Jeeze people, it's like every single law enacted somehow infringes on your "rights". Be a little bit reasonable - learn to differentiate the really important, infringing laws from those that *do* actually make some sense. There's no "right" to design a roller coaster that does more than 5G's - there are all sorts of laws regarding what can and can't be built in this country and without them we'd have all sorts of collapsing buildings and roller coasters running off the tracks (as we used to have many years ago).
Any coaster designer will tell you that they don't want to exceed 5 G's anyway. There's a limit to what the average human body can take for longer than a second - astronauts and air force pilots don't count, as it's possible to train the body to accept more and that's exactly what they do. Average humans, though, can't take 5 G's for more than a few moments - it's not just a matter of brain injury, it's a matter of nausea, headaches, and other unpleasant things.
I rode on Batman and Robin: The Chiller at Great Adventure for the first time this summer - that's the only coaster I know that exceeds 5G's (no, none of the other coasters at Great Adventure do, to whoever brought that up). I thought I was going to die afterwards. My brain felt like it was stuck in my stomach for about an hour afterwards - it very nearly ruined my day. I'm not normally squeamish on coasters either - we rode every single other coaster at GA that day (Medusa three times) and had no other problems.
Some people have a higher threshold than I do I'm sure, but 5G's is pretty much the accepted limit among coaster designers so I don't see the problem here. It's not as if you're not going to enjoy the ride if it's less than that - chances are you'll enjoy it more (and you all have been - very, very few coasters in the world exceed 5G's as it is).
If you think the telecom company is not responsible for the content then you have missed the point. You think DoCoMo got all their content by chance? No, they got it through a hugely innovative revenue-sharing system with content creators, which ensured both DoCoMo and the content creator profited while at the same time keeping the prices for consumers very low (i-Mode pricing starts at less than 3 bucks a month!). DoCoMo works directly with the largest content providers to ensure that they have up to date information available and that their pages look and work perfectly on their phones, and they make it extremely easy for smaller content providers (which make up the bulk of the i-Mode web service) to create and submit i-Mode sites to the company. They even make it easy for individuals to collect their own content fees through the service! It's the 60,000+ i-Mode sites that sprung up as a result of this - which are easy enough for almost anyone to create (hey, if Apple can get people to make movies, Sprint could get people to create i-Mode type sites - it's no more difficult), that have driven the subscription base and created the demand that you claim "isn't here" in the U.S.
I would suggest doing a little research on how DoCoMo's business model works, because it's not the way any American telco's business model works, and it should be. Wired Magazine did a lengthy article on the reasons for i-Mode's success a while back in their Japan issue - at least check that out.
But you really can't understand the Japanese wireless experience without going to Japan and seeing it. It's taken for granted there as the most effective way of communication there, and it's all aimed squarely at consumers, not businesses (after all, businessmen are consumers too - get them to subscribe personally, and they'll be more apt to consider the service for their business). It's not just i-Mode anymore either, it's J-phone and Tsu-ka too. They're all doing similar things now. And don't give me that bullshit about public transportation - I live in New York City, and you're going to tell me about public transportation? There are more people that ride the subways in New York City on any given day than subscribe to all the wireless web services available in this country combined. Clam up with your lame excuses as to why wireless isn't working in this country - it is the telco's fault(s).
Why do American companies seem to so not get this whole wireless thing? It's about consumers, and it's about content, stupid! Do these idiots think 30 million people in Japan signed up for i-Mode to play Cyracer or to access Google? Gimme a break! If you look at the wealth of content available on i-Mode, its pricing structure, its marketing (for God's sake, somebody please emulate DoCoMo's marketing, as they're obviously the only telecom company in the world that understands what the term means), then the essence of the thing and its success slowly starts to sink in.
To use one of DoCoMo's own failures in support of my argument, just look at the slow rate of adoption of 3G in Japan. Nobody cares about data speeds on cel phones, they care about content and pricing.
To paraphrase that famous Roman General Maximus, "DoCoMo had a vision that is wireless, and this is not it. This is not it." And neither is m-Mode, AT&T's poor attempt at an i-Mode knockoff, I'm sorry to say.
When Nintendo unveiled the GameCube at their Spaceworld event in Japan in 2000, one of the technologies touted was Bluetooth. I was there - they had it projected up on a big screen (along with a list of their technology partners - ATI, Panasonic, IBM, etc.), and when prompted in a Q&A session about it, stated vaguely that they were investigating various forms of wireless gaming. So they've been working on this for quite a while and always intended it to be part of the GameCube system. It's only natural that Sony would offer their input as well (and please, read the article - Nintendo and Sony aren't working together, they're offering their input individually to Motorola).
What's surprising to me is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be involving themselves at all in wireless network gaming. Considering the reported $1-$2 billion investment in Xbox Live, you'd think they'd be heartily working on a wireless option. In the end, MS may be the one looking like they're stuck in the stone ages - seems like Sony and Nintendo's plans are a bit more forward-thinking than most people thought (even though Nintendo's plan, at least, was really revealed 2 years ago).
