Every so often, one will hear the phrase "I am a pen." especially when dealing with younger Japanese. From what I understand, it's the first thing the English teachers teach the students. Even though the sentence itself is nonsencial and silly, it has a very clear structure and helps students to understand the very basic grammar.
I hope this explains the obscure joke in the heaven strip.:P
Well no, because that sentence would actually be "this is a pen", not "I am a pen". The Japanese may be silly in many ways, but they're not complete idiots. Apparently this sentence is silly enough that it's still made fun of by students there (I'd bet the comic strip is an intentional stab at humor, not a mistake... though obviously Japanese humor doesn't translate directly to English).
The first thing I learned in Japanese was "this is a book" (kore wa hon desu) and for a long time I'd just walk around saying that for no reason, like kids do. At some point I'm sure I said "I am a book" (watashi wa hon desu) just as a joke, knowing what it meant and just thinking it sounded funny - I think this is the same sort of thing.
The iTunes store afforded consumers much more freedom with their purchases than any of the other online stores, and this software may well have a hand in taking that away.
So f'ing what? Seriously. You gloom and doom types are overlooking the patently obvious here: without iTunes, what's left? KaZaA, Gnutella, etc. Shut down iTunes and you drive all those consumers right back to the free (and illegal) services, including the ones currently in the works that encrypt data across multiple nodes and make it nearly impossible to track downloaders. It's not like there's no other way to download music (and if you want it legally, it's not like there's no other way to buy it besides downloading). And let's not forget that it's legal to share music in Canada!
Shuttering iTunes is not in the record industry's best interests. Oh, they still may not realize it, but they will eventually or they will die. What is in their best interests is to simply let this go. Don't publicize it. Let the Slashdot crowd break the DRM on the tunes they've purchased; they're not the ones downloading music on KaZaA anyway. Sue more people who are sharing illegally and drive them to iTunes.
Alternative strategy is to try to shut this software down with a massive legal and PR blitz. Won't work, but it'll put the fear into a few people, at least. But shutting down iTunes does not seem to be an option in any case. It would be suicidal. It's not as if alternatives don't exist, that cost less (ie. free) and don't have DRM. Why push customers back to that at the very moment you seem to be educating them on the benefits of actually paying for music?
Except that it's NOT your data. You have a license to use it.
Bullshit. If it's on my hard drive, which is a physical platter that I purchased at retail, then it's a physical thing that exists in the real world and it's mine. You're telling me my hard drive is mine but its contents aren't? I don't buy that for a second, whatever some RIAA lackey wants to say to convince me. If it somehow found a way (legally) into my house and onto my hard drive, it belongs to nobody else but me, and as long as I keep it for myself, I'm allowed to do whatever I damn well please with it.
In fact, DRM exists because copyright holders know this. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for DRM! The whole point of DRM is to keep you from doing things you are legally entitled to do as specifically written in copyright law. The RIAA does not like the way copyright law is written so they are doing their best to usurp it with DRM (which they seem to think gains them additional protections under the DMCA that they don't otherwise have under regular old copyright law). I see no problem in breaking DRM in order to exercise my legal rights.
Now, as for this sob story about WMA becoming a "standard" because of this... I mean really, cry me a river. Neither AAC nor WMA will ever be considered a "standard". The only thing close to a "standard" is MP3 (only because so many people have already ripped their music to it, so every piece of hardware has to support it) and it obviously isn't used for many applications where real compression efficiency or the best absolute sound quality are required. MP3 will always be around - I'm sure not about to re-rip all 2,000 or so CD's I own, and doubt many others will either - so whatever gets declared a "standard" for any specific use doesn't really matter anyway.
WMA's DRM will be broken in time just as FairPlay apparently has been, in any case. It's the nature of digital data. Anything that's expressed in bits can and will be cracked, so WMA has no advantage here. Eventually these companies will hopefully accept that all DRM is doomed to fail, and just go back to allowing their customers to exercise their rights under the law, as they used to do many years ago.
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real.
Ok... so now instead of having a detached, intellectual knowledge that the magazine knows where you live, it'll be more "real", more like "oh my God! This magazine I subscribe to knows where I live!!"
I still don't see how this is newsworthy. I think there's a reasonable expectation among people that when they give their address out to somebody, that person or organization knows their address from that point on. I don't think this is a revalation to anybody.
It's one thing if some shadowy organization I had no prior contact with suddenly sent me a listing of my favorite color, favorite flavors of ice cream, which bone I broke when I was 10, how many pounds I lost in senior year of high school, and the total number of Big Macs I've eaten over my lifespan. That would shake me up a little bit. On the other hand, a magazine I subscribe to visually proving that they know where I live does not quite carry the same effect.
...are just lower prices for games, especially new releases.
US $50 is simply too much for a new PS2 game.
Argh, how does a comment like this get modded "insightful"?
First of all, N64 games listed at $69.99-$79.99 when the system was first released. Prior to that, Sega Genesis games sold for up to $80 (Phantasy Star IV being an example). The original Warcraft on PC had an MSRP over $50 (check this month's 10th Anniversary PC Gamer for confirmation). Going back further, most Atari 2600 titles retailed for $29.99 - in 1977. And that price went up over time with inflation, not down.
Secondly, how many gamesneed to be below $50 before people stop complaining about game prices? And that's not even counting brand new releases like Destruction Derby Arenas, which is selling for $20 on day one of release. There are quite a few games that fit that description these days.
If you're complaining about game prices, you either a) know nothing about video game history and/or economics, or b) are shopping at all the wrong places.
Anyway, notice where the story is: England. Guns are illegal there, so you're not allowed to defend yourself against muggers.
Yeah, because we all know that nobody ever gets mugged here in the US where everybody carries guns.
Right.
Where exactly do you live in the US again? Because see, here in NYC, we gots plenty of guns, and we also gots plenty of muggings. The iPod thing hasn't really caught on here, but mainly because there are more expensive things to steal (easy way to tell someone who's new to the city: they actually take their laptops out in public), not because muggers are afraid of their victims. As an attempted mugging victim myself years ago, and as someone who knows people who have also been mugged, raped, shot at, stabbed, and assaulted in other ways, I can assure you criminals are quite confident their own skills with their weapon of choice trump those of their victims (wrong as they often are; criminals are not usually the brightest people in the world).
Back on topic - I've always wondered why nobody bothers changing out those white headphones when they buy an iPod, as I've always thought it'd eventually be a magnet for theft once every moron carrying a laptop finally figures out to keep it locked up in a bag that's shaped like something other than a laptop. Plus, they're earbuds - who really likes wearing earbuds? I'd much rather wear my Koss Portapros, which no doubt sound better anyway. If somebody gets robbed because of their white headphones, I say it's their own damn fault. If you're going to be such a pretentious fop, so conspicuous because of the supposed "status" the headphones bring you, you deserve whatever happens as a result.
One question - I haven't played it, so I don't know - but - what do you like about Ninja Gaiden so much?
See, to me it looks like Rygar for PS2 (which is the same publisher.. and the same engine?), or Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for PS2.
Both published by Tecmo but that doesn't mean anything; they were developed by different development teams. Dev teams are almost little companies within companies; they usually have their own offices (often their own buildings), and they have their own stable of games. Ninja Gaiden was developed by Team Ninja, the team best-known recently for the Dead or Alive series (both fighting and now volleyball), but also for (wait for it) Ninja Gaiden, from which the team derived its name. This same team responsible for the new Xbox game also developed the classic NES version, and possibly the arcade, Lynx, and Game Gear versions, though they were all quite different.
Rygar was developed by a different team within Tecmo - I couldn't tell you who, but I know for a fact it was not Team Ninja, as they only work on Xbox right now and only with their little cast of Team Ninja characters (the characters in DOA and Ninja Gaiden do cross over to some extent - the little ninja core of DOA, comprised of Ryu, Kasumi and Ayane, are related and appear in both series). Team Ninja are pretty adamant about developing their own game engines as well, so Ninja Gaiden's was not borrowed from Rygar (two different platforms anyway).
Now, I haven't played the new Ninja Gaiden and I'm not disagreeing with you that in general it and Rygar may be similar games. But as in any action game, it comes down to the execution, so it may very well be that Ninja Gaiden is that much more of a precisely timed game, with better level and enemy design, better graphics, etc. But really, it is true that it's just an updated remake of a game that came out 15 years ago (as is Rygar; Castlevania is technically a sequel, but was derived from a similar action platformer).
