That's the fault of the printer vendor, not the OS vendor.
And as a consumer, that distinction doesn't matter in the least. A printer that doesn't work is a printer that doesn't work. For Vista, the problem might be video cards instead of printers, or maybe OpenOffice will have issues. It's pretty hard to predict. 64-bit OSs, I've heard, break a lot of drivers. But the point is, I'll only experience this frustration if I try to do an in-place upgrade of my current rig. If I leave WinXP on my current rig, and buy all new equipment that's ready to work on Vista, then the upgrade won't be an issue.
BTW, in case you're wondering, I built my curren't rig about 3 years ago. I'll probably get Vista next summer after the industry has had a chance to get better aquainted with it. That'll make my current rig about 4 years old. Why on earth would I wan't to load up all that new stuff on such an old box? KVMs are cheap. It won't hurt my feelings one bit to not have to fight my equipment and software in order to succesfully upgrade in place.
TW
Re:Already losing interest.
on
Romero's New Gig
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Games are getting dumbed down to be playable and understandable by the most stupid of players and as result lose their charm, they stop appealing to more intelligent players.
This is a real problem in almost any entertainment medium. People have been complaining about this in movies and music for decades. In those mediums, the answer is underground or indy films/music. Luckily, we have something of an easier fix in gaming.
This problem with gaming is almost exclusively present in single-player, or cooperative multiplayer games. If the game maker has to judge how strong/hard to make enemies/puzzles, he often ends up going witht he lowest commen denomenator.
The fix is multiplayer. I've been getting my butt kicked time and time again at BF2. Those guys are talented and smart and they'll find very creative ways to use their environment for an advantage. These are the games that I think would most bennefit from fully-destructible and other ways that you can leave a mark on your environment. The ability to track, better ability to hide, and the ability to destroy hiding spots, etc. could all make games much more interesting, but they depend on the basic premis that your enemy is at least as intelligent as you.
The one big problem with multiplayer is that there's not enough work being done to pit enemys of similar skill against each other. In sports they have various leagues that seperate different skill levels, but in multiplayer I'm often playing against morons on one game or gods on another. Both can be frustrating.
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore. There are quite a few fields that could still create an original game. Quite a few might involve combat as an element, but I doubt any good combat-based game can be made anymore.
First off, new and good don't necessarily go hand in hand. I've played a lot of games that weren't exactly new, but were plenty of fun.
Secondly, I'm still pretty impressed by how much tweeks in a formula can change the gameing experience in an fun way. The gravity gun in Half Life 2, the green cloud that causes bullet time in SIN episodes and the combination of tanks, planes and infantry in Battlefield 2 were all new to me when I tried them and all were fun.
There's still much to be explored. Fully interactive and destructable environments? People claim they have it, but have you ever really seen it? I want to be able to blow out any wall with my tank, not just the few they say I can, and I want to see whole buildings collapse when I blow out too many of them. I want to be able to push vegitation out of the way. I want to be able to see where others broke off branches or trampled grass when passing by. Hell, I want to see just one shooter in my lifetime where you NEVER see anybody's legs sticking through a wall.
There's a lot to explore in the genre. I'll keep looking at them as long as they keep trying out new stuff.
It's a 1.4GHz box with a geforce 4 video card. That sucker screams when playing games of the Win98/WinME era. Most of 'em can be loaded just fine on my WinXP box, but it's painful for some of them.
Then you fucked something up on your XP install. My personal desktop is a 1Ghz machine that runs XP just fine and I regularly play older games (like Quake, QII) on it.
Yep. WinXP runs on my 800Mhz laptop, too. Win98 runs faster. It's simply a better user experience.
The "painful" part of the quoted sentence isn't about speed, it's that a significant number of older games, especially ones that were less popular, don't really like being loaded on XP. Sure, all of the more popular ones either have a patch or are handled nicely by "compatibility mode", but I have quite a few games that aren't really covered by either. Why beat my head against a wall when I have this nice install of Win98SE that works just fine?
Software, hadware and their host OS has a tendency to run in eras or dynasties. When a new OS comes out, there are always potential issues with previous software and hardware. The more popular stuff gets a patch, or runs in a compatibility mode or a virtual machine. But some software or hardware manufacturers never quite upgrade, or they make you use a whole new version, that you may actually like less, in order to run on the new OS. They often make you pay for the new version, too, even when they could have just put out a new driver.
