Of course, it's a moot point in this case, as I never would have bought this bought the bootleg were it not for the film company in question formally announcing that they would never release the film in America. As an artist myself, I take copyright infringement fairly seriously.
You take copyright infringement fairly seriously yet you purposely bought a bootleg when there are many,many officially licensed and sanctioned versions of this film on DVD available to you? Jesus, what a hypocrite!
There is also "_no way_" that none of the people who downloaded this stuff would have bought it if it weren't available "for free."
Maybe in some bizarro logic this statement actually makes some amount of sense. I think maybe the problem isn't that you don't not have enough double negatives.
I saw these last night, and this is about the biggest spoiler you can possibly see for the movie. Almost every scene is pictured, along with a description of each scene.
SPOILER ALERT!
Annakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader! Senator Palpatine becomes Emperor Palpatine! Queen Amidala gives birth to Luke Skywalker and Princess Leah!
Seriously, the entire plot of this movie was either spoiled nearly 30 years ago in the FIRST Star Wars movie, or it should at least be pretty obvious by now (no, QUEEN Amidala was never mentioned by name in ep. 4, but jesus christ, who do you think gave birth to the PRINCESS?). If you're worried about "spoilers" at this point, then you really can't be much of a Star Wars fan to begin with. You'd have to be completely oblivious to the story to this point - we know the ending, we know the beginning, we're just missing one part of the saga in the middle, and as ingrained into pop culture as this franchise is, it's not difficult to fill in the gaps, screenshots or no.
as I have not yet been able to get my iPod working reliably with USB 2.0, it's nice to have both cables. (Plus it means I can leave one connected to my PC at all times, then bring my USB cable with me wherever I go and use the iPod as a portable hard drive.)
Er, to clarify this, as it seems contradictory, I can use the iPod as a drive with USB 2.0, and I can charge it, but iTunes will only sync about 20% of the time. So USB works fine for data, just not for music.
... my continued holding out for one of these guys is paying off. $350 for the 30 GB iPod Photo is not a bad deal.
Not bad but not as good as it looks either. Note that no iPod comes with the dock any longer, and the iPod photos do not come with a firewire cable either (the older 4G iPods came with both firewire and USB 2.0 - the 20GB still does).
Probably not a big deal for a lot of people, but not having a dock myself I can tell you I wish I did, and as I have not yet been able to get my iPod working reliably with USB 2.0, it's nice to have both cables. (Plus it means I can leave one connected to my PC at all times, then bring my USB cable with me wherever I go and use the iPod as a portable hard drive.)
Apple would charge something like $70 for the firewire cable and dock separately, so you're not really getting that much (if any) value over the old 40GB iPod photo when you also factor in the smaller capacity.
I also sort of lament the fact that with each new revision, the iPod becomes less of a luxury product and more of a commodity... but that's inevitable, I guess.
Searching backpacks is not going to prevent a school shooting.
Huh? They do and they have. Every now and again here in New York a gun is found in a student's backpack, and that's one less gun in the schools. With as many school shootings as we still have here (nothing on the Columbine level, but you get the occasional basketball game fight that escalates, or the after-school party that gets out of hand, or the drug deal gone bad), you can bet getting those guns out of those backpacks has prevented more than a few shootings. Metal detectors have prevented even more.
This is not about searching backpacks. There is no freedom to bring weapons into any public building anywhere in this country, and there is no expectation that anything you bring with you to a public building can be kept locked, hidden and/or concealed - this was true even before 9/11, and it has nothing to do with privacy. It's also true of adults (so you can get over your "kids have rights too!" argument), and it's true in buildings other than schools too.
This is not about that; this is about tagging everybody with a tracking device. That is an invasion of privacy - requiring that you wear a clear backpack and walk through a metal detector before going to school is not.
There is no expectation that you should be free to walk around school with weapons. There is an expectation that you should be free to walk around school without being tracked. Those are two different things.
If a kid is going to shoot a school nothing is going to stop him.
Jesus, what a defeatist, cynical attitude for a kid. Plenty of things can and have stopped school shootings hundreds of times over in this city alone. By your logic, we may as well not even have laws or a police department because people are just going to commit crimes regardless.
I don't know why this guy is expecting more of this review system. I don't even know why he's hopping mad about it. He made a comment in the article that somebody gave him some shit about recommending Animal Crossing over Wind Waker with the reasoning that WW had a higher score. Sounds to me like his real problem is with stupid fanboy'ism, not with the reviews themselves.
No, his problems are with the review scores, and I agree with him. This has also been a debate in the film industry ever since Siskel and Ebert debuted their "thumbs" ratings system and everybody else started their 1-4 or 1-5 scales. You just can't boil down every film or every book or every game onto some arbitrary numerical rating scale, in part because you are then automatically comparing games against each other (his friend didn't recommend AC over WW, the reviewer did by virtue of his scores).
Almost all of the arguments we have about game reviews - how scores can be bought and sold, how one site scores games differently than others (a 5/10 may be average on GameSpot but not on IGN), how one reviewer scores different than another on the same site, how games in different genres cannot be directly compared, how games from different eras cannot be directly compared, etc. etc. would completely disappear if the scores also completely disappeared. Doing away with scores is really the only way to restore integrity to the system.
The problem is scores exist as the Cliff's Notes version of a review for people who don't feel like bothering to actually read the review itself. Honestly, if you really read the review there is no need whatsoever to be told the score. If a review says "the gameplay is great, the graphics are ok, the structure is pretty linear but it's still fun, the voice acting is terrible"... I mean is knowing it's a 7.6 or a 6.9 or a 7.2 really going to provide you with any more useful information than the content that you've already read, upon which the score is supposedly based to begin with?
So we will probably never be able to lose the review scores because the public is too lazy to actually utilize their reading comprehension skills. But they're apparently not lazy enough to refrain from complaining about those scores on every game-related forum under the sun. It's a vicious cycle.
