Depends on what the goal was. If you just wanted to get rid of the people but didn't want the negative PR of just executing them outright, dumping them on an out of the way planet with just the bare essentials to survive is a very smart way to do it.
It's also like a minimal amount invested in a long term account. They wouldn't expect it to be usefull anytime soon, but they didn't spend much on it did they?
I don't know what you're smoking, dude, but that falsifrication guy is totally kicking butt.
He sure is, but i don't think he gets any points for kicking his own ass with his ignorance.
The people who lived in the American Old West knew how to build a much better technology level than they had, nowhere near the level of starships obviously, but they didn't even manage to go straight up to the highest level of 19th century technology.
Developing an industrial base takes a lot of time and a lot of labor. If he had all the raw materials in a pre-prossed form he might be able to do what he was talking about, but even just forging the steam engine would take a lot of time, and unless he's actually skilled at that craft it would take even more time for him to figure out the process.
In the end, he'd end up with a slow, inefficient, brass steam engine that would probably break down frequently and possibly explode on ocassion. And he wouldn't have any food because he spent all his time working on this steam engine. Or maybe he only spent half his time working on the steam engine and the other half hunting and gathering, so double the amount of time. In any event, the type of steam engine you could build out of brass probably wouldn't be and stronger or faster than a good horse, so now you've got the equivalent of a horse (except you need to chop wood for it rather than it feeding itself) what good does that do you? Your neighbor has ten horses by this point because he brought a breeding pair, so you're not really ahead of the game.
In reality, he probably wouldn't have all the materials in pre-processed form, so he'd have to mine and process the resources and make the tools. All the time spent mining is not time spent making a steam engine or getting food.
Anyone who's read any history or done any research into the subject knows that it takes a lot of work to provide food for a population. Most of the people in ancient civilizations spent their time working in farms in order to support a relatively small upper class than included the artisans who were building the tools. We have much more advanced farming techniques these days, but a lot of them won't do you much good without the proper tools, and you'll starve to death in the time it would take you to make the proper tools from scratch if you're going for the steam engine level of technology.
Firefly is not the first media to assume that outlying colonies on other planets will temporarily revert to more primitive technologies while an industrial infrastructure is being built up, _many_ science fiction authors who have put a lot more effort into researching the subject than falsifrication and are probably a lot smarter to boot have come to the same conclusions. Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, and S.M. Stirling are just the few that pop to mind immediatly.
In the long run, it's a lot cheaper in terms of mass to ship some horses and basic tools than all the materials necessary to make a car. You can send all the tools you need to make the tools you need to make a car, but it would be awhile before people had the time to focus on anything other than growing food and developing basic infrastructure. A decently large population could probably bootstrap itself up to a decent level of technology over twenty or forty years if tehy can find enough of the right resources, but that still leaves a large period of time where a horse and wagon would be the most commonly seen vehicle on the planet.
Where are you guys getting current info on console sales? I've bene checking The Magic Box, but their charts usually lag by a couple of weeks at least.
Now what exactly does the N-Gage offer that the PSP won't have at a lower price and, with the possible exception of the cell phone part, better quality?
More likely on the cost side. They've got to get the cost of development down. More project planning, tightly controlled development, blah blah blah.
Obviously you don't know what the "supply side" is in this case. That's the people who supply the games, ie the developers. Getting the cost of development down is an improvement in the supply side economics.
So: what, if any, video game related clothing do you own?
I've got a t-shirt with The Code on it, a Kingdom Hearts t-shirt, and i've been eyeing the new t-shirt with the box art from the old NES Metroid on it.
I'd like to pick up some Final Fantasy shirts, but all the ones i've seen so far have been printed on white shirts, which i don't really like.
It wasn't just one game though, they listed many "original" games that preformed anywhere from "not too well" to "hole in the ground."
