One of these days, these crappy encodes will likely end up being the ONLY existing copies of these commercials. For preservation purposes, it is essential that one capture at 720x480 or 720x576 (or 704x480/704x576, depending on hardware), at the respective frame rates for NTSC or PAL.
Jesus, I realize you're a local TV news dude, but these guys are probably encoding from old VHS tapes they've found lying around the house. They're not doing it from original source material, and they didn't even have stuff like digiBeta back then (the best the original would have been on was regular beta). I haven't been able to view these particular movies (bandwidth exceeded) but I've seen plenty of other sites that have similar old commercials so I'm sure they're doing the same thing.
With a 20 year old VHS tape originally recorded from broadcast TV, you're lucky if you've even got 250 lines of resolution left. By definition you would have to have 525 horizontal lines, but that doesn't mean every one of those lines will have distinguishable detail on it - you may need to combine two or even three lines before you'd be able to distinguish individual features from the image.
The end result being that I think 320x240 is generous. I doubt these tapes still have that much actual picture resolution. Compression is another matter, but if you're complaining about resolution, you're missing the point. You're not going to get any more quality by upping the resolution. It's not really much different than taking a digital photo at 1600x1200 and then blowing it up to 3200x2400. You don't get any extra detail that way.
And anyway, they're posting these on the web. Whenever I capture and encode for the web, I do one copy for archiving and one copy for the web. Because, as you can see right now, bandwidth does cost money. I don't know if these guys did that, but I wouldn't automatically assume that they didn't.
Why not just call it a temp job? I have two friends that work in the gaming industry (one does sound the other does character). Both have been laid off multiple times. Why? The major project they were on was done with and there were no new projects on the table, so they were laid off. The first time for both (they worked together at first) it was a small company so that was understandable.. but from my limited knowledge this seems to be the norm.
Well, this seems to be what the industry is moving towards, and it's honestly not such a bad thing.
The film industry and in fact most creative industries operate on a project-to-project basis. You're hired for a specific project, you work like mad for six months, you make a year's worth of money during that time and then you're done. You then shop yourself around to other producers and try to get yourself attached to another project. Or, you take six months off and recharge.
This makes most creative industries pretty cut-throat, but it has a couple of positive effects. First, it keeps creative professionals from being too overworked, which as we all know is a huge problem in the games industry. Right now, the industry operates like a project-based industry but with permanent employees, so the workers don't ever get that break when projects end. Second, it hopefully causes the cream of the crop to rise to the top, because it's sort of a Darwinian system. The strong survive, the weak can't get themselves attached to new projects and eventually find other work. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way in any creative industry - the most creative minds are not always great at networking, for one thing. But it does ensure at least a basic level of competence in the industry, which right now is lacking (I think we can all agree that the technical quality of games these days is really all over the map).
If there really is a transition within the industry to become more like the film or other similar industries, then once it's complete I think workers will actually be better off. There will still be permanent workers and plenty of them, but, like the film industry, they will mainly be in marketing and administrative positions, which are often (though not always) both lower stress and higher paying than development or production jobs are today. The pay per project of developers will actually go up, because there will be an actual incentive for developers to recruit top talent for top projects, and the number of total hours worked per year for developers will go down - unless someone's a real coding rock star who's in high demand and chooses to simply move straight on from one tough project to the next.
Again, plenty of industries already work like this and it makes more sense than asking poorly-paid, often untalented full-time employees for 24/7 devotion to the company. Weed the untalented out of the industry, pay the talented better and give them some more time off. If they've got the talent and some basic interview skills, they'll have no problem finding more work in such a system.
They're not the "new" Apple, they're more comparable to the Apple of the mid 1980's. You know, a company without a clear direction, (hopefully) approaching the bottom end of their inverse market share bell curve. I still say that getting out of the hardware market is the worst thing Sega ever did - the effect it had was to completely demoralize the company. Many of their top creative minds left the company, and those that remained just haven't seemed to be putting their hearts into the games they've been creating lately.
I guess my main argument with your statement (part of which I didn't quote, but it's there) is that Sega still makes "very good games". Visual Concepts, their sports studio, made some decent sports sims (though NFL 2K5 was buggy as all hell), but Sega themselves haven't made anything I've been excited about since Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube.
As for this deal, don't forget that part of the deal is that Visual Concepts make games for Sega's arcade business. So to Sega's mind, this probably puts them back where they were in the early 80's only without having to do any of the actual work. Not sure it's actually going to play out that way, though; it doesn't seem like Sega has much of a future to me. Wouldn't be surprised if they get bought themselves at some point (something I argued would never happen 10 years ago, but times change and the mighty have fallen and fallen hard).
btw, I do believe Sega is actually profitable, but at the cost of, to quote George Costanza, "significant shrinkage." They seem to contract further and further every year and it's the only way they've kept their head above water. This is not how you succeed in business - to succeed in business requires both profitability and growth. Sega is in no position to grow and at this rate will eventually implode; they will cease to exist even as an IP holding company, as they will have sold off everything worthwhile to other publishers.
The X-Box gets virtually all of the cross-platform console titles and the X-Box versions of these games are usually the best, due in part, although not entirely, to features such as the HDD and customisable soundtracks.
This isn't a very good argument for the Xbox being a very memorable console. Where are the quality first-party and exclusive titles? There are a few (Halo, KOTOR, if you're into those sorts of games), but not many. Most Xbox owners seem to have the system for the exact same games - everybody has DOA3, everybody has Project Gotham, everybody has Halo and Halo 2. They also may buy Madden and the odd random PC-port FPS when they get bored of Halo, but it just goes to show how basically forgettable and generic of a game library the system has.
I also completely disagree with your statement that "only Nintendo fanboys cling to this view". My statement above is based in part (though certainly not entirely) on my own buying experiences for my Xbox. I am an Xbox owner, and the reason I own it is for the multi-platform games. I'm certainly no Nintendo fanboy; I'm not gonna sign off here and fire up some Mario. I don't even like Mario games. (I think I'm at the stage of my life where I can finally admit that, after years of trying to convince myself otherwise.) But I will say that at least the GameCube has a decent amount of content that you can't find anywhere else (not even PC), unlike the Xbox.
The last stats I saw showed that the X-Box had out-sold the PS and the Gamecube by a considerable margin during the 2004 Christmas period.
I'm not sure where you saw those stats or what region(s) and time period(s) they covered. Certainly it was not the case worldwide. It may have been the case in one or another territory, over a specific period of weeks as determined by Microsoft to sound the most impressive in a press release. (Similar to what they've done here, with the "article" we're all supposedly bantering about.) Nintendo does the same thing, though; they put out their own set of stats showing how they'd more than doubled the sales of the PS2 and Xbox combined over the Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, for example. These numbers can always be selectively drawn and applied to achieve whatever marketing result you want.
0. That's how much. RTFA. Or do your own research.
Huh? The press release itself says:
""Halo: Combat Evolved" for the PC and Xbox, has sold a collective 12.8 million copies in just three years."
According to the press release, they're including PC numbers in there as well. That's easily a million or two out of that number.
5 million copies each on Xbox is nothing to sneeze at, but the hyperbole in this press release (like most MS press releases) is a bit over the top. Why do people even bother posting these things? A press release is not news. Only the facts (if there are any) within the press release could ever be considered news, and then only if they're something that wasn't already news like 3 months ago (it's not like we've never seen Halo sales numbers before). And these facts really should be verified before they're posted up, because several people have already pointed out some pretty blatant inaccuracies. If you're going to just post up press releases all over the place, I'd like to at least see some questioning of the claims made within the article submission itself.
I don't much see the point in posting documents that basically say "we're the best, nyah nyah nyah" over and over with no real content, except to generate pointless arguments like this one.
Sadly, it's nearly impossible to find an NTSC multiregion player here in the U.S.:-(
Are you kidding? I can pick one up at my local corner deli. (Seriously - they sell an iWin or J-Win or some such off-brand model for $129.) You may not be able to buy one at major retail chains like Best Buy, but to say these things are "impossible to find" in the U.S. is just not correct. In my experience, you can buy them almost everywhere but the major retail chains.
Just because you haven't personally looked very hard doesn't mean they're difficult to find. Anyone who really wants a region free player can find one easily, and even if you live out in Bumblefark, Idaho, there's always a little something I like to call the Internets.
Region coding is dead. The only people it affects are people who don't care enough to buy a region-free player, which means it's not helping the studios at all.
Considering that the whole PSP vs. DS fracas is one of the more strident arguments going on on Slashdot at the moment, I'm really scratching my head at how this one slipped by.
You think Slashdot's immune to the Sony hype machine? Why do you think big companies like Sony have PR people, anyway? It's specifically to manipulate the press to their advantage, and Slashdot is part of that, like it or not.
You would hope that both the submitters and the editors here would be a little more savvy - that's why some of us come here, after all - but unfortunately they're often just as naive as the rest of the press. I've found this is more often true in the games section than in other sections (games is one of the newest sections here, after all), but I see PR pieces posing as news in every section here on occasion.
I worked in the game industry for 5 years (and I don't mean as a clerk at EB, I mean for a major game publisher) and I can honestly say I don't think I've ever heard of the IGDA. There may be people more on the business or legal side of things that deal with these guys but this is not an organization that most publishers or developers talk to on a daily or weekly basis.
