Israel has violated UN declarations as well, you never see us huff and puff about them. Probably because there is no significant amount of oil, if any, in Isreal. North Korea readily admits to developing a nuclear program and defying the US, and we don't care too much about them either (no oil).
We sure as hell do care about North Korea. And don't even tell me anything Israel has done is even comparable to what Saddam Hussein has done. Israel has not killed 150,000 of its own people with mustard gas and VX. This is what boggles my mind when people make these ridiculous comparisons between Iraq and any other country, or between Saddam Hussein and any other world leader. Not even Slobodan Milosevic was worse than Saddam Hussein. Hussein is directly responsible for far more deaths of both his own and his enemies' people, and in far more gruesome ways.
The oil argument in general is absurd to begin with. The best thing for oil prices and the economy would be for us to cool it and say "ok, Iraq's complying, everything's fine". If this were about oil, that's what we'd do - that's what would make our own oil companies happy. But this is not about oil. I suspect we will see what it's really about sometime down the road, as I suspect our government knows more than it's letting on - but even what it has let on to this point as well as what Hussein himself has done publicly would be more than enough to land Saddam Hussein in jail for the rest of his life (or worse, if he were a common citizen in the US), and is more than enough to justify his removal from power, forcibly if necessary.
Apparently, the Chinese are going up there to mine - they don't have enough dirt in their country. As if that weren't bad enough, here's a not-so-subtle dig at us:
"I should point out that some powers in the world are on the way to militarizing outer space, not peacefully exploring outer resources," Huang Huikang, an official from China's foreign ministry, told the China Daily.
Umm, yeah. I think Huang's been watching too many Austin Powers films. I'm surprised he didn't mention the "reckless" and "provocative" Alan Parsons Project, which threatens the peace of the whole world. They may be disappointed when they reach the moon only to find that we haven't turned it into a "Death Star" (finger quotes) and that there is no secret moon base, just a big pile of space dirt.
Meanwhile, western Europe's got to try to prove to themselves that they still matter to the world by getting in on the action. Whatever they need for their own sense of self esteem, I guess. When's Canada going to the moon?
Go ahead, moderate as flamebait... my karma can stand it.
Blackley's comments are all well and good, but will someone tell me exactly what he's done to improve things? He's been directly responsible for 2-3 games in his career, none of which were particularly earth-shattering. He seems to be most famous these days for leaving Microsoft. Is this really someone that developers and publishers should be looking towards for inspiration? The proof of any theory is in the results, and so far I haven't seen Blackley's new company spewing out anything amazing that the world should be paying attention to. All I've seen is Blackley himself using his company as a platform to complain about the industry.
Meanwhile, guys like Miyamoto - working at the largest game developer in the world in terms of sales and the number of projects released yearly (yes, bigger than Microsoft) - keep on churning out games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing, which I would consider pretty innovative. Then the guy gets derided for saying things like "what I find most interesting about games is being able to push a character around the screen with a controller." Well hey, ever think maybe the guy's onto something? He's only the most successful individual game developer and producer in the history of video games, going back to the original Donkey Kong. Again, it's the results that prove the validity of a theory, and Miyamoto's theory has always been that simplicity and innovation are what count. He doesn't go around complaining that the publishing system is broken; he works within that publishing system and continues to make great games (and games that sell quite well - when less than a million is considered a "failure", you know you've set the benchmark pretty high).
I'm not sure the system is broken when we continue to get games like Super Monkey Ball, Rez, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Samba De Amigo, Dance Dance Revolution, and plenty of other highly innovative games that very often become popular without the name recognition that "branding" provides. And I don't see Seamus Blackley's name attached to any of these games.
I think we need to all finally agree that Blackley is not worth talking about. He's at best a footnote in video game history; one of the two guys who convinced Bill Gates to release the Xbox. But he's no longer involved with Xbox and didn't do much but evangelize it while he was. And I don't see him doing much of note since leaving Microsoft. Miyamoto, on the other hand, says lots of things that lots of people don't seem to "get" but has been directly responsible for 4-5 major hits and highly regarded games in just the past year, with an indirect hand in 20-30 others. Whose opinion counts more here?
There seem to be two camps here (with a third lurking in the background), and they're diametrically opposed: those who think the GUI is too big a change from WinXP and therefore people won't like it, and those who think the GUI is too much like WinXP's and therefore people won't like it.
You can't have it both ways.
There's always a third camp around here (of which I'm a part), which seems to be strangely under-represented in this thread today. This camp believes WinXP is actually a perfectly fine OS, its UI is perfectly functional and easy to use. These people look at Longhorn and think "well, it's no worse than XP, and probably a little better."
Lots of people use Windows XP and lots of people like it. Heck, lots of people even use its new swanky GUI - I do, my wife does, and everyone else I know does too (including most of my co-workers... all of the ones running WinXP, that is). I'm not sure why anybody would expect MS to make any drastic changes to a formula that works, and that a lot of people are used to using. Honestly, the core functions of the GUI haven't changed since Windows 95/NT 4 (which were very similar with the exception of the added administrator functions in the NT 4 GUI). Some of you seem blinded by bright lights - the XP GUI is almost no different than the Win2000 GUI underneath, and what *is* different (the control panel layout, start menu, etc.) can be easily changed back without removing any of the functionality or the prettiness. For my part, I find the new start menu much more useful than the old.
And from what I'm seeing of Longhorn, it's hardly any different from the XP GUI. It's a bit flatter, with fewer 3D effects - an attempt at being a little more tasteful and understated without going back to the ugliness of Win95 (though I'm not a fan of rounded window corners - especially when maximized, they just don't like right). Still has the start button, the systray, the quicklaunch, very few desktop icons, etc. A few new transparency effects on the new sidebar. Honestly, if anything I'm disappointed they haven't made more visual improvements to the UI, though this is still an early build, and most of the visual flash comes last in any software development. I'm sure the final release will look even better than this.
I think you all need to stop expecting Windows to be Linux (or BeOS, or whatever), and accept the fact that not all of us want to worry about customizing every last bit of our GUI or working in terminal consoles to get anything meaningful done. This doesn't mean we don't have "half a brain", it just means we want to spend less time with our OS and more time with our work. But it's nice if the OS looks good out of the box, so we don't *need* to spend time with it to make ourselves comfortable with it.
On the other hand, it seems KDE and Gnome are both trying to move closer to the Windows GUI. They both have "start" buttons of their own, they both have quicklaunch equivalents, etc. They're both even going for eye candy lately. So what are some of you complaining about? This is what most people want, and it's the way most people are used to working. Just deal.
The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics!
Don't know if you know this or not, but the Tandy 1000 was not just "IBM PC compatible", it was actually an IBM PCjr. clone. This is where you get the "Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics" - these are actually enhanced IBM PCjr. graphics modes. The Tandy 1000 was actually more successful than the PCjr., so some game developers referred specifically to the Tandy capabilities rather than to the PCJr.
They do. I've got a 4 year old Thinkpad that I've dropped countless times from normal table or standing height (a couple of times while it was on and the hard drive spinning!) and it's only got a single small scratch on the top of the casing to show for it. IBM still makes probably the toughest hardware out there, and they don't even advertise the fact - it's just assumed. IBM makes hardware the way people expect hardware should be made. (Though it's true that their PC keyboards are no longer built to the same standards as their old Model M's, but then most people don't even seem to like typing on that kind of keyboard anymore. I'd never give up mine, though.)
Just to compare, my wife has a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo, a made-in-Japan notebook with a metal casing. Her system has hinges that no longer work (she needs to prop up the screen on something) and the speakers crackle when the network's being used, apparently due to a bad connection. My IBM still looks and works as good as new despite the abuse it's taken.
Well, it seems the Slashdot crowd has plenty of book smarts, but no street smarts. Where I come from, we call leaked letters like this "propaganda". Nobody writes to their "friends" in this style. This was written for dissemination worldwide, and a "leak" cover story invented to make it seem more credible - to make it seem less like this "journalist" just made a bunch of stuff up.
Lots of journalists attend the WEF, yet this is the only "letter" we've seen like this. Why is that? Because it's not real, that's why.
Privacy concerns are moot when you're talking about hoaxes, propaganda, and articles intended for public consumption from the start. You're all missing the point here.
Do you understand that this isn't a realeased product? If you are a noob you should stay away from 9.1 beta versions and realease candidates and wait for the actual product in a month or so.
Did you read my post? I said I've been with Mandrake since 9.0 - this is not my first install. 2 of the 3 problems I described have been present since 9.0, and with every new release I hope they're fixed, and they aren't.
The point of any new release is to fix bugs in previous versions and add new functionality. It's fine when new things don't work in betas and release candidates, but I don't expect things that worked fine before (network) to suddenly stop working in a release candidate (especially when it worked perfectly in the betas!). And regardless, font import and auto-mounting didn't work for me in the supposedly stable 9.0 release either.