But publishers _do_ ask what "Readers" want or what "Listeners" want. There have been many articles on slashdot complaining about the RIAA only releasing "top 40 crap," and if you go into a bookstore you'll find lots of copies of the latest bestsellers, but you'll be in trouble looking for a copy of an older well reviewed but not so well selling book.
Sure they're not going to draw conclusions from one game or one customer, but they will try to figure out general trends from the entire population.
You'll notice that there's a lot more advertisement for fiction books, and a dozen famous fiction writers for every famous non-fiction writer. Fiction generally sells better per title than non-fiction (there are occasional exceptions, but again, in general) so that's where the most attention is focused. Likewise, taken as a whole, original games do not sell that well compared to reiterations of older titles, and since the game developers are interested in making money they'll focus their attention in the same way as the record industry and book industry.
I didn't do all that just for the sake of getting it - I did it because I thoroughly enjoyed it. I managed to unlock most of the 'Beyond' items as well. If I hadn't of enjoyed it, I wouldn't have bothered.
Doing a thing is not understanding a thing. Enjoying a thing is not understanding it either. You can do more than one of these things at once, but being in one of the states does not necesitate any of the others. I can do something i don't understand, understand something i don't enjoy, enjoy something i don't do, or any other combination.
Since your responses indicate a failure to grasp this concept, i will use a more down to earth and stereotypical example. There are many males in the world who have had sex quite a number of times, and who enjoy sex very much, but who do not actually understand sex, and from the perspective of their partner are not very good at it at all. The most boorish of these men will think that they "understand" sex because they have sex and enjoy having it, and have "finished" it many times.
However those who actually understand sex can find many aspects of it to enjoy that those who do not understand it don't even know exist.
I have not actually played Rez, so i'm not really qualified to judge directly whether or not it has deeper aspects as CheeseMonkey maintains. However while you have played the game, if you can not comprehend the difference between doing and enjoying, and understanding then you are not qualified to judge their statements either, and so my tendency would be to accept CheeseMonkey's arguments over yours. You are denying the existance of another level to the game merely because you have not ever seen it.
You say you understand the game because you can kill the enemies, reach the end, and unlock the bonus stuff. CheeseMonkey says they understand the game because they can accomplish that in such a way as to cause harmony with the effects of the game.
Freak.
We ARE talking about the same things here, right? A game, and not some religious cult that you have got absorbed into...?
We mock what we do not understand...
It is like the difference between seeing a sunset and saying "i wonder how much pollution is in the air to cause that?" and seeing the same sunset and, while understanding the physics of how the sunset is formed, thinking "that's beautiful," and then contemplating the cyclical nature of life. The later does not mean you're some kind of freak who follows some weird sun-worshiping religion, it just reflects a more introspective nature and a deeper understanding of things. Given what i know of Rez and all the reviews i've read of it, i suspect that the later understanding is more what the developers had in mind than the former.
For anyone who's looking forward to Spawn in Soul Caliber II on the XBox, or who is disapointed that Spawn isn't on the version they got, he's got his own game coming out soon. And unlike previous versions this one doesn't totally suck:) Since both Soul Caliber II and Spawn are being produced by Namco, the Soul Caliber II team helped out with the play mechanics some.
Actually, it was the exact opposite for me, so i guess it depends on which classes you take. There's been a big increase in the number of CS majors, so i had several CS classes with 20-30 people in them. Expecially cross-overs like Algorithms and Discrete. I also took several seminar hums, and those frequently had a dozen or less people in them.
Harvey Mudd has a very small student body (about 500 or 600 last i checked) and stresses lots of interaction between students and profs. There are a few big clases for freshman and sophmore year. Everyone who can't test out takes physics and chem, so those have over a hundred students in them, with recitation sections of about 30. Once you get past those big group classes, most of them are in the 20-40 person range.