From their web site, I can't even tell what it is they actually do. I see some advocacy topics, but that's about it - their "About the IGDA" section in the FAQ says absolutely nothing, and as someone else pointed out, their "membership benefits" are pretty non-existent. ("The main benefit of membership is knowing the you are developing your career and personally contributing the betterment of this industry by supporting the IGDA's mission." Uh... ok?).
It looks like they have about 5,700 members, but that's a tiny fraction of the total game industry.
Is this organization actually relevant in any way? What have they actually done to better the industry?
Re:It was actually a fairly reasonable letter unti
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Editors Get an Earful
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Of course I'm not the audience for that letter, I wonder how much their bottom line was actually affected. So the real question becomes.. how much does that sponsorship affect reviews? Is it possible to quantify it? If you compare reviews for games on sites that have ads for those games to reviews on sites that don't, can you find a coorelation that cross cuts many games? Common sense says that such a coorelation is so likely as to be obvious.
I worked in the marketing department of a major game publisher for a few years - one of these days I'll finally feel comfortable in naming them, but for now I'll just say they're much larger than 3DO ever was. I can tell you first-hand that this sort of thing is the norm in the industry, and that while Trip's letter was pretty ridiculous in some ways, it was more symptomatic of what's wrong with the entire publisher/media relationship than of anything unique to 3DO or Trip Hawkins.
If that's is the case, that really doesn't set up the writer of this letter for ridicule. He's behaving accordingly to the climate.
Well, the thing is, most of the time company CEO's don't go firing off angry letters to editors about their games, for a variety of reasons. It does at least open you up to ridicule, and depending on the position of your company, it also opens up the possibility of all-out war with the publication (or the gaming media as a whole - these guys all know each other and share war stories). If a company's obviously already on a downward slide, as 3DO was at this time, you're just as likely to hear a publication say "screw 'em" over something like this as you are to hear them cave. The publication will then ridicule the publisher at every turn, using them for comic relief, ragging on all of their games, and mentioning them negatively in completely unrelated articles. I've seen this happen, and I've even done it myself (I worked for an editorial web site before I worked for a game publisher). It's just not usually in the publisher's interest to say things like this.
This is what PR departments are for. My company got some scores that we considered "low" (in reality they were in the high 8 out of 10 range, at sites using that kind of scale, but we were expecting higher) and we did consider pulling advertising.
But this is where a good PR guy comes in. The CEO and the rest of the company could be ranting and raving about how they're going to walk over to GameSpot's or IGN's offices with baseball bats and billyclubs ready to bust in some kneecaps, but GameSpot and IGN would never hear this. Instead, they hear a carefully crafted, subtle message from a friendly PR guy who speaks in such a tone that you're not quite sure if he's threatening you or asking you out on a date. But you're left with the odd notion that something is not quite right with your relationship (and it is a relationship), and given the massive quantities of cash this company throws at you on a regular basis, maybe it would be in your (meaning GameSpot's or IGN's, in this example) best interests to fix it.
The real problem is not completely unique to the video game industry; it's true of all creative mass-market arts. Film, TV, games, they're all the same in that the media and the content creators rely completely on each other for their very existence. It's completely incestuous. All of the information in a gaming magazine or web site comes directly from a publisher, in one fashion or another. "Exclusives" are doled out in a manner that keeps everybody happy (over a period of time) and keeps everybody perpetually "in debt" to everybody else. Without content for their magazines or web sites, those mags or sites would cease to exist. And if a large publisher pulled its advertising and exclusives to one particular publication, that publication would no longer be able to compete.
By the same token, publishers need the media to build hype. Nobody just goes to a store and buys a game based on the box anymore; they buy it based on what t
Move along, nothing to see in this article. I mean, did anybody actually read it? It starts off like this:
A while ago Argos reduced the price of the GameCube console because they wished to get rid of their stock. After an incredible increase in sales they decided to carry on stocking it, but seem as if they wish to get rid of it now.
Let's all ponder that for a minute. "A while ago" Argos "wished" to get rid of their stock, and now they "wish" to get rid of it again. The trouble is, people just keep buying the stupid things! Poor Argos, their wish just never comes true! Those pesky customers just will not stop giving them their money.
Seriously, though, two points:
1. This is not new. The article itself says Argos first did this "a while ago", meaning (since this author can't seem to remember exactly) in 2003.
2. The rest of this article is nothing but speculation. "it is worrying that retailers are seemingly giving up on the GameCube" is an opinion based on an assumption based on nothing. The article itself says that prices were reduced previously and yet GameCubes are still on sale - why not assume this is simply a sales-generating tactic that's now been used repeatedly? Do stores never have loss-leader sales in the UK? (Rhetorical question - they obviously do, because Argos did it before with the GameCube.)
Nintendo's in a lot better shape than people seem to think they are. Just read their financial reports and look at the worldwide sales data (it's out there, though Europe's the toughest to come by - NPD and MediaCreate reports are pretty easily obtainable from various sources, though). They're profitable and they've got the #2 home console and #1, #2 and #3 handhelds in terms of current worldwide sales.
Many visitors may even be able to pick up easy words from signs in English rather than trying to translate Japanese characters.
They already havesigns in English in many places. This is nothing new.
The problem is this is mostly in the touristy areas. Get off the beaten path and everything's Japanese only, and that's never going to change. You're not going to convince the local municipality of Ryu-Gasaki in Ibaraki prefecture to change all of its signs for the three tourists they get per year, for example. That's true of most areas of Japan and even a lot of the non-tourist areas in big cities, and it's true not just of the cities themselves but of small businesses, many of whom are run by people with limited English skills (and so who could not realistically write everything properly in English for tourists anyway).
Giving out these PDA's would basically help free people from having to stay within these few tourist areas (if you read stuff like this, you'd think all of Japan consisted of the Shibuya, Akihabara, and Shinjuku wards of Tokyo), which can only increase tourist business nationwide.
What Japan really needs to go along with this, though, is a major international ad campaign (perhaps partnering with ANA and JAL - they sort of tried this with their "Yokoso Japan" campaign but they didn't actually run any TV ads in the US). Where I live in NYC, we pretty routinely see ads for visiting other countries (mostly in Europe but also Australia, Canada, Singapore, China and others), but I have never once seen an ad for Japan. It's not a place most people seem to think of as a tourist spot. But I don't think there's a real lack of interest, it's just not the first thought people have when considering a vacation - whenever I tell anybody I'm going there, their first reaction is "Oh! That sounds great!" As if I'd just reminded them of something they'd forgotten.
In other news, DC Comics has realized that it should stop publishing Superman and Batman titles in favor of new characters that nobody has any investment in.
I'd have modded this more "insightful" than "funny".
What's funny is how much Nintendo gets bashed around the net, considering they're, you know, the only profitable game hardware company out there. People act like they don't know what they're doing and that somehow Sony and MS have got their number. In reality, I think it's a lot more likely that Kaz at Sony and Bill over at MS sit there looking at their market share numbers vs. their profit/loss columns and think "huh? Shouldn't we be the ones making money here?"
Nintendo's doing something right; something that MS and Sony aren't. They realized a long time ago that dominating the industry is not necessary to be profitable. If you really look objectively at what they do vs. what Sony and MS do, you can make the following observations:
a) They've got a corner in every part of the market. They have strong first-party game development (unlike Sony and MS, which rely more on second- and third-party development), and they get all of those profits for themselves. They have two handhelds and one current home console, and in various territories they still sell "classic" consoles as well.
b) They allocate a certain percentage of development to proven franchises and a certain percentage to new titles, and they carefully manage that (it's not haphazard). This article seems to argue that the percentage allocation to proven franchises is too high, but where most game developers have failed is in doing the opposite. That's just the reality of today's market, which is "brand" based, for better or worse.
c) They have a strong "house style". Whether or not you personally like their house style is not really an issue - the fact is you buy a Nintendo product and you basically know what you're getting. Nintendo is not nearly as reliant on third parties to define their products, nor are they as reliant on "killer apps". You buy a Nintendo console for the overall Nintendo "experience". It's similar to what Disney does - it almost doesn't even matter whether a particular Disney movie is any good, people will go see it anyway because they know basically what it's all going to be about.
All this adds up to a well-managed company that tightly controls everything they do, which results in nearly continuous profit (I believe they've had one non-profitable quarter in something like the last ten years). They also just flat-out sell a lot more stuff than most people think they do - last year I think they were the #2 software publisher overall in terms of sales, for example, and I remember over Thanksgiving week this year they sold more total hardware in one week in the United States than their competitors sold for the entire month combined - and that's in their weakest territory. (That's including all of their systems; GBA SP, DS, GameCube.) The GameCube itself is #2 in sales worldwide, Nintendo handhelds have 95% of that market, I mean this company does sell a lot of products.
Whether or not you understand their business plan is pretty immaterial. A lot of people don't personally like what Nintendo's doing and they therefore don't personally think their strategies are sound. But Nintendo has continuously proven those people wrong throughout pretty much their entire history. And yet the naysayers still won't go away.
News is a rather large exception. And even in the news, the image must be newsworthy.