Basically these are all games within the same genre, so it's natural they would be similar. I don't think it's the originality that draws people to games like this; nobody would argue that remakes of classic games about ninjas are at all original. But that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
So if you like bubblegum pop, hiphop, and country, Wal-Marts the place to shop. Otherwise, no dice.
"We asked for Mojo Nixon, she said 'he don't work here'! We said if you don't got Mojo Nixon, then your store could use some fixin'." - the Dead Milkmen
"This is a traffic ticket for Microsoft," said Thomas Vinje of Clifford Chance, who represents Microsoft critics.
Well, yes, and it's probably intended to be. Traffic tickets are not intended to end life as you know it, nor would a regulatory fine be intended to put a company out of business. Monopoly or not, it would not be in the EU's best interests for Microsoft to suddenly go belly up, or to abandon the European market because it's become unprofitable, thereby leaving all those currently using MS software in the lurch, support-wise, and out of all their license money that's guaranteed them future upgrades.
The "slap on the wrist" analogy is often used to show that a penalty is too light, but in fact the whole point of a slap on the wrist is to get your attention and change your way of thinking and acting. Traffic tickets do not usually bankrupt anybody but hopefully they will get you to follow the law. They are an annoyance and one that most people would rather not deal with. And the only real way you eliminate the risk of receiving one is by obeying the law.
So if this is seen as a traffic ticket, good. The penalty will have done its job.
In most cases this will be a parking lot after we are through.
In other words, you are saying US will commit mass murder in revenge?
You say this as if simply repeating the notion will convince us all of how implausible or horrible it is. I am sure the original poster realized what he/she was saying, and I'm sure we all know what a horrible thought it is. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen, or that it wouldn't be supported by a lot of people in this country.
Nukes are not something just anybody can put together. A comparatively small number of countries can do it (relative to the total number of countries in the world), let alone individuals or small groups of people, however well financed they are. The best any of these groups can probably do is pay another country enough money to lend them materials and expertise. This is what we're really afraid of - that or that a nuke gets stolen from an unwitting country.
If it turns out a state had provided material or know-how to terrorists for building a nuclear bomb that was subsequently used in the US, and that's proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I and every other sane person in this country would rightly expect a massive military response. Now, I'm not saying a nuclear response, but in the days of the Cold War that was the generally accepted outcome - one country nukes another and in turn gets nuked back. Everybody knew it would happen; it wasn't questioned. That mutually assured destruction kept anybody from pulling the trigger - or so the thought went. Would we have used the a-bomb in Japan if we thought we'd get a-bombed back? I doubt it.
The same would hold now. The fact that another country thinks we could identify them and would respond in kind would hopefully be some form of deterrent. And if we didn't respond in kind, they should consider themselves lucky they're dealing with a country more merciful than most. In any case, if a city were wiped out along with the millions of people inhabiting it, and another country were identified as the real culprit behind it, well, I don't think there would be much crying over any military response we would choose to wield.
Argh, seems I hadn't read all the way to the end of the article.
Still, my basic point still stands. There's no law that says you have to use one brand of products all the time, or that you have to use the fastest thing available for every mundane task (not that those T40's are slow).
I'm surprised Sports Illustrated uses relatively cheap hardware and software to edit their photos. ACDSee (Fire!) is $50, and they use some pretty standard (and not all that impressive) IBM laptops for most of the field action. Even at the studios in New York they're using dual 450 G4's. No dual G5's yet. Anyone know how much that camera costs?
What an odd post.
First of all, what "studios in New York"? I work in New York for a creative company, and we mostly use PC's. If someone prefers to work on Mac we issue them a Mac. Same as SI. Most people, in all honesty, prefer to work on PC's at my company, so that's what we give them. And those people work no more slowly than those using Macs (dual 450 CPU's is hardly impressive these days either, so it's a little weird that you'd put that up against the IBM T40's and dual Xeons SI is using. The last Mac we issued was a dual 1.8 G5).
Secondly, what the hell does cost have to do with anything in qualitative terms? It's any company's responsibility to be efficient in budgeting, and part of that means choosing the cheapest tools you can that will reliably get the job done (key word being "reliably" - it's no use spending the least money you can if what you buy is going to be broken half the time). IBM Thinkpads seem a perfectly sensible idea to me for what SI is doing with them - they're reliable, they're not expensive, they're small and easily transportable, and with Pentium-M chips and 768MB of RAM they're more than adequate for what SI is using them for, which is downloading and tranferring image files. This is efficient use of tools.
Similarly, did you even read why they're using ACDSee? We use it at my company as well. It's simply a very fast image viewer; there's nothing I know of that's faster either, or more suitable to the task of sifting through large quantities of images in as quick a time as possible. We use it for the exact same purpose.
I'm honestly impressed at how efficient and organized it seems SI is running their image processing program. They seem to know what they're doing and they've selected the right tools for the job. Who cares if they use "cheap" cameras and PC's? You got a problem with the technical image quality on any of their recent covers?
Megapixels is the most idiotic resolution measurement system ever. Quick, what resolution does 3 megapixel equal? 3.2? 4? 5? IF THE CAMERA HAS A RESOLUTION OF 1152x864, just fucking say so. I should make a camera with a resolution of 1x5000000 and call it a 5 megapixel camera just out of spite.
And you call yourself a geek?
You can safely assume that these are square pixels in these sensors (they are). You can also safely assume that the aspect ratio is going to at least approximate that of 35mm film, as that's been the standard for many, many years. In fact, 1152x864 is a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is the same as 35mm film. Having to spell these things out is basically the same as a TV producer selling a TV by its actual screen dimensions rather than by a diagional measurement. It's more info than you need to know for comparison purposes, and more info than you need to know to figure out the exact dimensions on your own (assuming you know anything at all about TV's, and if you don't, plenty of resources exist to help you learn).
Now, the problem I have with these "megapixel" measurements is that 1152x864 does not even equal 1 megapixel! It is less than 1,000,000 pixels. It's not even a question of real megabytes vs. marketing megabytes in hard drives (the 1024 vs. 1000 thing); 1152x864 is just not a megapixel. I don't think it's ethical for a company to make a camera that's close to a megapixel (but not quite) and still call it that, because what's the threshold for what's "close enough"? Is a camera that's got 800,000 pixels close enough to be a "megapixel" camera? To some companies it probably is, but that's a big difference in resolution from a true megapixel camera. 1152x864 is closer than that (995,328) but still not a megapixel.
One big factor which is neglected in this article is compatibility.
I don't think this was neglected at all; it clearly influenced the choice in what codecs to test in the first place. The four codecs in this article are the four most popular - wmv comes standard on PC's, QuickTime is Apple's standard and works across all major platforms, Divx is still the non-Linux geek's codec of choice (and it works with WMP) and MPEG-4 is now supported in the latest QuickTime.
The codecs chosen for review, then, are the ones that work with the players used by the greatest number of people. A lot of earlier posters complained about this or that codec not being included here, but they obviously missed this pretty critical point of the article. It doesn't matter to me, as someone working for a commercial enterprise that has to encode videos for our customers, whether Xvid or whatever offers slightly fewer artifacts. Because the fact is my customers probably don't have that codec and aren't going to bother downloading it just for me. Even Divx is probably barely at the saturation point where it's worth covering in an article like this, but for certain purposes and for a certain audience (PC gamers, for example), it's worth considering.
As others have pointed out, there are articles out there dealing with the lesser-used codecs if you just want to know who the absolute quality winner is. But in the real world and unless you're encoding video only for yourself, whatever codec wins in absolute quality is basically irrelevant. What matters is which codec offers the best quality among those in widest general use, and I thought this was a decent article on that basis (though in all honesty simply seeing the examples is probably good enough - I don't need an explanation of how blocky MPEG-4 is in an image, I can see it myself).
And it seems to me that what this article is saying is that if you want to use a cross-platform codec that everybody probably has (even on Linux), use plain old QuickTime. If you want to encode for the geek crowd, use Divx. If you want the best quality overall and you don't care about excluding a small percentage of the audience, use WM9. Whatever you do, avoid MPEG-4. Simple, and helpful to any professional whose job includes either encoding or contracting out encoding of videos for customers.
Ten games? Come to the yearly California Extreme and see all those plus another 190 vids and pins.