Besides, I wonder if some people around here have forgotten what the term "Release Candidate" means. RC means it's out of the beta stage; all functions should work at this point.
Oh boy, here comes the conspiracy theory.
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More on Columbia
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· Score: 4, Insightful
We're just one step away from conspiracy theory time here, folks, and I don't like it. I posted at the start of this whole thing several weeks ago that I thought the foam theory was a red herring, several of you argued with me and the next day NASA all but ruled it out. I suppose it's human nature - the foam theory is the simplest explanation (even if it doesn't make logical sense) and it's one that we can visually see with our own layman eyes (we've all seen the video of the foam hitting the wing).
The problem is the truth is almost never that simple when it comes to accidents involving complex and highly redundant systems. NASA is obviously having a hard time believing a 2 foot, 2 pound piece of foam could bring down such a technologically advanced piece of engineering (and yes, it was technologically advanced - much of Columbia's heat shielding, including the leading edges of the wings, was replaced with state of the art materials in 1999). I am having a hard time believing it too.
Anyone who has ever read a major aircraft disaster report from the NTSB knows that it is almost always a series of highly implausible events that conspire to cause disaster. Any one of these events would be remote; the chances of them coming together in the way they did would be almost impossible (but not completely impossible). This is the way it almost always is. We know that several shuttles - including Columbia - have been hit in their wings by launch debris in the past and suffered no ill effects. Why do we all suddenly want to believe that same debris brought the shuttle down this time? I don't believe it.
I do believe it could be part of the answer, though not the full answer. I believe it's possible (and I'm sure NASA's looking into this, among other things) that the foam hit was the first in a series of problems that compounded upon each other to eventually cause disaster. If it hit in exactly the correct (or incorrect) spot, where a fault already existed, then that's a different story. I know NASA's looking at the procedures used in the Columbia's last overhaul, for example (it's flown only once since then). In that case, the foam hit wouldn't be the cause of the accident - the faulty overhaul of the heat shielding would be. But NASA's looking at a lot of things, and I'm just speculating here, like all the rest of us.
The point is, NASA is an organization of scientists. They wouldn't know how to spin if they tried. They're looking at things analytically and none of their computer models are telling them that the foam by itself could bring the shuttle down. Who are you to argue with them? You'd think on this site, of all places, people would understand that scientists don't go rushing and jumping to conclusions - they examine all the possibilities and analyze everything very methodically. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't "want us to believe". I'm sure if they weren't so focused on their job at hand right now they'd be laughing at what so many of us apparently want to believe, whether or not there's actually any evidence to support our "theory".
I admit I'm a noob, but I haven't had very good luck with 9.1 so far. I desperately want to run a Linux desktop and I'd heard Mandrake was the easiest (which it still may be for all I know - just because it's hard for me doesn't mean the others aren't harder). But so far, here are the problems I've had starting with 9.0 and now actually getting worse in 9.1:
1. Network doesn't work. This is new in 9.1 RC1. It worked in the betas and in 9.0, but doesn't in RC1. I have heard various workarounds but being a noob haven't really tried getting my hands dirty yet. It detects my card but does not connect to the net, and will not even connect to my router (so it's not just an internet thing).
2. Font import doesn't work. This has never worked for me, in any Mandrake release. I have pared my Windows fonts down to the minimum and it still hangs at various points during the import - hangs to the point where I need to restart the system in order to kill the process.
3. Mounting of pretty much anything other than the Linux partition on my hard drive takes about 10 minutes, as does doing any operation at all once mounted. This includes simply listening to a CD, or browsing my pictures on my Windows partition. Again, just trying to listen to a CD last night necessitated a reboot.
Any one of these is almost enough to get me to give up on Linux as a whole for now. Windows, for now, is much more useful as a desktop, however "easy" Mandrake is to use. I've spent almost 100% of my time with Mandrake so far just trying to get it set up, and I still can't get some pretty important things to work at all. I hope Mandrake and other distros continue to improve to the point where a newbie like me can actually use them, but I don't think we're at that point yet.
Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?
About 5 minutes... you do realize you can Ebay the real thing for not much more (if any) than that, right? (Sure, it costs a bit more to buy one with a collection of games, but not much.) I can understand the appeal of having something that takes up less space, but really, when half the games in that 10-in-1 were paddle games anyway, I'd rather have the real thing. You can never replicate the feeling of slapping a cartridge in a real 2600, switching your RF switchbox over to "game" and sitting there playing in front of that big, ugly piece of woodgrain.
This reminds me of the manga success thread of a few days ago. You have to understand that arcades ("game centers" is what they're called in Japan) are very different over there than they are here. The industry as a whole is not doing all that great there either, but Sega has been one of the few profitable companies in terms of their arcade business in Japan and I'm sure this is what attracted Sammy to them. Why?
Pachinko is big game center business in Japan. Seriously, it's a perfect match. Every major game center in Japan has a large section devoted to pachinko, including many Sega game centers (such as the multi-story monstrosity in Akihabara, which has an entire floor of pachinko machines). These are generally not "real" pachinko machines in that you don't actually gamble, but the real thing is extremely popular as well with a pachinko parlor seemingly on about every other block in some towns. The point being we may laugh at pachinko - but the Japanese don't. It'd be the equivalent of making slot machines legal in every municipality in this country - they'd sprout up like weeds all over the place. Pachinko is just the way Japanese people gamble mechanically, and pachinko and "regular" arcade machines are very closely related there.
Also, as has been mentioned, Sammy is not just a pachinko company. They just released Guilty Gear X2 in this country, which is doing quite well and has gotten a lot of good reviews. This is an old-school 2D fighter with modern visuals, and I think this also fits in with Sega's arcade business very well. It also obviously gives Sammy a new distribution channel for home consoles, along with a respected game development studio. Sammy Studios now just becomes another of Sega's development teams - which is great for Sega and Sammy both. 2D fighting is still quite popular in Japan and Sega really didn't have any major franchises in that area before.
As to what else it gives Sega... money, I would guess. They just revised downward their forecasts by 90%. 90%! That's huge. They have not made the transition to 3rd party developer smoothly at all, and their stock price has dropped by about 80% from its highs of a few months ago. They were in need of a white knight. I'm personally glad it was Sammy and not Microsoft, as unexpected as it was. They were increasingly vulnerable and now they are less vulnerable - I don't think Microsoft would be interested in acquiring Sammy, and I don't at all think this is the mysterious unnamed Japanese company that MS is invested in (I continue to believe that company is Tecmo).
Am I the only one that sees how freakin' poetic this is? This card was touted as the first real tangible result of the marriage between NVidia and 3Dfx (one of the reasons for the "FX" moniker, supposedly), and the company's having the exact same problems as 3Dfx did with their Voodoo 4 and 5's. Namely, that they're not as fast as people expected, they use too much power and generate too much heat. And their competition is passing them by.
Still, I don't see NVidia in the same precarious position as 3Dfx was at the time. NVidia likes to point out that after the latest Radeons were released by ATI, NVidia's market share actually went up, not down. The super-performance market is actually a very small market, and NVidia still offers the best value out there for mainstream users in the GeForce 4 Ti4200. For most people, the extra $250 they'd spend on a Radeon 9700 Pro vs. a Ti4200 is just not worth it - the extra few frames per second you'd get in most games are generally not even that noticeable, and there are a lot of better ways to spend that money. I don't really think NVidia's got a lot to worry about, then - unless the performance gulf and manufacturing problems become so pronounced that public perception (or misperception) filters down to even the mainstream products (as has been ATI's bugaboo over the years).
Still, it looks like the GeForce FX has been NVidia's first real dud in some time. No doubt the "stock" FX 5800's will be a good value once the NV35 is released (just as the Ti4200's are a good value now), but at the moment the card doesn't seem to really fit in any niche. Performance gamers will choose the Radeon 9700 Pro, mainstream gamers will choose the Ti4200, and low-end or business users will continue choosing ultra low-cost but perfectly capable cards like the GeForce 2 Ti.
No. The "other half" of Atari ceased to exist long ago, and Infogrames owns only the IP - not the offices Atari used to be headquartered in, not the employees that used to work there. There is no more "Atari" as a functioning entity - not even as a division of Infogrames. It is simply a name they slap on what they consider their "high end" games - most of which to this point have actually been developed outside the company (and in fact were in development before the purchase of Atari's IP from Hasbro).
Infogrames does not even do a very good job of branding the Atari name. I work at a game publisher with a setup similar to what Infogrames has (central company with several different "labels") and we would never, ever put our parent company name anywhere on one of our labeled games - we keep the labels pure, and each has a distinct identity and to anyone on the outside probably feels like a separate company. Yet on "Atari" games these days all you generally see of Atari is the logo on the packaging and at startup - but there are still Infogrames logos and information plastered all over the place in the manuals, on the web sites, in the advertising, etc. It's very transparent that this is simply an Infogrames brand, and that the games are simply Infogrames games. There's no sense that the name "Atari" actually means anything - it doesn't, but they could at least do a better job at making it seem like it does.