There are no TAs, and all the profs have regular office hours where you can go in and get help or dicuss the lecture or whatever. The head CS prof was pretty regularly online at about 2 am the night before a big project was due in the introductory CS class, and would answer any questions on the mailing list from people working on it at the last minute. Which was usually just about everyone of course:)
Pretty much all forms of media follow the same basic idea. There's a building of tension, a climatic scene, and then a denouemont. I'm sure most of you have been shown in school the distored bell graph ploting out the tension in a generic storyline. More advanced stories will have mini climaxes scattered throughout the plot, but the same general trend is still followed, with the biggest climax near the end and the resolving of tension afterwards.
If there's not some kind of climax, it's not going to be a very interesting story. All this person seems to be arguing is that the point where the ending starts should be moved. Most games switch from gameplay to ending at the peak of the climax, when you deal the final blow to the endboss or solve the final puzzle or whatever. When done in that manner ending catches the tail end of the action, and then procedes into the denouemont. he just thinks that the begining of the ending should be delayed until the denouemont is already underway. Is that really a significant change? As he pointed out himself, some games already do that, but it's really an artistic choice, and i can't see why any one way of doing it should be inherently superior to another.
He doesn't think games need "bosses," and in some sense that's true, if you just mean a large enemy more powerfull than any other you've placed in the game. However you need something to cause a climatic scene at the end, or the player isn't going to be very satisfied. And if you have that climatic moment you need some form of resolution afterwards, or it's just going to be really weird.
This artle is just a lot of philisophical meandering that doesn't have much of a point and certainly doesn't propose answers to any of the questions it poses. If not a climax and a denouemont, then what? The game just randomly stops at some point in the middle of whatever is going on and presents a black screen that says "The End"? That won't go over too well as a replacement.
The Federal government started the ball rolling by eliminating a lot of the laws restricting the energy companies, which left just the local state laws restraining them. That's why the energy companies are pushing states to deregulate now.
Take a look at this article which i believe was posted here a few days ago.
That may be one of the reasons, but i still think it's a shit reason. I want to get the Japanese version of the game with all the cool Japanese cultural references, but i wouldn't be able to understand what the hell i was doing. People who look at a game with a different cultural bacground as a problem instead of an interesting learning experience are fools.
The Scorpion King game last year did exactly that. The game was released at the same time as the DVD, and if you bought them both you got a mail in rebate or something similar. The game also had a trailer for the DVD, and i believe the DVD had one for the game as well, though i'm not sure on that last bit.
They're probably less likely to do this with big titles though, since they figure those will sell on their own even without the incentive. There will certainly be pleanty of cross-over advertising though.
3DO founder Trip Hawkins also bought an Internet patent and much of 3DO's back-catalog for $400,000. 3DO's lawyers claimed that the SEC investigation of games companies launched last month made possible suitors back off, saying: "It probably cost us $10 million easily."
First off, why would SEC investigations make companies back off from the auction? To the best of my understanding the investigation is mainly focused on accounting issues, so why should that affect decisions to purchase new properties? That seems only slightly more likely than claiming that the investigated companies have decided to stop working on games because of the SEC. It's not like they're going to stop everything and wait in breathless anticipation until the investigations are over. Is there some correlating factor i'm missing?
Second of all, doesn't it seem like Trip Hawkins got a good deal out of this? Especially if they're right about the investigation lowering the prices. He drove the company into the ground, and then managed to grab most of the non "A" titles and a pantent at bargain basement prices. I bet he'll evntually be able to sell the pieces at a much higher price once they're not part of a bankruptcy "everything must go now!" type auction.
Using the intelectual property as leverage he might even be able to get the venture capital to found a new, smaller game company. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Seriously, with rottentomatoes and metacritic, I really don't need to rely on word-of-mouth, whether it's from text messaging or actual spoken words.
Rottentomatoes is only a partial solution. First of all, you need to account for your own tastes. It doesn't matter if film A is the best romantic comedy of all time according to rottentomatoes, if you only like action films, you're not going to be happy with it.
