first started talking about it. Not when they finally had the unveiling. MS has been talking about the 360 for a while, and quite a few potential mock-up shots have been floating around the net since then.
They never had the big metal X at E3 that I recall. I believe they had it at GDC, but that was when they first announced that they were developing a console, not when they unveiled it to the masses.
Also, one glaring omission from these pics are extra controller ports on the front of the machine.
The Xbox 360's controllers will be wireless. The one port that there appears to be is for backward compatibility with any original Xbox controllers you might have. (My guess is it's so that you won't have to buy a second controller for two player games - I'm hoping it's not suggesting that they're doing away with the controller pack-in altogether.)
Note that I'm not saying these pics are definitely the final design - although I am convinced that they are (OurColony is definitely affiliated with MS - that's known - and they're not going to be releasing pics of an unfinished console). But what MS does finally unveil on MTV and then at E3 will definitely, positively be the final design you will see on store shelves at the end of the year. E3 is not the time to be showing mockups.
Yeah, but think about it - with desktop search, if you want to go after a file, just type the name, or some content related to it.
You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.
I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. The point is the OS still knows where it is, and what happens when something invariably gets erased either through user error or a system crash? You erase a folder now and you (should) know exactly what's in it. With the system they're talking about, you'd just lose a bunch of random files and you'd be coming across stuff you didn't even know you'd lost years after the fact (you'd only figure it out when you actually searched for those files, and you'd probably wonder why the search function is not coming up with anything).
I think the desktop metaphor not only still works fine, it is also necessary. There is real utility in knowing exactly where your OS thinks a file or folder really is - not just smart-search pseudo-folders that automatically update themselves based on your criteria (a neat idea, but this should be an addition to the desktop metaphor, not a replacement for it).
Tweaks and helpful features are one thing, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater like MS is talking about here. I sincerely hope there will be an option to just keep using your system the way we always have.
Remember how Windows XP turned off things like file extensions by default? Remember how the first thing you did when you got Windows XP, along with everybody else in the world, was to turn them back on? I feel like that's the sort of thing MS is trying to foist upon us again.
New search functions are fine. But I don't need to learn a completely new way of doing things on the desktop. My desktop - and my PC - works perfectly well as it is.
No I'm not... I said this when they first implemented this monstrosity back when I was working in the game industry.
"Oh.. we only want to help parents to make an educated CHOICE... we don't want to censor anything."
One fact that gets lost in comments like these - and really, you should know better - is that the ESRB is part of the game industry. Literally. It is comprised of all of the game developers and publishers who choose to participate in it. A publisher is perfectly free not to pay the membership fees, not to have ESRB representatives and not to have their games rated. It is a voluntary system that is funded by the publishers themselves. Most publishers choose to be a part of it for several reasons, including the fact that certain large chain stores will not accept unrated games for sale.
As a former member of the industry myself, I know a bit about how the ESRB works. Rating games is an almost shockingly simple yet seemingly arbitrary process. Publishers are told to send samples of the most prurient and violent content of their games, and then a panel of three average people rate what they see. This panel constantly rotates. They do not play the games. They may make their ratings based on the ten minutes of video the publisher sends.
You would think this process would be open to all sorts of abuse on both sides (especially given that it's an industry-funded organization), but in reality there are all sorts of checks and balances that prevent that from happening. There is an appeals process if a publisher believes their game was rated too harshly, and all ratings are subject to review. Conversely, a publisher faces heavy fines (and paying the fines is not voluntary, if you want to keep getting your games rated), not to mention a potential embarassing recall, if they are found to have withheld content that would result in a harsher rating or additional content descriptors.
Most publishers are pretty good about this stuff. It is rarely a surprise to a publisher when a game gets a particular rating or particular content descriptors - I mean most publishers were not born yesterday, they go through this many, many times a year and they pretty much know what to expect. Some of the descriptors themselves can be pretty goofy - I remember one of the games I worked on got a T rating with a descriptor of "Mild Lyrics", whatever the hell that means. "We just want to warn you... these lyrics, are really not that bad!" (The ESRB does provide specific definitions of all descriptors to publishers, but some of them are still a little wacky.) Most of the goofy ones, though, are not really worth worrying about. The one thing that trips some publishers up sometimes are distinctions between things like "cartoon violence" and plain old "violence", which can mean the difference between a T and an M rating. But even that's pretty rare, because the ESRB is pretty specific about what defines each of those descriptors, and again, publishers usually have plenty of past experience to go on.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that this is a more symbiotic relationship than most people think. Yes, publishers can groan every once in a while about the process or their ratings or whatever. But it's not the way a dissident groans about his government; it's more like the way a kid groans about his parents. The ESRB is literally related to the game publishers, and everybody is part of the same industry.
It may surprise many of you to know also that few, if anybody, in the industry want to get rid of the ESRB. Because they know the alternative is government action. The ESRB, as the game industry's self-regulating body, is obviously far preferable to getting congress and law enforcement involved. It's in the industry's best interests for the ESRB to be as effective as possible, and unfortunately the retailers have been letting the industry down in terms of ratings enforcement. At all the ESRB meetings I had to attend (and yes, I groaned at these along with everybody else) the complaints were always centered around retailers screwing everything up for the rest of the industry, not about the ESRB itself.
I don't get people's love affair with the PS controllers. They're so small my hands cramp up. The S controller for the box fits right into my hand comfortable and doesn't cause any fatigue.
I don't get the love affair with the dual shock either, but I don't get the love affair with the controller S even more.
I grant that it's fairly comfortably shaped, but it is, without doubt, by far the heaviest standard console gamepad ever made besides the original Xbox controller. They are both unacceptably heavy for long periods of use.
The buttons are also too resistant and not springy enough - they just don't have the right feel. And though MS could have easily gone to a more standard six-button layout with the S (something a lot of people were hoping for), they stubbornly stuck with those recessed black and white buttons, just put in a different place. At the same time, they put the start/back buttons in the exact spot where my thumb seems to want to go by mistake about fifty times per play session.
I personally think the S controller is the fifth worst console controller ever produced, behind the Atari 5200 joystick, the Colecovision and Intellivision gamepads, and the original Xbox controller. It's too heavy and the buttons are just a mess. Its shape is the only thing it's got going for it.
It's also the worst of the current three first-party controllers. The dual shock, while probably overrated, is at least shaped in such a way that your hands aren't really forced or even guided into any sort of position - you can hold it any way you want to. The buttons are okay, though not great, and they're laid out logically, if not traditionally. The Gamecube controller's only big failing is that it's just too specialized for its own good - the feel of it I think is amazing, but the button layout just doesn't work for a lot of games. And the d-pad is too small. Despite the bad layout, though, I think the springiness of the buttons is just perfect. Other than the d-pad, the Gamecube controller is probably the most comfortable gamepad I've ever used.
It's scary to think that we leave a trail behind online.
No, it's stupid to think that you don't. Especially if you are blogging, where the entire idea is that you leave a trail behind online.
Here's an idea for those who'd like to blog about work: don't. Seriously. I'm as pro free speech as anyone, but being in favor of free speech doesn't mean I think people should be gabbing endlessly on cell phones during theatrical movie showings or that strangers should be screaming in my ear as I'm walking down the street or that employees should be talking about their employers on publicly accessible blogs. I mean, use your freakin' head.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do that thing.
And if you do, and you have to face the consequences of it, tough tits. It was your choice. Nobody asked you to write a blog. In most cases, nobody but your employer probably even cared to read it.
To think you can actually write something in public online and not "leave a trail" is beyond naive.
(And yes, I practice what I preach - I have a blog, and I have another site as well. I have never even mentioned the name of either my current employer or my previous employer online. It should be pretty much common sense, but I guess it isn't. These are things you do not publicly broadcast unless it is part of your job to do so.)
What are the best HDTV capture cards, for Over the Air or for backside-of-the-cable/satelite-box? The article only touches on this, but it will be of greater concern for the home enthusiast/hacker in the next two years.
"Best" depends on what you're using to watch TV. For MCE, the FusionHD or ATI HDTV Wonder work equally well (if you want QAM tuning of non-encrypted cable signals, you want a FusionHD). For "backside of the cable box" you may as well just do firewire capture - providing a box that supports this is an FCC requirement now; your cable provider has to give you one if you ask.
Keep in mind you have to also have an analog tuner for MCE, even if you don't use it. (Most people will want one, though, unless they want to be stuck with only 12 or 13 channels, some of which don't even broadcast all the time.)
If you're not using MCE, then the MyHD line of cards is probably best - they do hardware MPEG2 decoding (note I said decoding - unlike analog capture cards, all an HDTV card needs to do when capturing is stream the digital TV signal to the hard drive). They can be finnicky to set up, though, and you don't want to buy one if you have MCE because hardware decoding is not supported in MCE.
I hope that includes Charlie Demerjian. This jumped out at me:
"here is the truth, if you are going to multitask and do and do anything that tasks both of the CPUs, one of those is going to be a game."
Bullshit. This drives me crazy on hardware sites, this supposition that the only reason anyone could ever want high performance in their PC is to play games.
At home, I use Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash, I run Windows Media Center for SDTV and DVD viewing, I do video encoding using various tools (Windows Media Encoder, Dr. Divx, and others). I often do all these things at the same time on the same PC, with a hacked version of Media Center that lets me log in remotely at the same time another account has the TV going.
I studiously avoid playing games on this system, because I'm asking it to do quite enough already - I've got another system that I play games on. But I would love a dual-core CPU for this thing, as it would help me out a lot.
Graphics professionals, photographers, multimedia content producers and other high-end users are, surprise surprise, a real market, and they spend even more money than gamers do. I don't see why that's so hard to grasp. I read the specific preview of Intel's dual-core CPU's that Charlie's talking about in his comment up there and I actually found it a refreshing change to find some real-world benchmarks that were not strictly based on playing Doom 3.
That said, I'm sure there is payola going on in the industry. But I worry more about the small sites that seem to give positive reviews to every single component they get sent for free than I do about sites that realize non-gamers are a legitimate group of users that require their own set of benchmarks.
I'm not too surprised actually. Microsoft has been pushing hard and listening to what the Japanese developers want. (And probably throwing alot of money around as well)
The problem is it's not Microsoft or the Japanese developers that determine a console's success there. It's Japanese consumers. And Japanese consumers think of the Xbox as a bad joke.