It's called the heat island effect, and it happens everywhere, not just Tokyo. If you live in any sort of urban area you know the temperature is always 5 degrees or so hotter than it is in the suburbs. It's not only due to A/C, but also greenhouse gases (in fact, I'll bet it's more the exhaust coming out of A/C units and the gases contained in them that's the problem, rather than the direct heating of the air).
The Japanese are always doing crazy, innovative things to solve problems, though, so more power to them if they want to use water pipes to cool the city. But it's not just a problem in Tokyo - it's just as much a problem in New York and elsewhere (and it's not just because of A/C).
Who's lower, Acclaim for proposing this fake marketing blitz several months ago, or Slashdot for providing them with the free publicity it was designed to attract not once, but twice?
Not only is whoever posted this guilty of redundancy, he's also been scammed - a full 5 months after everybody else figured it out. D'oh! I guess what they say about nerds lacking a certain street common sense is true, eh?
My $170 Sony Clie can do all the things touted in this Simputer (and more, considering no Simputer software even exists). All of the applications I run are freeware, and there are thousands of them. How is this $200 Simputer with zero developer support and no tangible hardware benefits (to those who would actually be using it) an improvement over my Clie?
Granted, the ability to run apps in native Indian languages is a big plus. But perhaps these people should try to work with some of the larger hardware and software developers to try to get the Palm OS and some of the more popular apps ported over to their native language rather than trying to start from scratch with an all-new handheld that nobody seems to want?
It seems to me they're trying to reinvent the wheel here. We already have low-cost handhelds that do everything they're talking about here. All that's needed are some tweaks to tailor them to the Indian market.
I think the point was more that just because *you* have only used Photoshop to make a couple wallpapers doesn't make it not worth $600 anymore than the fact that you only drive a Jaguar to the grocery store makes it not worth $60,000. The fact is these are not the applications for which these products are created, so you're not in any position to judge their worth on that basis (and consequently use that judgement as a rationalization of piracy).
If you feel Photoshop is overpriced for what you want to do, but that you'd pay $50 for a program to make your wallpapers, there are plenty of programs that'll do that for that price. It doesn't give you a right to rip off Adobe.
Please note that the fast food article was a reprint from one of Japan's weeklies (similar to the Weekly World News) - it was not intended as truth. That section of Mainichi's web site is entertainment-oriented - it obviously confused quite a few Western readers, judging by the reaction to it at the time (I guess the UK-like phrasings used by some of these "Japanese" girls wasn't a big enough tip-off that the article was bogus).
This article, on the other hand, is a regular news article, and while there's not that much detail, it's definitely legit - but that's not to say the science is 100% perfect, as there's just not enough information here to really make a judgement.
I'm a web producer (not designer) for a major corporation and a lot of what I've seen written here about the way sites are produced is pretty ridiculous. Now, while I can't say how every company does things, there are obviously quite a few misconceptions about how developers and designers work.
For one thing, if anyone in my position assumes "I use IE, therefore everyone else does" (as I've seen someone quote here), they need to find another job. Simple as that. No producer/developer/designer thinks that way. It takes 2 seconds to check server logs or, more likely, the results of whatever tracking software the company happens to be using. Those server logs will more than likely show that more than 98% of users use IE (as ours do). This talk of developers making ridiculous assumptions sounds to me more like sour grapes from those using other browsers who are refusing to acknowledge the simple fact that IE *is* the dominant browser.
Now, that doesn't mean we consciously code for any particular browser. We code HTML primarily using Dreamweaver and Flash, with a bit of hand-tweaking along the way. Anyone who says Notepad is the best way to design a web site is stuck in the pre-frame, pre-table, pre-Flash, pre-html 4.0 days of around 1996. I mean you simply can't manage a large site by hand-coding - it's just not efficient, you'd waste countless man-hours. Time is money; we have to use graphical editors, and then we test on various browsers (including Mozilla) and if it works, we move on. If it doesn't, we fix it until it's perfect on IE and at least viewable on Mozilla. Given the dominance of IE, that's just the most time-efficient use of resources.
The point is developers and designers are neither as nefarious nor as stupid as a lot of people here think. Corporations exist to make money and one of the ways you ensure profits is by minimizing expenses. If we can make a site look right for 98% of our users, there's really no point spending hours and hours of wasted time trying to make it perfect for the remaining 2%. We've got other sites we've got to work on (we're constantly creating new sites for our various products). It has nothing to do with ignoring standards or purposely favoring IE... it has to do with balancing speed, quality, and satisfying the vast majority of our users.
Ironically, the use of Flash is reviled by some here but it's the one way you can ensure that absolutely everybody using any graphical browser sees the same thing. A Flash site in IE looks exactly the same as a Flash site in Mozilla. If you want a standard, there it is. Flash also allows for a lot more artistic freedom than pure html, and while I know a lot of you are old-school info-only types, the fact is not everything in the offline world is strictly text-based so there's no reason the online world needs to be either. Designing in Flash is the only way you get the same freedom as you do designing for print or for other forms of media. Obviously I'm aware of the limitations (search engines, etc.) but in some cases those limitations are far outweighed by the benefits. And one of Flash's benefits is standardization across browsers.