Show me the law that says that. If it's done in public, it's fair game, regardless of whether it is "newsworthy" or not. I don't recall any newsworthiness standards, so I think that you're completely wrong.
Bzzzt. He's completely right. You're not.
Specifically what's wrong is your idea that "if it's done in public, it's fair game" - no, it isn't, and I want to put a stop to this myth right now.
Read this to learn the difference between informational (ie. news) and commercial (ie. non-news) uses of photography. Read this for some general information on when and why a release is required.
Now that that's out of the way, surely you must know that minors cannot sign binding contracts (ie. a release from a minor is meaningless, even if one exists in this case), and that depictions of underage nudity in this country are illegal in their own right. What some people are doing in this thread right now is defending child porn, whether or not they think that's what it is. Legally, that is what it is.
There is grounds for a lawsuit here on several different issues, and grounds for criminal prosecution on at least one.
There's competition, albiet not much, out there, not to mention the 512 to 1 gig players out there. Most people have no need for 40 gigs in their pocket or they don't want to drop 249 or 299 for an iPod, which wont record line in nor do FM/AM.
I have about eight separate issues with each one of your statements here. I will cover only the most pertinent in the interests of readability.
First of all, nobody needs any mp3 player. I mean let's get a sense of perspective here - every single one of these things, from the lowest of the low-end 128MB flash player to the 60GB iPod, is a complete luxury item. 10 years ago, we all got by just fine with our portable CD players. 10 years before that, we got along fine with our cassette walkmen. 10 years before that, we got along fine with nothing. (Maybe a nice transistor radio or something, but that's about it.)
So the argument that people will or will not buy one of these players based on "need" is meaningless. People buy these players because they want them, and that's one thing Apple understands that their competitors don't. Apple makes people want a product that they have absolutely no need for, whereas their competitors are busy building the products they think their customers need.
(It reminds me of an old saying about art, and I'm not sure I've got it exactly right, but it goes something like, "True art isn't about giving people what they want; true art is about giving people something that they didn't know they wanted.")
And what's this about recording AM/FM radio?? Honestly, who buys an mp3 player for this? This is akin to photocopying your favorite novels at the local library so you can enjoy them later, in all their degraded, barely-readable glory. I mean Jesus Christ, just buy the stupid thing. Listening to the radio is one thing, and I can see that being somewhat useful... but when you're talking 40GB worth of music at your fingertips, in as good quality as you chose to make it in the first place, I don't think listening to the radio is really a product seller in this category. (Yeah yeah, people want to time-shift their talk shows or whatever... all six of you out there.)
I see a lot of 128-512 meg players out there and people don't at all seem to mind not having their entire collection on them at all times.
Apple's on track to sell four million iPods in one quarter. I actually doubt there have been four million flash-based players sold in total, throughout the history of flash-based players, by every single manufacturer combined.
Now, to add my $0.03 (my opinion's worth one cent more than most!) about this iRiver player, I mean, I have nothing against it, competition is good, etc. etc. But it's not gonna make a dent in iPod sales. Because for one, even the iPod Mini is a shadow of its big brother in terms of sales (read the article I linked earlier), so it's not even Apple's biggest market. But it's still a market they dominate. They dominate that market through a combination of things that add up to a total user experience - and a couple of extra features on a competing model is not going to do anything to change that. Because it's frankly just not about features.
I'm no big fan of Apple but I acknowledge that they have a certain understanding about basic human nature that very few other companies do. Their product design teams are not run by a bunch of MBA's and they do not design by committee. They actively looked for a new market segment with the iPod, they found it, and they defined it. Nobody's going to catch up to them by just dumping a few extra features or a couple more hours of battery life into their player. I mean that's the reality. This is Apple's market.
Chihiro, at the beginning of the film, seems somewhat spoiled and incessantly whiney.
By the end, she has had to set her own goals, make her own decisions, accept responsibility, and carry through on a long-term plan. All without the guidance of her parents. It's the process of growing up and leaving the nest. Sorry, but "children should learn manners" just doesn't cover all that.
Well, you're a bit closer than the post you're replying to, but still not quite right.
Spirited Away is about greed and gluttony. Now, learning to be humble and respectful and responsible and all that is part of that lesson about greed and gluttony, so you're not wrong. Spirited Away suggests a return to a more traditional way of thinking as part of the solution, but the main issue in the film is greed.
This does not quite come through in the English translation as well as it does in the original Japanese. Still, it's fairly obvious, I think, right from the beginning of the film (when her parents literally turn into pigs through their gluttony) until the end (when Sen's purity returns them to humanity).
The only Miyazaki film I'd say even specifically deals with the environment is Princess Mononoke. (I'm calling these films by their English names because I'm speaking English, btw - I don't really see the point in mixing languages up when there is a proper, official English title available.) Lots of his films are misunderstood in this country - Spirited Away has nothing to do with the environment at all, and even Nausicaa (another film people think has an environmental lesson) is an allegory for the real-life Cold War that was going on at the time, and what would happen if it turned hot. The environment is used in these films as a vehicle to make a point.
Obviously nature and the environment are common Miyazaki themes, but don't confuse his common themes with the message in any particular film. He uses things like nature, tradition, history, etc. to make his points - but they are rarely, if ever, the point in themselves.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but where do people think going to Starbuck's is a status-enhancing gimmick? The only place where this might work is East Podunk, USA. In most metropolitan areas the Starbuck's outnumber the Kwik-E-Marts and carry about the same cachet.
It's not that it's "status-enhancing" so much as it's "status-confirming". It's telling people "I can afford to spend five bucks on a cup of coffee every morning and not even think about it." Even here in New York, where there's plenty of money and plenty of real coffee shops (not to mention Dunkin Donuts if you just want a quick cup), Starbucks is fairly popular among the white-collar crowd. And it's not because those people think it's got the best coffee - with so many better choices here, they can't possibly think that. It's so that they can be seen back at work with that $4-$5 cup in their hand. It's an image.
Dunkin Donuts has some of the best coffee I've ever had in the United States. It beats the pants off of Starbucks. If only they had a cooler marketing campaign and a better atmosphere in the stores they could really give Starbucks something to worry about.
I agree that DD coffee is some of the best available at a retail chain in the United States. But it's not great coffee in an absolute sense - it's a very light roast, it's very mild (which makes it a good everyday cup), some would even say weak. But it's far better than Starbucks, which is bitter and burnt - their fans like to say it's just a dark roast, but it's not. It's bitter; the roast is as dark as it is to try to mask the fact that they're not using very good beans.
I think you underestimate DD's popularity in the United States, though. It's far more popular in most of the northeast than Starbucks is. Starbucks has made some big inroads in New York and New Jersey over the past 10 years but it's hit a plateau now, and there are still a lot more DD's here than there are Starbucks.
One of DD's problems, though, is that they're franchised. So they're very inconsistent. The decor is pretty standardized (and they actually have updated to better compete... but they are a donut shop after all), but standards of cleanliness, customer service, and even the quality of the coffee itself is very uneven from store to store. I've actually complained to the DD company about this because the store nearest to where I used to live had to be about the worst DD in the entire nation - a cup of coffee there was really not much different than a cup of hot, cloudy water. Their employees, most of whom are not native to this country, also seem to have basically no coffee training and do not understand standard coffee terms like "regular" or "light" - you have to explain exactly what you want every time, and they still almost never get it quite right. This drives me crazy. They really need to institute some sort of company-wide training program.
But DD's marketing I think is actually pretty good - they've beaten the pants off Krispy Kreme (which is their main competitor, not Starbucks) by focusing on the coffee rather than the donuts, and they've always got new coffee drinks coming out on a seasonal basis (though most of them are undrinkable if you ask me - those "lattes" they have almost make me want to throw up). So they're doing okay.
But what they do well is regular, plain old every day coffee, nothing else, and the people who drink their coffee and like it are just not the same people who find Starbucks coffee tasty. DD's customers are a lot more blue-collar (even if they're really white-collar, like me), they don't care about having wi-fi with their coffee, they don't equate "bitter" with "good", they don't use the word "grande" when they really mean "medium", they don't need to pay four bucks for a cup-o-joe. So I think DD will probably pretty easily manage to co-exist with Starbucks; in the areas where both exist, DD is actually doing better right now.
(Of course, here in New York, we've got really good "real" coffee shops where you can get a nice, dark roast that's not bitter at all... so if you like your Starbucks, you can have that style of coffee the way it's supposed to be. But again, people who want that are not really Dunkin Donuts type customers anyway.)
One problem with all the 1280x1024 LCD monitors are that they don't have square pixels. The display itself is 4:3, but the pixels are squat, unlike 1600x1200, 1280x960, 1024x768, 800x600 et cetera.
This is completely, 100% false.
1280x1024 LCD screens have a 5:4 aspect ratio. This is why the resolution can be 1280x1024, and the pixels remain square. 1280x1024 screens are the only screens with a 5:4 ratio. Don't ask me why this is, but it is. You can easily verify this by looking at the specs on any LCD with this native resolution.