There is a lot more brand loyalty in Japan than there is almost anywhere else, and it's peppered with both a bit of xenophobia and a bit of nationalism (I'm not saying this is necessarily bad or that it's a whole lot different than here, but there is definitely a bias against non-Japanese electronics there, especially). Even getting some big-name Japanese games is not necessarily going to help the Xbox 2 - I mean people thought DOA3 would sell systems there and it didn't. Neither did Soul Calibur 2. Would Dragon Quest 9 or Final Fantasy 13? Maybe, maybe not. Those games would probably sell some systems, but it's a mistake to think that any single game - or even a few big games - will help turn around such a negative public perception.
I remember when the Xbox was first released in Japan, there was a picture floating around of a couple of Japanese guys at TGS looking at the system. They were literally pointing and laughing at it. It was a funny picture, but it pretty well illustrated MS's problem there.
This time around, MS has convinced developers that they'll do better, but it's not clear to me that there's really all that much they can do. I mean Ford's been trying to sell cars in Japan for a long time too, without much success. My guess is the honeymoon with Japanese developers will be a short-lived one once the initial sales numbers come in, unless those Japanese developers are in it more for the western game audience than for their home audience (which is possible, but would be a big mistake for them if you ask me).
Indeed, I stand corrected. But I figure that difference is only an argument of semantics. Seems pretty much the same thing (in this case) to me.
It is not even close. Nobody can "steal" GPL'd code - it is there for all to see and modify as they see fit. That's the whole point.
What you can't do is take that code, modify it, sell the binaries and then refuse to give your contributions back to the community. That is what the CherryOS people have done, and that is a GPL violation. As the copyrighted code is provided under the GPL only under the terms of said GPL, violation of it is by extension a copyright violation.
But you can't "steal" something that is freely available, so it is not just semantics whether or not it was "theft".
Yes, it was wrong - that's not the issue. But just as we're constantly berating the RIAA/MPAA for their hyperbole on such issues, we have to be careful in what we say about GPL-related copyright violations too.. especially as this is even further removed from "theft" than what people do when they download music or movies.
That'll stop Terr'rists! The 9/11 hijackers had legit ID, sheesh. More scare tactics to make you feel safe as the government takes away your freedom of movement.
Last time I travelled to Japan I was required to show my passport upon re-entering the United States. Last time I travelled to Europe (more than ten years ago!), same thing.
The deal we had with Canada was a special thing. You don't have any "right" to travel to another country and then re-enter without a passport. In fact, most countries require it - including the United States in every other case (except now with Mexico - and you can bet the DHS is looking at that now too).
This is just closing a loophole in the current immigration system. I don't see why Americans should continue to be able to get away without even owning a passport when practically every other citizen of the civilized world carries one pretty much wherever they go. There's no reason for us to be smug about our backwardness.
I agree with you completely. This gamne would fit nicely in the 'Cube library. Infact, I think that games like Katamari owe their existence to Nintendo.
Yeah, because it's not like Namco made Pac-Man before Nintendo even created their first home console, or anything.
Namco is an old-school developer just like Nintendo (and if you want to go further back, both Namco and Nintendo have been around far longer than video games have even existed). They've both been making video games since the early days of the video arcade, and they've both got their seminal classics and "quirky games" that helped establish genres. I wouldn't say Katamari Damacy "owes its existence" to Nintendo any more than I'd say Donkey Kong owes its existence to Namco.
Katamari Damacy is just the latest in a long list of Namco puzzle/maze games that started with the original Puckman (later renamed Pac-Man) in 1979 and has continued right up through the modern age with games like Mr. Driller, Star Trigon and now Katamari Damacy. The fact that KD is one of their best, most innovative and most recognized puzzle games in years doesn't mean it's outside their tradition, or more of a "GameCube" style game, or whatever.
Er, sorry, by this I meant the perspective is upside down, not the image itself. It's just an odd perspective that they've forced to match their map. But the image itself is right side up.
The World Trade Center looks basically up to date to me - although it's upside down (I've noticed Google skews the images to match their map orientation). I'd bet the age of each area differs depending on various factors, the most important probably being how often Google expects people to be searching for that particular area. Kind of odd that they'd be starting out with anything but the latest data for any location, but I wonder if every area will be updated with the same frequency once this has been up for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
This is because none of the sources were proven to be made up.
It's impossible (or at least very difficult) to prove a negative. You would literally have to go through the entire population of the planet to prove that these people didn't exist, and check death records over the past several years for every country on earth. If she's quoting someone, and her answer when somebody asks about them is "well, they were a friend of a friend, I don't know where they're from" (as she did say about several of these people), that's almost impossible to disprove.
It would be naive, though, to think that she didn't make these people up. There's a disturbing pattern here; this is not a few isolated cases, and it's interesting that she can provide contact info for some sources easily but cannot verify others at all (including some she supposedly contacted the very week this investigation was going on). If you read through the actual report, she did, for example, provide a source list for everyone but the sources that couldn't be found by others, and the few bits of info she did provide for these sources turned out to be fake (of course, she made up some new excuses for why the email addresses and phone numbers didn't work). So she was actively trying to cover for herself; this was not all just a big coincidence.
(As a side note, I have read entire articles on Wired that turned out to be fake for one reason or another, the most obvious examples being the "Toothing" article and the article about iPods on the Microsoft campus [which was filled with quotes from anonymous sources and was refuted pretty strongly by Microsoft employees after it ran]. Wired Online has some serious credibility problems right now, and the only reason nobody seems to much care is that the expectations of them seem to be so low to begin with.)