We have this already - it's called the SNK Neo Geo AES. Or the Atari Jaguar, if you want something *specifically* open-source (as opposed to that grey area when a company goes under). Hasbro released the rights to the Jaguar back when they owned Atari - it's now in the public domain.
In other words, given the runaway success the Jaguar *hasn't* been, I'm not sure this is a really workable idea.
"2. Why isn't this list adjusted for inflation?... It would be a better idea to adjust the movie grosses for inflation to reflect the true dollar value of the ticket sales. For example, ticket sales at present are $5 on average as compared to 50 cents in 1939 when Gone With the Wind (#30 on the list) was released. If one uses only the dollar sales as an indicator of a movie's ticket sales, the new movies would always come on top as against the movies released in the past.
It is too difficult to adjust for inflation as many of these films have been re-released over the years. The only way to calculate the true adjusted gross revenue (on a film which has been re-released) is to obtain the revenue from EACH YEAR that the movie was released (we don't have access to this information) & then multiply that dollar-amount by the inflationary-index vs. today's dollar.
In order to know the adjusted gross for (let's say) Disney's (original) "101 Dalmatians", you would have to know the revenue for the movie in 1961 x the 1961 adjusted dollar-value + the revenue for the movie when it was re-released in 1970 x the 1970 adjusted dollar-value +... the other 3 times it was re-released.
ALSO, the number of tickets sold is not counted... only the total gross ticket sales. "
The header here really needs the "3" removed - this is GTA: Vice City, not GTA3: Vice City. Read the press release. This is not an add-on, nor is it GTA3 redux. It's being built from the ground up, though it will obviously resemble GTA3 in terms of gameplay (it's a proven formula).
Sheesh, not only am I reading old news on Slashdot recently (Nintendo "announced" Metroid, Zelda, et. al months ago), now I'm reading erroneous news - when there's a press release right in front of you to refer to!
"Atari slit their throats by drastically cutting the price of thier Jaguar, 3D0 died this way and sega died this way.. Hell Nintendo has never resorted to price Whoring (yet) and they are all that is left from the big console wars of the late 80's early 90's."
Huh?? Uh, this is just the way the console world works. I bought my N64 for $129 - you think that was the launch price? No, the N64 had dropped in price by that point in time just the same as the SNES, NES, and every other console by every other manufacturer ever made has. This is just what happens when sales start to slow, competition starts to heat up and consumer expectations start to catch up with you. Console prices always drop - whether the console is a success or not (you're not going to sit there and tell me Sony slit their throat by dropping the price of the PSOne to $49 or that Atari did the same thing when the Atari 2600 hit that price 8 years after it had broken the 20 million unit sold barrier).
"Hell they survived their nintendo64 nightmare..."
Another bit of revisionism that's always bothered me... Nintendo sold more than 35 million N64's - just a slight bit fewer than the SNES - and made a huge amount of money on the system. The N64 was hardly a "nightmare" - it was a highly profitable system that sold quite a bit better than most people seem to think. In fact, it made a lot more money for Nintendo than the PS2 has so far for Sony, by a longshot. And that despite the "price whoring" you say Nintendo has never engaged in.
Nintendo is hardly a saint of a company - go back through history and they've engaged in their fair share of bullying and monopolistic business practices, for which they've repeatedly defended themselves in court (sometimes sucessfully, sometimes not). What they do know better than any other console manufacturer is how to make money. And that includes using price drops to entice customers.
Activision has been marketing this exact same idea for a while now - including 10 of their own Atari 2600 games as well as a few Imagic titles (some of the best available for the system). The titles in the Activision version are Pitfall, Atlantis, River Raid, Spider Fighter, Crackpots, Freeway, Tennis, Boxing, Ice Hockey, and Grand Prix. It looks like Infogrames may have just taken the idea and applied it to Atari first-party titles.
I can't find the Activision product at any online retailers I know of anymore, but there are plenty of Ebay auctions going on for it right now (just search for Atari 10-in-1).
"So, Microsoft decides to jump on the boat and they offer a console that is really nothing more than a repackaged desktop PC. Stock *everything* except for their pretty case. Microsoft sees Windows as "successful", and surely thought that if they do to the Xbox as with Windows, it too will be successful. That is to make it has huge and feature rich as they possibly can. Totally the wrong idea. It needs to fail so that game companies see quite clearly that this is no way to offer a console."
