I'm supporting the digital distibution model. I buy m4p tracks and convert them to m4a.
Record companies don't notice, they got their money and I'm not sharing the unprotected files.
Only person that should care is Apple, as I can now shift from ipod when the whim takes me. Currently I'm not in a huge rush, I'm perfectly happy with it by and large, but I hated the feeling of being trapped.
1) I am on Facebook.
2) I have no friends.
3) I want some Facebook people to put as my Facebook friends.
Facebook protest probably isn't too bad a place to try - would all have been a lot simpler if his mum had just breast-fed the retard.
"a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques"
You'll probably get the education in the end, it'll probably work fine - just might find a few subjects get dropped as they were a bit harder than your teachers thought when they started teaching you and you'll find your graduation slips by a few years.
Private operators competing, with serious regulators with f'in big teeth.
Look at airlines - we might all bitch and complain about the odd late flight, but by and large (especially considering the technology/logistics etc) involved they work/are safe/and cheap(ish).
" