I tend to disagree, free speech says you are free to voice your opinion. Does it state you are free to disguise it, or trick people into hearing/reading it?
I agree this is VERY arguable, which is why I called it dubious rather than wrong in my previous post. I just think that to draw an analogy, this would be like an 19th century politician disguising himself as the opposition, getting up onto a soapbox and totally destroying the oppositions reputation and then ripping off the disguise at the end and say, "hey, by the way, its me, not him".
Okay, maybe a bit extreme, but it is similar.:)
Freedom of speech should be the freedom to express your views as you, not as your opponent. And putting a disclaimer on the site (which he has done) is not good enough in my opinion. He has already lead the person to the site under false pretences.
Well in South Korea obviously it is popular enough to make a ton of cash off advertising since enough people watch the games. Once you have that, it is always possible for a select few to make a small fortune off playing a game.
Funnily enough if you watch any old soccer matchs, the game was indeed quite different. Strategies were different, a few seemingly minor rules differences can mean a complete change in strategy. Now in the last 10 years games that were popular have changed immensly. But with the release (as of today I believe) of CS:Source, valve is making sure that this game continues into the next generation of computer games with the same style of game play, just better graphics. I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that a version of CS (although definitely more advanced graphics wise) will still be being played in 10 years time. Even if there isn't, there will be some team based objective capturing fps game that is popular. (speaking from experience, if you can play cs well, you can move to other games and play them well in very little time).
Also, I think what South Korea has going for them is that they don't have this "gaming is a waste of time" attitude. They see gaming like any other sport, something to be practiced and perfected, and any time spent in that pursuit is not wasted. When the world treats amatuer gamers like they treat amateur football players (american or european), then you will truely see professional play take off.
I have had many friends who didn't really even want an invite to gmail, but once they got one anyway and tried it out, they suddenly stopped using anything else.
Personally I think google used the 1gig as advertising, but its the actual way it works that will make it the number one service, at least for email.;)
Funnily enough, important emails bairly ever take up much space at all. They are usually text, sometimes pdf's, rarely pictures. Use outlook/mozilla/whatever for the few important emails, and gmail for everything else. (This of course assumes you have more than one account, and I for one never ever give out the important email account to anyone unless I KNOW they will be sending important emails).
Currently I am down to 3 accounts that I read (though that contains many many email addresses). Soon it will be 2, one important and one gmail. Losing all my data on gmail will only be an issue if you think your joke/porn emails are important.
I think the point is that in the near future space will be controlled by the countries that got there first. And everyone else will essentially have to go through them. One day, space will be where the majority of our economies will be maintained with a large percentage of industries moving out there.
Any country that doesn't get a strong foot hold out there by themselves will have to rely heavily on those that did; and those that did, will eventually be able to tur na huge profit out of their advances.
At no point do I think the money spent now will help the current, or even the next few generations, but it will make a difference in the future.
If you believe that all the powers in space will be altruistic in the future, then maybe putting 88 million (or 500 if you look at their total space budget) into feeding everyone one will have more benifits. But then again, 500million dollers ends up being what, 50 cents per indian citizen, or maybe it could educate their citizens (though rough calculations put the percentage in the 0.00's)?
The knowledge gained from this should and will outstrip that 50c benifit in no time.
on the left column: " 6) You can make money without doing evil."
In fact the following google search
returns a hell of a lot of results.
Though on closer inspection it seems that pop up ads = evil, whilst censoring results on behalf of the chinese goverment = profit.
Yes months down the line its easy to google for...
I doubt they took any applications from the resulting web page seriously after the results got onto their own search engine. But before it got there, I'm sure a bunch of people had to solve it for themselves.
Argg why is it whenever there is a article like this someone mentions that they think phones should just be phones, AND GET MODDED UP TO 5!!!
Go look at the available phones, unless your area is something amazingly special, you will find cheap simple and effective phones that really are just that. At most they'll have a few alarm and meeting/memo functionalities, but these in NO WAY get in the way of the phones functionality.
The high tech cutting edge phones that you hear about on/. are here cos they are interesting. Many people don't want to carry around more than one device.
Miniature speakers may not be as good as a headset, but with each release like this I'm sure they will get better. In 20 years time, miniature speakers still won't be as good as a headset 20 years from now, but I bet they will be better than most headsets produced today.
*sigh* if we only produced things when they were perfect, we'd still be using rocks.
Damnit and I had just spent my last mod point! Grandparent was funny and true, not a troll. *sigh*
No MMOG will easily get rid of the idiots though, because if they pay, the company involved doesn't wan't to get rid of them. Maybe a MMOG with a/.esque karma system. Good roleplaying gets you good karma and players can filter out lesser players if they want.
Suddenly all those players really do become rabble that you neither care about or even really hear. Of course it may get pretty lonely.
Really, they have taken a laptop, removed the keyboard and touch pad and given it a stand. When you think of it this way, one really does have to ask the questions, "Why the hell hasn't this been done to death already?".:P
Right now this box doesn't have enough memory (128 megs, was enough for XP, not for the current gnome or KDE). Having used this exact box with XP pro, I can tell you that 128megs was more than enough to play any multimedia I wanted. Any encoding or cpu/memory intensive work happened on my desktop machine. Any suggestions for a good WM that is easy on the memory? Or should I just cough up the bucks for 512mb?
Linux does appear to be better, or at least more configurable as a multimedia box. It does however require a lot more computer knowledge, or at least ability.
Well okay fine. Except the DVD player part was easy. Took me a few hours of research, and then installing xine with some plug ins.
Its the TV out of the video cards. And the massive hassle I, as an admitted linux newbie, went through to try get something like the TV out on my graphics card working. I made some mistakes while originally trying to get my radeon 7000 to work, by the time I had it displaying on the tv, my sound no longer worked (no I still have no idea what I changed). I ended up removing the radeon and installing a gf4 mx I owned into the box, and even then it took me a good few hours to figure out what config files to edit and change (NVidia's help with installing new drivers is wonderful though).
The problem is NOT patents! Even with XP I had to install power DVD before I could play DVD's. The difference being that it installed first time, and the drivers that came with XP did not have any problem enabling the TV out of any gfx card I own.
The point was FC2 does a great job of getting the machine installed and ready to be a work machine. But the difficulty involved in getting multimedia working, even before you get round to finding a dvd player, is daunting for someone who isn't tech savvy, or is just plain new to linux. Now the second box I do will probably take me no more than a few hours to get up and running. Definitely no where near the time it took me to get the first one running, but those people who still struggle to update drivers on an XP box??? They stand no chance, no chance at all.
And anyway, my comment is fair reguardless if I pay or not. With a media box, XP wins, there is no way that I would suggest linux over XP right now to anyone unless cost was the ONLY issue (I still am going to use the linux box, the challenge and low cost of a legal box makes it more than worth it for me)
Well having just installed FC2 myself and being a complete and utter n00b at linux, I have to say that as far as desktop readyness goes I was most impressed with FC2. The install wen't pretty much without a hitch, everything worked for my desktop purposes, and unlike any windows install, by the time the install was finished I had a full office suite. Incidentally I always have problems connecting my XP machines to the network properly (none huge, but enough that they don't connect first time), yet the linux box was connected and talking to the internet without me even setting anything up!
Now if I had been installing a machine for a secretary or office worker, I would have been essentially finished within 2 hours. Unfortunately this was to be my movie/music player, attached to my tv. Two weeks later I finally managed to watch a dvd without a glitch.
For a standard desktop install: FC2 - 1 XP - 0 For a multimedia box: FC2 - 0 XP - 1
Disclaimer, these are my experiences and obviously a different person with different hardware would most likely have a different outcome.
You know I used to use DOS. Never had a problem with it. I, for the first time, installed linux a few weeks back. It was fedora and the install was hassle free until I wanted to add more stuff. Then I had go to console and and start figuring things out.
Funnily enough, the commands needed were not genetically encoded in my brain! Okay, so lets google for it. Oh wait I'm in console and my other machine was being used by the girlfriend who was not about to let me interrupt her game of NWN to do a google search. My brief experience of UNIX from about 5 years back, some of the commands being similar to dos and others just being good abbreviations of english allowed me to slowly figure some stuff out. But I'm still far from knowing how to do most things in the console. Remember back in the days of DOS we had a HELL OF A LOT LESS TO DO with the machine. I never had to figure out how to mount the usb thumb drive or set the graphics card to use the TV out when I was learning dos.
Now you go on about how people complain about having to use the console??? I consider myself fairly computer literate, I work on the damn things for a living (windows boxes), and yes I will figure out how to use the linux console in time, but to assume that everyone must learn to use the console is just wrong. You may as well have just said, "sorry we don't want new users using linux".