Obvious lack of historical knowledge here - quite a few game consoles have used essentially off-the-shelf PC parts. The Atari 2600 didn't have a custom chip in its body and it sold 29 million units (a ridiculously high number at the time). The ill-fated Atari 5200 was basically a repackaged Atari 400 computer, though that certainly wasn't what doomed it - its technical capabilities surpassed the competition at the time, but the horrible marketing and terrible controllers doomed it to failure. Most consoles throughout history have used at the very least some standard PC parts - and that's true of the PlayStation 2 and GameCube as well (PS2 employing a standard IDE drive interface, USB and FireWire ports and RDRAM memory; GameCube using a barely customized PowerPC CPU).
When the Xbox was first announced, many said using PC innards would give MS a cost advantage over the competition, and most praised it as a smart move. I still believe it's at the very least not the problem with the system - it's certainly not hurting it any more than it's what hurt the Atari 5200. No, the Xbox has plenty of real problems, just as the 5200 did - a lack of compelling & exclusive games, a huge honkin' case, controllers that feel like a couple of canned hams stuck together, and yes, the Microsoft name. Since when was it "cool" to say you owned a piece of Microsoft equipment? Video games are as much about pop culture as they are about technology or even games, and the Xbox may as well have been called the Geekbox. It's just not the console the cool kids play with. Good marketing may change that over time, but time is not on MS's side - without momentum, game developers will cease development, and a vicious downward spiral begins. That's probably already happening.
The thing about i-mode is that it's not a technology but simply a set of related services. In a sense, it's just a marketing buzzword for a collection of features that are appealing to consumers and have defined the cel phone experience in Japan. Sorta like what AT&T is already trying to do with Mlife here. So, in that way, you don't need to replicate it exactly in the US, since there's nothing precise upon which to base it in the first place. i-mode has been evolving since day one.
What unites all of i-mode's services and features is that they are all extremely easy to use, visually appealing and cheap by design - that includes the handsets (well, except for the "cheap" part), the user interfaces and the available i-mode "sites" (though DoCoMo is careful to *never* use internet terminology - calling i-mode the "wireless web" is fundamentally against what i-mode is all about). At the time i-mode was introduced, these features were all for the most part unique in Japan - as was the business model. But it was the ease of use and general friendliness of i-mode that caused it to catch on.
There's a well-known story about the head of DoCoMo getting the idea for i-mode by handing a random woman in a line a cel phone and asking her what was wrong with it - her answer was that she couldn't figure out how to use it. If AT&T's going to take the cop-out American attitude that they need to sell this service to business users first, they'll fail - i-mode was always a consumer-oriented service.
It's possible that even with significant changes AT&T could still get i-mode right, especially if they listen carefully to DoCoMo - who are pretty tuned in to why i-mode caught on the way it did in Japan. It's not about appealing to business users, and it's not about the "wireless web" - it's simply about connecting people to both each other as well as lots and lots of information and doing it in the easiest to use, most attractive and cheapest way possible. AT&T doesn't need to replicate the Japanese feature set precisely, but they do need to understand what makes i-mode i-mode as opposed to every other wireless web service out there.
Enermax has been selling selectable-speed 80mm case fans for a while now - plop one of these on top of an Alpha PAL8045 (a serious heat-sink in its own right) and you've got excellent cooling that's as quiet as you want it to be for high-speed CPU's. I run this setup myself (along with an Enermax Whisper PSU and another selectable-speed case fan) and my hard drive is much louder than my cooling system in my Athlon XP1700+. I can sleep well at night with this thing on.
Of course, any of these solutions are still simple stop-gaps, and you have to give some respect to Y.S. Tech for at least trying to prolong the lifespan of cheap air cooling. Eventually we'll reach a point where conventional fans and heatsinks just will not do the job (there's only so big you can make a heatsink, and only so fast you can spin a fan), and we'll need to turn to water-cooling (already gaining a foothold) or even a more advanced solution such as active refrigeration. These are, for now, high-cost, somewhat risky propositions however. But still, I think just plopping a bigger fan with speed control on top of a large heatsink would probably work just as well as this Y.S. Tech fan in terms of both cooling and noise control.
The entire concept of "consistency" in interface design is misguided from the start. The issue of "practicality" is an important one but it's certainly no less important than the issue of human individuality. If everything in life were designed for practicality above all else, and if everybody were forced into using all the same products for the sake of consistency, I'm not sure I'd really want to go on living. The issue of interface consistency is no different than the issue of whether or not we should all be forced to drive Nissan Sentras and paint our bedroom walls off-white. Please, somebody kill me if that happens.
This whole argument also completely ignores the fact that the user interface is increasingly moving off the desktop and onto the net - advanced Flash web sites and even html sites can have their own user interfaces that have nothing to do with the OS or programs you're running and that have their own learning curve to deal with. In fact, for my job, I'd say I deal more with web-based interfaces than I do with my OS interface. Is this guy really going to argue that every single web site, no matter what the content, should have the exact same interface for consistency's sake?
I couldn't really care less if somebody has to spend 10 minutes acclimating themselves to my own preferences on my own computer, and I accept that I will probably have to do the same if I use someone else's (how often *do* people use each other's computers, anyway?). I don't personally see what the big freakin' deal is, especially if skinning allows me and everybody else around me to feel just a little bit more expressive, creative, and downright human in what's increasingly becoming a sanitized and overly regulated world - especially at the office. If I want to put a friggin' Final Fantasy X wallpaper on my office computer, it isn't up to this guy to tell me a plain white background would somehow make me more "productive".