Think about the transition from Win3.11 to Win95. Microsoft just made you buy a new Office suite. How many people found their multifunction printers didn't work under Win2K? And was the transition from WinME to WinXP a painless one?
To avoid these problems, I've found it very helpful to just keep the old dynasty and run both concurrently, rather than "switch" to a new one. There's always some overlap, but I generally let my Win98 era stuff stay on a Win98 era box and I enjoy my WinXP stuff on my WinXP box. Wen I "upgrade" to Vista, it'll be by getting a whole new machine. I'll keep my WinXP box intact rather than face frustration with drivers not loading and reinstalling all my software.
There are only three possible reasons not to upgrade from Windows 98:
1. Cannot justify the expense when Windows 98 works fine. 2. Need to run programs that don't work in newer versions of Windows. 3. Too lazy to care.
Reason #4: Win98 is fast.
Fast is relative, but if you have a mid-level computer you bought in 2000, Win98 is going to be quite peppy while WinXP will be sluggish at best. If you keep Win98 on that old box, then the old box runs just fine. It runs about as fast as the day you bought it. As long as it does what you need it to do (say, run Office '97), there's no reason to upgrade the OS and, in fact, "upgrading" will actually hurt you.
I keep an old Win98 computer at home to run older games (I know, I'm leaking reason #2 in here). It's a 1.4GHz box with a geforce 4 video card. That sucker screams when playing games of the Win98/WinME era. Most of 'em can be loaded just fine on my WinXP box, but it's painful for some of them. The ones that play just fine on both boxes become an instant LAN party with both boxes running at great speeds, while the ones that are not quite as nice about XP still have a home.
That's a separate matter, and has been legalised properly.
That's good to know. TFA was short on the facts of the case and I had thought this was all being lumped together.
Since the effects of copying for the edit end up being nearly identical to the legal method of editing these works, it would apear that hair-splitting legaleeze is being enforced it this case.
Sure, copying is illegal, but in an ethical sense these two methods are the same. It's too bad the law can't see it that way.
TW
P.S. Your method would be great. Everyone would win. I could ignore the "clean" version just as easily as I ignore the "full screen" versions of DVDs. However, I still believe that people should have more control over what they buy.
You make an excellent point. However, everyone can read my post. You've clearly labled yours as an edit. No one reading your post will believe that those words, in that context, are my intended message.
Furthermore, you've made me out to look stupid in a comical way. It's a farce or spoof. Those very much are legal and there's nothing I can do about it. Ever see "Hardware Wars" or "Troops"? These are consitutionally protected free speech.
Finaly, though you actually copyed my text, the people who make these edits often use technology that requires no copying whatsoever. They're capable of doing on-the-fly-edits. How on earth can this be a violation of copyright law if there is no copying?
I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Yes, it destroys the vision of the artist, but, ya know what? If I own the copy, it's my right to destroy it in whatever way I see fit. Personally, I paint funny glasses and mustaches on pictures of our president every chance I get. Lets hope no one lobbies to make that illegal because it destroys the vision and intended message of his campaign manager.
Well put, but misplaced. I absolutely care about getting the full version of the film on my DVD, and I care about the producers, directors, etc, getting propper credit for their work.
However, my understanding is that these edited films were well labled as modified and that patrons of these companies had a very good understanding that they weren't getting the theatrical release. Assuming that's the case, then I have a very hard time understanding what the problem is. This ruling is exactly the equivilant of me buying a book, then ripping out some pages I dislike, then reselling the book, clearly labled as missing pages, to a third party. Making that illegal is silly.
Oh, and by the way, what does this say about DJ remixes? People enjoy modified works. As long as the modification is happening on a per-unit basis and eveyone gets properly credited and paid, why are we trying to restrict this.
And even if I hadn't been able to find the MP3 you named on Google in three clicks, I'm not sure exactly how that would make Google "evil". Evil is when you contribute to human suffering, not when you don't index binary files on your text search engine.
Ok, maybe not evil, but not very helpful either. Many people claim that Google is the best search engine. What this story tends to indicate is that Yahoo beats it handily if you happen to be searching for MP3s. That means Google is either purposely screwing up their searches or that Yahoo is, in fact, the superior search engine. That latter is definately not evil, but the former is. I suffer when I can't find what I'm looking for. Either way, Google just took a hit.