More importantly, although rottentomatoes is good at judging when a flim is good, it isn't very good at judging when a film is bad. You're probably safe with anything rated well, but there are some movies hidden in the bad ratings that you would probably enjoy.
Despite it's current 19% rating on rottentomatoes, i thought "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" was a great movie. It certainly wasn't a LotR or some artsy intelectual film, but it was a fun summer action movie, certainly far better than The Hulk which i'd see a few weeks before. I'm even hoping that i'll get a chance to see it a second time with some friends before it finishes it's run (which is going to be really soon given that it made $0.6 million in 500 theatres last week)
I've told my friends that i liked it, i've told them why i liked it, and i've also mentioned the bits the critics have hated and complained about just to give them a balanced view. However because my friends know me and my reactions to things, my feelings are generally a better guide that what some critic on rottentomatoes who they don't know at all thinks.
Likewise, i'll take a look at rottentomatoes if no one else has seen the movie yet, but if some friends have already gone, i'll ask them what they thought instead. I know them and know how their judgement works, and when it's likely to apply to me or not.
i agree that not knowing what's getting put on your machine is irksome, but this idea has sprung from two problems that everyone here is very aware of:
1. people don't do their patches! blaster is all over the news yet a casual poll of my non-geek friends (the windows ones at least) showed that only one had done the patch!
Some people are just idiots, but there are good reasons why some of them haven't installed the latest patch.
I work at a video game studio, and last week we got a email from our sys-admin saying that the Blaster worm was going around, and we should install the attached windows patch from Microsoft to fix the security hole.
Just ten minutes later we all got an urgent email from our sys-admin telling us NOT to install the patch if we hadn't done so already. Apparently the patch corrupts any 3D Studio Max files that are saved after installing it. Given that 3DS Max is the primary tool of about half the team, we obviously couldn't have half the people sitting around doing nothing to protect against Blaster. So instead he gave us the latest update to Norton Anti-virus. (I have no idea what happened to the artists who had already intalled the patch before getting his warning. Is there an easy uninstall?)
So the smart thing any sys-admin at a company is going to do is turn off the automatic update, however quite a number of home users are going to be really pissed when Microsoft automatically updates and it breaks some program that was important to the user but that Microsoft never thought to test against.
Maybe i'm missing something here, but this nuclear station will "only" need six engineers to run it, and is proposed for use by other cosmonauts in future mars expeditions.
So it needs people on Mars to run it, and people on Mars to take advantage of it. Do they actually have any firm plans for getting people to Mars?
I suppose maybe since it's so much easier to get hardward to Mars that maybe they'll send the nuclear power plant there and then use that to justify research into getting people over there. "After all, we've already got the equipment there for them to use, and it will be a waste if we don't send anyone."
In California's case, generating companies conspired to shut down for maintainence at the same time to produce shortages that they could then soak the public for. Instead of agreeing to rotate the shutdowns to minimize the effect to the end user, they shutdown multilple plants simultaneously.
And what would prevent that scenario from happening in a more reasonable deregulation scenario?
It seems to me that in a "free market" enviroment if a relatively small people have control of the production of a needed resource, there will be a strong preference for them to collude to increase their own profits. If they're prevented from doing that, they're not really deregulated.
This method doesn't work in most markets, where either the product isn't desperatly needed so the consumer can just not buy during temporary price increases, or there are too many players for them to be able to collude effectively. (Other markets have different dirty tricks for screwing over the consumer, but that's a different story)
This is not "something a little underground," and this is _not_ about fansubs. This is about professional pirates operating out of Taiwan and mass producing physical goods to sell at a profit.
I have no problem with fansubers and file-sharers, for anime or for mainstream media, but it really pisses me off that there are people out there making a profit off of this stuff. If i'm actually going to spend money on a product, i damn well want the profit going to the people who deserve it, not some criminals somewhere.