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Jeeze people, it's like every single law enacted somehow infringes on your "rights". Be a little bit reasonable - learn to differentiate the really important, infringing laws from those that *do* actually make some sense. There's no "right" to design a roller coaster that does more than 5G's - there are all sorts of laws regarding what can and can't be built in this country and without them we'd have all sorts of collapsing buildings and roller coasters running off the tracks (as we used to have many years ago).
Any coaster designer will tell you that they don't want to exceed 5 G's anyway. There's a limit to what the average human body can take for longer than a second - astronauts and air force pilots don't count, as it's possible to train the body to accept more and that's exactly what they do. Average humans, though, can't take 5 G's for more than a few moments - it's not just a matter of brain injury, it's a matter of nausea, headaches, and other unpleasant things.
I rode on Batman and Robin: The Chiller at Great Adventure for the first time this summer - that's the only coaster I know that exceeds 5G's (no, none of the other coasters at Great Adventure do, to whoever brought that up). I thought I was going to die afterwards. My brain felt like it was stuck in my stomach for about an hour afterwards - it very nearly ruined my day. I'm not normally squeamish on coasters either - we rode every single other coaster at GA that day (Medusa three times) and had no other problems.
Some people have a higher threshold than I do I'm sure, but 5G's is pretty much the accepted limit among coaster designers so I don't see the problem here. It's not as if you're not going to enjoy the ride if it's less than that - chances are you'll enjoy it more (and you all have been - very, very few coasters in the world exceed 5G's as it is).
If you think the telecom company is not responsible for the content then you have missed the point. You think DoCoMo got all their content by chance? No, they got it through a hugely innovative revenue-sharing system with content creators, which ensured both DoCoMo and the content creator profited while at the same time keeping the prices for consumers very low (i-Mode pricing starts at less than 3 bucks a month!). DoCoMo works directly with the largest content providers to ensure that they have up to date information available and that their pages look and work perfectly on their phones, and they make it extremely easy for smaller content providers (which make up the bulk of the i-Mode web service) to create and submit i-Mode sites to the company. They even make it easy for individuals to collect their own content fees through the service! It's the 60,000+ i-Mode sites that sprung up as a result of this - which are easy enough for almost anyone to create (hey, if Apple can get people to make movies, Sprint could get people to create i-Mode type sites - it's no more difficult), that have driven the subscription base and created the demand that you claim "isn't here" in the U.S.
I would suggest doing a little research on how DoCoMo's business model works, because it's not the way any American telco's business model works, and it should be. Wired Magazine did a lengthy article on the reasons for i-Mode's success a while back in their Japan issue - at least check that out.
But you really can't understand the Japanese wireless experience without going to Japan and seeing it. It's taken for granted there as the most effective way of communication there, and it's all aimed squarely at consumers, not businesses (after all, businessmen are consumers too - get them to subscribe personally, and they'll be more apt to consider the service for their business). It's not just i-Mode anymore either, it's J-phone and Tsu-ka too. They're all doing similar things now. And don't give me that bullshit about public transportation - I live in New York City, and you're going to tell me about public transportation? There are more people that ride the subways in New York City on any given day than subscribe to all the wireless web services available in this country combined. Clam up with your lame excuses as to why wireless isn't working in this country - it is the telco's fault(s).
Why do American companies seem to so not get this whole wireless thing? It's about consumers, and it's about content, stupid! Do these idiots think 30 million people in Japan signed up for i-Mode to play Cyracer or to access Google? Gimme a break! If you look at the wealth of content available on i-Mode, its pricing structure, its marketing (for God's sake, somebody please emulate DoCoMo's marketing, as they're obviously the only telecom company in the world that understands what the term means), then the essence of the thing and its success slowly starts to sink in.
To use one of DoCoMo's own failures in support of my argument, just look at the slow rate of adoption of 3G in Japan. Nobody cares about data speeds on cel phones, they care about content and pricing.
To paraphrase that famous Roman General Maximus, "DoCoMo had a vision that is wireless, and this is not it. This is not it." And neither is m-Mode, AT&T's poor attempt at an i-Mode knockoff, I'm sorry to say.
When Nintendo unveiled the GameCube at their Spaceworld event in Japan in 2000, one of the technologies touted was Bluetooth. I was there - they had it projected up on a big screen (along with a list of their technology partners - ATI, Panasonic, IBM, etc.), and when prompted in a Q&A session about it, stated vaguely that they were investigating various forms of wireless gaming. So they've been working on this for quite a while and always intended it to be part of the GameCube system. It's only natural that Sony would offer their input as well (and please, read the article - Nintendo and Sony aren't working together, they're offering their input individually to Motorola). What's surprising to me is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be involving themselves at all in wireless network gaming. Considering the reported $1-$2 billion investment in Xbox Live, you'd think they'd be heartily working on a wireless option. In the end, MS may be the one looking like they're stuck in the stone ages - seems like Sony and Nintendo's plans are a bit more forward-thinking than most people thought (even though Nintendo's plan, at least, was really revealed 2 years ago).