I think you're slightly missing the point. This is the American Museum of the Moving Image. It's a very large museum dedicated not just to video games but also to film and television (and related industries). It is across the street from a working television studio (the studio where they filmed the most recent Cosby show, and whatever Whoopee Goldberg's last bit of TV nonsense was), and AFAIK the studio is part of the various walking tours that the museum gives on occasion.
In other words, this is a small exhibit at a respected mainstream museum. I don't think the suggestion is that this is the definitive collection of classic video games. I think the story here is that a museum of this stature has recognized video games as being on the same level creatively as anything else we've done in moving visual arts. Of course, it's not the first time this museum has done this - just a year or so ago there was an exhibit that included games like Rez and other more avant-garde stuff. But an exhibit dedicated to classic games is obviously going to go further in capturing mainstream attention, since we all remember Asteroids and the like.
Anyway, this is akin to when we first started seeing comic book artists get featured at MoMA. You could just go to a comic book store and see more comic book art than MoMA could ever fit inside an exhibit, but that's not the point. The point is it's freakin' MoMA, for christ's sake, and they're showing comic book art. It lends the form a certain legitimacy. This is recognition that video games are both culturally and artistically relevant - not that many of us really needed convincing of that, but it's still nice when an institution like this does it.
"Most certainly, it is absolutely ideal and it is most likely this technology will be utilised," - Chris Shimizu, NEC's corporate relations manager.
Yeah, and? There's nothing grammatically wrong with that statement; it's better English than I hear most Americans use. Yeah, he used the words "most" and "it is" twice in one sentence, but that's really the only nitpick - he used them in grammatically correct ways. Just because it sounds strange to you doesn't mean it's incorrect, and it doesn't make it "Engrish" either.
I clicked on the link to this thread because I've used Narita Airport several times and thought it was odd that they'd start using these translators when all Narita customer service employees already speak at least practical English (it's a requirement for the job). I'm a little surprised at the undercurrent of racism going through a lot of the replies here so far. I've looked and laughed at the Engrish.com site myself in the past (as has my wife, who is Japanese, and many of our friends) - I'm not saying we all need to be PC here. There's a time and proper context for that kind of thing.
But when you see a new translator hit the market, why would your first thought be to make fun of the people it's trying to help? It's just juvenile.
Anyway, I think Narita is sort of a strange place to test market these translators only because Narita is already one of the most bilingual places in all of Japan. Being there is similar to being at San Francisco International. All signs are in English, all ticket agents and other reps speak English (usually perfect English), even prices on goods are often listed in both yen and dollars. I just don't see how translators are particularly necessary at Narita; they could be put to better use at various locations inside Tokyo itself.
Both are correct. Every geek I've heard say it uses the word "skow". Business people probably say "S.C.O."
Neither is "correct" if you ask me. SCO originally stood for the Santa Cruz Operation, and all employees and everyone who used the software called them "S.C.O.". Their main product was SCO Unix, a pretty advanced version of Unix at the time (and popular) - and it was pronounced "S.C.O. Unix", as the letters were still an abbreviation. SCO was a good company; for a while they had good technology, and they did not engage in the kinds of tactics the current SCO uses. They were similar to other Unix sellers.
Through the years the company has changed hands a number of times, and what is now "The SCO Group" has no real relation to the original Santa Cruz Operation. It is not HQ'd in Santa Cruz (as the original was), for one thing, so even though the current SCO owns that name they have said publicly that the correct pronunciation is now "Skow". As if it's a word. I think this is ridiculous. It's like Kramer on Seinfeld trying to use "Quone" in a game of Scrabble.
I still pronounce it S.C.O. and so does everyone else I know. We're old-school, I guess. Some may see this as a slap in the face at the real SCO, the original SCO, and I can understand that. But "Skow" just doesn't make any sense at all, and it's obvious that the current SCO is trying to profit off the name anyway (otherwise why even write it "SCO" and not "Sco" or "Skow"?), so to me calling them "S.C.O." sort of rubs their face in the fact that they're not who they say they are.
On the other hand, I've got a close relative who was an employee of the original Santa Cruz Operation - haven't bothered asking him what he thinks of me calling the current SCO by the same name. Kind of afraid to.
Plus it falls into periods of text which CANNOT have been written by anyone with ANY sort of legal training:
"The article inaccurately claims that HardOCP 'Compiled and researched all of the publicay available information we could find.' Clearly this is not the case or you are not very good at finding publicly available information."
Dear god that's terrible... it's so much like "you, you, you're a poopy pants... and, and, my dad says that what you said is wrong... you poopy pants"
I can see why they have not taken this seriously.
I'm sure this will not be the popular view here but I think this is both an incorrect and a dangerous way of looking at things. I mean, apparently lawyers can't win here at Slashdot. You use lots of legalese and it sounds like you're hiding behind it. You use plain English and you sound unprofessional.
What are lawyers supposed to sound like? How are they supposed to request changes be made to an article and retractions written?
It seems to me that this letter provides clear and in a lot of cases reasonable requests for factual changes to be made to an article. For example, the point about Tim Roberts being a Corporate Director of Medhire, not an employee - this is important because HardOCP implied he was lying on his resume. If what these guys are saying is true, he did not lie on his resume, and HardOCP is guilty of slander if they do not change this article (they will knowingly be leaving intact an article that is defamatory). They were also irresponsible for not researching the point properly to begin with.
If Infinium does decide to file a lawsuit (which they'd be dumb to do from a PR standpoint, but PR is obviously not their strong suit), they now have this document to point to specifically detailing HardOCP's transgressions, in plain English (so there can be no claim by Kyle that he did not understand any of their points), and requesting changes be made to address them. This is a required step in the process, if Infinium really is going to go the legal route.
I'm not saying the whole lawsuit threat is a smart way of doing business. It's certainly not helping the company's image any, and it's not the way I'd be going about things if I was running the show there - it seems very counterproductive. But it sure seems to me that when it comes down to it, Infinium may actually be right on a lot of points, and this was not the best-researched piece of writing that ever appeared on HardOCP. I do not fault the lawyers for speaking to Kyle like regular human beings rather than legal drones. I fault them for really, really bad public relations, but legally it seems to me that HardOCP is on the short end here.
It's not a freedom of speech or press issue when you lie about people with intent to harm their business. There are several points in those letters (including the one I noted above) that are factual issues that Kyle has chosen to ignore in his response. Don't turn this into something bigger than what it is - this is about defamation and slander, not freedom of the press. Some people are losing sight of the real issue, missing details and blowing things out of proportion, belittling lawyers and Infinium themselves without paying any real attention to what's really going on. With freedom of the press comes responsibility, and I'm not convinced this was really a responsible article on the part of HardOCP.
No, I do not work for either company involved, and have no interest in these proceedings either way, whether emotional or tangible.
laptops are meant to be portable. your average 8-9 pound 1 hour battery life monster isn't portable. it's a portable desktop. apple doesn't make portable desktops, it makes laptops.
I'll grant you that Apple's laptops are thin and light vs. their screen sizes, but the 17" PB is a definite desktop replacement, not a laptop.
And besides, Apple is not the only company out there making small laptops. There are so many laptops to choose from that it's honestly unfair to Apple to compare their lineup to the entirety of what's available. They make exactly two styles of laptops, both of which are cosmetically quite similar when you get down to it (one line has a different material for the case and is slightly smaller), so if you're going to play Apple vs. everybody else almost anybody could come up with examples of other brands doing either exactly what Apple's doing hardware-wise at least as well as they are, or alternatives that may take a different approach and one that some people might prefer.
This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century (well, maybe after bottled water). My old 400MHz IBM still does everything I ask of it, and if I had the choice I'd rather double the battery life than the processor speed.
I said the same thing about my old 300mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad until about a month ago, when I finally realized I was deluding myself, as you probably are. No offense, but to an extent I think this is a case of not really knowing what you're missing, and it's been true of public perception of every incremental speed increase in PC land in general, not just in laptops.
No doubt you think of your laptop as being the perfect machine for a certain task or tasks. And at 400mhz, it does those tasks well. Maybe you use it for programming, or word processing, email and web browsing. Maybe you even store your pictures and play your mp3's on it (though I doubt a 400mhz laptop has a very big hard drive). I did these things on my 300mhz machine too. Eventually it got to the point where even web browsing was ridiculously slow compared to my desktop, so I upgraded.