As for hardware, it'd be cool to see an Atari-branded console again but a) it'll never happen, and b) if it does, this is not the same Atari. It'd be an Infogrames console in reality and everyone would know it.
It's a shame about Midway West too. This was not some one-hit wonder - anyone remember Marble Madness? Crystal Castles? A.P.B.? Paperboy? Not to mention Pong. Atari Games' list of arcade hits is nearly endless and goes back further than any other arcade manufacturer's. All the way up to the early 1990's, they were one of the dominant developers of arcade hardware and hit games.
The New York Times has done a great job of bungling the Columbia story completely. First it was their lock-on to the foam theory, which has been all but discounted by NASA over the past couple days. It could still resurface, but if NASA's engineers with all their sophisticated computer modeling don't believe it, I don't believe it either - and I certainly don't believe the Times' journalists are more capable engineers than NASA's are. Now it's all this talk about Columbia's "outdated" computers - the implication being this thing was too old to fly, and that technology has passed it by.
Problem is, Columbia has been overhauled three times in the past twenty years, most recently in 1999, when it had a brand new glass cockpit installed, its heat shielding and many other components upgraded, and every inch of its wiring inspected. This in addition to the upgrades during the two previous overhauls.
In reality, this was probably the newest shuttle in the fleet. Its computers, avionics, and heat shielding were second to no other shuttle - only the Atlantis, which is the only other shuttle to go through this latest overhaul, matched Columbia in technology. I therefore have a hard time believing the computers were responsible for this accident. I have a hard time believing the heat shielding was responsible for this accident too. These were not old tiles, and this was not outdated shielding technology.
My feeling is this will come down to human error, as most of these things do. From what I understand, one of the new parts installed on Columbia in 1999 was upgraded heat shielding on the leading edges of the wing. Who's to say there wasn't a microscopic crack in this new shielding that was not detected and failed after a period of time, similar to what caused the UAL DC-10 crash in Sioux City a while back (a microscopic flaw in an engine part went undetected for more than 10 years before it finally failed in spectacular fashion). Who's to say this shielding wasn't installed or maintained improperly? (I have a difficult time believing this, but then most accidents of this magnitude are the result of difficult-to-believe events.) Who's to say there wasn't a *software* bug in the *new* flight systems, which only a particular set of peculiar events brought out on this particular flight? (Say, a bit of yaw, which the system over-compensated for and led to an oscillation that eventually ripped the ship apart.)
In any case, the NY Times is on the wrong track with this, and the whole idea of the Columbia containing all this obsolete technology needs to be dropped. The Columbia had leading-edge technology where it needed it, reliable and proven technology elsewhere. That's the same combination every new aircraft or spacecraft built today aspires to have. There's nothing anyone could complain about with regard to Columbia's technology.
Even those who purport to understand Japanese culture around here (and then proceed to talk about manga as child porn) are so off base I just had to act...
The Japanese consider their culture to be nearly impenetrable to westerners. Even if you go in with an extremely open mind, there are many aspects to the culture that we, as westerners, could probably never understand. Simple direct observation of the culture from within (yes, you have to actually *go* to Japan to understand this) along with said open mind doesn't hurt, though, and having a Japanese wife certainly helps too.
Looking at manga in terms of western comics is completely misguided from the start. Manga in Japan is simply the way quite a lot of literature is presented to the public; it's the accepted method of reading most less serious fiction and non-fiction for both children *and* adults. How-to books, instruction manuals, even novels come packaged in the same artful style and the variety of subjects is endless. There's not what you would even call a "manga industry" in Japan in the same way as there is a "comic industry" in the US - the manga industry is simply the Japanese publishing industry. They obviously have non-illustrated books too, but illustrated literature is a standard, accepted form of literature in a way that it is not here. Manga in Japan is quite literally everywhere - it's not something you go to the "manga shop" to buy. You couldn't get away from it if you tried.
Many of the causes for manga's success listed in the linked article are actually effects. The fact that there is so much variety in subject matter is less a reason for success than it is an effect of the cultural acceptance of the legitimacy of illustrated literature. The Japanese are very visual people, and I would argue that their alphabet itself - which is itself entirely symbolic - is one of the root causes for this. In other Asian countries you see similar phenomena (illustrated literature is very popular in Korea as well, for example). The Japanese are used to looking at iconography and determining meaning from it - it is necessary for them to get through life - whereas we largely are not. I would argue our brains are wired more for conceptual analysis than iconographic analysis; we assign meaning from text and speech rather than visuals.
It's also completely untrue that there's no collector culture in Japan. The fact that many "manga" books are disposable doesn't mean they all are. You may buy a disposable paperback at an airpot to read on an airplane here but that doesn't mean that hardcover first printing of "A Farewall to Arms" you've got at home is in the same category. Again, this just shows a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the fact that the "manga industry" is simply the publishing industry in Japan - the variety in manga extends not just to the subject matter but also to the durability of the literature. My wife has illustrated books of Miyazaki stories that she's had since she was a kid, and most Japanese people I know are the same way. And these are not even otaku - hardcore fans - who actively collect as much of this stuff as they can.
Anyway, the main point is that it's a mistake to look at anything in Japan through western eyes. You need to at least *try* to look through Japanese eyes, as impossible as that is. There are things you can at least begin to understand if you attempt to delve deeply into the culture, but you'll never get close if you insist on looking through our perspective.
"This is all in today's NYT and my local paper (which goes to bed later than our edition of the Times as I'm on the West Coast) and all comes straight from NASA."
Actually, you said yourself it's coming straight from the NY Times. As someone else mentioned, the press has already made up their mind about this and the NYT is just as capable of spinning a story as anyone. I've been watching the actual NASA press conference - the only way to get news "straight from NASA" - and like any good investigators they say they've ruled nothing out, the foam is a candidate but it's not the only candidate and it doesn't explain the breakup. Hence my post. Just because the media is focusing on one particular part of one particular statement NASA's made doesn't mean it's the only theory.
I think the term "root cause" is also important. NASA has said they're looking at this as a possible "root cause", which does not mean there is direct causality. It means it could be the catalyst for a chain of events, as I also mentioned.
Take the Challenger accident, for example. The root cause of that accident was the design of the O-rings. The direct cause was the solid rocket booster tilting itself into the fuel tank. A lot of implausible stuff had to happen in a certain way to get from point A to point B in that chain - otherwise it would have happened on day 1 of the shuttle program.
I've started to wonder if the insulation hit isn't a red herring. NASA themselves have said it doesn't explain the breakup - that there's a "missing link" (their exact words) that they've yet to find. The temperature on the left wing only rose by about 40 degrees despite 3,000 degree temperatures outside the shuttle - which doesn't sound to me like there was much tile missing. The Atlantis, I believe, was hit in much the same way as the Columbia was on an earlier launch and showed no ill effects. And the Columbia itself lost more than 100 tiles from its nose area on one flight and still made it home fine.
I could very well be wrong, but I would almost bet at this moment that the foam hit on launch is mostly a coincidence - or at most the beginning of a long chain of implausible events that preyed on some other, pre-existing fault. This is the case with most airplane disasters, where it's rarely one single problem but rather an entire series of highly implausible but still possible events that coincide in an extremely unlucky chain. The shuttle is not as fragile as some people are making it out to be right now; it was built to withstand the repeated abuse of the shock of liftoff and the heat of re-entry over many, many years and many, many cycles. The Columbia in particular was also just recently refurbished and had its heat shielding inspected and, where appropriate, upgraded to the latest materials available. It does not sound to me like a piece of foam hitting it at launch alone could bring it down - there has to be something more, and NASA seems to agree with their "missing link" statement.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Plenty of "weird games" still out there. You could be playing games like this, this, or this. Or even this.
I'm as big a fan of old-school gaming as anyone and still have my Atari 2600 hooked up. But there are just as many offbeat games now as there always were - and not every game back in the old days was all that innovative either (like now, most of them ripped off formulaic concepts). It's just that we don't remember the crappy games, despite the fact that they made up the bulk of the Atari 2600's 1000+ game library. There was a reason for the crash of 1984, after all - a deluge of junk on the market.
A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas. I would argue that the big guys are better at breaking their own formulas than any inexperienced, underfunded "little guy" ever could be - it's just that when they do, the games don't sell. Can you blame EA for putting out Madden 200X every year when a game like Rez sells fewer than 10,000 copies and Vib Ribbon isn't even released here for lack of interest?
News flash! Linux distributors promote Linux! Wonders never cease!