I would guess you're confusing what happens when you use 1280x1024 as a resolution on CRT's. This will give you non-square pixels, and you should not use 1280x1024 on a CRT for this reason (unless you have a 5:4 CRT, and I'd guess there are at least a few of them out there). You should use 1280x960 instead. But this does not apply to LCD's, all of which have one native resolution, and they're built specifically to support that native resolution.
Now, as to this assertion in the original article post that "most image editors" think LCD's are "nowhere near as good" as CRT's... I think this is at the very least overly dramatic, if not outright false. First of all, what's an "image editor" to begin with? A retoucher? A photographer? A designer (and print or web)? All of the above?
Up until a few months ago I worked in the web design department for a large corporation, and like most companies we worked pretty closely with the print designers as well. 95% of my company used LCD's because they wanted to use LCD's. If any designer wanted a CRT they could simply request it - very few did (maybe two or three at the entire company). I personally had an LCD as a primary monitor and a CRT as secondary, because when working for the web it's important to see how things are going to look on different setups (especially when working with compressed images).
I'm also a photographer, and I don't have a CRT in my house. I have three LCD screens, and while not all of them are created equally (the oldest one does have a pretty narrow gamut), they're all at least adequate for photo processing, and my laptop screen is perfectly fine. I know plenty of other photographers who also do retouching on their laptops and don't feel they're missing anything.
LCD's are different, but even with a narrower gamut they do some things better than CRT's. No CRT can approach an LCD's pixel-perfect sharpness, for example - it's impossible to judge a photograph's true sharpness when viewing it on a CRT. So there are tradeoffs in both directions.
I think there's a difference between intellectually knowing that one thing may be technically better in certain areas than another thing, and actually using those things in real life. "Image editors" are people too, and they like the convenience and space savings of LCD screens as much as anybody else. And there are things that LCD's do better than CRT's, just as there are things CRT's do better than LCD's.
The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.
That's not the point. What these idiots fail to realize is that it only takes one person with too much time on their hands to completely destroy the entire rationale for copy protection. It only takes one guy to rip this way, enter everything by hand (this is not a big deal, btw; I've done it on plenty of my own CD's not in the FreeDB), post to a Bittorrent tracker site, share an album on Edonkey, or whatever. Then it's out there, and everybody's got it. And you're back to square one again, with a DRM system that's doing nothing but inconveniencing people that want to exercise their legitimate and legally sanctioned fair use rights.
This is why DRM systems cannot work. Because in the Internet age, it only takes one single person to completely mess everything up and make all that work on the DRM scheme for nought. And we're not talking spending weeks cracking an encryption scheme, either; we're talking taking an hour to record a CD through an analog connection and then split the tracks up and type in a few track titles. This is hardly a large amount of work, nor does it require any technical skills.
Regardless, I'm sure the DRM itself will be cracked within the first day or two of its release. But even if it isn't, it will be worked around. It's just so completely pointless that it makes me angry that any company would waste any amount of money on it. I mean there are so many more useful things that could be done with that money, such as, you know, actually developing good musical acts.
(Honest question, I'm not trolling or flaming.) Does "suprnova's intent" refer to the intent of the administrators of suprnova, or to individuals who post links there? I think the distinction is important. If it's the administrator(s) we're ascribing intent to, how is it obvious that they intend that copyrighted materials be shared, as opposed to any materials? If it's the individuals posting to suprnova to whom we're ascribing intent, then maybe it would be more accurate to say "Some users of suprnova clearly intend to share copyrighted materials". I'm not trying to split hairs; it's these specific distinctions on which related legal cases will hinge.
Well, no, they won't.
Judges are not stupid, and neither, generally, are juries. It's obvious upon your first visit to suprnova that there is a huge amount of copyrighted content - it's right there on the front page, the most updated list, every day. It would be pretty difficult for the site administrators to claim ignorance in this case, or to say "we can't control what our users do". Well, yes you can - you can ban ip addresses, you can ban submitters, you can take the freakin' site down if that's what it takes. We're not talking about an actual p2p application when we're talking about a web site - this is not a case where "the genie's out of the bottle" and you can no longer control it. Somebody owns that site, somebody runs that site, and what's going on at that site is obvious for all to see.
Now, that doesn't mean I think suprnova's toast. But if they're not toast, it won't be because of the "it's not my fault" defense. It's going to have to be something more than that, like the site being hosted in a different country where linking to copyrighted content is not illegal.
What strikes me as odd is that the first step in this battle is just a bunch of lawsuits. No C&D's? No warnings? I think someone could legitimately make the case that they didn't realize posting tracker links was illegal (I'm not so sure it's absolutely clear-cut that it is, actually), which doesn't provide a legal defense, but you'd think some warning letters would be in order first if for no other reason than public relations. I have a feeling that'd scare most of these sites into submission without the costs of a legal fight. Those sites left still standing would be the tough ones to crack anyway; those in other countries, for example.
I know the popular opinion here is typically pro-Apple/iTMS/iPod but honestly I just don't see why we can be pro-reverse engineering on everything else and not this.
Isn't it obvious?
Real and Apple are going back and forth on the best ways to screw their customers. Apple by forcing you to use their DRM, Real by refusing to give you songs that'll be guaranteed to play on any particular player. They're both wrong.
The only way I'd support Real in this case is if they were putting out unprotected files and Apple was disabling those. But they're not - they're putting out files that use a different, incompatible DRM scheme from Apple's and telling customers the iPod will play it. Well, now it won't. Tough for them. They could have avoided this if they'd just given consumers what they want in the first place.
Yes, I realize the reasons for DRM, I realize record labels won't sell music without it, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, whatever. Does that mean I have to support Real? No. Apple? No. The RIAA? No. I don't support any of them; they are all trying to screw the customer with these unwiedly and incompatible DRM schemes.
The good news is the iPod will still play unprotected content. So ignore Real, ignore the iTunes Music Store and rip your own damn CD's - then you don't need to deal with any of this crap.
For now there is no reason. But I bet soon if not already the iPod will check to make sure the DRM signature is in the file. No Sig, No Music.
Yeah, and about 80% of all the music on all iPods around the world instantly stops working (hint: mp3). Great business plan.
If you mean strictly AAC files, well, that wouldn't make much sense either, because any CD's you rip with iTunes are encoded by default as non-protected AAC files. So Apple'd be screwing their own customers with that strategy. (And of course iTunes is not the only AAC ripper, so even if they locked down iTunes and just decided to ignore everybody who ripped non-protected files with it to this point, they'd still have problems.)
They realistically cannot lock out non-protected content, unless they want their player to be rendered absolutely useless. What do you think happened to Sony all this time? It'd be even worse for Apple, because there's already so much non-protected content on iPods throughout the world - they'd have an outright revolt on their hands.
This, kids, is why DRM sucks, and no DRM is good. Honestly, why do people put up with this crap? Use MP3 and play it back on whatever the hell player you want. That's the way it should work, and that's the way it does work for those of us who refuse to host any DRM'd files on their PC's or music players.
Re:Aren't most 1st gen portable products similar?
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Sony PSP Defects Reported
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Isn't buying a 1st gen. protable electronics device just begging for this kind of trouble? Why poeple buy bleeding edge products is beyond me.
I don't understand this mentality. Why would buying a product that's presumably been tested and deemed ready for the marketplace be "begging for trouble", whatever "generation" it is?
In fact, going back through history you can find just as many examples where the first generation of something is built significantly better than the later generations. The Atari VCS, for example; the early models had 1/4" thick plastic and actual metal armor plating on the bottom of the casing - later models had much thinner plastic and no armor plating, they were much more prone to cracking.
I don't see why portables need to be any different. Companies build products, they market test them, and then they put them out there. The public is not a bunch of beta testers; they're supposed to be building in certain tolerances and you would hope that if they're going to err, they'll err on the side of caution (as Atari did with the early VCS).
I guess my point is twofold:
a) Our expectations for "first generation" products these days are too low, and b) I think it's just as likely as not that later generation models will be worse as it is that they'll be better. You can't just look at the PS2 and Xbox as representative as the entire history of home and portable electronics; many devices do become less reliable as their production costs are cut back to save money down the line.
I have no idea if these PSP defects are widespread or if they're isolated incidents. There does seem to be a pattern, though, that suggests that in general, the PSP's build quality is probably not quite as good as many had expected, and I doubt that's ever going to change. Sony does not really have a history of redesigning products to be tougher. If there's an actual defect in the laser mechanism or something like that, then yes, they may do a minor redesign to correct errors (as they did with the PS2), but build quality is a different issue. They're not going to start using thicker plastic or reinforcing the unit with carbonized steel or do away with the "analog" nub - build quality issues are probably issues you'll just have to learn to live with. I'm sure Sony would tell you to just be more careful with the PSP.
As for the dead pixel issue, it's always a possibility in an LCD-based product, especially one with a fairly high-resolution display like this. You'd hope the warranty and/or return policy would cover it, but I guess the supply is such that stores in Japan are not accepting returns right now because of it. I doubt this problem is more widespread than on other LCD-based devices, though - this is a screen made by Sharp, which is one of the world's largest LCD producers. It's not as if they don't have experience making LCD displays.
Slashdot Mirror
One of these days, these crappy encodes will likely end up being the ONLY existing copies of these commercials. For preservation purposes, it is essential that one capture at 720x480 or 720x576 (or 704x480/704x576, depending on hardware), at the respective frame rates for NTSC or PAL.