It's called the heat island effect, and it happens everywhere, not just Tokyo. If you live in any sort of urban area you know the temperature is always 5 degrees or so hotter than it is in the suburbs. It's not only due to A/C, but also greenhouse gases (in fact, I'll bet it's more the exhaust coming out of A/C units and the gases contained in them that's the problem, rather than the direct heating of the air).
The Japanese are always doing crazy, innovative things to solve problems, though, so more power to them if they want to use water pipes to cool the city. But it's not just a problem in Tokyo - it's just as much a problem in New York and elsewhere (and it's not just because of A/C).
Who's lower, Acclaim for proposing this fake marketing blitz several months ago, or Slashdot for providing them with the free publicity it was designed to attract not once, but twice?
Not only is whoever posted this guilty of redundancy, he's also been scammed - a full 5 months after everybody else figured it out. D'oh! I guess what they say about nerds lacking a certain street common sense is true, eh?
My $170 Sony Clie can do all the things touted in this Simputer (and more, considering no Simputer software even exists). All of the applications I run are freeware, and there are thousands of them. How is this $200 Simputer with zero developer support and no tangible hardware benefits (to those who would actually be using it) an improvement over my Clie?
Granted, the ability to run apps in native Indian languages is a big plus. But perhaps these people should try to work with some of the larger hardware and software developers to try to get the Palm OS and some of the more popular apps ported over to their native language rather than trying to start from scratch with an all-new handheld that nobody seems to want?
It seems to me they're trying to reinvent the wheel here. We already have low-cost handhelds that do everything they're talking about here. All that's needed are some tweaks to tailor them to the Indian market.
I think the point was more that just because *you* have only used Photoshop to make a couple wallpapers doesn't make it not worth $600 anymore than the fact that you only drive a Jaguar to the grocery store makes it not worth $60,000. The fact is these are not the applications for which these products are created, so you're not in any position to judge their worth on that basis (and consequently use that judgement as a rationalization of piracy).
If you feel Photoshop is overpriced for what you want to do, but that you'd pay $50 for a program to make your wallpapers, there are plenty of programs that'll do that for that price. It doesn't give you a right to rip off Adobe.
Please note that the fast food article was a reprint from one of Japan's weeklies (similar to the Weekly World News) - it was not intended as truth. That section of Mainichi's web site is entertainment-oriented - it obviously confused quite a few Western readers, judging by the reaction to it at the time (I guess the UK-like phrasings used by some of these "Japanese" girls wasn't a big enough tip-off that the article was bogus).
This article, on the other hand, is a regular news article, and while there's not that much detail, it's definitely legit - but that's not to say the science is 100% perfect, as there's just not enough information here to really make a judgement.
Er, I meant "we code our sites using dreamweaver and flash" - obviously, we're not coding HTML with Flash.
I'm a web producer (not designer) for a major corporation and a lot of what I've seen written here about the way sites are produced is pretty ridiculous. Now, while I can't say how every company does things, there are obviously quite a few misconceptions about how developers and designers work.
For one thing, if anyone in my position assumes "I use IE, therefore everyone else does" (as I've seen someone quote here), they need to find another job. Simple as that. No producer/developer/designer thinks that way. It takes 2 seconds to check server logs or, more likely, the results of whatever tracking software the company happens to be using. Those server logs will more than likely show that more than 98% of users use IE (as ours do). This talk of developers making ridiculous assumptions sounds to me more like sour grapes from those using other browsers who are refusing to acknowledge the simple fact that IE *is* the dominant browser.
Now, that doesn't mean we consciously code for any particular browser. We code HTML primarily using Dreamweaver and Flash, with a bit of hand-tweaking along the way. Anyone who says Notepad is the best way to design a web site is stuck in the pre-frame, pre-table, pre-Flash, pre-html 4.0 days of around 1996. I mean you simply can't manage a large site by hand-coding - it's just not efficient, you'd waste countless man-hours. Time is money; we have to use graphical editors, and then we test on various browsers (including Mozilla) and if it works, we move on. If it doesn't, we fix it until it's perfect on IE and at least viewable on Mozilla. Given the dominance of IE, that's just the most time-efficient use of resources.
The point is developers and designers are neither as nefarious nor as stupid as a lot of people here think. Corporations exist to make money and one of the ways you ensure profits is by minimizing expenses. If we can make a site look right for 98% of our users, there's really no point spending hours and hours of wasted time trying to make it perfect for the remaining 2%. We've got other sites we've got to work on (we're constantly creating new sites for our various products). It has nothing to do with ignoring standards or purposely favoring IE... it has to do with balancing speed, quality, and satisfying the vast majority of our users.