Advertising is about brand recognition. Thats why it works, not because it makes people go out and buy stuff NOW, but because when they decide to buy something, they associate it with that brand.
Now a company that doesn't adevertise in games is going to have much less brand recognition with the game playing public and the company that does. Some people will do their research and buy whats best for them, the rest will buy the brand they recognise.
When getting my contract renewed recently, the provider I was with also listed only feature filled phones on their page of special.
I asked what else one could get and it turned out you could get many low end non colour screen phones for free as well. The only difference between the free feature packed phone and the free simple phone, was the monthly contract price actually wen't down with the simple phone.:) So it seems free with those feature packed phones isn't so free after all.
BTW this is in South Africa, so I have no idea how the US service providers do it.
Looking at Nokia USA it seems you can get several black and white and thus long battery life nokias.
I was being overly optimistic in thinking that maybe these struggling houses could try to bypass the japanese companies that currently hold all the trade marks and such. Create their own content, and market it to the whole world.
But then again thats like saying that bands should get their music out there without going through the RIAA.:P
Yea, making millions while the artists have to live with their parents. Now I'm no communist, but when businesses are so greedy, yes GREEDY, that the people who do work for them cannot survive by themselves with the money they make, then something is wrong.
The real money comes from broadcast rights, which are usually held by TV stations, publishers and major animation production companies.
Now I'm sure even the original creators (those true visionaries) are not CEO/Owner of any of these.
Possibly though, these artists should make the move, realising the the money is no longer in the Japanese markets, its in the world. *sigh* maybe its just being silly to think that artists can make money without having to subsidise some executives cocain habit.
I didn't think greed was limited to western cultures.
Seems the even though the animators are barely earning anything and all the money goes to the TV stations, that the managment still wants more and so will move the animation to where its even cheaper. Really does sound like yet another case of the artists getting screwed while the businessmen get richer.
Ahh Donkey Kong. My first and only handheld game.:P
Given that when I think nintendo, I think of Donkey Kong, I struggle to see how people can claim the two screen design is going to make this product fail.
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I tend to disagree, free speech says you are free to voice your opinion. Does it state you are free to disguise it, or trick people into hearing/reading it?
:)
I agree this is VERY arguable, which is why I called it dubious rather than wrong in my previous post. I just think that to draw an analogy, this would be like an 19th century politician disguising himself as the opposition, getting up onto a soapbox and totally destroying the oppositions reputation and then ripping off the disguise at the end and say, "hey, by the way, its me, not him".
Okay, maybe a bit extreme, but it is similar.
Freedom of speech should be the freedom to express your views as you, not as your opponent. And putting a disclaimer on the site (which he has done) is not good enough in my opinion. He has already lead the person to the site under false pretences.
The point here is more that even if the guy does eventually lose the domain, the damage is already done.
While one can argue free speech, this was morally dubious, and having enough money to fight it won't change that.
I think it has to do with this.
Dark StateWell in South Korea obviously it is popular enough to make a ton of cash off advertising since enough people watch the games. Once you have that, it is always possible for a select few to make a small fortune off playing a game.
Funnily enough if you watch any old soccer matchs, the game was indeed quite different. Strategies were different, a few seemingly minor rules differences can mean a complete change in strategy. Now in the last 10 years games that were popular have changed immensly. But with the release (as of today I believe) of CS:Source, valve is making sure that this game continues into the next generation of computer games with the same style of game play, just better graphics. I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that a version of CS (although definitely more advanced graphics wise) will still be being played in 10 years time. Even if there isn't, there will be some team based objective capturing fps game that is popular. (speaking from experience, if you can play cs well, you can move to other games and play them well in very little time).
Also, I think what South Korea has going for them is that they don't have this "gaming is a waste of time" attitude. They see gaming like any other sport, something to be practiced and perfected, and any time spent in that pursuit is not wasted. When the world treats amatuer gamers like they treat amateur football players (american or european), then you will truely see professional play take off.
Thank god I'm not the only one who read it that way.
Actually its usually only centralists that really want that.
The wings (left and right) only want that when they arn't in power.
I have had many friends who didn't really even want an invite to gmail, but once they got one anyway and tried it out, they suddenly stopped using anything else.
;)
Personally I think google used the 1gig as advertising, but its the actual way it works that will make it the number one service, at least for email.
Funnily enough, important emails bairly ever take up much space at all. They are usually text, sometimes pdf's, rarely pictures. Use outlook/mozilla/whatever for the few important emails, and gmail for everything else. (This of course assumes you have more than one account, and I for one never ever give out the important email account to anyone unless I KNOW they will be sending important emails).
Currently I am down to 3 accounts that I read (though that contains many many email addresses). Soon it will be 2, one important and one gmail. Losing all my data on gmail will only be an issue if you think your joke/porn emails are important.
I think the point is that in the near future space will be controlled by the countries that got there first. And everyone else will essentially have to go through them. One day, space will be where the majority of our economies will be maintained with a large percentage of industries moving out there.
Any country that doesn't get a strong foot hold out there by themselves will have to rely heavily on those that did; and those that did, will eventually be able to tur na huge profit out of their advances.
At no point do I think the money spent now will help the current, or even the next few generations, but it will make a difference in the future.
If you believe that all the powers in space will be altruistic in the future, then maybe putting 88 million (or 500 if you look at their total space budget) into feeding everyone one will have more benifits. But then again, 500million dollers ends up being what, 50 cents per indian citizen, or maybe it could educate their citizens (though rough calculations put the percentage in the 0.00's)?
The knowledge gained from this should and will outstrip that 50c benifit in no time.
Here is one place
on the left column: " 6) You can make money without doing evil."
In fact the following google search returns a hell of a lot of results. Though on closer inspection it seems that pop up ads = evil, whilst censoring results on behalf of the chinese goverment = profit.
Yes months down the line its easy to google for...
I doubt they took any applications from the resulting web page seriously after the results got onto their own search engine. But before it got there, I'm sure a bunch of people had to solve it for themselves.
Argg why is it whenever there is a article like this someone mentions that they think phones should just be phones, AND GET MODDED UP TO 5!!!
/. are here cos they are interesting. Many people don't want to carry around more than one device.
Go look at the available phones, unless your area is something amazingly special, you will find cheap simple and effective phones that really are just that. At most they'll have a few alarm and meeting/memo functionalities, but these in NO WAY get in the way of the phones functionality.
The high tech cutting edge phones that you hear about on
Miniature speakers may not be as good as a headset, but with each release like this I'm sure they will get better. In 20 years time, miniature speakers still won't be as good as a headset 20 years from now, but I bet they will be better than most headsets produced today.
*sigh* if we only produced things when they were perfect, we'd still be using rocks.
Damnit and I had just spent my last mod point! Grandparent was funny and true, not a troll. *sigh*
/.esque karma system. Good roleplaying gets you good karma and players can filter out lesser players if they want.
No MMOG will easily get rid of the idiots though, because if they pay, the company involved doesn't wan't to get rid of them. Maybe a MMOG with a
Suddenly all those players really do become rabble that you neither care about or even really hear. Of course it may get pretty lonely.
About that laptop comment.
:P
Really, they have taken a laptop, removed the keyboard and touch pad and given it a stand. When you think of it this way, one really does have to ask the questions, "Why the hell hasn't this been done to death already?".
Thanks for the info.
Right now this box doesn't have enough memory (128 megs, was enough for XP, not for the current gnome or KDE). Having used this exact box with XP pro, I can tell you that 128megs was more than enough to play any multimedia I wanted. Any encoding or cpu/memory intensive work happened on my desktop machine. Any suggestions for a good WM that is easy on the memory? Or should I just cough up the bucks for 512mb?
Linux does appear to be better, or at least more configurable as a multimedia box. It does however require a lot more computer knowledge, or at least ability.
Well okay fine. Except the DVD player part was easy. Took me a few hours of research, and then installing xine with some plug ins.
Its the TV out of the video cards. And the massive hassle I, as an admitted linux newbie, went through to try get something like the TV out on my graphics card working. I made some mistakes while originally trying to get my radeon 7000 to work, by the time I had it displaying on the tv, my sound no longer worked (no I still have no idea what I changed). I ended up removing the radeon and installing a gf4 mx I owned into the box, and even then it took me a good few hours to figure out what config files to edit and change (NVidia's help with installing new drivers is wonderful though).
The problem is NOT patents! Even with XP I had to install power DVD before I could play DVD's. The difference being that it installed first time, and the drivers that came with XP did not have any problem enabling the TV out of any gfx card I own.