The best judgement of a game (because of the above), is to see anomalies in gameranking.com listings. If IGN or Gamespot or Gamespy or EGM give a review that seems to be an anomaly, ignore it. It's a bought review.
You have this backwards. Anomalies are usually the independent reviews, and will more often than not give you closer to a "true" score for a game (if there is such a thing - games are pretty subjective, moreso than a lot of other "arts").
Actually, based on my five years in the game industry, first writing reviews for a living and then working on the publishing side, I've never seen an outright bought review. But game reviewers are human and they're weak; they're extremely susceptible to subtle payola and gifts, they're distracted by pretty girls, they're hardly immune to a good PR department. A publisher that's good at publishing knows how to work the reviewers and will do everything possible on all of the major mags and sites short of offering actual cash. They'll offer an all-expense paid trip out to see the game, with a room at a fancy hotel, they'll take them out for drinks (often at a "gentleman's club"), they'll usually have some sort of fun event set up. They'll pretend they're the reviewer's best friend - someone you wouldn't want to let down with a bad review, right?
This happens on every big game. On the biggest games, editorial staffs can hype each other to death. (Everybody reads everybody else's magazines and web sites.) By the end of it, game reviewers have convinced themselves of how big and good a game is, and they naturally gush excitedly about it so as not to appear behind the curve. If you owned a magazine and you didn't have Vice City on the cover back in 2002, man, you were out of it.
The thing you have to remember is how incestuous the game industry is. There is obviously competition, but these guys all know each other and are all friends. Game reviewers are one big voting bloc; they hang out together at events, they see each other multiple times per year, they often simply shuttle back and forth between publications. Publisher PR departments are comprised of either distractingly pretty girls or former reviewers that the current crop all know well. There is a tremendous amount of groupthink and peer pressure - it's like high school. If you're in a group of four guys sitting at a bar table and three of them are gushing about how great a game is, are you going to be the odd man out? I mean, this is your job - do you want to look like an idiot in front of your peers and colleagues? Or, failing that, would you, as an uber-gaming geek, want to disappoint that hot-ass chick in the PR department who's simply asking you for one little favor in writing that positive review?
It's a screwed up system, and for that reason I generally do not even bother reading game reviews anymore. And I refuse to get caught up in hype for games that almost always end up disappointing (despite their high review scores). You can still get useful info out of mainstream reviews if you learn to read between the lines, but it almost requires learning the language of the industry and the ability to find and then discount common threads among reviews (if you find repeated phrases or certain features that are heavily hyped in every review, those are most certainly either PR plants or straight-up plagiarism and should be simply ignored either way). I don't blame the general public for being unable to sift through the hyperbole and get to the relevant content underneath.
A bit off topic... but PPC? I keep hearing they'll be using a PPC arch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 1) Microsoft is not experienced with the PPC arch (okay, MS Works for Mac does not count, nor IE, I mean on the whole), nor is the majority of the gaming industry.
Ok, maybe Nintendo's not "the majority" of the gaming industry, but it's not like nobody's ever used a PPC before or written software for it. And MS has certainly written more than Works and IE for the PPC (MS Office, anyone?).
Let's face it, there is no Wintel monopoly in general-purpose CPU's anymore, and that's a good thing. And nobody except Sony actually custom-designs their own game console CPU's anymore, it's just too expensive (but even the Cell is supposedly intended for use outside the PS3, so they're obviously going to try to make their investment back in general-purpose machines). I just lament the fact that AMD is not getting their chips into any of these machines.
I definitely think the Cell is going to be a tougher nut for the industry to crack than the PPC. The Cell, while basically PPC-based, is a mostly-new architecture... the PPC itself, though, is pretty well worn-in.
That doesn't mean I think the Xbox 2 will be a success. If history's a guide, I think it will be absolutely crushed by the PS3. The game console market doesn't work the way MS thinks it works.
BTW, how in the world is this NOT a "laugh, it's funny" article?
Because it's pseudo-science that's trying to be serious. Which can be a dangerous thing, although probably isn't in this case.
I stopped reading when I read this:
"The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Similarly and extending from that, there is no law of anything that says that if you have a long series of 1's that it's more likely that your next number will be a 0. The "law of averages" is commonly cited here but there's really no such law.
Wikipedia has a nice little article that explains this, though I highly recommend the book Innumeracy for a lot more detail and an entertaining read to boot (that's a straight Amazon link, not a referral - I don't care where you buy it, just read it.)
... this will be the last day Google is considered a Good company on Slashdot.
I tend to agree, though apparently this guy a) had more than 400 complaints from within the company to Google's HR department asking that he be removed, and b) was obviously a complete idiot in the things he posted about in his blog.
Just because we all have the ability to post anything we want anywhere we want doesn't mean we should. You're free to say whatever you want in the United States but a company is not obligated to keep you under hire if you become a disruptive influence or publicly reveal trade secrets. It has nothing to do with whether he signed an NDA or not; it comes down to common sense.
I don't know exactly why he was fired but it should not be a surprise to anybody, including him. And I don't think this is a free speech issue; this is more of a lesson in learning when and where it is and isn't appropriate to say certain things, which is something that has been lost on the internet generation. Nobody can put you in jail for complaining about your company, but your company is not obliged to keep paying you for the privilege.
And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medievial history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?
(Insert obvious HP company age joke here)
Seriously, what does it matter? Most people change careers an average of three times during their lives, and many people don't ever get a job in what they went to school for. So you start at the bottom of some other industry and learn it, then work your way up. 20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway. I have no idea if Carly has that much experience in tech, but I wouldn't say her degree is the problem.
(btw, my degree is in film production, but I work as a web producer. Lots of people in the world are in the same boat.)
Anyway, I still say good riddance to her. I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years, but the company itself no longer stands for anything. Hopefully the next CEO will continue to improve the products while at the same time improving the company. That was her biggest failing, both in moral terms and in terms of bringing shareholder value.