Jesus, I realize you're a local TV news dude, but these guys are probably encoding from old VHS tapes they've found lying around the house. They're not doing it from original source material, and they didn't even have stuff like digiBeta back then (the best the original would have been on was regular beta). I haven't been able to view these particular movies (bandwidth exceeded) but I've seen plenty of other sites that have similar old commercials so I'm sure they're doing the same thing.
With a 20 year old VHS tape originally recorded from broadcast TV, you're lucky if you've even got 250 lines of resolution left. By definition you would have to have 525 horizontal lines, but that doesn't mean every one of those lines will have distinguishable detail on it - you may need to combine two or even three lines before you'd be able to distinguish individual features from the image.
The end result being that I think 320x240 is generous. I doubt these tapes still have that much actual picture resolution. Compression is another matter, but if you're complaining about resolution, you're missing the point. You're not going to get any more quality by upping the resolution. It's not really much different than taking a digital photo at 1600x1200 and then blowing it up to 3200x2400. You don't get any extra detail that way.
And anyway, they're posting these on the web. Whenever I capture and encode for the web, I do one copy for archiving and one copy for the web. Because, as you can see right now, bandwidth does cost money. I don't know if these guys did that, but I wouldn't automatically assume that they didn't.
It looks like these companies would do a lot better advertising on things like "Blade Runner", like Atari and TDK did. This did wonders for them.
Ironically, the Atari advertisements you see in Blade Runner are no longer ironic.
Why not just call it a temp job? I have two friends that work in the gaming industry (one does sound the other does character). Both have been laid off multiple times. Why? The major project they were on was done with and there were no new projects on the table, so they were laid off. The first time for both (they worked together at first) it was a small company so that was understandable.. but from my limited knowledge this seems to be the norm.
Well, this seems to be what the industry is moving towards, and it's honestly not such a bad thing.
The film industry and in fact most creative industries operate on a project-to-project basis. You're hired for a specific project, you work like mad for six months, you make a year's worth of money during that time and then you're done. You then shop yourself around to other producers and try to get yourself attached to another project. Or, you take six months off and recharge.
This makes most creative industries pretty cut-throat, but it has a couple of positive effects. First, it keeps creative professionals from being too overworked, which as we all know is a huge problem in the games industry. Right now, the industry operates like a project-based industry but with permanent employees, so the workers don't ever get that break when projects end. Second, it hopefully causes the cream of the crop to rise to the top, because it's sort of a Darwinian system. The strong survive, the weak can't get themselves attached to new projects and eventually find other work. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way in any creative industry - the most creative minds are not always great at networking, for one thing. But it does ensure at least a basic level of competence in the industry, which right now is lacking (I think we can all agree that the technical quality of games these days is really all over the map).
If there really is a transition within the industry to become more like the film or other similar industries, then once it's complete I think workers will actually be better off. There will still be permanent workers and plenty of them, but, like the film industry, they will mainly be in marketing and administrative positions, which are often (though not always) both lower stress and higher paying than development or production jobs are today. The pay per project of developers will actually go up, because there will be an actual incentive for developers to recruit top talent for top projects, and the number of total hours worked per year for developers will go down - unless someone's a real coding rock star who's in high demand and chooses to simply move straight on from one tough project to the next.
Again, plenty of industries already work like this and it makes more sense than asking poorly-paid, often untalented full-time employees for 24/7 devotion to the company. Weed the untalented out of the industry, pay the talented better and give them some more time off. If they've got the talent and some basic interview skills, they'll have no problem finding more work in such a system.
Is Sega the new Apple?
They're not the "new" Apple, they're more comparable to the Apple of the mid 1980's. You know, a company without a clear direction, (hopefully) approaching the bottom end of their inverse market share bell curve. I still say that getting out of the hardware market is the worst thing Sega ever did - the effect it had was to completely demoralize the company. Many of their top creative minds left the company, and those that remained just haven't seemed to be putting their hearts into the games they've been creating lately.
I guess my main argument with your statement (part of which I didn't quote, but it's there) is that Sega still makes "very good games". Visual Concepts, their sports studio, made some decent sports sims (though NFL 2K5 was buggy as all hell), but Sega themselves haven't made anything I've been excited about since Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube.
As for this deal, don't forget that part of the deal is that Visual Concepts make games for Sega's arcade business. So to Sega's mind, this probably puts them back where they were in the early 80's only without having to do any of the actual work. Not sure it's actually going to play out that way, though; it doesn't seem like Sega has much of a future to me. Wouldn't be surprised if they get bought themselves at some point (something I argued would never happen 10 years ago, but times change and the mighty have fallen and fallen hard).
btw, I do believe Sega is actually profitable, but at the cost of, to quote George Costanza, "significant shrinkage." They seem to contract further and further every year and it's the only way they've kept their head above water. This is not how you succeed in business - to succeed in business requires both profitability and growth. Sega is in no position to grow and at this rate will eventually implode; they will cease to exist even as an IP holding company, as they will have sold off everything worthwhile to other publishers.
The X-Box gets virtually all of the cross-platform console titles and the X-Box versions of these games are usually the best, due in part, although not entirely, to features such as the HDD and customisable soundtracks.
This isn't a very good argument for the Xbox being a very memorable console. Where are the quality first-party and exclusive titles? There are a few (Halo, KOTOR, if you're into those sorts of games), but not many. Most Xbox owners seem to have the system for the exact same games - everybody has DOA3, everybody has Project Gotham, everybody has Halo and Halo 2. They also may buy Madden and the odd random PC-port FPS when they get bored of Halo, but it just goes to show how basically forgettable and generic of a game library the system has.
I also completely disagree with your statement that "only Nintendo fanboys cling to this view". My statement above is based in part (though certainly not entirely) on my own buying experiences for my Xbox. I am an Xbox owner, and the reason I own it is for the multi-platform games. I'm certainly no Nintendo fanboy; I'm not gonna sign off here and fire up some Mario. I don't even like Mario games. (I think I'm at the stage of my life where I can finally admit that, after years of trying to convince myself otherwise.) But I will say that at least the GameCube has a decent amount of content that you can't find anywhere else (not even PC), unlike the Xbox.
The last stats I saw showed that the X-Box had out-sold the PS and the Gamecube by a considerable margin during the 2004 Christmas period.
I'm not sure where you saw those stats or what region(s) and time period(s) they covered. Certainly it was not the case worldwide. It may have been the case in one or another territory, over a specific period of weeks as determined by Microsoft to sound the most impressive in a press release. (Similar to what they've done here, with the "article" we're all supposedly bantering about.) Nintendo does the same thing, though; they put out their own set of stats showing how they'd more than doubled the sales of the PS2 and Xbox combined over the Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, for example. These numbers can always be selectively drawn and applied to achieve whatever marketing result you want.
how much of that 12.8 million is PC only?
0. That's how much. RTFA. Or do your own research.
Huh? The press release itself says:
""Halo: Combat Evolved" for the PC and Xbox, has sold a collective 12.8 million copies in just three years."
According to the press release, they're including PC numbers in there as well. That's easily a million or two out of that number.
5 million copies each on Xbox is nothing to sneeze at, but the hyperbole in this press release (like most MS press releases) is a bit over the top. Why do people even bother posting these things? A press release is not news. Only the facts (if there are any) within the press release could ever be considered news, and then only if they're something that wasn't already news like 3 months ago (it's not like we've never seen Halo sales numbers before). And these facts really should be verified before they're posted up, because several people have already pointed out some pretty blatant inaccuracies. If you're going to just post up press releases all over the place, I'd like to at least see some questioning of the claims made within the article submission itself.
I don't much see the point in posting documents that basically say "we're the best, nyah nyah nyah" over and over with no real content, except to generate pointless arguments like this one.
Sadly, it's nearly impossible to find an NTSC multiregion player here in the U.S. :-(
Are you kidding? I can pick one up at my local corner deli. (Seriously - they sell an iWin or J-Win or some such off-brand model for $129.) You may not be able to buy one at major retail chains like Best Buy, but to say these things are "impossible to find" in the U.S. is just not correct. In my experience, you can buy them almost everywhere but the major retail chains.
Just because you haven't personally looked very hard doesn't mean they're difficult to find. Anyone who really wants a region free player can find one easily, and even if you live out in Bumblefark, Idaho, there's always a little something I like to call the Internets.
Region coding is dead. The only people it affects are people who don't care enough to buy a region-free player, which means it's not helping the studios at all.
Considering that the whole PSP vs. DS fracas is one of the more strident arguments going on on Slashdot at the moment, I'm really scratching my head at how this one slipped by.
You think Slashdot's immune to the Sony hype machine? Why do you think big companies like Sony have PR people, anyway? It's specifically to manipulate the press to their advantage, and Slashdot is part of that, like it or not.
You would hope that both the submitters and the editors here would be a little more savvy - that's why some of us come here, after all - but unfortunately they're often just as naive as the rest of the press. I've found this is more often true in the games section than in other sections (games is one of the newest sections here, after all), but I see PR pieces posing as news in every section here on occasion.
At least this didn't make it to the front page.