Seriously, why is this even newsworthy? This is what I'd expect these companies to do. About the only thing remotely interesting about this story is the shunning of Lindows, which is becoming more and more of a community bastard child by the day. When I read the headline here at first I was expecting to see a consortium led by the likes of IBM and HP - which would be a pretty important news story - but I don't think a bunch of Linux distributors getting together to promote their own wares is much to get all excited about.
We all (should) know that Linux has quite a ways to go as a desktop OS anyway, though most of the work needed is on interface and ease of use issues these days. It's making progress, but it's a bit too soon to really start promoting it as a Windows replacement for average users (despite what a lot of the zealots around here are probably going to say).
I'm sorry, but this is more than $500 million MS has lost so far on Xbox, and that is big news no matter how you slice it. Does anyone honestly think MS got into this business in order to lose money? What would be the point? There are two possible reasons for MS to have gotten into the video game business, and only two:
1. To make profits. This is self explanatory.
2. To use the system to leverage their Windows business somehow, selling the system at a loss in order to eventually put some modified version of Media Center in your living room.
They're failing at #1, and as far a I know, #2 would be illegal - it's basically exactly what they were found guilty of in court already.
No company can continue to lose money at something forever. I'm sorry, but this is a publicly traded company and if I were holding MS shares there's not really anything MS could do at this point to convince me that getting into this business has been a good idea. Sony's profitable, Nintendo's profitable, MS is losing *large* amounts of money. What's wrong with this picture?
Almost lost in this story is that MS is now saying they're barely going to hit the low end of their sales forecasts. You think they expected to lose $384 million? They probably wouldn't have if they'd sold as many consoles as they'd hoped - this means less software sold, and fewer royalty payments. The fact is the Xbox is not doing well, however MS wants to spin it.
And regarding this Japanese company they're "propping up" - I would honestly doubt it's Sega, though it's possible. However, all of Sega's recently-released Xbox games were announced over a year ago (at the E3 prior to the Xbox's launch), and the only recent Xbox game I can recall being announced by Sega is Virtua Cop 3. That's honestly not a lot of support. More likely, the investment is in Tecmo - which has been devoting almost exclusive support to Xbox ever since its release, and which has two of the highest-profile titles ever released for the console - Dead or Alive 3 and Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, not to mention the recently announced Dead or Alive: Code Cronus and the hinted-at Dead or Alive 4. All Xbox-exclusive. Sega, by contrast, hasn't released any million-sellers for Xbox, not even close, and hasn't announced much for the system lately.
This article had my rapt attention until I got up to this:
"So far, the company has found the only drawback of adding too much AMP to their coffees, either in the mug or the grinds, is that it generates the taste of raw fish in your mouth, said scientist Stephen Gravina, Linguagen's associate director."
Ok, so the coffee's not bitter, but instead it tastes like raw fish. This is an improvement?
And yes, I realize it says that's only if you don't use the AMP properly. But coffee's only bitter if you don't make it properly too. If I had to choose between the two tastes of a bad brew - bitterness or the taste of raw fish - I don't even need to think about which one is worse.
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here?
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NARAS vs. the RIAA
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And that's just from the first third of the article (cuz I'm getting sick of this). Come on, people. These 3 paragraphs may seem convincing to people who don't have training in logic and statistics, but/. readers are supposed to be geeks. (Actually, only the third one really needs statistical reasoning; the other two should be obvious to anyone.)
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position. In that sense, I don't believe it was really all that helpful as it's probably going to have nothing more than a "blah blah blah, we've heard this all before" effect on its intended audience.
The article was 5 quite lengthy pages long, and much of it was alternately contradictory and repetitive (many of the same supporting points are used several times over to buttress different, conflicting main points). The author needs an editor. Pick one or two major arguments that don't conflict, support the heck out of them and leave it at that. This thing should have been 2 pages long at most.
Which is not to say that the basic gist of what he's saying isn't true - we all know it is, and this is why it's so annoying that his contradictions will probably relegate his ramblings to the realm of the rest of us crackpots among his peers. The music industry is in the early stages of a major upheaval, and as the author says, if these companies don't make the necessary changes themselves, somebody more powerful than them will buy them up and do it for them.
Sony will be the interesting company to watch over the next couple years, because as they go, likely so will the rest of the music industry. Sony is a mish-mash of competing interests but their electronics, computer, and game divisions collectively dwarf their music division (and their film division, for that matter). At the moment it's a stalemate between the music and other divisions regarding how to handle DRM issues and "piracy" (which the author rightly points out is a misused term these days), but I fully expect that, like any business, if Sony as a whole sees the music division dragging down their overall profitability (as it is right now), they'll do what it takes to right the ship. That means drastically restructuring how music publishing works for them in the end, as it will eventually become apparent that none of the current band-aid solutions is working. The only question is how they accomplish this - but I fully expect to see non-DRM MP3 players from them fairly soon, and some form of capitulation from Sony Music, which will then be integrated into a re-organized company in a completely new way.
I especially expect this to happen as Sony's Japanese management takes a slightly different view on these issues than the RIAA and even Sony America. Other music publishers will either follow Sony's lead, or get bought up by software or technology companies that will force Sony's new business model upon them. Either way, I believe we're close to the point (within the next 2-3 years) where all the little thumbs stuck in the dyke will no longer be enough to stem the tide and major, major changes will take place in the music industry, one way or another. And I strongly believe it'll be Sony leading the way.
Put any DVD you own in your DVD player and bring up the subtitle menu. I can almost guarantee one of the options will be English subtitles. There are several obvious reasons for this, especially on an Asian DVD:
1. Captions for the hearing-impaired 2. Subtitles for those who can speak and understand English, but not all that well.
My wife, when she first came to this country, fell into the 2nd category and nearly always watched English subtitles on English language DVD's to help her understand.
It could still be a hoax, but it could just as easily not be. The fact that there are English subtitles on an English language film is no proof of anything, and the fact that they're done badly isn't either.
Also, my roommate's talking about Neo Geo, which I recall in name only. Any thoughts on that? I'm FASCINATED.
I would guess you're talking about the Neo Geo AES, the home version of their arcade hardware. These things still fetch a pretty penny on eBay, and with good reason. First of all, they sold for $700 initially just like the 3DO. Secondly, despite what a lot of people think the system is still being supported by developers and in fact has had one of the longest lifespans of any console (the last game I know of - Rage of the Dragons - was released in Sept. 2002. The system these days generally gets about 2-4 new games per year). SNK never intended this system to be mass-market - it was always a niche console. It was priced to be profitable right from the start, as were the games, which sold for $300 and up initially and still do. The idea was to generate buzz for the company's arcade business by getting systems into the hands of high-class buyers who would then spread word of mouth about the games and drive people to the arcades where average people could afford to play them - the exact opposite of what most other arcade publishers do today.
The reason for the high game prices? The games were literally the exact same games as you'd find in the arcade. Only the pin-outs of the carts were different (in fact, you can buy adapters now so that you can use the cheaper arcade carts in your home AES system). Lots and lots of RAM, and this back in the day when RAM was not cheap. As RAM came down in price, the games didn't because SNK just kept adding more memory to the games.
A CD-based system was released several years after the AES in order to try to make it more mass-market. But it still wasn't really supposed to compete with the likes of the PlayStation or Saturn - more to just satisfy less cash-rich Neo Geo fans and open up new lines of revenue. The system was still expensive, though the games dropped to around $50. Load times were a major problem, though, and real Neo Geo afficionados avoided the system because of the lack of arcade perfection. Some games were actually enhanced with new redbook audio, but again, it was arcade-perfection that Neo Geo fans wanted. The system was a failure even by SNK's modest standards. (A second version of the system was released to try to fix some of its problems, but it didn't really help.)
There is still a large and thriving Neo Geo community - as you'd expect from a fully alive and thriving console. Neo Geo systems are no longer produced and SNK themselves went bankrupt about a year ago - but not because of the AES system (their arcade business - the core part of the company - fell apart). The system itself, though, is still supported with new titles periodically and is considered by many probably the best 2D system ever. That is, of course, if you're a fan of Neo Geo games - there's always a debate among the "classic gaming" community as to whether SNK ever actually put out any good games or not (most of them were fighting games that didn't differ all that much, though I personally find more variety in the company's titles than most, and enjoy a lot of the smaller, lesser-known games that the company released).
As a Neo Geo owner I have to say that it's still one serious system. Everything about it just feels quality - at least if you have one of the original packages with the old-style large controllers. It's a large system but doesn't look it - with its clean, elegant, bat-wedge design. The cartridges are absolutely monstrous and most of them come in high-quality clamshell cases. Holding one in your hand is like holding a brick. Truly a unique system and one that I definitely recommend owning - no way it belongs on this list of failures.
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Israel has violated UN declarations as well, you never see us huff and puff about them. Probably because there is no significant amount of oil, if any, in Isreal. North Korea readily admits to developing a nuclear program and defying the US, and we don't care too much about them either (no oil).