And with a faster laptop, especially a dramatically faster laptop, you are able to do many more things that you wouldn't have considered a laptop suitable for before. My new laptop has become my primary PC - I do everything on it, from photo and video editing to gaming to watching DVD's, dual-booting Linux and Windows (couldn't before; hard drive was too small) plus all the things I used to use my laptop for. Simply being a laptop is not the limiting factor that you probably think it is with an older machine.
Oh, and you will likely get better battery life with a new machine. Mine gets around 4 hours and it's not even a Pentium-M.
While I'm at it here, I want to say something about the following in the original article posting: It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower.
I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this a swipe at PC (in this case meaning non-Mac) users, or is it some kinship with fellow Mac users (including Macs in the term "PC" as it technically should be)? If it's a swipe at PC users, it's at worst inaccurate and at best debateable, as test after test has shown common x86-based CPU's to be at least as capable as the fastest G5 chips on a variety of real-world tasks and in synthetic benchmarks. Even a Mac-biased site such as this one shows older, slower x86 compatible chips to be neck and neck with the fastest G5 Apple still sells (and faster if you move to the games page) - and there are faster x86 chips out now (Here is a slightly more up to date comparison that focuses on 64 bit chips.) In laptops, a 1.7ghz Pentium-M runs neck and neck on most tests with a P4-3.2 desktop chip which would probably put it about on par with a single-CPU 2.0ghz G5 (I don't believe anyone has made this comparison yet, since you can't get a G5 in a laptop). And most Pentium-M laptops trump any Apple laptop in battery life. The Pentium-M is truly a revolutionary mobile chip - far more important by almost any measure than the 1.4ghz G4 being talked about here (sure wish I had one - I went on the cheap with a P4-M).
I know I burn through karma like a wildfire every time I post something like this but it needs to be said, as there are a lot of assumptions made by people out there, along with plain old myths, that just are not supported by any real-world evidence. The equivalent of PC urban legends (and yes, I do post about real UL's too!).
I can totally see why they shouldnt force people to have something like 911 service. Heaven forbid you be able to get emergency service! Moron.
Really... why is this under "your rights online"? Isn't it my right, by FCC rules, that when I pick up the phone I can get emergency service? It shouldn't matter if that's online or not.
We all pay for emergency services whether we like it or not at the time. We do it mostly with our taxes (which pay for the police and fire coverage to begin with), and you don't get to opt out of those just because you don't want to pay them. Part of it's the concept of the "greater good", but it's also for your own good as well - you may get all hot and bothered about being forced to pay for 911 service now, but that day you wake up to find your house burning down or a burglar downstairs you'll be happy it's there.
Obviously what the government does not want to happen is for some family of five somewhere to die by smoke inhalation because they didn't know the phone number of their fire department. This happened pretty often before 911 was a standard, and it would happen pretty often again if VoIP took off without 911 service mandated. There would eventually be a public outcry and you'd all be forced to pay for 911 service eventually anyway - the difference being that doing it upfront means nobody has to die before it's forced upon you. I think that's fair, quite honestly.
Now, It's none of their business what kind of arrangement I will make with someone else to transfer the service whether it's a roommate, a friend that needs a cell phone or whatever.
What a load of crap! Of course it's their business! Their business is collecting fees for services rendered, and when they agree to provide you with service they have done so under specific terms. Namely, they have checked your credit to determine risk, and if they have determined the risk is too great to assume they have taken a deposit from you or simply withheld service (for example, my wife could not get international calling on her cel phone at all for a while, even with a deposit, because she had no credit).
They cannot do this if you decide to transfer your contract to someone else. How do you know the buyer of this phone number hasn't just declared bankruptcy and otherwise cannot even get a phone line in his house? Obviously, this is certainly the phone company's business! It is the very definition of their business.
What their specific rights are according to law and their contracts is up for interpretation by lawyers and judges, but what is and isn't their business is not. It is most definitely their business who they decide to provide service to and under what terms, and you're at the very least skirting their policies and doing a runaround of the credit check by transferring your service. Even if the phone company says "oh, no problem, we'll just run the credit check on the transferee", if that check then comes back with unacceptable results, who is going to take responsibility? The seller? I doubt it. The buyer? Ha! It's his credit that's shot in the first place. Which leaves the phone company to foot the bill, and probably to mediate a dispute that's now grown between the buyer and seller. Obviously it is in their best interests (and probably yours, if you think about it) not to let this happen.
somehow, the standard controllers that were given with the XBox on their launch seems very small compared to the original joysticks you got with the NeoGeo.
Well, that's probably because they were, but you can't directly compare them. The Neo Geo AES shipped with arcade joysticks, a fundamentally different type of controller than MS's (and the rest of the current industry's) gamepads. SNK also made gamepads for the Neo Geo systems and they were about the size of a Sega Genesis or Super NES pad (which means smaller than the Xbox gamepad).
I always loved the aesthetic design of the Neo Geo AES and its controllers, though. They're these sort of monolithic black slabs, very large but with subtle curves that make them look a lot smaller than they are. The system itself is so sleek that I thought it was about the smallest system I owned, until I stuck it on a shelf with the rest of my collection and discovered it's just the opposite - as large as an Atari 5200, much larger than a PS2, as deep and wide as an Xbox (though not as tall - unless it has a cartridge in it!). It's truly about the pinnacle of industrial design in the game console industry.
The NeoGeo actually felt like bringing the arcade coin-ops in your home , allthough it has never reached any recognition over here (the Netherlands).
Well it didn't get any recognition here (in the US) either. It's one of those things that nobody bought at the time but now that the company's got such respect, everybody claims to be major fans. It's really a bandwagon thing. But there are still relatively few of these systems out there and they're still quite expensive, so I have to always scratch my head at the sheer number of people claiming to have these vivid Neo Geo memories these days. I suppose the arcade machines were more ubiquitous but the home systems were never particularly popular. (I acquired mine through trade; I could have never justified the cost otherwise.)
Oh, and the Neo Geo AES didn't just feel like bringing arcade coin-ops home, that is in fact what you were doing. The home carts were exactly the same as the arcade carts except for the pinouts (in fact adapters exist to let you play the arcade carts on a home machine - they just adapt the pinouts). There's no technical reason why the pinouts were different, either, it was strictly so SNK could charge more for the home carts, as the arcade carts were quite cheap - the idea being to make the money in arcades on the machines themselves, whereas at home it was just the opposite.
Or you could buy a first-gen 17" Powerbook for about $2500, spend $100 and upgrade it to a gig of ram, and ignore the screen resolution since there isn't a mobile graphics card on the planet that can drive a display for a first-person shooter at either system's native resolution anyway.
(spit-take)
What what what??! You really have no idea what level of technology the rest of the world is actually using.
A mobile Radeon 9700 is more than powerful enough to play any fps at the native resolution of this laptop. I have a brand new laptop with a 2.4ghz non-Extreme P4 and the same res. screen as the XPS and I can play UT2K3 and Max Payne 2 at native resolution at around 60fps with a Radeon 9000. So your statement is clearly ignorant, and false.
There's nothing wrong with buying a 17" Powerbook if that's what you want, but you're fundamentally misunderstanding the market for the Dell XPS if that's what you'd think that audience would want. Mac people always say "or just buy a Mac" for pretty much every situation, as if their machines work best for everything. The simple fact is the XPS would be a far better gaming machine than a 17" Powerbook - it has a faster CPU and it has a faster graphics card (and it's upgradeable). The PC market is a specialized market, with a lot of different machines for different purposes. The whole point of a gaming laptop is to have a laptop that's good for playing games, not to have a laptop that's a catch-all device with gaming as merely one of the possible functions. This is not a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none... this is a master of one trade, and that's it.
That said, I wouldn't buy an XPS myself. It's fugly, for one thing. And heavy, and unnecessarily expensive. When I can play games like those I listed above at good frame rates at native res. on my $1,200 widescreen laptop that doesn't weight 9 pounds and also looks better than the XPS, what the heck am I spending $5,000 on? Which is not to say I think these things are silly for everyone, I am just not their target market. I do have a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none machine. If I really had some extra cash to waste, I'd at least go for something like this or even this. At least they're somewhat portable and don't look like they were designed in 1989.
Slashdot Mirror
Every so often, one will hear the phrase "I am a pen." especially when dealing with younger Japanese. From what I understand, it's the first thing the English teachers teach the students. Even though the sentence itself is nonsencial and silly, it has a very clear structure and helps students to understand the very basic grammar.