I worked in the game industry for 5 years (and I don't mean as a clerk at EB, I mean for a major game publisher) and I can honestly say I don't think I've ever heard of the IGDA. There may be people more on the business or legal side of things that deal with these guys but this is not an organization that most publishers or developers talk to on a daily or weekly basis.
From their web site, I can't even tell what it is they actually do. I see some advocacy topics, but that's about it - their "About the IGDA" section in the FAQ says absolutely nothing, and as someone else pointed out, their "membership benefits" are pretty non-existent. ("The main benefit of membership is knowing the you are developing your career and personally contributing the betterment of this industry by supporting the IGDA's mission." Uh... ok?).
It looks like they have about 5,700 members, but that's a tiny fraction of the total game industry.
Is this organization actually relevant in any way? What have they actually done to better the industry?
Of course I'm not the audience for that letter, I wonder how much their bottom line was actually affected. So the real question becomes.. how much does that sponsorship affect reviews? Is it possible to quantify it? If you compare reviews for games on sites that have ads for those games to reviews on sites that don't, can you find a coorelation that cross cuts many games? Common sense says that such a coorelation is so likely as to be obvious.
I worked in the marketing department of a major game publisher for a few years - one of these days I'll finally feel comfortable in naming them, but for now I'll just say they're much larger than 3DO ever was. I can tell you first-hand that this sort of thing is the norm in the industry, and that while Trip's letter was pretty ridiculous in some ways, it was more symptomatic of what's wrong with the entire publisher/media relationship than of anything unique to 3DO or Trip Hawkins.
If that's is the case, that really doesn't set up the writer of this letter for ridicule. He's behaving accordingly to the climate.
Well, the thing is, most of the time company CEO's don't go firing off angry letters to editors about their games, for a variety of reasons. It does at least open you up to ridicule, and depending on the position of your company, it also opens up the possibility of all-out war with the publication (or the gaming media as a whole - these guys all know each other and share war stories). If a company's obviously already on a downward slide, as 3DO was at this time, you're just as likely to hear a publication say "screw 'em" over something like this as you are to hear them cave. The publication will then ridicule the publisher at every turn, using them for comic relief, ragging on all of their games, and mentioning them negatively in completely unrelated articles. I've seen this happen, and I've even done it myself (I worked for an editorial web site before I worked for a game publisher). It's just not usually in the publisher's interest to say things like this.
This is what PR departments are for. My company got some scores that we considered "low" (in reality they were in the high 8 out of 10 range, at sites using that kind of scale, but we were expecting higher) and we did consider pulling advertising.
But this is where a good PR guy comes in. The CEO and the rest of the company could be ranting and raving about how they're going to walk over to GameSpot's or IGN's offices with baseball bats and billyclubs ready to bust in some kneecaps, but GameSpot and IGN would never hear this. Instead, they hear a carefully crafted, subtle message from a friendly PR guy who speaks in such a tone that you're not quite sure if he's threatening you or asking you out on a date. But you're left with the odd notion that something is not quite right with your relationship (and it is a relationship), and given the massive quantities of cash this company throws at you on a regular basis, maybe it would be in your (meaning GameSpot's or IGN's, in this example) best interests to fix it.
The real problem is not completely unique to the video game industry; it's true of all creative mass-market arts. Film, TV, games, they're all the same in that the media and the content creators rely completely on each other for their very existence. It's completely incestuous. All of the information in a gaming magazine or web site comes directly from a publisher, in one fashion or another. "Exclusives" are doled out in a manner that keeps everybody happy (over a period of time) and keeps everybody perpetually "in debt" to everybody else. Without content for their magazines or web sites, those mags or sites would cease to exist. And if a large publisher pulled its advertising and exclusives to one particular publication, that publication would no longer be able to compete.
By the same token, publishers need the media to build hype. Nobody just goes to a store and buys a game based on the box anymore; they buy it based on what t
Move along, nothing to see in this article. I mean, did anybody actually read it? It starts off like this:
A while ago Argos reduced the price of the GameCube console because they wished to get rid of their stock. After an incredible increase in sales they decided to carry on stocking it, but seem as if they wish to get rid of it now.
Let's all ponder that for a minute. "A while ago" Argos "wished" to get rid of their stock, and now they "wish" to get rid of it again. The trouble is, people just keep buying the stupid things! Poor Argos, their wish just never comes true! Those pesky customers just will not stop giving them their money.
Seriously, though, two points:
1. This is not new. The article itself says Argos first did this "a while ago", meaning (since this author can't seem to remember exactly) in 2003.
2. The rest of this article is nothing but speculation. "it is worrying that retailers are seemingly giving up on the GameCube" is an opinion based on an assumption based on nothing. The article itself says that prices were reduced previously and yet GameCubes are still on sale - why not assume this is simply a sales-generating tactic that's now been used repeatedly? Do stores never have loss-leader sales in the UK? (Rhetorical question - they obviously do, because Argos did it before with the GameCube.)
Nintendo's in a lot better shape than people seem to think they are. Just read their financial reports and look at the worldwide sales data (it's out there, though Europe's the toughest to come by - NPD and MediaCreate reports are pretty easily obtainable from various sources, though). They're profitable and they've got the #2 home console and #1, #2 and #3 handhelds in terms of current worldwide sales.
Many visitors may even be able to pick up easy words from signs in English rather than trying to translate Japanese characters.
They already have signs in English in many places. This is nothing new.
The problem is this is mostly in the touristy areas. Get off the beaten path and everything's Japanese only, and that's never going to change. You're not going to convince the local municipality of Ryu-Gasaki in Ibaraki prefecture to change all of its signs for the three tourists they get per year, for example. That's true of most areas of Japan and even a lot of the non-tourist areas in big cities, and it's true not just of the cities themselves but of small businesses, many of whom are run by people with limited English skills (and so who could not realistically write everything properly in English for tourists anyway).
Giving out these PDA's would basically help free people from having to stay within these few tourist areas (if you read stuff like this, you'd think all of Japan consisted of the Shibuya, Akihabara, and Shinjuku wards of Tokyo), which can only increase tourist business nationwide.
What Japan really needs to go along with this, though, is a major international ad campaign (perhaps partnering with ANA and JAL - they sort of tried this with their "Yokoso Japan" campaign but they didn't actually run any TV ads in the US). Where I live in NYC, we pretty routinely see ads for visiting other countries (mostly in Europe but also Australia, Canada, Singapore, China and others), but I have never once seen an ad for Japan. It's not a place most people seem to think of as a tourist spot. But I don't think there's a real lack of interest, it's just not the first thought people have when considering a vacation - whenever I tell anybody I'm going there, their first reaction is "Oh! That sounds great!" As if I'd just reminded them of something they'd forgotten.
In other news, DC Comics has realized that it should stop publishing Superman and Batman titles in favor of new characters that nobody has any investment in.
I'd have modded this more "insightful" than "funny".
What's funny is how much Nintendo gets bashed around the net, considering they're, you know, the only profitable game hardware company out there. People act like they don't know what they're doing and that somehow Sony and MS have got their number. In reality, I think it's a lot more likely that Kaz at Sony and Bill over at MS sit there looking at their market share numbers vs. their profit/loss columns and think "huh? Shouldn't we be the ones making money here?"
Nintendo's doing something right; something that MS and Sony aren't. They realized a long time ago that dominating the industry is not necessary to be profitable. If you really look objectively at what they do vs. what Sony and MS do, you can make the following observations:
a) They've got a corner in every part of the market. They have strong first-party game development (unlike Sony and MS, which rely more on second- and third-party development), and they get all of those profits for themselves. They have two handhelds and one current home console, and in various territories they still sell "classic" consoles as well.
b) They allocate a certain percentage of development to proven franchises and a certain percentage to new titles, and they carefully manage that (it's not haphazard). This article seems to argue that the percentage allocation to proven franchises is too high, but where most game developers have failed is in doing the opposite. That's just the reality of today's market, which is "brand" based, for better or worse.
c) They have a strong "house style". Whether or not you personally like their house style is not really an issue - the fact is you buy a Nintendo product and you basically know what you're getting. Nintendo is not nearly as reliant on third parties to define their products, nor are they as reliant on "killer apps". You buy a Nintendo console for the overall Nintendo "experience". It's similar to what Disney does - it almost doesn't even matter whether a particular Disney movie is any good, people will go see it anyway because they know basically what it's all going to be about.
All this adds up to a well-managed company that tightly controls everything they do, which results in nearly continuous profit (I believe they've had one non-profitable quarter in something like the last ten years). They also just flat-out sell a lot more stuff than most people think they do - last year I think they were the #2 software publisher overall in terms of sales, for example, and I remember over Thanksgiving week this year they sold more total hardware in one week in the United States than their competitors sold for the entire month combined - and that's in their weakest territory. (That's including all of their systems; GBA SP, DS, GameCube.) The GameCube itself is #2 in sales worldwide, Nintendo handhelds have 95% of that market, I mean this company does sell a lot of products.
Whether or not you understand their business plan is pretty immaterial. A lot of people don't personally like what Nintendo's doing and they therefore don't personally think their strategies are sound. But Nintendo has continuously proven those people wrong throughout pretty much their entire history. And yet the naysayers still won't go away.