Yeah, import CDs are expensive, and given the market for cheap pirated ones i can't figure out why the real companies don't make cheaper American versions. The high prices may justify not buying the original in your mind, but that doesn't excuse buying counterfeit goods. Either cough up the extra $10 or $15 for the real thing, or just content yourself with mp3s.
I congratulate you on your reasonable view on the spamming issue:) Not good that he fucked up, good that he fixed it.
That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads.
I have a few worries about his general electability, not because i think he would do a bad job of course, but just because of the smear campaign Bush is likely to run.
However it has been pointed out that Dean's views on gun-control, that it should be left up to the states without any more federal involvement, is likely to pick him up a lot of "single-issue" NRA types. The fact that he's a fiscal conservative who balanced the budget in Vermont, making it one of the very few states with a budget surplus in this time of recession, is likely to pick up some of the Republicans who are more concerned that Bush has turned at 10 year $6 trillion surpluss in a $4 trillion deficit.
The "civil unions" issue will probably hurt him, but he apparently did a very good job of turning a lot people's views around in Vermont, who were initially very against the idea, as long as he stuck with "civil union" rather than "gay marriage." Conservatives get upset about the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuals get upset about the lack of social benefits inherit in marriage, civil unions are a good compromise that doesn't torque off either side off too badly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also like a minimal amount invested in a long term account. They wouldn't expect it to be usefull anytime soon, but they didn't spend much on it did they?
He sure is, but i don't think he gets any points for kicking his own ass with his ignorance.
The people who lived in the American Old West knew how to build a much better technology level than they had, nowhere near the level of starships obviously, but they didn't even manage to go straight up to the highest level of 19th century technology.
Developing an industrial base takes a lot of time and a lot of labor. If he had all the raw materials in a pre-prossed form he might be able to do what he was talking about, but even just forging the steam engine would take a lot of time, and unless he's actually skilled at that craft it would take even more time for him to figure out the process.
In the end, he'd end up with a slow, inefficient, brass steam engine that would probably break down frequently and possibly explode on ocassion. And he wouldn't have any food because he spent all his time working on this steam engine. Or maybe he only spent half his time working on the steam engine and the other half hunting and gathering, so double the amount of time. In any event, the type of steam engine you could build out of brass probably wouldn't be and stronger or faster than a good horse, so now you've got the equivalent of a horse (except you need to chop wood for it rather than it feeding itself) what good does that do you? Your neighbor has ten horses by this point because he brought a breeding pair, so you're not really ahead of the game.
In reality, he probably wouldn't have all the materials in pre-processed form, so he'd have to mine and process the resources and make the tools. All the time spent mining is not time spent making a steam engine or getting food.
Anyone who's read any history or done any research into the subject knows that it takes a lot of work to provide food for a population. Most of the people in ancient civilizations spent their time working in farms in order to support a relatively small upper class than included the artisans who were building the tools. We have much more advanced farming techniques these days, but a lot of them won't do you much good without the proper tools, and you'll starve to death in the time it would take you to make the proper tools from scratch if you're going for the steam engine level of technology.
Firefly is not the first media to assume that outlying colonies on other planets will temporarily revert to more primitive technologies while an industrial infrastructure is being built up, _many_ science fiction authors who have put a lot more effort into researching the subject than falsifrication and are probably a lot smarter to boot have come to the same conclusions. Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, and S.M. Stirling are just the few that pop to mind immediatly.
In the long run, it's a lot cheaper in terms of mass to ship some horses and basic tools than all the materials necessary to make a car. You can send all the tools you need to make the tools you need to make a car, but it would be awhile before people had the time to focus on anything other than growing food and developing basic infrastructure. A decently large population could probably bootstrap itself up to a decent level of technology over twenty or forty years if tehy can find enough of the right resources, but that still leaves a large period of time where a horse and wagon would be the most commonly seen vehicle on the planet.
Where are you guys getting current info on console sales? I've bene checking The Magic Box, but their charts usually lag by a couple of weeks at least.