We sure as hell do care about North Korea. And don't even tell me anything Israel has done is even comparable to what Saddam Hussein has done. Israel has not killed 150,000 of its own people with mustard gas and VX. This is what boggles my mind when people make these ridiculous comparisons between Iraq and any other country, or between Saddam Hussein and any other world leader. Not even Slobodan Milosevic was worse than Saddam Hussein. Hussein is directly responsible for far more deaths of both his own and his enemies' people, and in far more gruesome ways.
The oil argument in general is absurd to begin with. The best thing for oil prices and the economy would be for us to cool it and say "ok, Iraq's complying, everything's fine". If this were about oil, that's what we'd do - that's what would make our own oil companies happy. But this is not about oil. I suspect we will see what it's really about sometime down the road, as I suspect our government knows more than it's letting on - but even what it has let on to this point as well as what Hussein himself has done publicly would be more than enough to land Saddam Hussein in jail for the rest of his life (or worse, if he were a common citizen in the US), and is more than enough to justify his removal from power, forcibly if necessary.
Apparently, the Chinese are going up there to mine - they don't have enough dirt in their country. As if that weren't bad enough, here's a not-so-subtle dig at us:
"I should point out that some powers in the world are on the way to militarizing outer space, not peacefully exploring outer resources," Huang Huikang, an official from China's foreign ministry, told the China Daily.
Umm, yeah. I think Huang's been watching too many Austin Powers films. I'm surprised he didn't mention the "reckless" and "provocative" Alan Parsons Project, which threatens the peace of the whole world. They may be disappointed when they reach the moon only to find that we haven't turned it into a "Death Star" (finger quotes) and that there is no secret moon base, just a big pile of space dirt.
Meanwhile, western Europe's got to try to prove to themselves that they still matter to the world by getting in on the action. Whatever they need for their own sense of self esteem, I guess. When's Canada going to the moon?
Go ahead, moderate as flamebait... my karma can stand it.
Blackley's comments are all well and good, but will someone tell me exactly what he's done to improve things? He's been directly responsible for 2-3 games in his career, none of which were particularly earth-shattering. He seems to be most famous these days for leaving Microsoft. Is this really someone that developers and publishers should be looking towards for inspiration? The proof of any theory is in the results, and so far I haven't seen Blackley's new company spewing out anything amazing that the world should be paying attention to. All I've seen is Blackley himself using his company as a platform to complain about the industry.
Meanwhile, guys like Miyamoto - working at the largest game developer in the world in terms of sales and the number of projects released yearly (yes, bigger than Microsoft) - keep on churning out games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing, which I would consider pretty innovative. Then the guy gets derided for saying things like "what I find most interesting about games is being able to push a character around the screen with a controller." Well hey, ever think maybe the guy's onto something? He's only the most successful individual game developer and producer in the history of video games, going back to the original Donkey Kong. Again, it's the results that prove the validity of a theory, and Miyamoto's theory has always been that simplicity and innovation are what count. He doesn't go around complaining that the publishing system is broken; he works within that publishing system and continues to make great games (and games that sell quite well - when less than a million is considered a "failure", you know you've set the benchmark pretty high).
I'm not sure the system is broken when we continue to get games like Super Monkey Ball, Rez, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Samba De Amigo, Dance Dance Revolution, and plenty of other highly innovative games that very often become popular without the name recognition that "branding" provides. And I don't see Seamus Blackley's name attached to any of these games.
I think we need to all finally agree that Blackley is not worth talking about. He's at best a footnote in video game history; one of the two guys who convinced Bill Gates to release the Xbox. But he's no longer involved with Xbox and didn't do much but evangelize it while he was. And I don't see him doing much of note since leaving Microsoft. Miyamoto, on the other hand, says lots of things that lots of people don't seem to "get" but has been directly responsible for 4-5 major hits and highly regarded games in just the past year, with an indirect hand in 20-30 others. Whose opinion counts more here?
There seem to be two camps here (with a third lurking in the background), and they're diametrically opposed: those who think the GUI is too big a change from WinXP and therefore people won't like it, and those who think the GUI is too much like WinXP's and therefore people won't like it.
You can't have it both ways.
There's always a third camp around here (of which I'm a part), which seems to be strangely under-represented in this thread today. This camp believes WinXP is actually a perfectly fine OS, its UI is perfectly functional and easy to use. These people look at Longhorn and think "well, it's no worse than XP, and probably a little better."
Lots of people use Windows XP and lots of people like it. Heck, lots of people even use its new swanky GUI - I do, my wife does, and everyone else I know does too (including most of my co-workers... all of the ones running WinXP, that is). I'm not sure why anybody would expect MS to make any drastic changes to a formula that works, and that a lot of people are used to using. Honestly, the core functions of the GUI haven't changed since Windows 95/NT 4 (which were very similar with the exception of the added administrator functions in the NT 4 GUI). Some of you seem blinded by bright lights - the XP GUI is almost no different than the Win2000 GUI underneath, and what *is* different (the control panel layout, start menu, etc.) can be easily changed back without removing any of the functionality or the prettiness. For my part, I find the new start menu much more useful than the old.
And from what I'm seeing of Longhorn, it's hardly any different from the XP GUI. It's a bit flatter, with fewer 3D effects - an attempt at being a little more tasteful and understated without going back to the ugliness of Win95 (though I'm not a fan of rounded window corners - especially when maximized, they just don't like right). Still has the start button, the systray, the quicklaunch, very few desktop icons, etc. A few new transparency effects on the new sidebar. Honestly, if anything I'm disappointed they haven't made more visual improvements to the UI, though this is still an early build, and most of the visual flash comes last in any software development. I'm sure the final release will look even better than this.
I think you all need to stop expecting Windows to be Linux (or BeOS, or whatever), and accept the fact that not all of us want to worry about customizing every last bit of our GUI or working in terminal consoles to get anything meaningful done. This doesn't mean we don't have "half a brain", it just means we want to spend less time with our OS and more time with our work. But it's nice if the OS looks good out of the box, so we don't *need* to spend time with it to make ourselves comfortable with it.
On the other hand, it seems KDE and Gnome are both trying to move closer to the Windows GUI. They both have "start" buttons of their own, they both have quicklaunch equivalents, etc. They're both even going for eye candy lately. So what are some of you complaining about? This is what most people want, and it's the way most people are used to working. Just deal.
The Tandy 1000SX was an IBM PC compatible, but it had some custom hardware: It had sound which was better than the PC speaker (in that it was polyphonic), and some sort of 16-color graphics which was nevertheless incompatible with EGA... so, most games couldn't do better than CGA, but MechWarrior supported both Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics!
Don't know if you know this or not, but the Tandy 1000 was not just "IBM PC compatible", it was actually an IBM PCjr. clone. This is where you get the "Tandy Sound and Tandy Graphics" - these are actually enhanced IBM PCjr. graphics modes. The Tandy 1000 was actually more successful than the PCjr., so some game developers referred specifically to the Tandy capabilities rather than to the PCJr.
Pity they don't make them that solidly anymore.
They do. I've got a 4 year old Thinkpad that I've dropped countless times from normal table or standing height (a couple of times while it was on and the hard drive spinning!) and it's only got a single small scratch on the top of the casing to show for it. IBM still makes probably the toughest hardware out there, and they don't even advertise the fact - it's just assumed. IBM makes hardware the way people expect hardware should be made. (Though it's true that their PC keyboards are no longer built to the same standards as their old Model M's, but then most people don't even seem to like typing on that kind of keyboard anymore. I'd never give up mine, though.)
Just to compare, my wife has a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo, a made-in-Japan notebook with a metal casing. Her system has hinges that no longer work (she needs to prop up the screen on something) and the speakers crackle when the network's being used, apparently due to a bad connection. My IBM still looks and works as good as new despite the abuse it's taken.
Well, it seems the Slashdot crowd has plenty of book smarts, but no street smarts. Where I come from, we call leaked letters like this "propaganda". Nobody writes to their "friends" in this style. This was written for dissemination worldwide, and a "leak" cover story invented to make it seem more credible - to make it seem less like this "journalist" just made a bunch of stuff up.
Lots of journalists attend the WEF, yet this is the only "letter" we've seen like this. Why is that? Because it's not real, that's why.
Privacy concerns are moot when you're talking about hoaxes, propaganda, and articles intended for public consumption from the start. You're all missing the point here.
Do you understand that this isn't a realeased product? If you are a noob you should stay away from 9.1 beta versions and realease candidates and wait for the actual product in a month or so.
Did you read my post? I said I've been with Mandrake since 9.0 - this is not my first install. 2 of the 3 problems I described have been present since 9.0, and with every new release I hope they're fixed, and they aren't.