Ahmen. Booting an OS off of a floppy is something that still needs to be done from time to time and this is one of the best wayst to do it. I must admit, though, I was a bit concerned by this paragraph at the end of TFA
"I really want to break out of the mold of MS-DOS, and start to extend what DOS means," he says. "FreeDOS-32 is along that direction." Hall says that software will include features like multitasking and flat memory. "I'd also like to see more utilities to make it possible to replicate some of the advanced features we take for granted in modern operating systems, such as Linux." Hall says he hopes Linux users will feel right at home with FreeDOS. He also wants to bring Mac users into the fold, but understands their need for a strong GUI.
32-bit? Multitasking? Is he serious? I hope this part is just another joke. The beauty of light-weight is it's lightness.
Long answer: Characters as well as buildings, objects, etc, are designed with the style of the particular picture in mind. Characters from something like Over the Hedge just wouldn't look right in something like Shrek or Toy Story and the same goes the other way. In more realistic films, if you took a character like Kong and put him in LotR, he wouldn't fit.
What you say is true of a lot of live action as well. Actors act differently according to the role. But consider someone like John Wayne or Owen Wilson. Their acting doesn't change much from movie to movie. They have voice styles, mannerisms and even a particular walk (Wayne) that carries over from picture to picture. Perhaps Shrek himself isn't portable, but Pinces Fiona could have easily fit in Over the Hedge as one of the suberb dwellers or in Toy Story 2 as the Mom.
TW I'm not trying to say that CGI "actors" will ever make it big. I'm really just playing the devil's advocate. But it is an intriquing idea to think about.
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Ok, sure, you're right. So OSS software ends up achieving the same lofty status as Kaza. I'm sure my company will jump right on the OSS bandwagon if that's the case. I'm sure OSS will have no problem attracting the best and brightest programers once they realize they get to be genuine lawbreakers.
Viva la Open Source! Long live the revolution!
Personally, I'd rather we, as a society, took the steps necessary to keep OSS from being marginalized and going underground in the first place.
Mixed works well for us as well. I know less about large data centers, but on our medium sized network(a couple hundred servers), the performance and instalation costs don't really matter, as long as we restrict the agents to machines the really need it. In actual practice, this works out to about a couple dozen servers. We may add more in the future, but this is totaly managable at the moment.
I know this article doesn't really cover it, but we feel very different about client computer agents. Deployment is the kicker here. When you have a quarter of your workforce highly mobile, some of whom almost never come into the office, then installing agents is a real headache. Sometimes you can't help it because the agents you need to instal are the very ones that will make managing large numbers of mobile users practicle. But where we can avoid it, we do.
That asus is just a standard fan mounted in a case that looks like a jet engine, but it's the same technology.
On the other hand, the HP one uses small blades that are shorter and that spin faster. As such they create more thrust/airflow and reduce noise that normal blades produce from the tips of their blades.
On the other hand neither technology is even remotely related to jet engines in the normal sense of the word and both are really just electric fans. I probably wouldn't have bothered to bring it up, since anyone can see so just by looking a TFA, but I thought it was funny that
a) the headline of the aritcle "Using Jet Engines to Cool Servers" was comicly misleading and b) You're sitting here trying to point out that the poster above you doesn't get that the Asus thingamabob is only pretending to be a jet engine when, in fact, both are just posers
I know, at least one is capable of propelling an aircraft. So are standard propellers. The minute they start putting real jet engines on motherboards let me know. I could use another good laugh.
We (arrogant scientists) explain a lot. We try to explain as simply as possible. But simpleminded people often decide "nope, you're wrong" without ever delving more deeply into the subject.
Opponents often attack the simple explanations, or small pieces of the more complicated subjects, rather than the body of complex evidence. It's actually ok to attack small pieces, but simpleminded people take those small pieces and extrapolate them to the whole, without really looking at whether that extrapolation is appropriate.
But the most simpleminded people make their decision based on desired outcome before they bother to look at the evidence at all. How much of your "overblown" decision is based on a desire to avoid proposed remedies and let market forces prevail instead of looking at the evidence first? Hell, I'm not even saying your wrong, just that deciding you don't want to drive an electric car is the wrong place to look to determine if global warming is real.