And on top of that we already know the PSP will have wireless capability.
Now what exactly does the N-Gage offer that the PSP won't have at a lower price and, with the possible exception of the cell phone part, better quality?
More likely on the cost side. They've got to get the cost of development down. More project planning, tightly controlled development, blah blah blah.
Obviously you don't know what the "supply side" is in this case. That's the people who supply the games, ie the developers. Getting the cost of development down is an improvement in the supply side economics.
Too bad i'm not ten years younger. So few female geeks my age, so many jailbait ones.
And i was just young enough to miss out on the internet boom as well, my timing sucks.
I've got a t-shirt with The Code on it, a Kingdom Hearts t-shirt, and i've been eyeing the new t-shirt with the box art from the old NES Metroid on it.
I'd like to pick up some Final Fantasy shirts, but all the ones i've seen so far have been printed on white shirts, which i don't really like.
This is new? :)
er, wait, did you say _more_women_ than _boys_? Are you sure?
Um, so, in other news, water is apparently dry, dogs and cats are living together, mass hysteria!
But publishers _do_ ask what "Readers" want or what "Listeners" want. There have been many articles on slashdot complaining about the RIAA only releasing "top 40 crap," and if you go into a bookstore you'll find lots of copies of the latest bestsellers, but you'll be in trouble looking for a copy of an older well reviewed but not so well selling book.
Sure they're not going to draw conclusions from one game or one customer, but they will try to figure out general trends from the entire population.
You'll notice that there's a lot more advertisement for fiction books, and a dozen famous fiction writers for every famous non-fiction writer. Fiction generally sells better per title than non-fiction (there are occasional exceptions, but again, in general) so that's where the most attention is focused. Likewise, taken as a whole, original games do not sell that well compared to reiterations of older titles, and since the game developers are interested in making money they'll focus their attention in the same way as the record industry and book industry.
Doing a thing is not understanding a thing. Enjoying a thing is not understanding it either. You can do more than one of these things at once, but being in one of the states does not necesitate any of the others. I can do something i don't understand, understand something i don't enjoy, enjoy something i don't do, or any other combination.
Since your responses indicate a failure to grasp this concept, i will use a more down to earth and stereotypical example. There are many males in the world who have had sex quite a number of times, and who enjoy sex very much, but who do not actually understand sex, and from the perspective of their partner are not very good at it at all. The most boorish of these men will think that they "understand" sex because they have sex and enjoy having it, and have "finished" it many times.
However those who actually understand sex can find many aspects of it to enjoy that those who do not understand it don't even know exist.
I have not actually played Rez, so i'm not really qualified to judge directly whether or not it has deeper aspects as CheeseMonkey maintains. However while you have played the game, if you can not comprehend the difference between doing and enjoying, and understanding then you are not qualified to judge their statements either, and so my tendency would be to accept CheeseMonkey's arguments over yours. You are denying the existance of another level to the game merely because you have not ever seen it.
You say you understand the game because you can kill the enemies, reach the end, and unlock the bonus stuff. CheeseMonkey says they understand the game because they can accomplish that in such a way as to cause harmony with the effects of the game.
Freak. We ARE talking about the same things here, right? A game, and not some religious cult that you have got absorbed into...?
We mock what we do not understand...
It is like the difference between seeing a sunset and saying "i wonder how much pollution is in the air to cause that?" and seeing the same sunset and, while understanding the physics of how the sunset is formed, thinking "that's beautiful," and then contemplating the cyclical nature of life. The later does not mean you're some kind of freak who follows some weird sun-worshiping religion, it just reflects a more introspective nature and a deeper understanding of things. Given what i know of Rez and all the reviews i've read of it, i suspect that the later understanding is more what the developers had in mind than the former.