The point of any new release is to fix bugs in previous versions and add new functionality. It's fine when new things don't work in betas and release candidates, but I don't expect things that worked fine before (network) to suddenly stop working in a release candidate (especially when it worked perfectly in the betas!). And regardless, font import and auto-mounting didn't work for me in the supposedly stable 9.0 release either.
Besides, I wonder if some people around here have forgotten what the term "Release Candidate" means. RC means it's out of the beta stage; all functions should work at this point.
We're just one step away from conspiracy theory time here, folks, and I don't like it. I posted at the start of this whole thing several weeks ago that I thought the foam theory was a red herring, several of you argued with me and the next day NASA all but ruled it out. I suppose it's human nature - the foam theory is the simplest explanation (even if it doesn't make logical sense) and it's one that we can visually see with our own layman eyes (we've all seen the video of the foam hitting the wing).
The problem is the truth is almost never that simple when it comes to accidents involving complex and highly redundant systems. NASA is obviously having a hard time believing a 2 foot, 2 pound piece of foam could bring down such a technologically advanced piece of engineering (and yes, it was technologically advanced - much of Columbia's heat shielding, including the leading edges of the wings, was replaced with state of the art materials in 1999). I am having a hard time believing it too.
Anyone who has ever read a major aircraft disaster report from the NTSB knows that it is almost always a series of highly implausible events that conspire to cause disaster. Any one of these events would be remote; the chances of them coming together in the way they did would be almost impossible (but not completely impossible). This is the way it almost always is. We know that several shuttles - including Columbia - have been hit in their wings by launch debris in the past and suffered no ill effects. Why do we all suddenly want to believe that same debris brought the shuttle down this time? I don't believe it.
I do believe it could be part of the answer, though not the full answer. I believe it's possible (and I'm sure NASA's looking into this, among other things) that the foam hit was the first in a series of problems that compounded upon each other to eventually cause disaster. If it hit in exactly the correct (or incorrect) spot, where a fault already existed, then that's a different story. I know NASA's looking at the procedures used in the Columbia's last overhaul, for example (it's flown only once since then). In that case, the foam hit wouldn't be the cause of the accident - the faulty overhaul of the heat shielding would be. But NASA's looking at a lot of things, and I'm just speculating here, like all the rest of us.
The point is, NASA is an organization of scientists. They wouldn't know how to spin if they tried. They're looking at things analytically and none of their computer models are telling them that the foam by itself could bring the shuttle down. Who are you to argue with them? You'd think on this site, of all places, people would understand that scientists don't go rushing and jumping to conclusions - they examine all the possibilities and analyze everything very methodically. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't "want us to believe". I'm sure if they weren't so focused on their job at hand right now they'd be laughing at what so many of us apparently want to believe, whether or not there's actually any evidence to support our "theory".
I admit I'm a noob, but I haven't had very good luck with 9.1 so far. I desperately want to run a Linux desktop and I'd heard Mandrake was the easiest (which it still may be for all I know - just because it's hard for me doesn't mean the others aren't harder). But so far, here are the problems I've had starting with 9.0 and now actually getting worse in 9.1:
1. Network doesn't work. This is new in 9.1 RC1. It worked in the betas and in 9.0, but doesn't in RC1. I have heard various workarounds but being a noob haven't really tried getting my hands dirty yet. It detects my card but does not connect to the net, and will not even connect to my router (so it's not just an internet thing).
2. Font import doesn't work. This has never worked for me, in any Mandrake release. I have pared my Windows fonts down to the minimum and it still hangs at various points during the import - hangs to the point where I need to restart the system in order to kill the process.
3. Mounting of pretty much anything other than the Linux partition on my hard drive takes about 10 minutes, as does doing any operation at all once mounted. This includes simply listening to a CD, or browsing my pictures on my Windows partition. Again, just trying to listen to a CD last night necessitated a reboot.
Any one of these is almost enough to get me to give up on Linux as a whole for now. Windows, for now, is much more useful as a desktop, however "easy" Mandrake is to use. I've spent almost 100% of my time with Mandrake so far just trying to get it set up, and I still can't get some pretty important things to work at all. I hope Mandrake and other distros continue to improve to the point where a newbie like me can actually use them, but I don't think we're at that point yet.
Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?
About 5 minutes... you do realize you can Ebay the real thing for not much more (if any) than that, right? (Sure, it costs a bit more to buy one with a collection of games, but not much.) I can understand the appeal of having something that takes up less space, but really, when half the games in that 10-in-1 were paddle games anyway, I'd rather have the real thing. You can never replicate the feeling of slapping a cartridge in a real 2600, switching your RF switchbox over to "game" and sitting there playing in front of that big, ugly piece of woodgrain.
This reminds me of the manga success thread of a few days ago. You have to understand that arcades ("game centers" is what they're called in Japan) are very different over there than they are here. The industry as a whole is not doing all that great there either, but Sega has been one of the few profitable companies in terms of their arcade business in Japan and I'm sure this is what attracted Sammy to them. Why?
Pachinko is big game center business in Japan. Seriously, it's a perfect match. Every major game center in Japan has a large section devoted to pachinko, including many Sega game centers (such as the multi-story monstrosity in Akihabara, which has an entire floor of pachinko machines). These are generally not "real" pachinko machines in that you don't actually gamble, but the real thing is extremely popular as well with a pachinko parlor seemingly on about every other block in some towns. The point being we may laugh at pachinko - but the Japanese don't. It'd be the equivalent of making slot machines legal in every municipality in this country - they'd sprout up like weeds all over the place. Pachinko is just the way Japanese people gamble mechanically, and pachinko and "regular" arcade machines are very closely related there.
Also, as has been mentioned, Sammy is not just a pachinko company. They just released Guilty Gear X2 in this country, which is doing quite well and has gotten a lot of good reviews. This is an old-school 2D fighter with modern visuals, and I think this also fits in with Sega's arcade business very well. It also obviously gives Sammy a new distribution channel for home consoles, along with a respected game development studio. Sammy Studios now just becomes another of Sega's development teams - which is great for Sega and Sammy both. 2D fighting is still quite popular in Japan and Sega really didn't have any major franchises in that area before.
As to what else it gives Sega... money, I would guess. They just revised downward their forecasts by 90%. 90%! That's huge. They have not made the transition to 3rd party developer smoothly at all, and their stock price has dropped by about 80% from its highs of a few months ago. They were in need of a white knight. I'm personally glad it was Sammy and not Microsoft, as unexpected as it was. They were increasingly vulnerable and now they are less vulnerable - I don't think Microsoft would be interested in acquiring Sammy, and I don't at all think this is the mysterious unnamed Japanese company that MS is invested in (I continue to believe that company is Tecmo).
Am I the only one that sees how freakin' poetic this is? This card was touted as the first real tangible result of the marriage between NVidia and 3Dfx (one of the reasons for the "FX" moniker, supposedly), and the company's having the exact same problems as 3Dfx did with their Voodoo 4 and 5's. Namely, that they're not as fast as people expected, they use too much power and generate too much heat. And their competition is passing them by.
Still, I don't see NVidia in the same precarious position as 3Dfx was at the time. NVidia likes to point out that after the latest Radeons were released by ATI, NVidia's market share actually went up, not down. The super-performance market is actually a very small market, and NVidia still offers the best value out there for mainstream users in the GeForce 4 Ti4200. For most people, the extra $250 they'd spend on a Radeon 9700 Pro vs. a Ti4200 is just not worth it - the extra few frames per second you'd get in most games are generally not even that noticeable, and there are a lot of better ways to spend that money. I don't really think NVidia's got a lot to worry about, then - unless the performance gulf and manufacturing problems become so pronounced that public perception (or misperception) filters down to even the mainstream products (as has been ATI's bugaboo over the years).
Still, it looks like the GeForce FX has been NVidia's first real dud in some time. No doubt the "stock" FX 5800's will be a good value once the NV35 is released (just as the Ti4200's are a good value now), but at the moment the card doesn't seem to really fit in any niche. Performance gamers will choose the Radeon 9700 Pro, mainstream gamers will choose the Ti4200, and low-end or business users will continue choosing ultra low-cost but perfectly capable cards like the GeForce 2 Ti.
Is Infogrames producing any hardware?
No. The "other half" of Atari ceased to exist long ago, and Infogrames owns only the IP - not the offices Atari used to be headquartered in, not the employees that used to work there. There is no more "Atari" as a functioning entity - not even as a division of Infogrames. It is simply a name they slap on what they consider their "high end" games - most of which to this point have actually been developed outside the company (and in fact were in development before the purchase of Atari's IP from Hasbro).