Evidence first, conclusions second. Loving god has no bearing on the Earths position in the universe or it's age. It has nothing to do with whether evolution is real. Evidence first. The global economy, our dependance on oil and our desire to drive SUVs has no bearing whatsover with whether global warming is real. It will be real or not despite my enjoyment of big cars and capitalism. Evidence first.
Forget the RIAA, Weird Al's record label is definately the entity in charge.
I know you all hate the labels, but it doesn't make sense to assume they're stupid. They may be greedy, exploitive and unfriendly to their own customers, but "stupid" would not be a word I would use to describe them.
Weird Al said that he didn't really "get" the part of his contract that gave him far less money for digital downloads. He signed it anyway. That tells me pretty clearly that what Al didn't really "get" was the business of digital downloads in general. If he had, he woul have realized that paid downloads are increasing at roughly the rate of iPod sales and those iPod sales are through the roof. If he "got" digital downloads, he would have realized that 5 years from now digital could easily be a bigger business than CD.
The thing is, his recording label did get it. They got it so well that they presented him a deal that looks pretty good now, while CD sales are still king, but will totaly bite ass in the near future when downloads are more common than CD sales. Yes, they're little better than the slickest of con men who will tell you exactly how they will get your money in the same breath that they con you out of it, but stupid? Hell no. They're in charge.
The unfortunate thing about climatology is that we can't do any simple experiments to test the individual factors to determine which are really important
This is true with the word "simple," which you used, but is not true once you factor in that bright scientists are more than capable of doing complicated experiments that give real insight.
Evolution suffers from the same problem of inescapable complexity. That's one of the reasons why people who value simplicity (feel free to substitute "simpleminded" ) have a hard time understanding it. Thankfully, the world community of scientists tends to value observation and experimentation over simplicity, even if it is less convienient.
I'd love to see other, more authoritative numbers, but this particular pro-Nintendo article says "sold" in both cases. If you have other numbers with a "shipped" next to the Sony side and you can supply a link, I would be very grateful.
The great thing about interoperability with Microsoft is that it's not. MS loves to "inovate" any open standard it gan get it's hands on. Amazingly enough, MS holds the copyright, patends and actaul implimentations for all of this inovation so the open standard quickly becomes a closed standard, at least if you wnat to interoperate with their version of it.
The GPL did one thing very right. It said that companies that "improve" software have to give those improvements back to the community. If the leaders of the open source community decide to accept this offer of "truce," they'd better make sure they don't fall victim. It's MSs primary way of crushing the competition.
It is something that my 2 year old can play, my wife can play, my friends can play, and something that I would want to play.
But is it something the majority of households want to play? The argument of the aricle is that Nintendo will "win." This is your argument too. But in order to do that, you not only need great games that a lot of people want to play, you need great games that a majority (or at least a plurality) of people want to play.
Looking at the numbers of the last generation, the kind of games most people wanted to play were the type of games they were likely to find on the PS2 or Xbox. Though the Nintendo games were often terrific, far fewer people thought they were worth their hard-erned cash.
Even on the handheld gaming front, TFA says
The DS has sold around 16-17million DSs; Sony has sold around 16-17million PSPs. So this is no walkover - it's a battle still raging!
Clearly, many people are speaking with their dollars that PSP/PS2-style games are something they prefer on handhelds as well.
But now lets come full circle. Also from TFA
Handheld format -- installed base (Japan) DS (and DS Lite) -- 8.1 million GBA SP -- 5.5 million PSP -- 4.4 million
Clearly some people much prefer the Nintendo mix of games. Those people have a tendency to live in Japan. Nintendo will never "win" if the only hearts and minds it captures are in Japan and the rest of the world prefers a different style of gaming. They'll be very succesful (the are very successful) but "winning" will stay beyond their grasp.
TW
P.S. Were you getting the full implication of those handheld numbers? If the total sales are equal, but DS sold nearly 4 million consoles more in Japan, that means that the DS sold nearly 4 million consoles less in the rest of the world. These numbers imply that the DS is actually "losing" everywhere but Japan.
Apple in recent years has gone toward simple and stylish. Those are both things that modern games and game systems are not.