:P
I hope this explains the obscure joke in the heaven strip.
Well no, because that sentence would actually be "this is a pen", not "I am a pen". The Japanese may be silly in many ways, but they're not complete idiots. Apparently this sentence is silly enough that it's still made fun of by students there (I'd bet the comic strip is an intentional stab at humor, not a mistake... though obviously Japanese humor doesn't translate directly to English).
The first thing I learned in Japanese was "this is a book" (kore wa hon desu) and for a long time I'd just walk around saying that for no reason, like kids do. At some point I'm sure I said "I am a book" (watashi wa hon desu) just as a joke, knowing what it meant and just thinking it sounded funny - I think this is the same sort of thing.
The iTunes store afforded consumers much more freedom with their purchases than any of the other online stores, and this software may well have a hand in taking that away.
So f'ing what? Seriously. You gloom and doom types are overlooking the patently obvious here: without iTunes, what's left? KaZaA, Gnutella, etc. Shut down iTunes and you drive all those consumers right back to the free (and illegal) services, including the ones currently in the works that encrypt data across multiple nodes and make it nearly impossible to track downloaders. It's not like there's no other way to download music (and if you want it legally, it's not like there's no other way to buy it besides downloading). And let's not forget that it's legal to share music in Canada!
Shuttering iTunes is not in the record industry's best interests. Oh, they still may not realize it, but they will eventually or they will die. What is in their best interests is to simply let this go. Don't publicize it. Let the Slashdot crowd break the DRM on the tunes they've purchased; they're not the ones downloading music on KaZaA anyway. Sue more people who are sharing illegally and drive them to iTunes.
Alternative strategy is to try to shut this software down with a massive legal and PR blitz. Won't work, but it'll put the fear into a few people, at least. But shutting down iTunes does not seem to be an option in any case. It would be suicidal. It's not as if alternatives don't exist, that cost less (ie. free) and don't have DRM. Why push customers back to that at the very moment you seem to be educating them on the benefits of actually paying for music?
Except that it's NOT your data. You have a license to use it.
Bullshit. If it's on my hard drive, which is a physical platter that I purchased at retail, then it's a physical thing that exists in the real world and it's mine. You're telling me my hard drive is mine but its contents aren't? I don't buy that for a second, whatever some RIAA lackey wants to say to convince me. If it somehow found a way (legally) into my house and onto my hard drive, it belongs to nobody else but me, and as long as I keep it for myself, I'm allowed to do whatever I damn well please with it.
In fact, DRM exists because copyright holders know this. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for DRM! The whole point of DRM is to keep you from doing things you are legally entitled to do as specifically written in copyright law. The RIAA does not like the way copyright law is written so they are doing their best to usurp it with DRM (which they seem to think gains them additional protections under the DMCA that they don't otherwise have under regular old copyright law). I see no problem in breaking DRM in order to exercise my legal rights.
Now, as for this sob story about WMA becoming a "standard" because of this... I mean really, cry me a river. Neither AAC nor WMA will ever be considered a "standard". The only thing close to a "standard" is MP3 (only because so many people have already ripped their music to it, so every piece of hardware has to support it) and it obviously isn't used for many applications where real compression efficiency or the best absolute sound quality are required. MP3 will always be around - I'm sure not about to re-rip all 2,000 or so CD's I own, and doubt many others will either - so whatever gets declared a "standard" for any specific use doesn't really matter anyway.
WMA's DRM will be broken in time just as FairPlay apparently has been, in any case. It's the nature of digital data. Anything that's expressed in bits can and will be cracked, so WMA has no advantage here. Eventually these companies will hopefully accept that all DRM is doomed to fail, and just go back to allowing their customers to exercise their rights under the law, as they used to do many years ago.
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real.
Ok... so now instead of having a detached, intellectual knowledge that the magazine knows where you live, it'll be more "real", more like "oh my God! This magazine I subscribe to knows where I live!!"
I still don't see how this is newsworthy. I think there's a reasonable expectation among people that when they give their address out to somebody, that person or organization knows their address from that point on. I don't think this is a revalation to anybody.
It's one thing if some shadowy organization I had no prior contact with suddenly sent me a listing of my favorite color, favorite flavors of ice cream, which bone I broke when I was 10, how many pounds I lost in senior year of high school, and the total number of Big Macs I've eaten over my lifespan. That would shake me up a little bit. On the other hand, a magazine I subscribe to visually proving that they know where I live does not quite carry the same effect.
...are just lower prices for games, especially new releases.
US $50 is simply too much for a new PS2 game.
Argh, how does a comment like this get modded "insightful"?
First of all, N64 games listed at $69.99-$79.99 when the system was first released. Prior to that, Sega Genesis games sold for up to $80 (Phantasy Star IV being an example). The original Warcraft on PC had an MSRP over $50 (check this month's 10th Anniversary PC Gamer for confirmation). Going back further, most Atari 2600 titles retailed for $29.99 - in 1977. And that price went up over time with inflation, not down.
Secondly, how many games need to be below $50 before people stop complaining about game prices? And that's not even counting brand new releases like Destruction Derby Arenas, which is selling for $20 on day one of release. There are quite a few games that fit that description these days.
If you're complaining about game prices, you either a) know nothing about video game history and/or economics, or b) are shopping at all the wrong places.
Anyway, notice where the story is: England. Guns are illegal there, so you're not allowed to defend yourself against muggers.
Yeah, because we all know that nobody ever gets mugged here in the US where everybody carries guns.
Right.
Where exactly do you live in the US again? Because see, here in NYC, we gots plenty of guns, and we also gots plenty of muggings. The iPod thing hasn't really caught on here, but mainly because there are more expensive things to steal (easy way to tell someone who's new to the city: they actually take their laptops out in public), not because muggers are afraid of their victims. As an attempted mugging victim myself years ago, and as someone who knows people who have also been mugged, raped, shot at, stabbed, and assaulted in other ways, I can assure you criminals are quite confident their own skills with their weapon of choice trump those of their victims (wrong as they often are; criminals are not usually the brightest people in the world).
Back on topic - I've always wondered why nobody bothers changing out those white headphones when they buy an iPod, as I've always thought it'd eventually be a magnet for theft once every moron carrying a laptop finally figures out to keep it locked up in a bag that's shaped like something other than a laptop. Plus, they're earbuds - who really likes wearing earbuds? I'd much rather wear my Koss Portapros, which no doubt sound better anyway. If somebody gets robbed because of their white headphones, I say it's their own damn fault. If you're going to be such a pretentious fop, so conspicuous because of the supposed "status" the headphones bring you, you deserve whatever happens as a result.
One question - I haven't played it, so I don't know - but - what do you like about Ninja Gaiden so much?
See, to me it looks like Rygar for PS2 (which is the same publisher.. and the same engine?), or Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for PS2.
Both published by Tecmo but that doesn't mean anything; they were developed by different development teams. Dev teams are almost little companies within companies; they usually have their own offices (often their own buildings), and they have their own stable of games. Ninja Gaiden was developed by Team Ninja, the team best-known recently for the Dead or Alive series (both fighting and now volleyball), but also for (wait for it) Ninja Gaiden, from which the team derived its name. This same team responsible for the new Xbox game also developed the classic NES version, and possibly the arcade, Lynx, and Game Gear versions, though they were all quite different.
Rygar was developed by a different team within Tecmo - I couldn't tell you who, but I know for a fact it was not Team Ninja, as they only work on Xbox right now and only with their little cast of Team Ninja characters (the characters in DOA and Ninja Gaiden do cross over to some extent - the little ninja core of DOA, comprised of Ryu, Kasumi and Ayane, are related and appear in both series). Team Ninja are pretty adamant about developing their own game engines as well, so Ninja Gaiden's was not borrowed from Rygar (two different platforms anyway).
Now, I haven't played the new Ninja Gaiden and I'm not disagreeing with you that in general it and Rygar may be similar games. But as in any action game, it comes down to the execution, so it may very well be that Ninja Gaiden is that much more of a precisely timed game, with better level and enemy design, better graphics, etc. But really, it is true that it's just an updated remake of a game that came out 15 years ago (as is Rygar; Castlevania is technically a sequel, but was derived from a similar action platformer).