Infogrames does not even do a very good job of branding the Atari name. I work at a game publisher with a setup similar to what Infogrames has (central company with several different "labels") and we would never, ever put our parent company name anywhere on one of our labeled games - we keep the labels pure, and each has a distinct identity and to anyone on the outside probably feels like a separate company. Yet on "Atari" games these days all you generally see of Atari is the logo on the packaging and at startup - but there are still Infogrames logos and information plastered all over the place in the manuals, on the web sites, in the advertising, etc. It's very transparent that this is simply an Infogrames brand, and that the games are simply Infogrames games. There's no sense that the name "Atari" actually means anything - it doesn't, but they could at least do a better job at making it seem like it does.
As for hardware, it'd be cool to see an Atari-branded console again but a) it'll never happen, and b) if it does, this is not the same Atari. It'd be an Infogrames console in reality and everyone would know it.
It's a shame about Midway West too. This was not some one-hit wonder - anyone remember Marble Madness? Crystal Castles? A.P.B.? Paperboy? Not to mention Pong. Atari Games' list of arcade hits is nearly endless and goes back further than any other arcade manufacturer's. All the way up to the early 1990's, they were one of the dominant developers of arcade hardware and hit games.
The New York Times has done a great job of bungling the Columbia story completely. First it was their lock-on to the foam theory, which has been all but discounted by NASA over the past couple days. It could still resurface, but if NASA's engineers with all their sophisticated computer modeling don't believe it, I don't believe it either - and I certainly don't believe the Times' journalists are more capable engineers than NASA's are. Now it's all this talk about Columbia's "outdated" computers - the implication being this thing was too old to fly, and that technology has passed it by.
Problem is, Columbia has been overhauled three times in the past twenty years, most recently in 1999, when it had a brand new glass cockpit installed, its heat shielding and many other components upgraded, and every inch of its wiring inspected. This in addition to the upgrades during the two previous overhauls.
In reality, this was probably the newest shuttle in the fleet. Its computers, avionics, and heat shielding were second to no other shuttle - only the Atlantis, which is the only other shuttle to go through this latest overhaul, matched Columbia in technology. I therefore have a hard time believing the computers were responsible for this accident. I have a hard time believing the heat shielding was responsible for this accident too. These were not old tiles, and this was not outdated shielding technology.
My feeling is this will come down to human error, as most of these things do. From what I understand, one of the new parts installed on Columbia in 1999 was upgraded heat shielding on the leading edges of the wing. Who's to say there wasn't a microscopic crack in this new shielding that was not detected and failed after a period of time, similar to what caused the UAL DC-10 crash in Sioux City a while back (a microscopic flaw in an engine part went undetected for more than 10 years before it finally failed in spectacular fashion). Who's to say this shielding wasn't installed or maintained improperly? (I have a difficult time believing this, but then most accidents of this magnitude are the result of difficult-to-believe events.) Who's to say there wasn't a *software* bug in the *new* flight systems, which only a particular set of peculiar events brought out on this particular flight? (Say, a bit of yaw, which the system over-compensated for and led to an oscillation that eventually ripped the ship apart.)
In any case, the NY Times is on the wrong track with this, and the whole idea of the Columbia containing all this obsolete technology needs to be dropped. The Columbia had leading-edge technology where it needed it, reliable and proven technology elsewhere. That's the same combination every new aircraft or spacecraft built today aspires to have. There's nothing anyone could complain about with regard to Columbia's technology.
Even those who purport to understand Japanese culture around here (and then proceed to talk about manga as child porn) are so off base I just had to act...
The Japanese consider their culture to be nearly impenetrable to westerners. Even if you go in with an extremely open mind, there are many aspects to the culture that we, as westerners, could probably never understand. Simple direct observation of the culture from within (yes, you have to actually *go* to Japan to understand this) along with said open mind doesn't hurt, though, and having a Japanese wife certainly helps too.
Looking at manga in terms of western comics is completely misguided from the start. Manga in Japan is simply the way quite a lot of literature is presented to the public; it's the accepted method of reading most less serious fiction and non-fiction for both children *and* adults. How-to books, instruction manuals, even novels come packaged in the same artful style and the variety of subjects is endless. There's not what you would even call a "manga industry" in Japan in the same way as there is a "comic industry" in the US - the manga industry is simply the Japanese publishing industry. They obviously have non-illustrated books too, but illustrated literature is a standard, accepted form of literature in a way that it is not here. Manga in Japan is quite literally everywhere - it's not something you go to the "manga shop" to buy. You couldn't get away from it if you tried.
Many of the causes for manga's success listed in the linked article are actually effects. The fact that there is so much variety in subject matter is less a reason for success than it is an effect of the cultural acceptance of the legitimacy of illustrated literature. The Japanese are very visual people, and I would argue that their alphabet itself - which is itself entirely symbolic - is one of the root causes for this. In other Asian countries you see similar phenomena (illustrated literature is very popular in Korea as well, for example). The Japanese are used to looking at iconography and determining meaning from it - it is necessary for them to get through life - whereas we largely are not. I would argue our brains are wired more for conceptual analysis than iconographic analysis; we assign meaning from text and speech rather than visuals.
It's also completely untrue that there's no collector culture in Japan. The fact that many "manga" books are disposable doesn't mean they all are. You may buy a disposable paperback at an airpot to read on an airplane here but that doesn't mean that hardcover first printing of "A Farewall to Arms" you've got at home is in the same category. Again, this just shows a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the fact that the "manga industry" is simply the publishing industry in Japan - the variety in manga extends not just to the subject matter but also to the durability of the literature. My wife has illustrated books of Miyazaki stories that she's had since she was a kid, and most Japanese people I know are the same way. And these are not even otaku - hardcore fans - who actively collect as much of this stuff as they can.
Anyway, the main point is that it's a mistake to look at anything in Japan through western eyes. You need to at least *try* to look through Japanese eyes, as impossible as that is. There are things you can at least begin to understand if you attempt to delve deeply into the culture, but you'll never get close if you insist on looking through our perspective.
"This is all in today's NYT and my local paper (which goes to bed later than our edition of the Times as I'm on the West Coast) and all comes straight from NASA."
Actually, you said yourself it's coming straight from the NY Times. As someone else mentioned, the press has already made up their mind about this and the NYT is just as capable of spinning a story as anyone. I've been watching the actual NASA press conference - the only way to get news "straight from NASA" - and like any good investigators they say they've ruled nothing out, the foam is a candidate but it's not the only candidate and it doesn't explain the breakup. Hence my post. Just because the media is focusing on one particular part of one particular statement NASA's made doesn't mean it's the only theory.
I think the term "root cause" is also important. NASA has said they're looking at this as a possible "root cause", which does not mean there is direct causality. It means it could be the catalyst for a chain of events, as I also mentioned.
Take the Challenger accident, for example. The root cause of that accident was the design of the O-rings. The direct cause was the solid rocket booster tilting itself into the fuel tank. A lot of implausible stuff had to happen in a certain way to get from point A to point B in that chain - otherwise it would have happened on day 1 of the shuttle program.
I've started to wonder if the insulation hit isn't a red herring. NASA themselves have said it doesn't explain the breakup - that there's a "missing link" (their exact words) that they've yet to find. The temperature on the left wing only rose by about 40 degrees despite 3,000 degree temperatures outside the shuttle - which doesn't sound to me like there was much tile missing. The Atlantis, I believe, was hit in much the same way as the Columbia was on an earlier launch and showed no ill effects. And the Columbia itself lost more than 100 tiles from its nose area on one flight and still made it home fine.
I could very well be wrong, but I would almost bet at this moment that the foam hit on launch is mostly a coincidence - or at most the beginning of a long chain of implausible events that preyed on some other, pre-existing fault. This is the case with most airplane disasters, where it's rarely one single problem but rather an entire series of highly implausible but still possible events that coincide in an extremely unlucky chain. The shuttle is not as fragile as some people are making it out to be right now; it was built to withstand the repeated abuse of the shock of liftoff and the heat of re-entry over many, many years and many, many cycles. The Columbia in particular was also just recently refurbished and had its heat shielding inspected and, where appropriate, upgraded to the latest materials available. It does not sound to me like a piece of foam hitting it at launch alone could bring it down - there has to be something more, and NASA seems to agree with their "missing link" statement.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Plenty of "weird games" still out there. You could be playing games like this, this, or this. Or even this.
I'm as big a fan of old-school gaming as anyone and still have my Atari 2600 hooked up. But there are just as many offbeat games now as there always were - and not every game back in the old days was all that innovative either (like now, most of them ripped off formulaic concepts). It's just that we don't remember the crappy games, despite the fact that they made up the bulk of the Atari 2600's 1000+ game library. There was a reason for the crash of 1984, after all - a deluge of junk on the market.
A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas. I would argue that the big guys are better at breaking their own formulas than any inexperienced, underfunded "little guy" ever could be - it's just that when they do, the games don't sell. Can you blame EA for putting out Madden 200X every year when a game like Rez sells fewer than 10,000 copies and Vib Ribbon isn't even released here for lack of interest?