Even Nintendo, with their hopes of "casual gaming" has managed to make a "nunchuck" controler that looks like its from a sci-fi movie. Games are about buttons and levels and power-up and complexity on the complicated side, and on the friendlier side they're still complicated enough to need two screens on a handheld and a virtual weapon of a controller on the console.
Apple chose to license "iTunes" to cell phone makers rather than attach itself to anything as unwieldy as a modern music playing phone. Speculation has been for years that the iPod would become a PDA and Apple just hasn't bitten, presumably because it would have complicated their device. After 22 years of the Macintosh, how many buttons are beneath the track pad of your MacBook Pro?
Now my take on the logic of the article. The Sony PSP comes in iPod white too. Does this mean Apple will buy Sony? Get real.
I wonder what this will mean for use of titanium in everyday applications. There's a certain cachet to titanium, but its not all that clear that everyday things, such as tools and such actually *need* the special properties of titanium.
I couple years ago I bought a stainless steel coffee maker. It looked great, but didn't work any better than the plastic one I had before. A few months ago, I bought a plastic single cup coffee maker. It works just as well as the stainless steel one did. All three were about as easy to clean.
Lessons learned:
1. The more expensive material was definately not needed. 2. Anything that brings extra cachet with it will end up being used regardless of need.
BTW, that SS coffee maker looked awesome in my kitchen. I'm reasonably certain I'd profusley salivate over a titanium one.
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That's the fault of the printer vendor, not the OS vendor.
And as a consumer, that distinction doesn't matter in the least. A printer that doesn't work is a printer that doesn't work. For Vista, the problem might be video cards instead of printers, or maybe OpenOffice will have issues. It's pretty hard to predict. 64-bit OSs, I've heard, break a lot of drivers. But the point is, I'll only experience this frustration if I try to do an in-place upgrade of my current rig. If I leave WinXP on my current rig, and buy all new equipment that's ready to work on Vista, then the upgrade won't be an issue.
BTW, in case you're wondering, I built my curren't rig about 3 years ago. I'll probably get Vista next summer after the industry has had a chance to get better aquainted with it. That'll make my current rig about 4 years old. Why on earth would I wan't to load up all that new stuff on such an old box? KVMs are cheap. It won't hurt my feelings one bit to not have to fight my equipment and software in order to succesfully upgrade in place.
TW
This is a real problem in almost any entertainment medium. People have been complaining about this in movies and music for decades. In those mediums, the answer is underground or indy films/music. Luckily, we have something of an easier fix in gaming.
This problem with gaming is almost exclusively present in single-player, or cooperative multiplayer games. If the game maker has to judge how strong/hard to make enemies/puzzles, he often ends up going witht he lowest commen denomenator.
The fix is multiplayer. I've been getting my butt kicked time and time again at BF2. Those guys are talented and smart and they'll find very creative ways to use their environment for an advantage. These are the games that I think would most bennefit from fully-destructible and other ways that you can leave a mark on your environment. The ability to track, better ability to hide, and the ability to destroy hiding spots, etc. could all make games much more interesting, but they depend on the basic premis that your enemy is at least as intelligent as you.
The one big problem with multiplayer is that there's not enough work being done to pit enemys of similar skill against each other. In sports they have various leagues that seperate different skill levels, but in multiplayer I'm often playing against morons on one game or gods on another. Both can be frustrating.
TW
First off, new and good don't necessarily go hand in hand. I've played a lot of games that weren't exactly new, but were plenty of fun.
Secondly, I'm still pretty impressed by how much tweeks in a formula can change the gameing experience in an fun way. The gravity gun in Half Life 2, the green cloud that causes bullet time in SIN episodes and the combination of tanks, planes and infantry in Battlefield 2 were all new to me when I tried them and all were fun.
There's still much to be explored. Fully interactive and destructable environments? People claim they have it, but have you ever really seen it? I want to be able to blow out any wall with my tank, not just the few they say I can, and I want to see whole buildings collapse when I blow out too many of them. I want to be able to push vegitation out of the way. I want to be able to see where others broke off branches or trampled grass when passing by. Hell, I want to see just one shooter in my lifetime where you NEVER see anybody's legs sticking through a wall.
There's a lot to explore in the genre. I'll keep looking at them as long as they keep trying out new stuff.