Basically these are all games within the same genre, so it's natural they would be similar. I don't think it's the originality that draws people to games like this; nobody would argue that remakes of classic games about ninjas are at all original. But that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
So if you like bubblegum pop, hiphop, and country, Wal-Marts the place to shop. Otherwise, no dice.
"We asked for Mojo Nixon, she said 'he don't work here'! We said if you don't got Mojo Nixon, then your store could use some fixin'." - the Dead Milkmen
"This is a traffic ticket for Microsoft," said Thomas Vinje of Clifford Chance, who represents Microsoft critics.
Well, yes, and it's probably intended to be. Traffic tickets are not intended to end life as you know it, nor would a regulatory fine be intended to put a company out of business. Monopoly or not, it would not be in the EU's best interests for Microsoft to suddenly go belly up, or to abandon the European market because it's become unprofitable, thereby leaving all those currently using MS software in the lurch, support-wise, and out of all their license money that's guaranteed them future upgrades.
The "slap on the wrist" analogy is often used to show that a penalty is too light, but in fact the whole point of a slap on the wrist is to get your attention and change your way of thinking and acting. Traffic tickets do not usually bankrupt anybody but hopefully they will get you to follow the law. They are an annoyance and one that most people would rather not deal with. And the only real way you eliminate the risk of receiving one is by obeying the law.
So if this is seen as a traffic ticket, good. The penalty will have done its job.
In most cases this will be a parking lot after we are through.
In other words, you are saying US will commit mass murder in revenge?
You say this as if simply repeating the notion will convince us all of how implausible or horrible it is. I am sure the original poster realized what he/she was saying, and I'm sure we all know what a horrible thought it is. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen, or that it wouldn't be supported by a lot of people in this country.
Nukes are not something just anybody can put together. A comparatively small number of countries can do it (relative to the total number of countries in the world), let alone individuals or small groups of people, however well financed they are. The best any of these groups can probably do is pay another country enough money to lend them materials and expertise. This is what we're really afraid of - that or that a nuke gets stolen from an unwitting country.
If it turns out a state had provided material or know-how to terrorists for building a nuclear bomb that was subsequently used in the US, and that's proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I and every other sane person in this country would rightly expect a massive military response. Now, I'm not saying a nuclear response, but in the days of the Cold War that was the generally accepted outcome - one country nukes another and in turn gets nuked back. Everybody knew it would happen; it wasn't questioned. That mutually assured destruction kept anybody from pulling the trigger - or so the thought went. Would we have used the a-bomb in Japan if we thought we'd get a-bombed back? I doubt it.
The same would hold now. The fact that another country thinks we could identify them and would respond in kind would hopefully be some form of deterrent. And if we didn't respond in kind, they should consider themselves lucky they're dealing with a country more merciful than most. In any case, if a city were wiped out along with the millions of people inhabiting it, and another country were identified as the real culprit behind it, well, I don't think there would be much crying over any military response we would choose to wield.
First of all, what "studios in New York"?
Argh, seems I hadn't read all the way to the end of the article.
Still, my basic point still stands. There's no law that says you have to use one brand of products all the time, or that you have to use the fastest thing available for every mundane task (not that those T40's are slow).
I'm surprised Sports Illustrated uses relatively cheap hardware and software to edit their photos. ACDSee (Fire!) is $50, and they use some pretty standard (and not all that impressive) IBM laptops for most of the field action. Even at the studios in New York they're using dual 450 G4's. No dual G5's yet. Anyone know how much that camera costs?
What an odd post.
First of all, what "studios in New York"? I work in New York for a creative company, and we mostly use PC's. If someone prefers to work on Mac we issue them a Mac. Same as SI. Most people, in all honesty, prefer to work on PC's at my company, so that's what we give them. And those people work no more slowly than those using Macs (dual 450 CPU's is hardly impressive these days either, so it's a little weird that you'd put that up against the IBM T40's and dual Xeons SI is using. The last Mac we issued was a dual 1.8 G5).
Secondly, what the hell does cost have to do with anything in qualitative terms? It's any company's responsibility to be efficient in budgeting, and part of that means choosing the cheapest tools you can that will reliably get the job done (key word being "reliably" - it's no use spending the least money you can if what you buy is going to be broken half the time). IBM Thinkpads seem a perfectly sensible idea to me for what SI is doing with them - they're reliable, they're not expensive, they're small and easily transportable, and with Pentium-M chips and 768MB of RAM they're more than adequate for what SI is using them for, which is downloading and tranferring image files. This is efficient use of tools.
Similarly, did you even read why they're using ACDSee? We use it at my company as well. It's simply a very fast image viewer; there's nothing I know of that's faster either, or more suitable to the task of sifting through large quantities of images in as quick a time as possible. We use it for the exact same purpose.
I'm honestly impressed at how efficient and organized it seems SI is running their image processing program. They seem to know what they're doing and they've selected the right tools for the job. Who cares if they use "cheap" cameras and PC's? You got a problem with the technical image quality on any of their recent covers?
Megapixels is the most idiotic resolution measurement system ever. Quick, what resolution does 3 megapixel equal? 3.2? 4? 5? IF THE CAMERA HAS A RESOLUTION OF 1152x864, just fucking say so. I should make a camera with a resolution of 1x5000000 and call it a 5 megapixel camera just out of spite.
And you call yourself a geek?
You can safely assume that these are square pixels in these sensors (they are). You can also safely assume that the aspect ratio is going to at least approximate that of 35mm film, as that's been the standard for many, many years. In fact, 1152x864 is a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is the same as 35mm film. Having to spell these things out is basically the same as a TV producer selling a TV by its actual screen dimensions rather than by a diagional measurement. It's more info than you need to know for comparison purposes, and more info than you need to know to figure out the exact dimensions on your own (assuming you know anything at all about TV's, and if you don't, plenty of resources exist to help you learn).
Now, the problem I have with these "megapixel" measurements is that 1152x864 does not even equal 1 megapixel! It is less than 1,000,000 pixels. It's not even a question of real megabytes vs. marketing megabytes in hard drives (the 1024 vs. 1000 thing); 1152x864 is just not a megapixel. I don't think it's ethical for a company to make a camera that's close to a megapixel (but not quite) and still call it that, because what's the threshold for what's "close enough"? Is a camera that's got 800,000 pixels close enough to be a "megapixel" camera? To some companies it probably is, but that's a big difference in resolution from a true megapixel camera. 1152x864 is closer than that (995,328) but still not a megapixel.
One big factor which is neglected in this article is compatibility.
I don't think this was neglected at all; it clearly influenced the choice in what codecs to test in the first place. The four codecs in this article are the four most popular - wmv comes standard on PC's, QuickTime is Apple's standard and works across all major platforms, Divx is still the non-Linux geek's codec of choice (and it works with WMP) and MPEG-4 is now supported in the latest QuickTime.
The codecs chosen for review, then, are the ones that work with the players used by the greatest number of people. A lot of earlier posters complained about this or that codec not being included here, but they obviously missed this pretty critical point of the article. It doesn't matter to me, as someone working for a commercial enterprise that has to encode videos for our customers, whether Xvid or whatever offers slightly fewer artifacts. Because the fact is my customers probably don't have that codec and aren't going to bother downloading it just for me. Even Divx is probably barely at the saturation point where it's worth covering in an article like this, but for certain purposes and for a certain audience (PC gamers, for example), it's worth considering.
As others have pointed out, there are articles out there dealing with the lesser-used codecs if you just want to know who the absolute quality winner is. But in the real world and unless you're encoding video only for yourself, whatever codec wins in absolute quality is basically irrelevant. What matters is which codec offers the best quality among those in widest general use, and I thought this was a decent article on that basis (though in all honesty simply seeing the examples is probably good enough - I don't need an explanation of how blocky MPEG-4 is in an image, I can see it myself).
And it seems to me that what this article is saying is that if you want to use a cross-platform codec that everybody probably has (even on Linux), use plain old QuickTime. If you want to encode for the geek crowd, use Divx. If you want the best quality overall and you don't care about excluding a small percentage of the audience, use WM9. Whatever you do, avoid MPEG-4. Simple, and helpful to any professional whose job includes either encoding or contracting out encoding of videos for customers.
Ten games? Come to the yearly California Extreme and see all those plus another 190 vids and pins.