I say, if you're a news organization and you can't verify the source of a quote, you treat it as a fake source and you in turn treat the entire article as suspect. These articles should all be pulled and her career should be over. She should get no "second" chance - her second chance was the first article she wrote after her first made-up source. She continued to make up sources for subsequent articles, so she has more than used up her "second" chances if you ask me.
He did not merely say "nine." He said that the original trilogy was the middle one of three trilogies.
He had originally "planned" nine films - and I put "planned" in quotes because I don't believe he ever actually thought he'd get to make all nine. Then sometime during the filming of the original trilogy, he said "screw it" and condensed the plot of the last four films in the saga into Return of the Jedi. There is no story after Return of the Jedi as Lucas originally envisioned it. (Sure, there are some obvious story continuations you can make, and I'm not a Star Wars geek so I'm just guessing books have been written post-Jedi, but Lucas' original story only extends to the end of that film.)
Of course, the Modern Humorist has a good take on all this.
Why?
So the Japanese can fit it in their apartments.
Seriously - I don't think most westerners can really appreciate the situation in Japan. Apartments of 50 square feet in size are not unheard of (that's 5' by 10' if you're not good at math).
There are reasons why Sony was successful in Japan while MS wasn't, and why even the GameCube has outsold the Xbox by a significant amount there. It has nothing to do with xenophobia, either - they love their Levi's jeans and their Coke and their McDonald's. They just did not specifically like the Xbox, and two of the reasons were a) it was ugly, and b) it was too big.
I'm not sure MS has fixed the ugly issue (I personally think they made it worse), but standing the thing upright really saves on shelf space. Even for me, in a New York apartment, with four consoles on my console shelf I'd never be able to fit them all if two weren't standing upright (a US and an import PS2) and one wasn't a tiny GameCube. For the Japanese, size matters even that much more.
No doubt you can stand the Xbox 360 either horizontally or vertically, so if you don't like the vertical you're not going to be locked into it. But making it an option is something MS had to do at this point to compete with Sony and Nintendo in Japan.
Wow, that's great news, but isn't it coming a little late in the timeline? If sets on sale in July were supposed to have BF support, you'd think that they would already be being manufactured that way.
Not necessarily, because a lot of HDTV's aren't even really TV's at all - they're monitors. It's up to you to decide what tuner to use, be it a PC tuner or a set-top box.
No PC tuner in existence right now respects the broadcast flag, and the way the flag is implemented, it is not something that can just be "turned on" in new drivers or firmware. It requires another chip on the board. So if you buy a piece of hardware that does not respect the BF, it will never respect the BF, and because tuners are relatively cheap to make and ship, tuner manufacturers were all sitting on the sidelines waiting this out and producing non-BF hardware in the meantime. (No doubt they had updated designs in the wings, but there was no reason to produce them yet.)
It's also worth noting that, AFAIK, equipment couldn't be made after July 1 without respecting the broadcast flag. So manufacturers could have, if they wanted, made sets and tuners right up to June 31 that did not respect it, and then switched over on July 1.
The courts didn't say that the broadcast flag was illegal because it interfered with fair use rights.
And this is important because what the court in essence did was throw the issue back to Congress - where copyright issues constitutionally belong. If you think the broadcast flag is dead, think again - all the court said was "this is unenforceable as an FCC rule - only Congress can make such a rule."
So you can bet the MPAA is on the horn right about now to every senator and representative they've ever donated money to trying to call in a favor. And you can bet they'll get that favor, probably sooner rather than later. There are still almost two months before that July 1 deadline - it is not just possible, but probable that the broadcast flag will still take effect on that date, this time enacted by congress and signed into law by Bush himself.
Check this article out -- it is saying that Gates called it an entertainment hub, and also provides a picture of the next XBox that I have never seen...
Correction, he never called it an entertainment hub - the "news" sources doing the quoting put those words in his mouth. What he said is this:
"If you're used to that menu, when you use this Xenon you'll see a menu a lot like that that lets you get photos, TV, music and all those different things."
People in the press take that to mean it's a hub. But that's not what he said. He said it lets you "get" all those different things - meaning from your Media Center PC. MCE is the hub - Xbox 360 is the client.
This is the same way the current Xbox works, it sounds like they're just streamlining the interface for the 360. But it'll just act as an MCE Extender, which is a strategy MS is already using right now with Xbox 1. If you read the Engadget interview, Bill basically says as much there.
The problem is, much of the press knows absolutely nothing about MCE or MCE Extenders, so they hear quotes like the one above and assume he's saying the Xbox 360 itself will be a hub. But he never said that (in fact he says exactly and specifically the opposite on Engadget).
DLP on the other hand, gets you somewhat the best of both worlds. It is still CRT driven (quality) and makes headways into burn-in and size, as well as ambient lighting.
DLP is the way to go, if you can afford it.
DLP's can be had for well under $2,000 these days. CRT projection sets are still cheaper but the difference is not that great.
The "problem" some people have with DLP's is the rainbow effect. I've looked hard and I don't see it, but some people say they do to the point where it makes the set unwatchable. I don't disbelieve this - I'm sensitive to refresh rate to a point greater than most people, for example, so I know it's possible to see things that other people don't perceive - but I do think the issue is probably a little overblown.
Another problem with DLP's is viewing angle. I was just at the "Samsung Experience" store (or whatever you want to call it) in New York yesterday, and I got a nice look at their top-end DLP set. The picture on it was great, and they weren't even using an HD source (I think it was the Finding Nemo DVD), but from a bit off to the side and at standing height, it was almost completely black. I thought they'd set things up wrong until I leaned down and in a bit, and all of a sudden the picture "popped" into view. It was a major contrast to the plasma set they had set up ten feet away, which I could see fine even standing about 80 degrees off to the side.