TW
The "painful" part of the quoted sentence isn't about speed, it's that a significant number of older games, especially ones that were less popular, don't really like being loaded on XP. Sure, all of the more popular ones either have a patch or are handled nicely by "compatibility mode", but I have quite a few games that aren't really covered by either. Why beat my head against a wall when I have this nice install of Win98SE that works just fine?
Software, hadware and their host OS has a tendency to run in eras or dynasties. When a new OS comes out, there are always potential issues with previous software and hardware. The more popular stuff gets a patch, or runs in a compatibility mode or a virtual machine. But some software or hardware manufacturers never quite upgrade, or they make you use a whole new version, that you may actually like less, in order to run on the new OS. They often make you pay for the new version, too, even when they could have just put out a new driver.
Think about the transition from Win3.11 to Win95. Microsoft just made you buy a new Office suite. How many people found their multifunction printers didn't work under Win2K? And was the transition from WinME to WinXP a painless one?
To avoid these problems, I've found it very helpful to just keep the old dynasty and run both concurrently, rather than "switch" to a new one. There's always some overlap, but I generally let my Win98 era stuff stay on a Win98 era box and I enjoy my WinXP stuff on my WinXP box. Wen I "upgrade" to Vista, it'll be by getting a whole new machine. I'll keep my WinXP box intact rather than face frustration with drivers not loading and reinstalling all my software.
TW
Fast is relative, but if you have a mid-level computer you bought in 2000, Win98 is going to be quite peppy while WinXP will be sluggish at best. If you keep Win98 on that old box, then the old box runs just fine. It runs about as fast as the day you bought it. As long as it does what you need it to do (say, run Office '97), there's no reason to upgrade the OS and, in fact, "upgrading" will actually hurt you.
I keep an old Win98 computer at home to run older games (I know, I'm leaking reason #2 in here). It's a 1.4GHz box with a geforce 4 video card. That sucker screams when playing games of the Win98/WinME era. Most of 'em can be loaded just fine on my WinXP box, but it's painful for some of them. The ones that play just fine on both boxes become an instant LAN party with both boxes running at great speeds, while the ones that are not quite as nice about XP still have a home.
TW
That's a separate matter, and has been legalised properly.
That's good to know. TFA was short on the facts of the case and I had thought this was all being lumped together.
Since the effects of copying for the edit end up being nearly identical to the legal method of editing these works, it would apear that hair-splitting legaleeze is being enforced it this case.
Sure, copying is illegal, but in an ethical sense these two methods are the same. It's too bad the law can't see it that way.
TW
P.S. Your method would be great. Everyone would win. I could ignore the "clean" version just as easily as I ignore the "full screen" versions of DVDs. However, I still believe that people should have more control over what they buy.
You make an excellent point. However, everyone can read my post. You've clearly labled yours as an edit. No one reading your post will believe that those words, in that context, are my intended message.
Furthermore, you've made me out to look stupid in a comical way. It's a farce or spoof. Those very much are legal and there's nothing I can do about it. Ever see "Hardware Wars" or "Troops"? These are consitutionally protected free speech.
Finaly, though you actually copyed my text, the people who make these edits often use technology that requires no copying whatsoever. They're capable of doing on-the-fly-edits. How on earth can this be a violation of copyright law if there is no copying?
I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Yes, it destroys the vision of the artist, but, ya know what? If I own the copy, it's my right to destroy it in whatever way I see fit. Personally, I paint funny glasses and mustaches on pictures of our president every chance I get. Lets hope no one lobbies to make that illegal because it destroys the vision and intended message of his campaign manager.
TW
Well put, but misplaced. I absolutely care about getting the full version of the film on my DVD, and I care about the producers, directors, etc, getting propper credit for their work.
However, my understanding is that these edited films were well labled as modified and that patrons of these companies had a very good understanding that they weren't getting the theatrical release. Assuming that's the case, then I have a very hard time understanding what the problem is. This ruling is exactly the equivilant of me buying a book, then ripping out some pages I dislike, then reselling the book, clearly labled as missing pages, to a third party. Making that illegal is silly.
Oh, and by the way, what does this say about DJ remixes? People enjoy modified works. As long as the modification is happening on a per-unit basis and eveyone gets properly credited and paid, why are we trying to restrict this.
TW
TW
TW
Long answer: Characters as well as buildings, objects, etc, are designed with the style of the particular picture in mind. Characters from something like Over the Hedge just wouldn't look right in something like Shrek or Toy Story and the same goes the other way. In more realistic films, if you took a character like Kong and put him in LotR, he wouldn't fit.