I think you're slightly missing the point. This is the American Museum of the Moving Image. It's a very large museum dedicated not just to video games but also to film and television (and related industries). It is across the street from a working television studio (the studio where they filmed the most recent Cosby show, and whatever Whoopee Goldberg's last bit of TV nonsense was), and AFAIK the studio is part of the various walking tours that the museum gives on occasion.
In other words, this is a small exhibit at a respected mainstream museum. I don't think the suggestion is that this is the definitive collection of classic video games. I think the story here is that a museum of this stature has recognized video games as being on the same level creatively as anything else we've done in moving visual arts. Of course, it's not the first time this museum has done this - just a year or so ago there was an exhibit that included games like Rez and other more avant-garde stuff. But an exhibit dedicated to classic games is obviously going to go further in capturing mainstream attention, since we all remember Asteroids and the like.
Anyway, this is akin to when we first started seeing comic book artists get featured at MoMA. You could just go to a comic book store and see more comic book art than MoMA could ever fit inside an exhibit, but that's not the point. The point is it's freakin' MoMA, for christ's sake, and they're showing comic book art. It lends the form a certain legitimacy. This is recognition that video games are both culturally and artistically relevant - not that many of us really needed convincing of that, but it's still nice when an institution like this does it.
This is a quote from the article (Engrish!):
"Most certainly, it is absolutely ideal and it is most likely this technology will be utilised," - Chris Shimizu, NEC's corporate relations manager.
Yeah, and? There's nothing grammatically wrong with that statement; it's better English than I hear most Americans use. Yeah, he used the words "most" and "it is" twice in one sentence, but that's really the only nitpick - he used them in grammatically correct ways. Just because it sounds strange to you doesn't mean it's incorrect, and it doesn't make it "Engrish" either.
I clicked on the link to this thread because I've used Narita Airport several times and thought it was odd that they'd start using these translators when all Narita customer service employees already speak at least practical English (it's a requirement for the job). I'm a little surprised at the undercurrent of racism going through a lot of the replies here so far. I've looked and laughed at the Engrish.com site myself in the past (as has my wife, who is Japanese, and many of our friends) - I'm not saying we all need to be PC here. There's a time and proper context for that kind of thing.
But when you see a new translator hit the market, why would your first thought be to make fun of the people it's trying to help? It's just juvenile.
Anyway, I think Narita is sort of a strange place to test market these translators only because Narita is already one of the most bilingual places in all of Japan. Being there is similar to being at San Francisco International. All signs are in English, all ticket agents and other reps speak English (usually perfect English), even prices on goods are often listed in both yen and dollars. I just don't see how translators are particularly necessary at Narita; they could be put to better use at various locations inside Tokyo itself.
Both are correct. Every geek I've heard say it uses the word "skow". Business people probably say "S.C.O."
Neither is "correct" if you ask me. SCO originally stood for the Santa Cruz Operation, and all employees and everyone who used the software called them "S.C.O.". Their main product was SCO Unix, a pretty advanced version of Unix at the time (and popular) - and it was pronounced "S.C.O. Unix", as the letters were still an abbreviation. SCO was a good company; for a while they had good technology, and they did not engage in the kinds of tactics the current SCO uses. They were similar to other Unix sellers.
Through the years the company has changed hands a number of times, and what is now "The SCO Group" has no real relation to the original Santa Cruz Operation. It is not HQ'd in Santa Cruz (as the original was), for one thing, so even though the current SCO owns that name they have said publicly that the correct pronunciation is now "Skow". As if it's a word. I think this is ridiculous. It's like Kramer on Seinfeld trying to use "Quone" in a game of Scrabble.
I still pronounce it S.C.O. and so does everyone else I know. We're old-school, I guess. Some may see this as a slap in the face at the real SCO, the original SCO, and I can understand that. But "Skow" just doesn't make any sense at all, and it's obvious that the current SCO is trying to profit off the name anyway (otherwise why even write it "SCO" and not "Sco" or "Skow"?), so to me calling them "S.C.O." sort of rubs their face in the fact that they're not who they say they are.
On the other hand, I've got a close relative who was an employee of the original Santa Cruz Operation - haven't bothered asking him what he thinks of me calling the current SCO by the same name. Kind of afraid to.
Plus it falls into periods of text which CANNOT have been written by anyone with ANY sort of legal training:
"The article inaccurately claims that HardOCP 'Compiled and researched all of the publicay available information we could find.' Clearly this is not the case or you are not very good at finding publicly available information."
Dear god that's terrible... it's so much like "you, you, you're a poopy pants... and, and, my dad says that what you said is wrong... you poopy pants"
I can see why they have not taken this seriously.
I'm sure this will not be the popular view here but I think this is both an incorrect and a dangerous way of looking at things. I mean, apparently lawyers can't win here at Slashdot. You use lots of legalese and it sounds like you're hiding behind it. You use plain English and you sound unprofessional.
What are lawyers supposed to sound like? How are they supposed to request changes be made to an article and retractions written?
It seems to me that this letter provides clear and in a lot of cases reasonable requests for factual changes to be made to an article. For example, the point about Tim Roberts being a Corporate Director of Medhire, not an employee - this is important because HardOCP implied he was lying on his resume. If what these guys are saying is true, he did not lie on his resume, and HardOCP is guilty of slander if they do not change this article (they will knowingly be leaving intact an article that is defamatory). They were also irresponsible for not researching the point properly to begin with.
If Infinium does decide to file a lawsuit (which they'd be dumb to do from a PR standpoint, but PR is obviously not their strong suit), they now have this document to point to specifically detailing HardOCP's transgressions, in plain English (so there can be no claim by Kyle that he did not understand any of their points), and requesting changes be made to address them. This is a required step in the process, if Infinium really is going to go the legal route.
I'm not saying the whole lawsuit threat is a smart way of doing business. It's certainly not helping the company's image any, and it's not the way I'd be going about things if I was running the show there - it seems very counterproductive. But it sure seems to me that when it comes down to it, Infinium may actually be right on a lot of points, and this was not the best-researched piece of writing that ever appeared on HardOCP. I do not fault the lawyers for speaking to Kyle like regular human beings rather than legal drones. I fault them for really, really bad public relations, but legally it seems to me that HardOCP is on the short end here.
It's not a freedom of speech or press issue when you lie about people with intent to harm their business. There are several points in those letters (including the one I noted above) that are factual issues that Kyle has chosen to ignore in his response. Don't turn this into something bigger than what it is - this is about defamation and slander, not freedom of the press. Some people are losing sight of the real issue, missing details and blowing things out of proportion, belittling lawyers and Infinium themselves without paying any real attention to what's really going on. With freedom of the press comes responsibility, and I'm not convinced this was really a responsible article on the part of HardOCP.
No, I do not work for either company involved, and have no interest in these proceedings either way, whether emotional or tangible.
laptops are meant to be portable. your average 8-9 pound 1 hour battery life monster isn't portable. it's a portable desktop. apple doesn't make portable desktops, it makes laptops.
Ummmm.
I'll grant you that Apple's laptops are thin and light vs. their screen sizes, but the 17" PB is a definite desktop replacement, not a laptop.
And besides, Apple is not the only company out there making small laptops. There are so many laptops to choose from that it's honestly unfair to Apple to compare their lineup to the entirety of what's available. They make exactly two styles of laptops, both of which are cosmetically quite similar when you get down to it (one line has a different material for the case and is slightly smaller), so if you're going to play Apple vs. everybody else almost anybody could come up with examples of other brands doing either exactly what Apple's doing hardware-wise at least as well as they are, or alternatives that may take a different approach and one that some people might prefer.
Well, you can buy 64-bit laptops today. They're just not x86 or Mac/PPC based.
No?
It's ugly and I wouldn't buy one, but yes, there are 64 bit x86 laptops out there, on the market, right now. And they're not expensive at all.
This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century (well, maybe after bottled water). My old 400MHz IBM still does everything I ask of it, and if I had the choice I'd rather double the battery life than the processor speed.
I said the same thing about my old 300mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad until about a month ago, when I finally realized I was deluding myself, as you probably are. No offense, but to an extent I think this is a case of not really knowing what you're missing, and it's been true of public perception of every incremental speed increase in PC land in general, not just in laptops.
No doubt you think of your laptop as being the perfect machine for a certain task or tasks. And at 400mhz, it does those tasks well. Maybe you use it for programming, or word processing, email and web browsing. Maybe you even store your pictures and play your mp3's on it (though I doubt a 400mhz laptop has a very big hard drive). I did these things on my 300mhz machine too. Eventually it got to the point where even web browsing was ridiculously slow compared to my desktop, so I upgraded.