Its cultural. On the other side of the coin, the Japanese don't get many sports themed games, while games like Madden 200* are bestsellers in the US.
Ummm, you might want to check up on that. The Japanese get plenty of sports themed games, both American and Japanese, including Madden.
The Japanese get pretty much everything. Their tastes are different - they do not like genres such as fps's that much, and they're obviously not that interested in American football - but that doesn't stop publishers from publishing those games there. It's a small country with a very high density of gamers per square mile, so the costs of releasing what would be considered "niche" games is lower there than it is here and it's not difficult to turn a profit.
It's almost a cliche to say it but game stores there are pretty ridiculous - many of them have entire floors dedicated just to one system. There are many more games released there than there are here. Most of these are "niche" titles, because those games are still profitable.
In the US, with distribution being more difficult and expensive, niche games don't get as much of a chance. It's not cultural, it's more geographical. Most games in Japan only sell ten thousand or so copies, but that's a profitable game there. Here, you'd probably have to sell around ten-fold more to break even, simply because you're dealing with a much larger area, a much more dispersed customer base, and a much more hodge-podge and regional system of transportation.
And really, good riddance. If they're logging all their users' downloads, installing all kinds of adware, spyware, and other crapware on your systems (which they also admitted in court documents), and just generally acting not only as a bad corporate citizen but also an evil software developer in terms of their own users' interests, then this is most definitely not a company we need in existence in the world.
Whether you're for or against P2P in general (I'm for it), the world will be better off with Kazaa completely out of the picture.
People have been suggesting Azureus but I was under the impression that Shareaza was not a bittorrent client.
Shareaza has a BT client built-in, along with eDonkey, Gnutella and Gnutella 2. It's a great concept (a FOSS-based all-in-one P2P app) and it's a pretty slick looking app but unfortunately the performance is nowhere near any of the standalone apps for the various protocols it supports. (I have verified this in side by side testing.)
Azureus is what I use, although it's got some issues as well. It's clean and well-organized and gives you a lot of info on the files you're downloading, but it seems to have some sort of memory leak or something... it runs fine at first and transfer speed is never an issue, but after a few hours of running it will bring my entire system practically to a halt. It is impossible to just leave it running in the background, which is really what you're supposed to do with BT.
I've got a decent system, too - P4 2.4, 512MB, etc. so that's not the issue. It's either a problem with java (Azureus is java-based) or it's a leak in Azureus itself.
How much of an increase in violent crime do you need to see in the UK or Australia before it dawns on you that:
A) Banning guns is a very, very bad idea
Very bad example. Here's why. The murder rate in the United States is still four times higher than it is in either the UK or Australia, despite a higher overall violent crime rate in those countries. In other words, there is more violent crime in the UK and Australia, but less murder. Why do you think this is?
It's because of cases like this. Cases that would be a simple mugging in other countries pretty frequently turn into murders here with easy access to deadly weapons. This woman - and countless others like her every year - simply would not be dead today if these stupid kids (and the stupid adults supposedly supervising them) did not have access to such weapons. Your position is directly supporting the murder of people like Nicole Dufresne.
B) It's impossible
Bullshit. Go to Japan and try to buy a gun. Seriously. If you think gun control doesn't work, then you just don't have a very well-developed world view. It does work and it has been working in various countries for many years. In fact, I just did a quick Google search on gun murder in Japan and quickly came up with some numbers from 1996: 9,390 gun murders in the US vs. 15 in Japan. Japan's murder rate has not increased appreciably since then - they have around 1,300 total per year (about 1/8 the number of gun murders alone in this country) with a population about half that of the United States.
I would say banning guns would have a far greater effect on reducing the murder rate than banning violent video game sales to minors. But that does not mean I am against such a ban. I don't see why it has to be either/or. There is no reason, for example, that a 12 year old kid should be playing a game like Manhunt. No justifiable reason at all. I would argue that there's no reason for anybody to play that game, but if adults want to play it, that's up to them. Kids, though - I mean adults need to step in and say "no". Yes, it's the parents' responsibility, but a lot of people seem to use that fact as some sort of rationale for abdicating societal responsibility. It is not, for example, legal for 12 year olds to commit murder or even to drive a car simply because it's their parents' responsibility to make sure that they don't. There is still a law saying they cannot do it, as there should be.
Handguns should be illegal. M-rated game sales to minors should be illegal. End of story. This is not a question of "my rights online", it's a question of living in a free and safe society that does not endorse the sale of devices whose sole purpose is to kill other human beings or the sale of adult content to children who do not yet have the mental maturity to properly process it.
I realize Slashdot has more than a bit of a libertarian slant, but there is a difference between being a libertarian and being an anarchist. There are plenty of countries in the world that are freer than we are in the United States but nevertheless have successfully implemented these perfectly reasonable regulations regarding public safety.
It's absurd to prevent a company from install its OS on the computers it sells. We have no problem letting Microsoft put Windows on the hardware it sells.
And I'm sure you're willing to apply the same standard to Novell, Mandrake, and Red Hat, right? God forbid a software company be allowed to pre-install an OS on a system that somebody else built!
By that standard, we'd have exactly three choices in computer hardware today - IBM, Sun or Apple. It's not very FOSS-ish of you to argue that less choice in both software and hardware would be good for anybody. Besides, if MS had to, you know they'd be able to outspend any of these guys on developing consumer hardware, so they'd still be a monopoly. You'd just have less Linux out there.
MS can be blamed for a lot of things, but really, this article is just a lot of pro-Mac, anti-MS hooey. Why it gets featured on Slashdot is not really a mystery given the site's post-OS X pro-Mac bias, but that doesn't make it really newsworthy either. I don't honestly even believe the guy's story about installing Windows on his SO's machine; the 4 minute attack is lifted straight out of an article that appeared here about 4-5 months ago. Seems a bit coincidental that a self-confessed lifetime Mac user would suddenly be installing Windows XP on his SO's machine just so he can write about how awful it is.
The second half of his article just goes on at length with the standard Mac fanboy arguments that we've heard for years - it stops being about security and instead touches on the prices of Macs vs. PC's (he argues PC's are actually more expensive once you bring them "up to the level" of a comparable Mac), the user-friendliness of Windows vs. OS X, the innovativeness of Apple vs. MS. I mean seriously, blah blah blah. If I wanted to read this, I'd just search the Usenet archives from 1986.
There's no doubt that Windows XP has its share of security problems, moreso than most OS's. But there's no new info in this article and lots of annoying fanboy hyperbole. I've seen more insightful writing in Slashdot posts, and that's saying something.
So then, really, this is nothing new, just a new package made by marketing as a new way of selling accessories that have been on the market for years? And why is this being advertised as a "story" on Slashdot? I don't remember reading about Tide's new 64 oz bottle, with New Easy To Pour Handle (tm)
Huh? What's new is that Sony announced official pricing and a launch date for their new game system that is not yet on the market in NA. That qualifies as "news" to me, you know, considering that nobody knew it before.
I call bs. You are posting on/. hence you can't have a girlfriend let alone a hot asian one.
I'll do him one better - I've got a hot Asian (actually Japanese) wife!
But he is actually right - sushi neither refers to the rice nor directly to the fish. It's a method of preserving food. Specifically, it originally was a method of preserving fish - hence it generally being served with fish today (though not always). But it is not really correct to say that sushi does not refer to the fish - without fish, sushi never would have been invented, and the first forms of sushi were little more than fish, salt, and vinegar. There was no rice.
Sushi evolved over the years like many foods do. Today's maki are not even really Japanese (though neither was the first sushi, really, either).
Do a Google search on the origins of sushi and you'll find a bunch of stories that say basically the same thing - you can glean the true history from that. (I'm not linking to a specific page because they all have minor details that sound more or less apocryphal, but the gist is basically the same between most of them).
The kanji for sushi also looks like a fish. Kanji originally was a pictographic language - it depicts what it is. Here's a nice page that shows the various kanji used throughout the years and also talks a little bit about their origins and the origins of sushi. (Before anyone gets confused by that page talking about a bunch of Chinese stuff, remember that Japanese kanji is derived from Chinese kanji, so all Japanese kanji have origins in the Chinese language.)
Games should be awarded as games, not for pretending to be films. See the Bafta games awards (www.bafta.com) for a more competent attempt at the idea.
Yeah, because it's not as if the British Academy of Film and Television see any parallels between games and films...
You think the category of "Art Direction" was invented for video games?
I think the fact is film and video games have more in common than you seem to recognize. Surely you realize that the "outstanding character performance" relates to voice acting, do you not? Is Judy Dench not still an actor if she's in a game? Does she suddenly have to turn in her SAG card? It's not as if they hired her to plow snow off the studio lot; she's acting in Goldeneye: Rogue Agent (or "Rouge Agent", as AIAS lists it).
I understand your wanting games to be games, but I also think voice actors should get their just recognition, especially given the poor state of voice acting in most games. When it's done well, it should be rewarded. That can only encourage higher standards in the future.
I actually have more of a problem with both BAFTA and AIAS listing video games under a generic "interactive" category - under the same main heading as "Children's Learning" for BAFTA, for example. AIAS actually only does games, which makes their moniker all the more puzzling. I'm sure eight years ago "interactive entertainment" sounded more respectable than "video games", but today it just sounds like a dumb marketing buzzword phrase.
btw, I can tell you from firsthand past experience that the guys at Rockstar are about to bust some kneecaps right about now.
A fact that seems lost on most journalists these days.
And I see that R'ing TFA is still lost on most Slashdotters these days...
This is not an article about how CAN-SPAM has increased spam. It is an article about how spam has increased despite CAN-SPAM. That is a very different thing. Several viewpoints are given from all sides involved on why it's happening, but at no time does the article itself suggest CAN-SPAM is the cause - only that it has not been an effective deterrent.
I'm gonna give my vote to SuSE... the ease and speed of updates is one reason I've stuck with it, after giving up on Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora.
Argh...this kinda came out wrong... the reasons I gave up on other distros were not specifically due to the updates (Red Hat has a nice auto-update utility as well) but for a variety of reasons. SuSE is, IMO, the most polished distro I have used overall, and that includes the very nice YAST2. I have just not had any real problems with it, whereas I've had various bits of hardware that could never be properly configured under Mandrake or RH/Fedora, despite the fact that they were supposed to work out of the box. (This included the complete inability to even set hard drive mount points under Fedora Core 3, which is what finally led me to dump Fedora altogether.)
I'm gonna give my vote to SuSE... the ease and speed of updates is one reason I've stuck with it, after giving up on Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora. YAST2 (the built-in setup utility) is just such an easy and powerful tool, and it "just works" - you can set it to auto-update if you want (it sets up a cron job for you if you select this option), but even on manual it will identify critical patches separately from non-critical patches, which makes it easy to pick and choose.
Plus, it's Novell now, so it's owned by a "real company", which may or may not be something your own company/organization is looking for (some business do require some level of centralized accountability and support).
I've also been pleasantly surprised with SuSE 9.2 in other areas - it's the cleanest and easiest-to-use distro out of the box that I've used, with no obvious bugs that I've seen. No reason not to use it, and lots of reasons to use it. YAST2 is a big selling point, in my opinion.
Nice, but as it says right on the site, 90% of them are Japanese. Which is cool, but doesn't really satisfy the nostalgia factor that most of us westerners have (I realize there are probably some Japanese here too, but most Japanese residents probably just read their own Slashdot).
Would be great to have a site like this that really focused on western stuff, as a counterpart, not instead of this site (since Japan has a long and storied game history as well, just not one most of us personally experienced).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it's a moot point in this case, as I never would have bought this bought the bootleg were it not for the film company in question formally announcing that they would never release the film in America. As an artist myself, I take copyright infringement fairly seriously.