Every display technology has its pros and cons. In projection sets, CRT is tried and true but it's big and heavy, they can suffer burn-in and the geometry is never quite right (which makes them less than ideal for dual-use as PC displays). CRT's also pretty much require professional calibration to bring out their best. DLP's do not suffer burn-in, they are light and have a picture rivaling CRT's (and are easier to calibrate on your own), but only if you don't see the rainbows and only if you're sitting dead-center. Plasmas are even lighter and thinner than DLP sets, with perfect geometry and no convergence issues, as well as tube-like viewing angles, but the resolution is lower, they often have a "screen-door" effect (though less so now than in the past), and they can suffer burn-in like a CRT. LCD's are smaller, generally, than sets based on the other technologies, and their black level is poor, but they are much higher resolution than plasma. (LCD-based projection sets can be as big as you want, but they still suffer from poor black level.)
There is no "perfect" HD display technology right now. I have heard that JVC's LCOS technology should solve some of DLP's issues while providing the same benefits, but supposedly it is still in need of further refinement. I'm keeping my eye on it, though.
Until then, you pick your poison. You need to determine what you can live with, and which issues will affect/bother you personally the least.
They have 1.5 million customers.
They have 3 million subscribers, not 1.5 million (I hate to link to such a dire-sounding headline, but the article does have a lot of hard info). And their subscriber base is growing rapidly.
Every day at my office you can see a bunch of those red envelopes in the office inbox. And a lot of us that subscribe get them at home, so clearly there are more where I work than I even know about.
This is a popular service and one that people really like. One of the first things I learned when picking stocks is that the bottom line is the product has to be something people want. The quick test of any stock is to look around at what people are saying about the company, not from a business perspective but as customers. I have honestly heard the words "I love Netflix" more times in one week than I've probably heard the words "I love Blockbuster" in my entire life.
That doesn't mean the company's on the road to success, but it does mean they have the basic building blocks right. Blockbuster's really got nowhere to go but down at this point.
Might as well just use one of the many "theme" generators for XP to create a longhorn theme and call it identical.
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call. Longhorn can do that, and it's one of the big features I'm waiting for.
Seriously, I can't believe how many people here are focusing on the visuals. Who the hell cares? It looks fine to me, just as XP does. I don't fire up an OS to look at all the pretty colors, I fire up an OS to run applications. Longhorn has a whole mess of security improvements that make it more like Linux (i.e. non-root accounts are actually somewhat functional, so people might actually want to use them), it has smart folders that automatically look for documents matching parameters you specify, it has the aforementioned network auto-sync feature that is sorely needed for anyone who owns multiple PC's (useful for things like backup, media centers, etc.).
And those are just the features I'm personally excited about. Even without WinFS, this is a significant upgrade to Windows XP.
Before you start thinking I'm some sort of MS shill, look up my history for the last Longhorn-related post I made, wherein I bitched about MS trying to sell us something other than the desktop metaphor. I'm actually happy MS is not trying to reinvent the UI wheel after seeing these screens. XP works perfectly well enough for me from a UI standpoint; it is just missing some obvious features that a modern OS really has to have in this day and age.
People go nuts about a 0.1 incremental upgrade to the Mac OS, and are only too happy to pay $130 for it. Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger and all anyone can say about it is how much it sucks because it looks like Windows? Get over it. It is Windows - what the hell did you expect? If you buy your OS based on looks and you don't like the look of Longhorn, why do you even care anyway? I would think you'd already be using a different OS as it is.
There's no tabbed messaging
Tabbed messaging has been in Trillian since 2.0. See here.
you still have to have an account with each service you want to use
For at least a couple of the services, you can do this right through Trillian (for the others, it loads up a web page just like the official client does). I don't see how this is any different than what you'd do with an official client.
Trillian is basically just an IM client aggregator- it doesn't provide any messaging capabilities itself
Well, being an IM client aggregator pretty much makes it a killer app in itself (yes, I know there are others, but that alone instantly puts it a rung above all "official" IM clients, as does the lack of ads).
Being nicely designed and skinnable puts it yet again a step above even most other aggregators. Trillian 3.0 is so far ahead of any other IM client in terms of clean visual presentation throughout that it's not even funny. All apps should look this good by default, and if by some remote chance you don't like it, you can just download a new skin. The entire UI is skinnable, not just the outer edges. It also supports all sorts of plugins, from RSS readers to IM forwarders to weather.
Having features like tabbed messaging and 128-bit encryption is yet another point in its favor. No other freely downloadable Windows-based IM clients have these features, that I know of.
In short, Trillian does a lot of things, does some things no other IM client does, and everything it does do, it does well. AOL is apparently copying many of the features of Trillian in Triton, which should tell you something - I don't personally know anyone who actually uses the regular AIM client anymore.
What "situation"? The point is that it's not really important whether we switch or not. It's just television.
The problem is it's not just television. This is about freeing up radio spectrum for other things (like wireless communications), which is the entire point in changing over to digital TV in the first place, and the reason why the change was mandated rather than allowed to "happen organically". TV stations were given the extra spectrum required for DTV OTA broadcasts with the understanding that they would switch off their analog broadcasts at a certain date. There is no good reason I can see for allowing TV stations to hog all that spectrum, duplicating channels, for an unspecified period of time.