News flash! Linux distributors promote Linux! Wonders never cease!
Seriously, why is this even newsworthy? This is what I'd expect these companies to do. About the only thing remotely interesting about this story is the shunning of Lindows, which is becoming more and more of a community bastard child by the day. When I read the headline here at first I was expecting to see a consortium led by the likes of IBM and HP - which would be a pretty important news story - but I don't think a bunch of Linux distributors getting together to promote their own wares is much to get all excited about.
We all (should) know that Linux has quite a ways to go as a desktop OS anyway, though most of the work needed is on interface and ease of use issues these days. It's making progress, but it's a bit too soon to really start promoting it as a Windows replacement for average users (despite what a lot of the zealots around here are probably going to say).
I'm sorry, but this is more than $500 million MS has lost so far on Xbox, and that is big news no matter how you slice it. Does anyone honestly think MS got into this business in order to lose money? What would be the point? There are two possible reasons for MS to have gotten into the video game business, and only two:
1. To make profits. This is self explanatory.
2. To use the system to leverage their Windows business somehow, selling the system at a loss in order to eventually put some modified version of Media Center in your living room.
They're failing at #1, and as far a I know, #2 would be illegal - it's basically exactly what they were found guilty of in court already.
No company can continue to lose money at something forever. I'm sorry, but this is a publicly traded company and if I were holding MS shares there's not really anything MS could do at this point to convince me that getting into this business has been a good idea. Sony's profitable, Nintendo's profitable, MS is losing *large* amounts of money. What's wrong with this picture?
Almost lost in this story is that MS is now saying they're barely going to hit the low end of their sales forecasts. You think they expected to lose $384 million? They probably wouldn't have if they'd sold as many consoles as they'd hoped - this means less software sold, and fewer royalty payments. The fact is the Xbox is not doing well, however MS wants to spin it.
And regarding this Japanese company they're "propping up" - I would honestly doubt it's Sega, though it's possible. However, all of Sega's recently-released Xbox games were announced over a year ago (at the E3 prior to the Xbox's launch), and the only recent Xbox game I can recall being announced by Sega is Virtua Cop 3. That's honestly not a lot of support. More likely, the investment is in Tecmo - which has been devoting almost exclusive support to Xbox ever since its release, and which has two of the highest-profile titles ever released for the console - Dead or Alive 3 and Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, not to mention the recently announced Dead or Alive: Code Cronus and the hinted-at Dead or Alive 4. All Xbox-exclusive. Sega, by contrast, hasn't released any million-sellers for Xbox, not even close, and hasn't announced much for the system lately.
This article had my rapt attention until I got up to this:
"So far, the company has found the only drawback of adding too much AMP to their coffees, either in the mug or the grinds, is that it generates the taste of raw fish in your mouth, said scientist Stephen Gravina, Linguagen's associate director."
Ok, so the coffee's not bitter, but instead it tastes like raw fish. This is an improvement?
And yes, I realize it says that's only if you don't use the AMP properly. But coffee's only bitter if you don't make it properly too. If I had to choose between the two tastes of a bad brew - bitterness or the taste of raw fish - I don't even need to think about which one is worse.
And that's just from the first third of the article (cuz I'm getting sick of this). Come on, people. These 3 paragraphs may seem convincing to people who don't have training in logic and statistics, but /. readers are supposed to be geeks. (Actually, only the third one really needs statistical reasoning; the other two should be obvious to anyone.)
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position. In that sense, I don't believe it was really all that helpful as it's probably going to have nothing more than a "blah blah blah, we've heard this all before" effect on its intended audience.
The article was 5 quite lengthy pages long, and much of it was alternately contradictory and repetitive (many of the same supporting points are used several times over to buttress different, conflicting main points). The author needs an editor. Pick one or two major arguments that don't conflict, support the heck out of them and leave it at that. This thing should have been 2 pages long at most.
Which is not to say that the basic gist of what he's saying isn't true - we all know it is, and this is why it's so annoying that his contradictions will probably relegate his ramblings to the realm of the rest of us crackpots among his peers. The music industry is in the early stages of a major upheaval, and as the author says, if these companies don't make the necessary changes themselves, somebody more powerful than them will buy them up and do it for them.
Sony will be the interesting company to watch over the next couple years, because as they go, likely so will the rest of the music industry. Sony is a mish-mash of competing interests but their electronics, computer, and game divisions collectively dwarf their music division (and their film division, for that matter). At the moment it's a stalemate between the music and other divisions regarding how to handle DRM issues and "piracy" (which the author rightly points out is a misused term these days), but I fully expect that, like any business, if Sony as a whole sees the music division dragging down their overall profitability (as it is right now), they'll do what it takes to right the ship. That means drastically restructuring how music publishing works for them in the end, as it will eventually become apparent that none of the current band-aid solutions is working. The only question is how they accomplish this - but I fully expect to see non-DRM MP3 players from them fairly soon, and some form of capitulation from Sony Music, which will then be integrated into a re-organized company in a completely new way.
I especially expect this to happen as Sony's Japanese management takes a slightly different view on these issues than the RIAA and even Sony America. Other music publishers will either follow Sony's lead, or get bought up by software or technology companies that will force Sony's new business model upon them. Either way, I believe we're close to the point (within the next 2-3 years) where all the little thumbs stuck in the dyke will no longer be enough to stem the tide and major, major changes will take place in the music industry, one way or another. And I strongly believe it'll be Sony leading the way.
Put any DVD you own in your DVD player and bring up the subtitle menu. I can almost guarantee one of the options will be English subtitles. There are several obvious reasons for this, especially on an Asian DVD:
1. Captions for the hearing-impaired
2. Subtitles for those who can speak and understand English, but not all that well.
My wife, when she first came to this country, fell into the 2nd category and nearly always watched English subtitles on English language DVD's to help her understand.
It could still be a hoax, but it could just as easily not be. The fact that there are English subtitles on an English language film is no proof of anything, and the fact that they're done badly isn't either.
Also, my roommate's talking about Neo Geo, which I recall in name only. Any thoughts on that? I'm FASCINATED.
I would guess you're talking about the Neo Geo AES, the home version of their arcade hardware. These things still fetch a pretty penny on eBay, and with good reason. First of all, they sold for $700 initially just like the 3DO. Secondly, despite what a lot of people think the system is still being supported by developers and in fact has had one of the longest lifespans of any console (the last game I know of - Rage of the Dragons - was released in Sept. 2002. The system these days generally gets about 2-4 new games per year). SNK never intended this system to be mass-market - it was always a niche console. It was priced to be profitable right from the start, as were the games, which sold for $300 and up initially and still do. The idea was to generate buzz for the company's arcade business by getting systems into the hands of high-class buyers who would then spread word of mouth about the games and drive people to the arcades where average people could afford to play them - the exact opposite of what most other arcade publishers do today.
The reason for the high game prices? The games were literally the exact same games as you'd find in the arcade. Only the pin-outs of the carts were different (in fact, you can buy adapters now so that you can use the cheaper arcade carts in your home AES system). Lots and lots of RAM, and this back in the day when RAM was not cheap. As RAM came down in price, the games didn't because SNK just kept adding more memory to the games.
A CD-based system was released several years after the AES in order to try to make it more mass-market. But it still wasn't really supposed to compete with the likes of the PlayStation or Saturn - more to just satisfy less cash-rich Neo Geo fans and open up new lines of revenue. The system was still expensive, though the games dropped to around $50. Load times were a major problem, though, and real Neo Geo afficionados avoided the system because of the lack of arcade perfection. Some games were actually enhanced with new redbook audio, but again, it was arcade-perfection that Neo Geo fans wanted. The system was a failure even by SNK's modest standards. (A second version of the system was released to try to fix some of its problems, but it didn't really help.)
There is still a large and thriving Neo Geo community - as you'd expect from a fully alive and thriving console. Neo Geo systems are no longer produced and SNK themselves went bankrupt about a year ago - but not because of the AES system (their arcade business - the core part of the company - fell apart). The system itself, though, is still supported with new titles periodically and is considered by many probably the best 2D system ever. That is, of course, if you're a fan of Neo Geo games - there's always a debate among the "classic gaming" community as to whether SNK ever actually put out any good games or not (most of them were fighting games that didn't differ all that much, though I personally find more variety in the company's titles than most, and enjoy a lot of the smaller, lesser-known games that the company released).
As a Neo Geo owner I have to say that it's still one serious system. Everything about it just feels quality - at least if you have one of the original packages with the old-style large controllers. It's a large system but doesn't look it - with its clean, elegant, bat-wedge design. The cartridges are absolutely monstrous and most of them come in high-quality clamshell cases. Holding one in your hand is like holding a brick. Truly a unique system and one that I definitely recommend owning - no way it belongs on this list of failures.