You take copyright infringement fairly seriously yet you purposely bought a bootleg when there are many, many officially licensed and sanctioned versions of this film on DVD available to you? Jesus, what a hypocrite!
There is also "_no way_" that none of the people who downloaded this stuff would have bought it if it weren't available "for free."
Maybe in some bizarro logic this statement actually makes some amount of sense. I think maybe the problem isn't that you don't not have enough double negatives.
I saw these last night, and this is about the biggest spoiler you can possibly see for the movie. Almost every scene is pictured, along with a description of each scene.
SPOILER ALERT!
Annakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader! Senator Palpatine becomes Emperor Palpatine! Queen Amidala gives birth to Luke Skywalker and Princess Leah!
Seriously, the entire plot of this movie was either spoiled nearly 30 years ago in the FIRST Star Wars movie, or it should at least be pretty obvious by now (no, QUEEN Amidala was never mentioned by name in ep. 4, but jesus christ, who do you think gave birth to the PRINCESS?). If you're worried about "spoilers" at this point, then you really can't be much of a Star Wars fan to begin with. You'd have to be completely oblivious to the story to this point - we know the ending, we know the beginning, we're just missing one part of the saga in the middle, and as ingrained into pop culture as this franchise is, it's not difficult to fill in the gaps, screenshots or no.
as I have not yet been able to get my iPod working reliably with USB 2.0, it's nice to have both cables. (Plus it means I can leave one connected to my PC at all times, then bring my USB cable with me wherever I go and use the iPod as a portable hard drive.)
Er, to clarify this, as it seems contradictory, I can use the iPod as a drive with USB 2.0, and I can charge it, but iTunes will only sync about 20% of the time. So USB works fine for data, just not for music.
(mods, no need to touch this message.)
Not bad but not as good as it looks either. Note that no iPod comes with the dock any longer, and the iPod photos do not come with a firewire cable either (the older 4G iPods came with both firewire and USB 2.0 - the 20GB still does).
Probably not a big deal for a lot of people, but not having a dock myself I can tell you I wish I did, and as I have not yet been able to get my iPod working reliably with USB 2.0, it's nice to have both cables. (Plus it means I can leave one connected to my PC at all times, then bring my USB cable with me wherever I go and use the iPod as a portable hard drive.)
Apple would charge something like $70 for the firewire cable and dock separately, so you're not really getting that much (if any) value over the old 40GB iPod photo when you also factor in the smaller capacity.
I also sort of lament the fact that with each new revision, the iPod becomes less of a luxury product and more of a commodity... but that's inevitable, I guess.
Searching backpacks is not going to prevent a school shooting.
Huh? They do and they have. Every now and again here in New York a gun is found in a student's backpack, and that's one less gun in the schools. With as many school shootings as we still have here (nothing on the Columbine level, but you get the occasional basketball game fight that escalates, or the after-school party that gets out of hand, or the drug deal gone bad), you can bet getting those guns out of those backpacks has prevented more than a few shootings. Metal detectors have prevented even more.
This is not about searching backpacks. There is no freedom to bring weapons into any public building anywhere in this country, and there is no expectation that anything you bring with you to a public building can be kept locked, hidden and/or concealed - this was true even before 9/11, and it has nothing to do with privacy. It's also true of adults (so you can get over your "kids have rights too!" argument), and it's true in buildings other than schools too.
This is not about that; this is about tagging everybody with a tracking device. That is an invasion of privacy - requiring that you wear a clear backpack and walk through a metal detector before going to school is not.
There is no expectation that you should be free to walk around school with weapons. There is an expectation that you should be free to walk around school without being tracked. Those are two different things.
If a kid is going to shoot a school nothing is going to stop him.
Jesus, what a defeatist, cynical attitude for a kid. Plenty of things can and have stopped school shootings hundreds of times over in this city alone. By your logic, we may as well not even have laws or a police department because people are just going to commit crimes regardless.
I don't know why this guy is expecting more of this review system. I don't even know why he's hopping mad about it. He made a comment in the article that somebody gave him some shit about recommending Animal Crossing over Wind Waker with the reasoning that WW had a higher score. Sounds to me like his real problem is with stupid fanboy'ism, not with the reviews themselves.
No, his problems are with the review scores, and I agree with him. This has also been a debate in the film industry ever since Siskel and Ebert debuted their "thumbs" ratings system and everybody else started their 1-4 or 1-5 scales. You just can't boil down every film or every book or every game onto some arbitrary numerical rating scale, in part because you are then automatically comparing games against each other (his friend didn't recommend AC over WW, the reviewer did by virtue of his scores).
Almost all of the arguments we have about game reviews - how scores can be bought and sold, how one site scores games differently than others (a 5/10 may be average on GameSpot but not on IGN), how one reviewer scores different than another on the same site, how games in different genres cannot be directly compared, how games from different eras cannot be directly compared, etc. etc. would completely disappear if the scores also completely disappeared. Doing away with scores is really the only way to restore integrity to the system.
The problem is scores exist as the Cliff's Notes version of a review for people who don't feel like bothering to actually read the review itself. Honestly, if you really read the review there is no need whatsoever to be told the score. If a review says "the gameplay is great, the graphics are ok, the structure is pretty linear but it's still fun, the voice acting is terrible"... I mean is knowing it's a 7.6 or a 6.9 or a 7.2 really going to provide you with any more useful information than the content that you've already read, upon which the score is supposedly based to begin with?
So we will probably never be able to lose the review scores because the public is too lazy to actually utilize their reading comprehension skills. But they're apparently not lazy enough to refrain from complaining about those scores on every game-related forum under the sun. It's a vicious cycle.
The best judgement of a game (because of the above), is to see anomalies in gameranking.com listings. If IGN or Gamespot or Gamespy or EGM give a review that seems to be an anomaly, ignore it. It's a bought review.
You have this backwards. Anomalies are usually the independent reviews, and will more often than not give you closer to a "true" score for a game (if there is such a thing - games are pretty subjective, moreso than a lot of other "arts").