Maybe not enough has been done to promote the switchover - obviously, there are some people even on Slashdot who don't understand why the switchover is even important. But it is, and it has to happen. I don't know what the solution is, but I wouldn't be averse to simply letting things go and seeing those "70 million" TV's go dark. (I doubt there are nearly that many analog-only sets receiving OTA broadcasts still in use anyway - are we counting analog sets hooked up to digital cable boxes like mine, as well as analog sets that are just sitting in a closet doing nothing? My guess is yes).
I'm a little sick of luddites deciding matters of technology policy for the entire country. This would be the equivalent of forcing our phone system to continue to support the telegraph at the expense of voice communications because a few people still used it. At some point, you say enough is enough and force an upgrade for the good of the rest of the world.
I could easily see this being a mock up unit made specifically for E3 and not necessarily close to what will be on shelves when the unit is released.
Nobody "unveils" a mock-up at E3 (or as an infomercial on MTV). Think about what you're saying - it doesn't make any sense. The whole point of an unveiling is to show people what to look for when the product starts appearing on shelves.
Any one remember the giant metal X that was shown when MS first started talking about the original Xbox?
Yes, when they first started talking about it. Not when they finally had the unveiling. MS has been talking about the 360 for a while, and quite a few potential mock-up shots have been floating around the net since then.
They never had the big metal X at E3 that I recall. I believe they had it at GDC, but that was when they first announced that they were developing a console, not when they unveiled it to the masses.
Also, one glaring omission from these pics are extra controller ports on the front of the machine.
The Xbox 360's controllers will be wireless. The one port that there appears to be is for backward compatibility with any original Xbox controllers you might have. (My guess is it's so that you won't have to buy a second controller for two player games - I'm hoping it's not suggesting that they're doing away with the controller pack-in altogether.)
Note that I'm not saying these pics are definitely the final design - although I am convinced that they are (OurColony is definitely affiliated with MS - that's known - and they're not going to be releasing pics of an unfinished console). But what MS does finally unveil on MTV and then at E3 will definitely, positively be the final design you will see on store shelves at the end of the year. E3 is not the time to be showing mockups.
Yeah, but think about it - with desktop search, if you want to go after a file, just type the name, or some content related to it.
You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.
I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. The point is the OS still knows where it is, and what happens when something invariably gets erased either through user error or a system crash? You erase a folder now and you (should) know exactly what's in it. With the system they're talking about, you'd just lose a bunch of random files and you'd be coming across stuff you didn't even know you'd lost years after the fact (you'd only figure it out when you actually searched for those files, and you'd probably wonder why the search function is not coming up with anything).
I think the desktop metaphor not only still works fine, it is also necessary. There is real utility in knowing exactly where your OS thinks a file or folder really is - not just smart-search pseudo-folders that automatically update themselves based on your criteria (a neat idea, but this should be an addition to the desktop metaphor, not a replacement for it).
Tweaks and helpful features are one thing, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater like MS is talking about here. I sincerely hope there will be an option to just keep using your system the way we always have.
Remember how Windows XP turned off things like file extensions by default? Remember how the first thing you did when you got Windows XP, along with everybody else in the world, was to turn them back on? I feel like that's the sort of thing MS is trying to foist upon us again.
New search functions are fine. But I don't need to learn a completely new way of doing things on the desktop. My desktop - and my PC - works perfectly well as it is.
No I'm not... I said this when they first implemented this monstrosity back when I was working in the game industry.
"Oh.. we only want to help parents to make an educated CHOICE... we don't want to censor anything."
One fact that gets lost in comments like these - and really, you should know better - is that the ESRB is part of the game industry. Literally. It is comprised of all of the game developers and publishers who choose to participate in it. A publisher is perfectly free not to pay the membership fees, not to have ESRB representatives and not to have their games rated. It is a voluntary system that is funded by the publishers themselves. Most publishers choose to be a part of it for several reasons, including the fact that certain large chain stores will not accept unrated games for sale.
As a former member of the industry myself, I know a bit about how the ESRB works. Rating games is an almost shockingly simple yet seemingly arbitrary process. Publishers are told to send samples of the most prurient and violent content of their games, and then a panel of three average people rate what they see. This panel constantly rotates. They do not play the games. They may make their ratings based on the ten minutes of video the publisher sends.
You would think this process would be open to all sorts of abuse on both sides (especially given that it's an industry-funded organization), but in reality there are all sorts of checks and balances that prevent that from happening. There is an appeals process if a publisher believes their game was rated too harshly, and all ratings are subject to review. Conversely, a publisher faces heavy fines (and paying the fines is not voluntary, if you want to keep getting your games rated), not to mention a potential embarassing recall, if they are found to have withheld content that would result in a harsher rating or additional content descriptors.