What you say is true of a lot of live action as well. Actors act differently according to the role. But consider someone like John Wayne or Owen Wilson. Their acting doesn't change much from movie to movie. They have voice styles, mannerisms and even a particular walk (Wayne) that carries over from picture to picture. Perhaps Shrek himself isn't portable, but Pinces Fiona could have easily fit in Over the Hedge as one of the suberb dwellers or in Toy Story 2 as the Mom.
TW
I'm not trying to say that CGI "actors" will ever make it big. I'm really just playing the devil's advocate. But it is an intriquing idea to think about.
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Ok, sure, you're right. So OSS software ends up achieving the same lofty status as Kaza. I'm sure my company will jump right on the OSS bandwagon if that's the case. I'm sure OSS will have no problem attracting the best and brightest programers once they realize they get to be genuine lawbreakers.
Viva la Open Source! Long live the revolution!
Personally, I'd rather we, as a society, took the steps necessary to keep OSS from being marginalized and going underground in the first place.
TW
The only thing that can destroy Open Source is if people stop writing Open Source Software.
Which they will if they get sued into oblivion.
TW
Mixed works well for us as well. I know less about large data centers, but on our medium sized network(a couple hundred servers), the performance and instalation costs don't really matter, as long as we restrict the agents to machines the really need it. In actual practice, this works out to about a couple dozen servers. We may add more in the future, but this is totaly managable at the moment.
I know this article doesn't really cover it, but we feel very different about client computer agents. Deployment is the kicker here. When you have a quarter of your workforce highly mobile, some of whom almost never come into the office, then installing agents is a real headache. Sometimes you can't help it because the agents you need to instal are the very ones that will make managing large numbers of mobile users practicle. But where we can avoid it, we do.
TW
On the other hand neither technology is even remotely related to jet engines in the normal sense of the word and both are really just electric fans. I probably wouldn't have bothered to bring it up, since anyone can see so just by looking a TFA, but I thought it was funny that
a) the headline of the aritcle "Using Jet Engines to Cool Servers" was comicly misleading and
b) You're sitting here trying to point out that the poster above you doesn't get that the Asus thingamabob is only pretending to be a jet engine when, in fact, both are just posers
I know, at least one is capable of propelling an aircraft. So are standard propellers. The minute they start putting real jet engines on motherboards let me know. I could use another good laugh.
TW
We (arrogant scientists) explain a lot. We try to explain as simply as possible. But simpleminded people often decide "nope, you're wrong" without ever delving more deeply into the subject.
Opponents often attack the simple explanations, or small pieces of the more complicated subjects, rather than the body of complex evidence. It's actually ok to attack small pieces, but simpleminded people take those small pieces and extrapolate them to the whole, without really looking at whether that extrapolation is appropriate.
But the most simpleminded people make their decision based on desired outcome before they bother to look at the evidence at all. How much of your "overblown" decision is based on a desire to avoid proposed remedies and let market forces prevail instead of looking at the evidence first? Hell, I'm not even saying your wrong, just that deciding you don't want to drive an electric car is the wrong place to look to determine if global warming is real.
Evidence first, conclusions second. Loving god has no bearing on the Earths position in the universe or it's age. It has nothing to do with whether evolution is real. Evidence first. The global economy, our dependance on oil and our desire to drive SUVs has no bearing whatsover with whether global warming is real. It will be real or not despite my enjoyment of big cars and capitalism. Evidence first.
TW
TW
Forget the RIAA, Weird Al's record label is definately the entity in charge.
I know you all hate the labels, but it doesn't make sense to assume they're stupid. They may be greedy, exploitive and unfriendly to their own customers, but "stupid" would not be a word I would use to describe them.
Weird Al said that he didn't really "get" the part of his contract that gave him far less money for digital downloads. He signed it anyway. That tells me pretty clearly that what Al didn't really "get" was the business of digital downloads in general. If he had, he woul have realized that paid downloads are increasing at roughly the rate of iPod sales and those iPod sales are through the roof. If he "got" digital downloads, he would have realized that 5 years from now digital could easily be a bigger business than CD.