For anyone who's looking forward to Spawn in Soul Caliber II on the XBox, or who is disapointed that Spawn isn't on the version they got, he's got his own game coming out soon. And unlike previous versions this one doesn't totally suck :) Since both Soul Caliber II and Spawn are being produced by Namco, the Soul Caliber II team helped out with the play mechanics some.
Actually, it was the exact opposite for me, so i guess it depends on which classes you take. There's been a big increase in the number of CS majors, so i had several CS classes with 20-30 people in them. Expecially cross-overs like Algorithms and Discrete. I also took several seminar hums, and those frequently had a dozen or less people in them.
There are no TAs, and all the profs have regular office hours where you can go in and get help or dicuss the lecture or whatever. The head CS prof was pretty regularly online at about 2 am the night before a big project was due in the introductory CS class, and would answer any questions on the mailing list from people working on it at the last minute. Which was usually just about everyone of course :)
If there's not some kind of climax, it's not going to be a very interesting story. All this person seems to be arguing is that the point where the ending starts should be moved. Most games switch from gameplay to ending at the peak of the climax, when you deal the final blow to the endboss or solve the final puzzle or whatever. When done in that manner ending catches the tail end of the action, and then procedes into the denouemont. he just thinks that the begining of the ending should be delayed until the denouemont is already underway. Is that really a significant change? As he pointed out himself, some games already do that, but it's really an artistic choice, and i can't see why any one way of doing it should be inherently superior to another.
He doesn't think games need "bosses," and in some sense that's true, if you just mean a large enemy more powerfull than any other you've placed in the game. However you need something to cause a climatic scene at the end, or the player isn't going to be very satisfied. And if you have that climatic moment you need some form of resolution afterwards, or it's just going to be really weird.
This artle is just a lot of philisophical meandering that doesn't have much of a point and certainly doesn't propose answers to any of the questions it poses. If not a climax and a denouemont, then what? The game just randomly stops at some point in the middle of whatever is going on and presents a black screen that says "The End"? That won't go over too well as a replacement.
Take a look at this article which i believe was posted here a few days ago.
That may be one of the reasons, but i still think it's a shit reason. I want to get the Japanese version of the game with all the cool Japanese cultural references, but i wouldn't be able to understand what the hell i was doing. People who look at a game with a different cultural bacground as a problem instead of an interesting learning experience are fools.
They're probably less likely to do this with big titles though, since they figure those will sell on their own even without the incentive. There will certainly be pleanty of cross-over advertising though.
First off, why would SEC investigations make companies back off from the auction? To the best of my understanding the investigation is mainly focused on accounting issues, so why should that affect decisions to purchase new properties? That seems only slightly more likely than claiming that the investigated companies have decided to stop working on games because of the SEC. It's not like they're going to stop everything and wait in breathless anticipation until the investigations are over. Is there some correlating factor i'm missing?
Second of all, doesn't it seem like Trip Hawkins got a good deal out of this? Especially if they're right about the investigation lowering the prices. He drove the company into the ground, and then managed to grab most of the non "A" titles and a pantent at bargain basement prices. I bet he'll evntually be able to sell the pieces at a much higher price once they're not part of a bankruptcy "everything must go now!" type auction.
Using the intelectual property as leverage he might even be able to get the venture capital to found a new, smaller game company. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Rottentomatoes is only a partial solution. First of all, you need to account for your own tastes. It doesn't matter if film A is the best romantic comedy of all time according to rottentomatoes, if you only like action films, you're not going to be happy with it.
More importantly, although rottentomatoes is good at judging when a flim is good, it isn't very good at judging when a film is bad. You're probably safe with anything rated well, but there are some movies hidden in the bad ratings that you would probably enjoy.
Despite it's current 19% rating on rottentomatoes, i thought "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" was a great movie. It certainly wasn't a LotR or some artsy intelectual film, but it was a fun summer action movie, certainly far better than The Hulk which i'd see a few weeks before. I'm even hoping that i'll get a chance to see it a second time with some friends before it finishes it's run (which is going to be really soon given that it made $0.6 million in 500 theatres last week)
I've told my friends that i liked it, i've told them why i liked it, and i've also mentioned the bits the critics have hated and complained about just to give them a balanced view. However because my friends know me and my reactions to things, my feelings are generally a better guide that what some critic on rottentomatoes who they don't know at all thinks.
Likewise, i'll take a look at rottentomatoes if no one else has seen the movie yet, but if some friends have already gone, i'll ask them what they thought instead. I know them and know how their judgement works, and when it's likely to apply to me or not.
1. people don't do their patches! blaster is all over the news yet a casual poll of my non-geek friends (the windows ones at least) showed that only one had done the patch!
Some people are just idiots, but there are good reasons why some of them haven't installed the latest patch.
I work at a video game studio, and last week we got a email from our sys-admin saying that the Blaster worm was going around, and we should install the attached windows patch from Microsoft to fix the security hole.
Just ten minutes later we all got an urgent email from our sys-admin telling us NOT to install the patch if we hadn't done so already. Apparently the patch corrupts any 3D Studio Max files that are saved after installing it. Given that 3DS Max is the primary tool of about half the team, we obviously couldn't have half the people sitting around doing nothing to protect against Blaster. So instead he gave us the latest update to Norton Anti-virus. (I have no idea what happened to the artists who had already intalled the patch before getting his warning. Is there an easy uninstall?)
So the smart thing any sys-admin at a company is going to do is turn off the automatic update, however quite a number of home users are going to be really pissed when Microsoft automatically updates and it breaks some program that was important to the user but that Microsoft never thought to test against.
So it needs people on Mars to run it, and people on Mars to take advantage of it. Do they actually have any firm plans for getting people to Mars?
I suppose maybe since it's so much easier to get hardward to Mars that maybe they'll send the nuclear power plant there and then use that to justify research into getting people over there. "After all, we've already got the equipment there for them to use, and it will be a waste if we don't send anyone."
And what would prevent that scenario from happening in a more reasonable deregulation scenario?
It seems to me that in a "free market" enviroment if a relatively small people have control of the production of a needed resource, there will be a strong preference for them to collude to increase their own profits. If they're prevented from doing that, they're not really deregulated.
This method doesn't work in most markets, where either the product isn't desperatly needed so the consumer can just not buy during temporary price increases, or there are too many players for them to be able to collude effectively. (Other markets have different dirty tricks for screwing over the consumer, but that's a different story)
I have no problem with fansubers and file-sharers, for anime or for mainstream media, but it really pisses me off that there are people out there making a profit off of this stuff. If i'm actually going to spend money on a product, i damn well want the profit going to the people who deserve it, not some criminals somewhere.
Yeah, import CDs are expensive, and given the market for cheap pirated ones i can't figure out why the real companies don't make cheaper American versions. The high prices may justify not buying the original in your mind, but that doesn't excuse buying counterfeit goods. Either cough up the extra $10 or $15 for the real thing, or just content yourself with mp3s.
That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads.
I have a few worries about his general electability, not because i think he would do a bad job of course, but just because of the smear campaign Bush is likely to run.
However it has been pointed out that Dean's views on gun-control, that it should be left up to the states without any more federal involvement, is likely to pick him up a lot of "single-issue" NRA types. The fact that he's a fiscal conservative who balanced the budget in Vermont, making it one of the very few states with a budget surplus in this time of recession, is likely to pick up some of the Republicans who are more concerned that Bush has turned at 10 year $6 trillion surpluss in a $4 trillion deficit.
The "civil unions" issue will probably hurt him, but he apparently did a very good job of turning a lot people's views around in Vermont, who were initially very against the idea, as long as he stuck with "civil union" rather than "gay marriage." Conservatives get upset about the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuals get upset about the lack of social benefits inherit in marriage, civil unions are a good compromise that doesn't torque off either side off too badly.