Most publishers are pretty good about this stuff. It is rarely a surprise to a publisher when a game gets a particular rating or particular content descriptors - I mean most publishers were not born yesterday, they go through this many, many times a year and they pretty much know what to expect. Some of the descriptors themselves can be pretty goofy - I remember one of the games I worked on got a T rating with a descriptor of "Mild Lyrics", whatever the hell that means. "We just want to warn you... these lyrics, are really not that bad!" (The ESRB does provide specific definitions of all descriptors to publishers, but some of them are still a little wacky.) Most of the goofy ones, though, are not really worth worrying about. The one thing that trips some publishers up sometimes are distinctions between things like "cartoon violence" and plain old "violence", which can mean the difference between a T and an M rating. But even that's pretty rare, because the ESRB is pretty specific about what defines each of those descriptors, and again, publishers usually have plenty of past experience to go on.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that this is a more symbiotic relationship than most people think. Yes, publishers can groan every once in a while about the process or their ratings or whatever. But it's not the way a dissident groans about his government; it's more like the way a kid groans about his parents. The ESRB is literally related to the game publishers, and everybody is part of the same industry.
It may surprise many of you to know also that few, if anybody, in the industry want to get rid of the ESRB. Because they know the alternative is government action. The ESRB, as the game industry's self-regulating body, is obviously far preferable to getting congress and law enforcement involved. It's in the industry's best interests for the ESRB to be as effective as possible, and unfortunately the retailers have been letting the industry down in terms of ratings enforcement. At all the ESRB meetings I had to attend (and yes, I groaned at these along with everybody else) the complaints were always centered around retailers screwing everything up for the rest of the industry, not about the ESRB itself.
I don't get people's love affair with the PS controllers. They're so small my hands cramp up. The S controller for the box fits right into my hand comfortable and doesn't cause any fatigue.
I don't get the love affair with the dual shock either, but I don't get the love affair with the controller S even more.
I grant that it's fairly comfortably shaped, but it is, without doubt, by far the heaviest standard console gamepad ever made besides the original Xbox controller. They are both unacceptably heavy for long periods of use.
The buttons are also too resistant and not springy enough - they just don't have the right feel. And though MS could have easily gone to a more standard six-button layout with the S (something a lot of people were hoping for), they stubbornly stuck with those recessed black and white buttons, just put in a different place. At the same time, they put the start/back buttons in the exact spot where my thumb seems to want to go by mistake about fifty times per play session.
I personally think the S controller is the fifth worst console controller ever produced, behind the Atari 5200 joystick, the Colecovision and Intellivision gamepads, and the original Xbox controller. It's too heavy and the buttons are just a mess. Its shape is the only thing it's got going for it.
It's also the worst of the current three first-party controllers. The dual shock, while probably overrated, is at least shaped in such a way that your hands aren't really forced or even guided into any sort of position - you can hold it any way you want to. The buttons are okay, though not great, and they're laid out logically, if not traditionally. The Gamecube controller's only big failing is that it's just too specialized for its own good - the feel of it I think is amazing, but the button layout just doesn't work for a lot of games. And the d-pad is too small. Despite the bad layout, though, I think the springiness of the buttons is just perfect. Other than the d-pad, the Gamecube controller is probably the most comfortable gamepad I've ever used.
It's scary to think that we leave a trail behind online.
No, it's stupid to think that you don't. Especially if you are blogging, where the entire idea is that you leave a trail behind online.
Here's an idea for those who'd like to blog about work: don't. Seriously. I'm as pro free speech as anyone, but being in favor of free speech doesn't mean I think people should be gabbing endlessly on cell phones during theatrical movie showings or that strangers should be screaming in my ear as I'm walking down the street or that employees should be talking about their employers on publicly accessible blogs. I mean, use your freakin' head.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do that thing.
And if you do, and you have to face the consequences of it, tough tits. It was your choice. Nobody asked you to write a blog. In most cases, nobody but your employer probably even cared to read it.
To think you can actually write something in public online and not "leave a trail" is beyond naive.
(And yes, I practice what I preach - I have a blog, and I have another site as well. I have never even mentioned the name of either my current employer or my previous employer online. It should be pretty much common sense, but I guess it isn't. These are things you do not publicly broadcast unless it is part of your job to do so.)
What are the best HDTV capture cards, for Over the Air or for backside-of-the-cable/satelite-box? The article only touches on this, but it will be of greater concern for the home enthusiast/hacker in the next two years.
"Best" depends on what you're using to watch TV. For MCE, the FusionHD or ATI HDTV Wonder work equally well (if you want QAM tuning of non-encrypted cable signals, you want a FusionHD). For "backside of the cable box" you may as well just do firewire capture - providing a box that supports this is an FCC requirement now; your cable provider has to give you one if you ask.
Keep in mind you have to also have an analog tuner for MCE, even if you don't use it. (Most people will want one, though, unless they want to be stuck with only 12 or 13 channels, some of which don't even broadcast all the time.)
If you're not using MCE, then the MyHD line of cards is probably best - they do hardware MPEG2 decoding (note I said decoding - unlike analog capture cards, all an HDTV card needs to do when capturing is stream the digital TV signal to the hard drive). They can be finnicky to set up, though, and you don't want to buy one if you have MCE because hardware decoding is not supported in MCE.
I don't trust anybody.
I hope that includes Charlie Demerjian. This jumped out at me:
"here is the truth, if you are going to multitask and do and do anything that tasks both of the CPUs, one of those is going to be a game."
Bullshit. This drives me crazy on hardware sites, this supposition that the only reason anyone could ever want high performance in their PC is to play games.
At home, I use Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash, I run Windows Media Center for SDTV and DVD viewing, I do video encoding using various tools (Windows Media Encoder, Dr. Divx, and others). I often do all these things at the same time on the same PC, with a hacked version of Media Center that lets me log in remotely at the same time another account has the TV going.