The thing is, his recording label did get it. They got it so well that they presented him a deal that looks pretty good now, while CD sales are still king, but will totaly bite ass in the near future when downloads are more common than CD sales. Yes, they're little better than the slickest of con men who will tell you exactly how they will get your money in the same breath that they con you out of it, but stupid? Hell no. They're in charge.
TW
The unfortunate thing about climatology is that we can't do any simple experiments to test the individual factors to determine which are really important
This is true with the word "simple," which you used, but is not true once you factor in that bright scientists are more than capable of doing complicated experiments that give real insight.
Evolution suffers from the same problem of inescapable complexity. That's one of the reasons why people who value simplicity (feel free to substitute "simpleminded" ) have a hard time understanding it. Thankfully, the world community of scientists tends to value observation and experimentation over simplicity, even if it is less convienient.
TW
Thanks! Good numbers are hard to find. Is there any industry concensus on the delta between Sony's shipped and sold?
TW
I'd love to see other, more authoritative numbers, but this particular pro-Nintendo article says "sold" in both cases. If you have other numbers with a "shipped" next to the Sony side and you can supply a link, I would be very grateful.
Thanks.
TW
The great thing about interoperability with Microsoft is that it's not. MS loves to "inovate" any open standard it gan get it's hands on. Amazingly enough, MS holds the copyright, patends and actaul implimentations for all of this inovation so the open standard quickly becomes a closed standard, at least if you wnat to interoperate with their version of it.
The GPL did one thing very right. It said that companies that "improve" software have to give those improvements back to the community. If the leaders of the open source community decide to accept this offer of "truce," they'd better make sure they don't fall victim. It's MSs primary way of crushing the competition.
TW
But is it something the majority of households want to play? The argument of the aricle is that Nintendo will "win." This is your argument too. But in order to do that, you not only need great games that a lot of people want to play, you need great games that a majority (or at least a plurality) of people want to play.
Looking at the numbers of the last generation, the kind of games most people wanted to play were the type of games they were likely to find on the PS2 or Xbox. Though the Nintendo games were often terrific, far fewer people thought they were worth their hard-erned cash.
Even on the handheld gaming front, TFA says Clearly, many people are speaking with their dollars that PSP/PS2-style games are something they prefer on handhelds as well.
But now lets come full circle. Also from TFA
Clearly some people much prefer the Nintendo mix of games. Those people have a tendency to live in Japan. Nintendo will never "win" if the only hearts and minds it captures are in Japan and the rest of the world prefers a different style of gaming. They'll be very succesful (the are very successful) but "winning" will stay beyond their grasp.
TW
P.S. Were you getting the full implication of those handheld numbers? If the total sales are equal, but DS sold nearly 4 million consoles more in Japan, that means that the DS sold nearly 4 million consoles less in the rest of the world. These numbers imply that the DS is actually "losing" everywhere but Japan.
Apple in recent years has gone toward simple and stylish. Those are both things that modern games and game systems are not.
Even Nintendo, with their hopes of "casual gaming" has managed to make a "nunchuck" controler that looks like its from a sci-fi movie. Games are about buttons and levels and power-up and complexity on the complicated side, and on the friendlier side they're still complicated enough to need two screens on a handheld and a virtual weapon of a controller on the console.
Apple chose to license "iTunes" to cell phone makers rather than attach itself to anything as unwieldy as a modern music playing phone. Speculation has been for years that the iPod would become a PDA and Apple just hasn't bitten, presumably because it would have complicated their device. After 22 years of the Macintosh, how many buttons are beneath the track pad of your MacBook Pro?
Now my take on the logic of the article. The Sony PSP comes in iPod white too. Does this mean Apple will buy Sony? Get real.
TW
I wonder what this will mean for use of titanium in everyday applications. There's a certain cachet to titanium, but its not all that clear that everyday things, such as tools and such actually *need* the special properties of titanium.
I couple years ago I bought a stainless steel coffee maker. It looked great, but didn't work any better than the plastic one I had before. A few months ago, I bought a plastic single cup coffee maker. It works just as well as the stainless steel one did. All three were about as easy to clean.
Lessons learned:
1. The more expensive material was definately not needed.
2. Anything that brings extra cachet with it will end up being used regardless of need.
BTW, that SS coffee maker looked awesome in my kitchen. I'm reasonably certain I'd profusley salivate over a titanium one.
TW