Actually, based on my five years in the game industry, first writing reviews for a living and then working on the publishing side, I've never seen an outright bought review. But game reviewers are human and they're weak; they're extremely susceptible to subtle payola and gifts, they're distracted by pretty girls, they're hardly immune to a good PR department. A publisher that's good at publishing knows how to work the reviewers and will do everything possible on all of the major mags and sites short of offering actual cash. They'll offer an all-expense paid trip out to see the game, with a room at a fancy hotel, they'll take them out for drinks (often at a "gentleman's club"), they'll usually have some sort of fun event set up. They'll pretend they're the reviewer's best friend - someone you wouldn't want to let down with a bad review, right?
This happens on every big game. On the biggest games, editorial staffs can hype each other to death. (Everybody reads everybody else's magazines and web sites.) By the end of it, game reviewers have convinced themselves of how big and good a game is, and they naturally gush excitedly about it so as not to appear behind the curve. If you owned a magazine and you didn't have Vice City on the cover back in 2002, man, you were out of it.
The thing you have to remember is how incestuous the game industry is. There is obviously competition, but these guys all know each other and are all friends. Game reviewers are one big voting bloc; they hang out together at events, they see each other multiple times per year, they often simply shuttle back and forth between publications. Publisher PR departments are comprised of either distractingly pretty girls or former reviewers that the current crop all know well. There is a tremendous amount of groupthink and peer pressure - it's like high school. If you're in a group of four guys sitting at a bar table and three of them are gushing about how great a game is, are you going to be the odd man out? I mean, this is your job - do you want to look like an idiot in front of your peers and colleagues? Or, failing that, would you, as an uber-gaming geek, want to disappoint that hot-ass chick in the PR department who's simply asking you for one little favor in writing that positive review?
It's a screwed up system, and for that reason I generally do not even bother reading game reviews anymore. And I refuse to get caught up in hype for games that almost always end up disappointing (despite their high review scores). You can still get useful info out of mainstream reviews if you learn to read between the lines, but it almost requires learning the language of the industry and the ability to find and then discount common threads among reviews (if you find repeated phrases or certain features that are heavily hyped in every review, those are most certainly either PR plants or straight-up plagiarism and should be simply ignored either way). I don't blame the general public for being unable to sift through the hyperbole and get to the relevant content underneath.
A bit off topic... but PPC? I keep hearing they'll be using a PPC arch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 1) Microsoft is not experienced with the PPC arch (okay, MS Works for Mac does not count, nor IE, I mean on the whole), nor is the majority of the gaming industry.
Ummm...
Ok, maybe Nintendo's not "the majority" of the gaming industry, but it's not like nobody's ever used a PPC before or written software for it. And MS has certainly written more than Works and IE for the PPC (MS Office, anyone?).
Let's face it, there is no Wintel monopoly in general-purpose CPU's anymore, and that's a good thing. And nobody except Sony actually custom-designs their own game console CPU's anymore, it's just too expensive (but even the Cell is supposedly intended for use outside the PS3, so they're obviously going to try to make their investment back in general-purpose machines). I just lament the fact that AMD is not getting their chips into any of these machines.
I definitely think the Cell is going to be a tougher nut for the industry to crack than the PPC. The Cell, while basically PPC-based, is a mostly-new architecture... the PPC itself, though, is pretty well worn-in.
That doesn't mean I think the Xbox 2 will be a success. If history's a guide, I think it will be absolutely crushed by the PS3. The game console market doesn't work the way MS thinks it works.
Woops, my link was removed (damn, how many years have I been posting on this site, anyway?). Here's a link to the book that should make it through.
BTW, how in the world is this NOT a "laugh, it's funny" article?
Because it's pseudo-science that's trying to be serious. Which can be a dangerous thing, although probably isn't in this case.
I stopped reading when I read this:
"The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Similarly and extending from that, there is no law of anything that says that if you have a long series of 1's that it's more likely that your next number will be a 0. The "law of averages" is commonly cited here but there's really no such law.
Wikipedia has a nice little article that explains this, though I highly recommend the book Innumeracy for a lot more detail and an entertaining read to boot (that's a straight Amazon link, not a referral - I don't care where you buy it, just read it.)
I tend to agree, though apparently this guy a) had more than 400 complaints from within the company to Google's HR department asking that he be removed, and b) was obviously a complete idiot in the things he posted about in his blog.
Just because we all have the ability to post anything we want anywhere we want doesn't mean we should. You're free to say whatever you want in the United States but a company is not obligated to keep you under hire if you become a disruptive influence or publicly reveal trade secrets. It has nothing to do with whether he signed an NDA or not; it comes down to common sense.
I don't know exactly why he was fired but it should not be a surprise to anybody, including him. And I don't think this is a free speech issue; this is more of a lesson in learning when and where it is and isn't appropriate to say certain things, which is something that has been lost on the internet generation. Nobody can put you in jail for complaining about your company, but your company is not obliged to keep paying you for the privilege.
And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medievial history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?
(Insert obvious HP company age joke here)
Seriously, what does it matter? Most people change careers an average of three times during their lives, and many people don't ever get a job in what they went to school for. So you start at the bottom of some other industry and learn it, then work your way up. 20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway. I have no idea if Carly has that much experience in tech, but I wouldn't say her degree is the problem.
(btw, my degree is in film production, but I work as a web producer. Lots of people in the world are in the same boat.)
Anyway, I still say good riddance to her. I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years, but the company itself no longer stands for anything. Hopefully the next CEO will continue to improve the products while at the same time improving the company. That was her biggest failing, both in moral terms and in terms of bringing shareholder value.
Its cultural. On the other side of the coin, the Japanese don't get many sports themed games, while games like Madden 200* are bestsellers in the US.
Ummm, you might want to check up on that. The Japanese get plenty of sports themed games, both American and Japanese, including Madden.