I studiously avoid playing games on this system, because I'm asking it to do quite enough already - I've got another system that I play games on. But I would love a dual-core CPU for this thing, as it would help me out a lot.
Graphics professionals, photographers, multimedia content producers and other high-end users are, surprise surprise, a real market, and they spend even more money than gamers do. I don't see why that's so hard to grasp. I read the specific preview of Intel's dual-core CPU's that Charlie's talking about in his comment up there and I actually found it a refreshing change to find some real-world benchmarks that were not strictly based on playing Doom 3.
That said, I'm sure there is payola going on in the industry. But I worry more about the small sites that seem to give positive reviews to every single component they get sent for free than I do about sites that realize non-gamers are a legitimate group of users that require their own set of benchmarks.
I'm not too surprised actually. Microsoft has been pushing hard and listening to what the Japanese developers want. (And probably throwing alot of money around as well)
The problem is it's not Microsoft or the Japanese developers that determine a console's success there. It's Japanese consumers. And Japanese consumers think of the Xbox as a bad joke.
There is a lot more brand loyalty in Japan than there is almost anywhere else, and it's peppered with both a bit of xenophobia and a bit of nationalism (I'm not saying this is necessarily bad or that it's a whole lot different than here, but there is definitely a bias against non-Japanese electronics there, especially). Even getting some big-name Japanese games is not necessarily going to help the Xbox 2 - I mean people thought DOA3 would sell systems there and it didn't. Neither did Soul Calibur 2. Would Dragon Quest 9 or Final Fantasy 13? Maybe, maybe not. Those games would probably sell some systems, but it's a mistake to think that any single game - or even a few big games - will help turn around such a negative public perception.
I remember when the Xbox was first released in Japan, there was a picture floating around of a couple of Japanese guys at TGS looking at the system. They were literally pointing and laughing at it. It was a funny picture, but it pretty well illustrated MS's problem there.
This time around, MS has convinced developers that they'll do better, but it's not clear to me that there's really all that much they can do. I mean Ford's been trying to sell cars in Japan for a long time too, without much success. My guess is the honeymoon with Japanese developers will be a short-lived one once the initial sales numbers come in, unless those Japanese developers are in it more for the western game audience than for their home audience (which is possible, but would be a big mistake for them if you ask me).
Indeed, I stand corrected. But I figure that difference is only an argument of semantics. Seems pretty much the same thing (in this case) to me.
It is not even close. Nobody can "steal" GPL'd code - it is there for all to see and modify as they see fit. That's the whole point.
What you can't do is take that code, modify it, sell the binaries and then refuse to give your contributions back to the community. That is what the CherryOS people have done, and that is a GPL violation. As the copyrighted code is provided under the GPL only under the terms of said GPL, violation of it is by extension a copyright violation.
But you can't "steal" something that is freely available, so it is not just semantics whether or not it was "theft".
Yes, it was wrong - that's not the issue. But just as we're constantly berating the RIAA/MPAA for their hyperbole on such issues, we have to be careful in what we say about GPL-related copyright violations too.. especially as this is even further removed from "theft" than what people do when they download music or movies.
That'll stop Terr'rists! The 9/11 hijackers had legit ID, sheesh. More scare tactics to make you feel safe as the government takes away your freedom of movement.
Last time I travelled to Japan I was required to show my passport upon re-entering the United States. Last time I travelled to Europe (more than ten years ago!), same thing.
The deal we had with Canada was a special thing. You don't have any "right" to travel to another country and then re-enter without a passport. In fact, most countries require it - including the United States in every other case (except now with Mexico - and you can bet the DHS is looking at that now too).
This is just closing a loophole in the current immigration system. I don't see why Americans should continue to be able to get away without even owning a passport when practically every other citizen of the civilized world carries one pretty much wherever they go. There's no reason for us to be smug about our backwardness.
I agree with you completely. This gamne would fit nicely in the 'Cube library. Infact, I think that games like Katamari owe their existence to Nintendo.
Yeah, because it's not like Namco made Pac-Man before Nintendo even created their first home console, or anything.
Namco is an old-school developer just like Nintendo (and if you want to go further back, both Namco and Nintendo have been around far longer than video games have even existed). They've both been making video games since the early days of the video arcade, and they've both got their seminal classics and "quirky games" that helped establish genres. I wouldn't say Katamari Damacy "owes its existence" to Nintendo any more than I'd say Donkey Kong owes its existence to Namco.
Katamari Damacy is just the latest in a long list of Namco puzzle/maze games that started with the original Puckman (later renamed Pac-Man) in 1979 and has continued right up through the modern age with games like Mr. Driller, Star Trigon and now Katamari Damacy. The fact that KD is one of their best, most innovative and most recognized puzzle games in years doesn't mean it's outside their tradition, or more of a "GameCube" style game, or whatever.
"Arguing with unreasonable people who hide behind anonymity is a waste time, so I don't bother."
Sounds like he's not a member of Slashdot.
although it's upside down
Er, sorry, by this I meant the perspective is upside down, not the image itself. It's just an odd perspective that they've forced to match their map. But the image itself is right side up.
The World Trade Center looks basically up to date to me - although it's upside down (I've noticed Google skews the images to match their map orientation). I'd bet the age of each area differs depending on various factors, the most important probably being how often Google expects people to be searching for that particular area. Kind of odd that they'd be starting out with anything but the latest data for any location, but I wonder if every area will be updated with the same frequency once this has been up for a while.