Anyway ontopic I haven't been following this story, at all, but from what I can see they say they own Linux?
On behalf of the people of Earth, I would like to formally welcome you to our planet.
News is a rather large exception. And even in the news, the image must be newsworthy.
Show me the law that says that. If it's done in public, it's fair game, regardless of whether it is "newsworthy" or not. I don't recall any newsworthiness standards, so I think that you're completely wrong.
Bzzzt. He's completely right. You're not.
Specifically what's wrong is your idea that "if it's done in public, it's fair game" - no, it isn't, and I want to put a stop to this myth right now.
Read this to learn the difference between informational (ie. news) and commercial (ie. non-news) uses of photography. Read this for some general information on when and why a release is required.
Now that that's out of the way, surely you must know that minors cannot sign binding contracts (ie. a release from a minor is meaningless, even if one exists in this case), and that depictions of underage nudity in this country are illegal in their own right. What some people are doing in this thread right now is defending child porn, whether or not they think that's what it is. Legally, that is what it is.
There is grounds for a lawsuit here on several different issues, and grounds for criminal prosecution on at least one.
There's competition, albiet not much, out there, not to mention the 512 to 1 gig players out there. Most people have no need for 40 gigs in their pocket or they don't want to drop 249 or 299 for an iPod, which wont record line in nor do FM/AM.
I have about eight separate issues with each one of your statements here. I will cover only the most pertinent in the interests of readability.
First of all, nobody needs any mp3 player. I mean let's get a sense of perspective here - every single one of these things, from the lowest of the low-end 128MB flash player to the 60GB iPod, is a complete luxury item. 10 years ago, we all got by just fine with our portable CD players. 10 years before that, we got along fine with our cassette walkmen. 10 years before that, we got along fine with nothing. (Maybe a nice transistor radio or something, but that's about it.)
So the argument that people will or will not buy one of these players based on "need" is meaningless. People buy these players because they want them, and that's one thing Apple understands that their competitors don't. Apple makes people want a product that they have absolutely no need for, whereas their competitors are busy building the products they think their customers need.
(It reminds me of an old saying about art, and I'm not sure I've got it exactly right, but it goes something like, "True art isn't about giving people what they want; true art is about giving people something that they didn't know they wanted.")
And what's this about recording AM/FM radio?? Honestly, who buys an mp3 player for this? This is akin to photocopying your favorite novels at the local library so you can enjoy them later, in all their degraded, barely-readable glory. I mean Jesus Christ, just buy the stupid thing. Listening to the radio is one thing, and I can see that being somewhat useful... but when you're talking 40GB worth of music at your fingertips, in as good quality as you chose to make it in the first place, I don't think listening to the radio is really a product seller in this category. (Yeah yeah, people want to time-shift their talk shows or whatever... all six of you out there.)
I see a lot of 128-512 meg players out there and people don't at all seem to mind not having their entire collection on them at all times.
Apple's on track to sell four million iPods in one quarter. I actually doubt there have been four million flash-based players sold in total, throughout the history of flash-based players, by every single manufacturer combined.
Now, to add my $0.03 (my opinion's worth one cent more than most!) about this iRiver player, I mean, I have nothing against it, competition is good, etc. etc. But it's not gonna make a dent in iPod sales. Because for one, even the iPod Mini is a shadow of its big brother in terms of sales (read the article I linked earlier), so it's not even Apple's biggest market. But it's still a market they dominate. They dominate that market through a combination of things that add up to a total user experience - and a couple of extra features on a competing model is not going to do anything to change that. Because it's frankly just not about features.
I'm no big fan of Apple but I acknowledge that they have a certain understanding about basic human nature that very few other companies do. Their product design teams are not run by a bunch of MBA's and they do not design by committee. They actively looked for a new market segment with the iPod, they found it, and they defined it. Nobody's going to catch up to them by just dumping a few extra features or a couple more hours of battery life into their player. I mean that's the reality. This is Apple's market.
Chihiro, at the beginning of the film, seems somewhat spoiled and incessantly whiney.
By the end, she has had to set her own goals, make her own decisions, accept responsibility, and carry through on a long-term plan. All without the guidance of her parents. It's the process of growing up and leaving the nest. Sorry, but "children should learn manners" just doesn't cover all that.
Well, you're a bit closer than the post you're replying to, but still not quite right.
Spirited Away is about greed and gluttony. Now, learning to be humble and respectful and responsible and all that is part of that lesson about greed and gluttony, so you're not wrong. Spirited Away suggests a return to a more traditional way of thinking as part of the solution, but the main issue in the film is greed.
This does not quite come through in the English translation as well as it does in the original Japanese. Still, it's fairly obvious, I think, right from the beginning of the film (when her parents literally turn into pigs through their gluttony) until the end (when Sen's purity returns them to humanity).
The only Miyazaki film I'd say even specifically deals with the environment is Princess Mononoke. (I'm calling these films by their English names because I'm speaking English, btw - I don't really see the point in mixing languages up when there is a proper, official English title available.) Lots of his films are misunderstood in this country - Spirited Away has nothing to do with the environment at all, and even Nausicaa (another film people think has an environmental lesson) is an allegory for the real-life Cold War that was going on at the time, and what would happen if it turned hot. The environment is used in these films as a vehicle to make a point.
Obviously nature and the environment are common Miyazaki themes, but don't confuse his common themes with the message in any particular film. He uses things like nature, tradition, history, etc. to make his points - but they are rarely, if ever, the point in themselves.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but where do people think going to Starbuck's is a status-enhancing gimmick? The only place where this might work is East Podunk, USA. In most metropolitan areas the Starbuck's outnumber the Kwik-E-Marts and carry about the same cachet.
It's not that it's "status-enhancing" so much as it's "status-confirming". It's telling people "I can afford to spend five bucks on a cup of coffee every morning and not even think about it." Even here in New York, where there's plenty of money and plenty of real coffee shops (not to mention Dunkin Donuts if you just want a quick cup), Starbucks is fairly popular among the white-collar crowd. And it's not because those people think it's got the best coffee - with so many better choices here, they can't possibly think that. It's so that they can be seen back at work with that $4-$5 cup in their hand. It's an image.
Dunkin Donuts has some of the best coffee I've ever had in the United States. It beats the pants off of Starbucks. If only they had a cooler marketing campaign and a better atmosphere in the stores they could really give Starbucks something to worry about.
I agree that DD coffee is some of the best available at a retail chain in the United States. But it's not great coffee in an absolute sense - it's a very light roast, it's very mild (which makes it a good everyday cup), some would even say weak. But it's far better than Starbucks, which is bitter and burnt - their fans like to say it's just a dark roast, but it's not. It's bitter; the roast is as dark as it is to try to mask the fact that they're not using very good beans.
I think you underestimate DD's popularity in the United States, though. It's far more popular in most of the northeast than Starbucks is. Starbucks has made some big inroads in New York and New Jersey over the past 10 years but it's hit a plateau now, and there are still a lot more DD's here than there are Starbucks.
One of DD's problems, though, is that they're franchised. So they're very inconsistent. The decor is pretty standardized (and they actually have updated to better compete... but they are a donut shop after all), but standards of cleanliness, customer service, and even the quality of the coffee itself is very uneven from store to store. I've actually complained to the DD company about this because the store nearest to where I used to live had to be about the worst DD in the entire nation - a cup of coffee there was really not much different than a cup of hot, cloudy water. Their employees, most of whom are not native to this country, also seem to have basically no coffee training and do not understand standard coffee terms like "regular" or "light" - you have to explain exactly what you want every time, and they still almost never get it quite right. This drives me crazy. They really need to institute some sort of company-wide training program.
But DD's marketing I think is actually pretty good - they've beaten the pants off Krispy Kreme (which is their main competitor, not Starbucks) by focusing on the coffee rather than the donuts, and they've always got new coffee drinks coming out on a seasonal basis (though most of them are undrinkable if you ask me - those "lattes" they have almost make me want to throw up). So they're doing okay.
But what they do well is regular, plain old every day coffee, nothing else, and the people who drink their coffee and like it are just not the same people who find Starbucks coffee tasty. DD's customers are a lot more blue-collar (even if they're really white-collar, like me), they don't care about having wi-fi with their coffee, they don't equate "bitter" with "good", they don't use the word "grande" when they really mean "medium", they don't need to pay four bucks for a cup-o-joe. So I think DD will probably pretty easily manage to co-exist with Starbucks; in the areas where both exist, DD is actually doing better right now.
(Of course, here in New York, we've got really good "real" coffee shops where you can get a nice, dark roast that's not bitter at all... so if you like your Starbucks, you can have that style of coffee the way it's supposed to be. But again, people who want that are not really Dunkin Donuts type customers anyway.)
One problem with all the 1280x1024 LCD monitors are that they don't have square pixels. The display itself is 4:3, but the pixels are squat, unlike 1600x1200, 1280x960, 1024x768, 800x600 et cetera.
This is completely, 100% false.
1280x1024 LCD screens have a 5:4 aspect ratio. This is why the resolution can be 1280x1024, and the pixels remain square. 1280x1024 screens are the only screens with a 5:4 ratio. Don't ask me why this is, but it is. You can easily verify this by looking at the specs on any LCD with this native resolution.