The Japanese get pretty much everything. Their tastes are different - they do not like genres such as fps's that much, and they're obviously not that interested in American football - but that doesn't stop publishers from publishing those games there. It's a small country with a very high density of gamers per square mile, so the costs of releasing what would be considered "niche" games is lower there than it is here and it's not difficult to turn a profit.
It's almost a cliche to say it but game stores there are pretty ridiculous - many of them have entire floors dedicated just to one system. There are many more games released there than there are here. Most of these are "niche" titles, because those games are still profitable.
In the US, with distribution being more difficult and expensive, niche games don't get as much of a chance. It's not cultural, it's more geographical. Most games in Japan only sell ten thousand or so copies, but that's a profitable game there. Here, you'd probably have to sell around ten-fold more to break even, simply because you're dealing with a much larger area, a much more dispersed customer base, and a much more hodge-podge and regional system of transportation.
It looks like bye-bye kazaa.
And really, good riddance. If they're logging all their users' downloads, installing all kinds of adware, spyware, and other crapware on your systems (which they also admitted in court documents), and just generally acting not only as a bad corporate citizen but also an evil software developer in terms of their own users' interests, then this is most definitely not a company we need in existence in the world.
Whether you're for or against P2P in general (I'm for it), the world will be better off with Kazaa completely out of the picture.
People have been suggesting Azureus but I was under the impression that Shareaza was not a bittorrent client.
Shareaza has a BT client built-in, along with eDonkey, Gnutella and Gnutella 2. It's a great concept (a FOSS-based all-in-one P2P app) and it's a pretty slick looking app but unfortunately the performance is nowhere near any of the standalone apps for the various protocols it supports. (I have verified this in side by side testing.)
Azureus is what I use, although it's got some issues as well. It's clean and well-organized and gives you a lot of info on the files you're downloading, but it seems to have some sort of memory leak or something... it runs fine at first and transfer speed is never an issue, but after a few hours of running it will bring my entire system practically to a halt. It is impossible to just leave it running in the background, which is really what you're supposed to do with BT.
I've got a decent system, too - P4 2.4, 512MB, etc. so that's not the issue. It's either a problem with java (Azureus is java-based) or it's a leak in Azureus itself.
How much of an increase in violent crime do you need to see in the UK or Australia before it dawns on you that:
A) Banning guns is a very, very bad idea
Very bad example. Here's why. The murder rate in the United States is still four times higher than it is in either the UK or Australia, despite a higher overall violent crime rate in those countries. In other words, there is more violent crime in the UK and Australia, but less murder. Why do you think this is?
It's because of cases like this. Cases that would be a simple mugging in other countries pretty frequently turn into murders here with easy access to deadly weapons. This woman - and countless others like her every year - simply would not be dead today if these stupid kids (and the stupid adults supposedly supervising them) did not have access to such weapons. Your position is directly supporting the murder of people like Nicole Dufresne.
B) It's impossible
Bullshit. Go to Japan and try to buy a gun. Seriously. If you think gun control doesn't work, then you just don't have a very well-developed world view. It does work and it has been working in various countries for many years. In fact, I just did a quick Google search on gun murder in Japan and quickly came up with some numbers from 1996: 9,390 gun murders in the US vs. 15 in Japan. Japan's murder rate has not increased appreciably since then - they have around 1,300 total per year (about 1/8 the number of gun murders alone in this country) with a population about half that of the United States.
I would say banning guns would have a far greater effect on reducing the murder rate than banning violent video game sales to minors. But that does not mean I am against such a ban. I don't see why it has to be either/or. There is no reason, for example, that a 12 year old kid should be playing a game like Manhunt. No justifiable reason at all. I would argue that there's no reason for anybody to play that game, but if adults want to play it, that's up to them. Kids, though - I mean adults need to step in and say "no". Yes, it's the parents' responsibility, but a lot of people seem to use that fact as some sort of rationale for abdicating societal responsibility. It is not, for example, legal for 12 year olds to commit murder or even to drive a car simply because it's their parents' responsibility to make sure that they don't. There is still a law saying they cannot do it, as there should be.
Handguns should be illegal. M-rated game sales to minors should be illegal. End of story. This is not a question of "my rights online", it's a question of living in a free and safe society that does not endorse the sale of devices whose sole purpose is to kill other human beings or the sale of adult content to children who do not yet have the mental maturity to properly process it.
I realize Slashdot has more than a bit of a libertarian slant, but there is a difference between being a libertarian and being an anarchist. There are plenty of countries in the world that are freer than we are in the United States but nevertheless have successfully implemented these perfectly reasonable regulations regarding public safety.
It's absurd to prevent a company from install its OS on the computers it sells. We have no problem letting Microsoft put Windows on the hardware it sells.
And I'm sure you're willing to apply the same standard to Novell, Mandrake, and Red Hat, right? God forbid a software company be allowed to pre-install an OS on a system that somebody else built!
By that standard, we'd have exactly three choices in computer hardware today - IBM, Sun or Apple. It's not very FOSS-ish of you to argue that less choice in both software and hardware would be good for anybody. Besides, if MS had to, you know they'd be able to outspend any of these guys on developing consumer hardware, so they'd still be a monopoly. You'd just have less Linux out there.
MS can be blamed for a lot of things, but really, this article is just a lot of pro-Mac, anti-MS hooey. Why it gets featured on Slashdot is not really a mystery given the site's post-OS X pro-Mac bias, but that doesn't make it really newsworthy either. I don't honestly even believe the guy's story about installing Windows on his SO's machine; the 4 minute attack is lifted straight out of an article that appeared here about 4-5 months ago. Seems a bit coincidental that a self-confessed lifetime Mac user would suddenly be installing Windows XP on his SO's machine just so he can write about how awful it is.