And with a faster laptop, especially a dramatically faster laptop, you are able to do many more things that you wouldn't have considered a laptop suitable for before. My new laptop has become my primary PC - I do everything on it, from photo and video editing to gaming to watching DVD's, dual-booting Linux and Windows (couldn't before; hard drive was too small) plus all the things I used to use my laptop for. Simply being a laptop is not the limiting factor that you probably think it is with an older machine.
Oh, and you will likely get better battery life with a new machine. Mine gets around 4 hours and it's not even a Pentium-M.
While I'm at it here, I want to say something about the following in the original article posting: It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower.
I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this a swipe at PC (in this case meaning non-Mac) users, or is it some kinship with fellow Mac users (including Macs in the term "PC" as it technically should be)? If it's a swipe at PC users, it's at worst inaccurate and at best debateable, as test after test has shown common x86-based CPU's to be at least as capable as the fastest G5 chips on a variety of real-world tasks and in synthetic benchmarks. Even a Mac-biased site such as this one shows older, slower x86 compatible chips to be neck and neck with the fastest G5 Apple still sells (and faster if you move to the games page) - and there are faster x86 chips out now (Here is a slightly more up to date comparison that focuses on 64 bit chips.) In laptops, a 1.7ghz Pentium-M runs neck and neck on most tests with a P4-3.2 desktop chip which would probably put it about on par with a single-CPU 2.0ghz G5 (I don't believe anyone has made this comparison yet, since you can't get a G5 in a laptop). And most Pentium-M laptops trump any Apple laptop in battery life. The Pentium-M is truly a revolutionary mobile chip - far more important by almost any measure than the 1.4ghz G4 being talked about here (sure wish I had one - I went on the cheap with a P4-M).
I know I burn through karma like a wildfire every time I post something like this but it needs to be said, as there are a lot of assumptions made by people out there, along with plain old myths, that just are not supported by any real-world evidence. The equivalent of PC urban legends (and yes, I do post about real UL's too!).
I can totally see why they shouldnt force people to have something like 911 service. Heaven forbid you be able to get emergency service! Moron.
Really... why is this under "your rights online"? Isn't it my right, by FCC rules, that when I pick up the phone I can get emergency service? It shouldn't matter if that's online or not.
We all pay for emergency services whether we like it or not at the time. We do it mostly with our taxes (which pay for the police and fire coverage to begin with), and you don't get to opt out of those just because you don't want to pay them. Part of it's the concept of the "greater good", but it's also for your own good as well - you may get all hot and bothered about being forced to pay for 911 service now, but that day you wake up to find your house burning down or a burglar downstairs you'll be happy it's there.
Obviously what the government does not want to happen is for some family of five somewhere to die by smoke inhalation because they didn't know the phone number of their fire department. This happened pretty often before 911 was a standard, and it would happen pretty often again if VoIP took off without 911 service mandated. There would eventually be a public outcry and you'd all be forced to pay for 911 service eventually anyway - the difference being that doing it upfront means nobody has to die before it's forced upon you. I think that's fair, quite honestly.
Now, It's none of their business what kind of arrangement I will make with someone else to transfer the service whether it's a roommate, a friend that needs a cell phone or whatever.
What a load of crap! Of course it's their business! Their business is collecting fees for services rendered, and when they agree to provide you with service they have done so under specific terms. Namely, they have checked your credit to determine risk, and if they have determined the risk is too great to assume they have taken a deposit from you or simply withheld service (for example, my wife could not get international calling on her cel phone at all for a while, even with a deposit, because she had no credit).
They cannot do this if you decide to transfer your contract to someone else. How do you know the buyer of this phone number hasn't just declared bankruptcy and otherwise cannot even get a phone line in his house? Obviously, this is certainly the phone company's business! It is the very definition of their business.
What their specific rights are according to law and their contracts is up for interpretation by lawyers and judges, but what is and isn't their business is not. It is most definitely their business who they decide to provide service to and under what terms, and you're at the very least skirting their policies and doing a runaround of the credit check by transferring your service. Even if the phone company says "oh, no problem, we'll just run the credit check on the transferee", if that check then comes back with unacceptable results, who is going to take responsibility? The seller? I doubt it. The buyer? Ha! It's his credit that's shot in the first place. Which leaves the phone company to foot the bill, and probably to mediate a dispute that's now grown between the buyer and seller. Obviously it is in their best interests (and probably yours, if you think about it) not to let this happen.
somehow, the standard controllers that were given with the XBox on their launch seems very small compared to the original joysticks you got with the NeoGeo.
Well, that's probably because they were, but you can't directly compare them. The Neo Geo AES shipped with arcade joysticks, a fundamentally different type of controller than MS's (and the rest of the current industry's) gamepads. SNK also made gamepads for the Neo Geo systems and they were about the size of a Sega Genesis or Super NES pad (which means smaller than the Xbox gamepad).
I always loved the aesthetic design of the Neo Geo AES and its controllers, though. They're these sort of monolithic black slabs, very large but with subtle curves that make them look a lot smaller than they are. The system itself is so sleek that I thought it was about the smallest system I owned, until I stuck it on a shelf with the rest of my collection and discovered it's just the opposite - as large as an Atari 5200, much larger than a PS2, as deep and wide as an Xbox (though not as tall - unless it has a cartridge in it!). It's truly about the pinnacle of industrial design in the game console industry.
The NeoGeo actually felt like bringing the arcade coin-ops in your home , allthough it has never reached any recognition over here (the Netherlands).
Well it didn't get any recognition here (in the US) either. It's one of those things that nobody bought at the time but now that the company's got such respect, everybody claims to be major fans. It's really a bandwagon thing. But there are still relatively few of these systems out there and they're still quite expensive, so I have to always scratch my head at the sheer number of people claiming to have these vivid Neo Geo memories these days. I suppose the arcade machines were more ubiquitous but the home systems were never particularly popular. (I acquired mine through trade; I could have never justified the cost otherwise.)
Oh, and the Neo Geo AES didn't just feel like bringing arcade coin-ops home, that is in fact what you were doing. The home carts were exactly the same as the arcade carts except for the pinouts (in fact adapters exist to let you play the arcade carts on a home machine - they just adapt the pinouts). There's no technical reason why the pinouts were different, either, it was strictly so SNK could charge more for the home carts, as the arcade carts were quite cheap - the idea being to make the money in arcades on the machines themselves, whereas at home it was just the opposite.
Or you could buy a first-gen 17" Powerbook for about $2500, spend $100 and upgrade it to a gig of ram, and ignore the screen resolution since there isn't a mobile graphics card on the planet that can drive a display for a first-person shooter at either system's native resolution anyway.
(spit-take)
What what what??! You really have no idea what level of technology the rest of the world is actually using.
A mobile Radeon 9700 is more than powerful enough to play any fps at the native resolution of this laptop. I have a brand new laptop with a 2.4ghz non-Extreme P4 and the same res. screen as the XPS and I can play UT2K3 and Max Payne 2 at native resolution at around 60fps with a Radeon 9000. So your statement is clearly ignorant, and false.
There's nothing wrong with buying a 17" Powerbook if that's what you want, but you're fundamentally misunderstanding the market for the Dell XPS if that's what you'd think that audience would want. Mac people always say "or just buy a Mac" for pretty much every situation, as if their machines work best for everything. The simple fact is the XPS would be a far better gaming machine than a 17" Powerbook - it has a faster CPU and it has a faster graphics card (and it's upgradeable). The PC market is a specialized market, with a lot of different machines for different purposes. The whole point of a gaming laptop is to have a laptop that's good for playing games, not to have a laptop that's a catch-all device with gaming as merely one of the possible functions. This is not a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none... this is a master of one trade, and that's it.
That said, I wouldn't buy an XPS myself. It's fugly, for one thing. And heavy, and unnecessarily expensive. When I can play games like those I listed above at good frame rates at native res. on my $1,200 widescreen laptop that doesn't weight 9 pounds and also looks better than the XPS, what the heck am I spending $5,000 on? Which is not to say I think these things are silly for everyone, I am just not their target market. I do have a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none machine. If I really had some extra cash to waste, I'd at least go for something like this or even this. At least they're somewhat portable and don't look like they were designed in 1989.