I would guess you're confusing what happens when you use 1280x1024 as a resolution on CRT's. This will give you non-square pixels, and you should not use 1280x1024 on a CRT for this reason (unless you have a 5:4 CRT, and I'd guess there are at least a few of them out there). You should use 1280x960 instead. But this does not apply to LCD's, all of which have one native resolution, and they're built specifically to support that native resolution.
Now, as to this assertion in the original article post that "most image editors" think LCD's are "nowhere near as good" as CRT's... I think this is at the very least overly dramatic, if not outright false. First of all, what's an "image editor" to begin with? A retoucher? A photographer? A designer (and print or web)? All of the above?
Up until a few months ago I worked in the web design department for a large corporation, and like most companies we worked pretty closely with the print designers as well. 95% of my company used LCD's because they wanted to use LCD's. If any designer wanted a CRT they could simply request it - very few did (maybe two or three at the entire company). I personally had an LCD as a primary monitor and a CRT as secondary, because when working for the web it's important to see how things are going to look on different setups (especially when working with compressed images).
I'm also a photographer, and I don't have a CRT in my house. I have three LCD screens, and while not all of them are created equally (the oldest one does have a pretty narrow gamut), they're all at least adequate for photo processing, and my laptop screen is perfectly fine. I know plenty of other photographers who also do retouching on their laptops and don't feel they're missing anything.
LCD's are different, but even with a narrower gamut they do some things better than CRT's. No CRT can approach an LCD's pixel-perfect sharpness, for example - it's impossible to judge a photograph's true sharpness when viewing it on a CRT. So there are tradeoffs in both directions.
I think there's a difference between intellectually knowing that one thing may be technically better in certain areas than another thing, and actually using those things in real life. "Image editors" are people too, and they like the convenience and space savings of LCD screens as much as anybody else. And there are things that LCD's do better than CRT's, just as there are things CRT's do better than LCD's.
The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.
That's not the point. What these idiots fail to realize is that it only takes one person with too much time on their hands to completely destroy the entire rationale for copy protection. It only takes one guy to rip this way, enter everything by hand (this is not a big deal, btw; I've done it on plenty of my own CD's not in the FreeDB), post to a Bittorrent tracker site, share an album on Edonkey, or whatever. Then it's out there, and everybody's got it. And you're back to square one again, with a DRM system that's doing nothing but inconveniencing people that want to exercise their legitimate and legally sanctioned fair use rights.
This is why DRM systems cannot work. Because in the Internet age, it only takes one single person to completely mess everything up and make all that work on the DRM scheme for nought. And we're not talking spending weeks cracking an encryption scheme, either; we're talking taking an hour to record a CD through an analog connection and then split the tracks up and type in a few track titles. This is hardly a large amount of work, nor does it require any technical skills.
Regardless, I'm sure the DRM itself will be cracked within the first day or two of its release. But even if it isn't, it will be worked around. It's just so completely pointless that it makes me angry that any company would waste any amount of money on it. I mean there are so many more useful things that could be done with that money, such as, you know, actually developing good musical acts.
(Honest question, I'm not trolling or flaming.) Does "suprnova's intent" refer to the intent of the administrators of suprnova, or to individuals who post links there? I think the distinction is important. If it's the administrator(s) we're ascribing intent to, how is it obvious that they intend that copyrighted materials be shared, as opposed to any materials? If it's the individuals posting to suprnova to whom we're ascribing intent, then maybe it would be more accurate to say "Some users of suprnova clearly intend to share copyrighted materials". I'm not trying to split hairs; it's these specific distinctions on which related legal cases will hinge.
Well, no, they won't.
Judges are not stupid, and neither, generally, are juries. It's obvious upon your first visit to suprnova that there is a huge amount of copyrighted content - it's right there on the front page, the most updated list, every day. It would be pretty difficult for the site administrators to claim ignorance in this case, or to say "we can't control what our users do". Well, yes you can - you can ban ip addresses, you can ban submitters, you can take the freakin' site down if that's what it takes. We're not talking about an actual p2p application when we're talking about a web site - this is not a case where "the genie's out of the bottle" and you can no longer control it. Somebody owns that site, somebody runs that site, and what's going on at that site is obvious for all to see.
Now, that doesn't mean I think suprnova's toast. But if they're not toast, it won't be because of the "it's not my fault" defense. It's going to have to be something more than that, like the site being hosted in a different country where linking to copyrighted content is not illegal.
What strikes me as odd is that the first step in this battle is just a bunch of lawsuits. No C&D's? No warnings? I think someone could legitimately make the case that they didn't realize posting tracker links was illegal (I'm not so sure it's absolutely clear-cut that it is, actually), which doesn't provide a legal defense, but you'd think some warning letters would be in order first if for no other reason than public relations. I have a feeling that'd scare most of these sites into submission without the costs of a legal fight. Those sites left still standing would be the tough ones to crack anyway; those in other countries, for example.
I know the popular opinion here is typically pro-Apple/iTMS/iPod but honestly I just don't see why we can be pro-reverse engineering on everything else and not this.
Isn't it obvious?
Real and Apple are going back and forth on the best ways to screw their customers. Apple by forcing you to use their DRM, Real by refusing to give you songs that'll be guaranteed to play on any particular player. They're both wrong.
The only way I'd support Real in this case is if they were putting out unprotected files and Apple was disabling those. But they're not - they're putting out files that use a different, incompatible DRM scheme from Apple's and telling customers the iPod will play it. Well, now it won't. Tough for them. They could have avoided this if they'd just given consumers what they want in the first place.
Yes, I realize the reasons for DRM, I realize record labels won't sell music without it, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, whatever. Does that mean I have to support Real? No. Apple? No. The RIAA? No. I don't support any of them; they are all trying to screw the customer with these unwiedly and incompatible DRM schemes.
The good news is the iPod will still play unprotected content. So ignore Real, ignore the iTunes Music Store and rip your own damn CD's - then you don't need to deal with any of this crap.
Fight the power!
For now there is no reason. But I bet soon if not already the iPod will check to make sure the DRM signature is in the file. No Sig, No Music.
Yeah, and about 80% of all the music on all iPods around the world instantly stops working (hint: mp3). Great business plan.
If you mean strictly AAC files, well, that wouldn't make much sense either, because any CD's you rip with iTunes are encoded by default as non-protected AAC files. So Apple'd be screwing their own customers with that strategy. (And of course iTunes is not the only AAC ripper, so even if they locked down iTunes and just decided to ignore everybody who ripped non-protected files with it to this point, they'd still have problems.)
They realistically cannot lock out non-protected content, unless they want their player to be rendered absolutely useless. What do you think happened to Sony all this time? It'd be even worse for Apple, because there's already so much non-protected content on iPods throughout the world - they'd have an outright revolt on their hands.
This, kids, is why DRM sucks, and no DRM is good. Honestly, why do people put up with this crap? Use MP3 and play it back on whatever the hell player you want. That's the way it should work, and that's the way it does work for those of us who refuse to host any DRM'd files on their PC's or music players.
Isn't buying a 1st gen. protable electronics device just begging for this kind of trouble?
Why poeple buy bleeding edge products is beyond me.
I don't understand this mentality. Why would buying a product that's presumably been tested and deemed ready for the marketplace be "begging for trouble", whatever "generation" it is?
In fact, going back through history you can find just as many examples where the first generation of something is built significantly better than the later generations. The Atari VCS, for example; the early models had 1/4" thick plastic and actual metal armor plating on the bottom of the casing - later models had much thinner plastic and no armor plating, they were much more prone to cracking.
I don't see why portables need to be any different. Companies build products, they market test them, and then they put them out there. The public is not a bunch of beta testers; they're supposed to be building in certain tolerances and you would hope that if they're going to err, they'll err on the side of caution (as Atari did with the early VCS).
I guess my point is twofold:
a) Our expectations for "first generation" products these days are too low, and
b) I think it's just as likely as not that later generation models will be worse as it is that they'll be better. You can't just look at the PS2 and Xbox as representative as the entire history of home and portable electronics; many devices do become less reliable as their production costs are cut back to save money down the line.
I have no idea if these PSP defects are widespread or if they're isolated incidents. There does seem to be a pattern, though, that suggests that in general, the PSP's build quality is probably not quite as good as many had expected, and I doubt that's ever going to change. Sony does not really have a history of redesigning products to be tougher. If there's an actual defect in the laser mechanism or something like that, then yes, they may do a minor redesign to correct errors (as they did with the PS2), but build quality is a different issue. They're not going to start using thicker plastic or reinforcing the unit with carbonized steel or do away with the "analog" nub - build quality issues are probably issues you'll just have to learn to live with. I'm sure Sony would tell you to just be more careful with the PSP.
As for the dead pixel issue, it's always a possibility in an LCD-based product, especially one with a fairly high-resolution display like this. You'd hope the warranty and/or return policy would cover it, but I guess the supply is such that stores in Japan are not accepting returns right now because of it. I doubt this problem is more widespread than on other LCD-based devices, though - this is a screen made by Sharp, which is one of the world's largest LCD producers. It's not as if they don't have experience making LCD displays.