Ironically, the use of Flash is reviled by some here but it's the one way you can ensure that absolutely everybody using any graphical browser sees the same thing. A Flash site in IE looks exactly the same as a Flash site in Mozilla. If you want a standard, there it is. Flash also allows for a lot more artistic freedom than pure html, and while I know a lot of you are old-school info-only types, the fact is not everything in the offline world is strictly text-based so there's no reason the online world needs to be either. Designing in Flash is the only way you get the same freedom as you do designing for print or for other forms of media. Obviously I'm aware of the limitations (search engines, etc.) but in some cases those limitations are far outweighed by the benefits. And one of Flash's benefits is standardization across browsers.
We have this already - it's called the SNK Neo Geo AES. Or the Atari Jaguar, if you want something *specifically* open-source (as opposed to that grey area when a company goes under). Hasbro released the rights to the Jaguar back when they owned Atari - it's now in the public domain. In other words, given the runaway success the Jaguar *hasn't* been, I'm not sure this is a really workable idea.
"Many Dreamcasts were sold because of their hacking potential..."
I guess if your definition of "many" is "four or less"...
From Movieweb.com:
... It would be a better idea to adjust the movie grosses for inflation to reflect the true dollar value of the ticket sales. For example, ticket sales at present are $5 on average as compared to 50 cents in 1939 when Gone With the Wind (#30 on the list) was released. If one uses only the dollar sales as an indicator of a movie's ticket sales, the new movies would always come on top as against the movies released in the past.
... the other 3 times it was re-released.
ALSO, the number of tickets sold is not counted ... only the total gross ticket sales. "
"2. Why isn't this list adjusted for inflation?
It is too difficult to adjust for inflation as many of these films have been re-released over the years. The only way to calculate the true adjusted gross revenue (on a film which has been re-released) is to obtain the revenue from EACH YEAR that the movie was released (we don't have access to this information) & then multiply that dollar-amount by the inflationary-index vs. today's dollar.
In order to know the adjusted gross for (let's say) Disney's (original) "101 Dalmatians", you would have to know the revenue for the movie in 1961 x the 1961 adjusted dollar-value + the revenue for the movie when it was re-released in 1970 x the 1970 adjusted dollar-value +
Should give you an idea why this usually isn't done. Nevertheless: http://www.teako170.com/inflation.html
Has the original Star Wars listed at #2, adjusted for inflation (not very accurate, I'm sure, for the reasons listed above).
The header here really needs the "3" removed - this is GTA: Vice City, not GTA3: Vice City. Read the press release. This is not an add-on, nor is it GTA3 redux. It's being built from the ground up, though it will obviously resemble GTA3 in terms of gameplay (it's a proven formula). Sheesh, not only am I reading old news on Slashdot recently (Nintendo "announced" Metroid, Zelda, et. al months ago), now I'm reading erroneous news - when there's a press release right in front of you to refer to!
"Atari slit their throats by drastically cutting the price of thier Jaguar, 3D0 died this way and sega died this way.. Hell Nintendo has never resorted to price Whoring (yet) and they are all that is left from the big console wars of the late 80's early 90's."
Huh?? Uh, this is just the way the console world works. I bought my N64 for $129 - you think that was the launch price? No, the N64 had dropped in price by that point in time just the same as the SNES, NES, and every other console by every other manufacturer ever made has. This is just what happens when sales start to slow, competition starts to heat up and consumer expectations start to catch up with you. Console prices always drop - whether the console is a success or not (you're not going to sit there and tell me Sony slit their throat by dropping the price of the PSOne to $49 or that Atari did the same thing when the Atari 2600 hit that price 8 years after it had broken the 20 million unit sold barrier).
"Hell they survived their nintendo64 nightmare..."
Another bit of revisionism that's always bothered me... Nintendo sold more than 35 million N64's - just a slight bit fewer than the SNES - and made a huge amount of money on the system. The N64 was hardly a "nightmare" - it was a highly profitable system that sold quite a bit better than most people seem to think. In fact, it made a lot more money for Nintendo than the PS2 has so far for Sony, by a longshot. And that despite the "price whoring" you say Nintendo has never engaged in.
Nintendo is hardly a saint of a company - go back through history and they've engaged in their fair share of bullying and monopolistic business practices, for which they've repeatedly defended themselves in court (sometimes sucessfully, sometimes not). What they do know better than any other console manufacturer is how to make money. And that includes using price drops to entice customers.
Activision has been marketing this exact same idea for a while now - including 10 of their own Atari 2600 games as well as a few Imagic titles (some of the best available for the system). The titles in the Activision version are Pitfall, Atlantis, River Raid, Spider Fighter, Crackpots, Freeway, Tennis, Boxing, Ice Hockey, and Grand Prix. It looks like Infogrames may have just taken the idea and applied it to Atari first-party titles.
I can't find the Activision product at any online retailers I know of anymore, but there are plenty of Ebay auctions going on for it right now (just search for Atari 10-in-1).