The second half of his article just goes on at length with the standard Mac fanboy arguments that we've heard for years - it stops being about security and instead touches on the prices of Macs vs. PC's (he argues PC's are actually more expensive once you bring them "up to the level" of a comparable Mac), the user-friendliness of Windows vs. OS X, the innovativeness of Apple vs. MS. I mean seriously, blah blah blah. If I wanted to read this, I'd just search the Usenet archives from 1986.
There's no doubt that Windows XP has its share of security problems, moreso than most OS's. But there's no new info in this article and lots of annoying fanboy hyperbole. I've seen more insightful writing in Slashdot posts, and that's saying something.
So then, really, this is nothing new, just a new package made by marketing as a new way of selling accessories that have been on the market for years? And why is this being advertised as a "story" on Slashdot? I don't remember reading about Tide's new 64 oz bottle, with New Easy To Pour Handle (tm)
Huh? What's new is that Sony announced official pricing and a launch date for their new game system that is not yet on the market in NA. That qualifies as "news" to me, you know, considering that nobody knew it before.
Sheesh.
I call bs. You are posting on /. hence you can't have a girlfriend let alone a hot asian one.
I'll do him one better - I've got a hot Asian (actually Japanese) wife!
But he is actually right - sushi neither refers to the rice nor directly to the fish. It's a method of preserving food. Specifically, it originally was a method of preserving fish - hence it generally being served with fish today (though not always). But it is not really correct to say that sushi does not refer to the fish - without fish, sushi never would have been invented, and the first forms of sushi were little more than fish, salt, and vinegar. There was no rice.
Sushi evolved over the years like many foods do. Today's maki are not even really Japanese (though neither was the first sushi, really, either).
Do a Google search on the origins of sushi and you'll find a bunch of stories that say basically the same thing - you can glean the true history from that. (I'm not linking to a specific page because they all have minor details that sound more or less apocryphal, but the gist is basically the same between most of them).
The kanji for sushi also looks like a fish. Kanji originally was a pictographic language - it depicts what it is. Here's a nice page that shows the various kanji used throughout the years and also talks a little bit about their origins and the origins of sushi. (Before anyone gets confused by that page talking about a bunch of Chinese stuff, remember that Japanese kanji is derived from Chinese kanji, so all Japanese kanji have origins in the Chinese language.)
We can expect to see a massive farting extravaganza as Terence and Philip sort out the US?
Or just an entire country falling asleep. At least according to the submitter.
(Weary/wary is a pet peeve of mine... it's not just a misspelling, the two words mean completely different things.)
This is just jaw-droppingly idiotic.
Games should be awarded as games, not for pretending to be films. See the Bafta games awards (www.bafta.com) for a more competent attempt at the idea.
Yeah, because it's not as if the British Academy of Film and Television see any parallels between games and films...
You think the category of "Art Direction" was invented for video games?
I think the fact is film and video games have more in common than you seem to recognize. Surely you realize that the "outstanding character performance" relates to voice acting, do you not? Is Judy Dench not still an actor if she's in a game? Does she suddenly have to turn in her SAG card? It's not as if they hired her to plow snow off the studio lot; she's acting in Goldeneye: Rogue Agent (or "Rouge Agent", as AIAS lists it).
I understand your wanting games to be games, but I also think voice actors should get their just recognition, especially given the poor state of voice acting in most games. When it's done well, it should be rewarded. That can only encourage higher standards in the future.
I actually have more of a problem with both BAFTA and AIAS listing video games under a generic "interactive" category - under the same main heading as "Children's Learning" for BAFTA, for example. AIAS actually only does games, which makes their moniker all the more puzzling. I'm sure eight years ago "interactive entertainment" sounded more respectable than "video games", but today it just sounds like a dumb marketing buzzword phrase.
btw, I can tell you from firsthand past experience that the guys at Rockstar are about to bust some kneecaps right about now.
A fact that seems lost on most journalists these days.
And I see that R'ing TFA is still lost on most Slashdotters these days...
This is not an article about how CAN-SPAM has increased spam. It is an article about how spam has increased despite CAN-SPAM. That is a very different thing. Several viewpoints are given from all sides involved on why it's happening, but at no time does the article itself suggest CAN-SPAM is the cause - only that it has not been an effective deterrent.
I think that's something we can all agree on.
I'm gonna give my vote to SuSE... the ease and speed of updates is one reason I've stuck with it, after giving up on Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora.
Argh...this kinda came out wrong... the reasons I gave up on other distros were not specifically due to the updates (Red Hat has a nice auto-update utility as well) but for a variety of reasons. SuSE is, IMO, the most polished distro I have used overall, and that includes the very nice YAST2. I have just not had any real problems with it, whereas I've had various bits of hardware that could never be properly configured under Mandrake or RH/Fedora, despite the fact that they were supposed to work out of the box. (This included the complete inability to even set hard drive mount points under Fedora Core 3, which is what finally led me to dump Fedora altogether.)
I'm gonna give my vote to SuSE... the ease and speed of updates is one reason I've stuck with it, after giving up on Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora. YAST2 (the built-in setup utility) is just such an easy and powerful tool, and it "just works" - you can set it to auto-update if you want (it sets up a cron job for you if you select this option), but even on manual it will identify critical patches separately from non-critical patches, which makes it easy to pick and choose.
Plus, it's Novell now, so it's owned by a "real company", which may or may not be something your own company/organization is looking for (some business do require some level of centralized accountability and support).
I've also been pleasantly surprised with SuSE 9.2 in other areas - it's the cleanest and easiest-to-use distro out of the box that I've used, with no obvious bugs that I've seen. No reason not to use it, and lots of reasons to use it. YAST2 is a big selling point, in my opinion.
Over 2100 videogame commercials
Nice, but as it says right on the site, 90% of them are Japanese. Which is cool, but doesn't really satisfy the nostalgia factor that most of us westerners have (I realize there are probably some Japanese here too, but most Japanese residents probably just read their own Slashdot).
Would be great to have a site like this that really focused on western stuff, as a counterpart, not instead of this site (since Japan has a long and storied game history as well, just not one most of us personally experienced).