The point was FC2 does a great job of getting the machine installed and ready to be a work machine. But the difficulty involved in getting multimedia working, even before you get round to finding a dvd player, is daunting for someone who isn't tech savvy, or is just plain new to linux. Now the second box I do will probably take me no more than a few hours to get up and running. Definitely no where near the time it took me to get the first one running, but those people who still struggle to update drivers on an XP box??? They stand no chance, no chance at all.
And anyway, my comment is fair reguardless if I pay or not. With a media box, XP wins, there is no way that I would suggest linux over XP right now to anyone unless cost was the ONLY issue (I still am going to use the linux box, the challenge and low cost of a legal box makes it more than worth it for me)
Well having just installed FC2 myself and being a complete and utter n00b at linux, I have to say that as far as desktop readyness goes I was most impressed with FC2. The install wen't pretty much without a hitch, everything worked for my desktop purposes, and unlike any windows install, by the time the install was finished I had a full office suite. Incidentally I always have problems connecting my XP machines to the network properly (none huge, but enough that they don't connect first time), yet the linux box was connected and talking to the internet without me even setting anything up!
Now if I had been installing a machine for a secretary or office worker, I would have been essentially finished within 2 hours. Unfortunately this was to be my movie/music player, attached to my tv. Two weeks later I finally managed to watch a dvd without a glitch.
For a standard desktop install: FC2 - 1 XP - 0
For a multimedia box: FC2 - 0 XP - 1
Disclaimer, these are my experiences and obviously a different person with different hardware would most likely have a different outcome.
You know I used to use DOS. Never had a problem with it. I, for the first time, installed linux a few weeks back. It was fedora and the install was hassle free until I wanted to add more stuff. Then I had go to console and and start figuring things out.
Funnily enough, the commands needed were not genetically encoded in my brain! Okay, so lets google for it. Oh wait I'm in console and my other machine was being used by the girlfriend who was not about to let me interrupt her game of NWN to do a google search. My brief experience of UNIX from about 5 years back, some of the commands being similar to dos and others just being good abbreviations of english allowed me to slowly figure some stuff out. But I'm still far from knowing how to do most things in the console. Remember back in the days of DOS we had a HELL OF A LOT LESS TO DO with the machine. I never had to figure out how to mount the usb thumb drive or set the graphics card to use the TV out when I was learning dos.
Now you go on about how people complain about having to use the console??? I consider myself fairly computer literate, I work on the damn things for a living (windows boxes), and yes I will figure out how to use the linux console in time, but to assume that everyone must learn to use the console is just wrong. You may as well have just said, "sorry we don't want new users using linux".
Advertising is about brand recognition. Thats why it works, not because it makes people go out and buy stuff NOW, but because when they decide to buy something, they associate it with that brand.
Now a company that doesn't adevertise in games is going to have much less brand recognition with the game playing public and the company that does. Some people will do their research and buy whats best for them, the rest will buy the brand they recognise.
When getting my contract renewed recently, the provider I was with also listed only feature filled phones on their page of special.
:) So it seems free with those feature packed phones isn't so free after all.
I asked what else one could get and it turned out you could get many low end non colour screen phones for free as well. The only difference between the free feature packed phone and the free simple phone, was the monthly contract price actually wen't down with the simple phone.
BTW this is in South Africa, so I have no idea how the US service providers do it.
Looking at Nokia USA it seems you can get several black and white and thus long battery life nokias.
Not quite what I meant.
I was being overly optimistic in thinking that maybe these struggling houses could try to bypass the japanese companies that currently hold all the trade marks and such. Create their own content, and market it to the whole world.
But then again thats like saying that bands should get their music out there without going through the RIAA. :P
Yea, making millions while the artists have to live with their parents. Now I'm no communist, but when businesses are so greedy, yes GREEDY, that the people who do work for them cannot survive by themselves with the money they make, then something is wrong.
Now I'm sure even the original creators (those true visionaries) are not CEO/Owner of any of these.Possibly though, these artists should make the move, realising the the money is no longer in the Japanese markets, its in the world. *sigh* maybe its just being silly to think that artists can make money without having to subsidise some executives cocain habit.
I didn't think greed was limited to western cultures.
Seems the even though the animators are barely earning anything and all the money goes to the TV stations, that the managment still wants more and so will move the animation to where its even cheaper. Really does sound like yet another case of the artists getting screwed while the businessmen get richer.
Ahh Donkey Kong. My first and only handheld game. :P
Given that when I think nintendo, I think of Donkey Kong, I struggle to see how people can claim the two screen design is going to make this product fail.