When the Xbox was first announced, many said using PC innards would give MS a cost advantage over the competition, and most praised it as a smart move. I still believe it's at the very least not the problem with the system - it's certainly not hurting it any more than it's what hurt the Atari 5200. No, the Xbox has plenty of real problems, just as the 5200 did - a lack of compelling & exclusive games, a huge honkin' case, controllers that feel like a couple of canned hams stuck together, and yes, the Microsoft name. Since when was it "cool" to say you owned a piece of Microsoft equipment? Video games are as much about pop culture as they are about technology or even games, and the Xbox may as well have been called the Geekbox. It's just not the console the cool kids play with. Good marketing may change that over time, but time is not on MS's side - without momentum, game developers will cease development, and a vicious downward spiral begins. That's probably already happening.
"Now if only someone would write an integrated client that works across all the p2p networks."
Where are those Trillian guys when you need 'em?
The thing about i-mode is that it's not a technology but simply a set of related services. In a sense, it's just a marketing buzzword for a collection of features that are appealing to consumers and have defined the cel phone experience in Japan. Sorta like what AT&T is already trying to do with Mlife here. So, in that way, you don't need to replicate it exactly in the US, since there's nothing precise upon which to base it in the first place. i-mode has been evolving since day one.
What unites all of i-mode's services and features is that they are all extremely easy to use, visually appealing and cheap by design - that includes the handsets (well, except for the "cheap" part), the user interfaces and the available i-mode "sites" (though DoCoMo is careful to *never* use internet terminology - calling i-mode the "wireless web" is fundamentally against what i-mode is all about). At the time i-mode was introduced, these features were all for the most part unique in Japan - as was the business model. But it was the ease of use and general friendliness of i-mode that caused it to catch on.
There's a well-known story about the head of DoCoMo getting the idea for i-mode by handing a random woman in a line a cel phone and asking her what was wrong with it - her answer was that she couldn't figure out how to use it. If AT&T's going to take the cop-out American attitude that they need to sell this service to business users first, they'll fail - i-mode was always a consumer-oriented service.
It's possible that even with significant changes AT&T could still get i-mode right, especially if they listen carefully to DoCoMo - who are pretty tuned in to why i-mode caught on the way it did in Japan. It's not about appealing to business users, and it's not about the "wireless web" - it's simply about connecting people to both each other as well as lots and lots of information and doing it in the easiest to use, most attractive and cheapest way possible. AT&T doesn't need to replicate the Japanese feature set precisely, but they do need to understand what makes i-mode i-mode as opposed to every other wireless web service out there.
Enermax has been selling selectable-speed 80mm case fans for a while now - plop one of these on top of an Alpha PAL8045 (a serious heat-sink in its own right) and you've got excellent cooling that's as quiet as you want it to be for high-speed CPU's. I run this setup myself (along with an Enermax Whisper PSU and another selectable-speed case fan) and my hard drive is much louder than my cooling system in my Athlon XP1700+. I can sleep well at night with this thing on.
Of course, any of these solutions are still simple stop-gaps, and you have to give some respect to Y.S. Tech for at least trying to prolong the lifespan of cheap air cooling. Eventually we'll reach a point where conventional fans and heatsinks just will not do the job (there's only so big you can make a heatsink, and only so fast you can spin a fan), and we'll need to turn to water-cooling (already gaining a foothold) or even a more advanced solution such as active refrigeration. These are, for now, high-cost, somewhat risky propositions however. But still, I think just plopping a bigger fan with speed control on top of a large heatsink would probably work just as well as this Y.S. Tech fan in terms of both cooling and noise control.
The entire concept of "consistency" in interface design is misguided from the start. The issue of "practicality" is an important one but it's certainly no less important than the issue of human individuality. If everything in life were designed for practicality above all else, and if everybody were forced into using all the same products for the sake of consistency, I'm not sure I'd really want to go on living. The issue of interface consistency is no different than the issue of whether or not we should all be forced to drive Nissan Sentras and paint our bedroom walls off-white. Please, somebody kill me if that happens.
This whole argument also completely ignores the fact that the user interface is increasingly moving off the desktop and onto the net - advanced Flash web sites and even html sites can have their own user interfaces that have nothing to do with the OS or programs you're running and that have their own learning curve to deal with. In fact, for my job, I'd say I deal more with web-based interfaces than I do with my OS interface. Is this guy really going to argue that every single web site, no matter what the content, should have the exact same interface for consistency's sake?
I couldn't really care less if somebody has to spend 10 minutes acclimating themselves to my own preferences on my own computer, and I accept that I will probably have to do the same if I use someone else's (how often *do* people use each other's computers, anyway?). I don't personally see what the big freakin' deal is, especially if skinning allows me and everybody else around me to feel just a little bit more expressive, creative, and downright human in what's increasingly becoming a sanitized and overly regulated world - especially at the office. If I want to put a friggin' Final Fantasy X wallpaper on my office computer, it isn't up to this guy to tell me a plain white background would somehow make me more "productive".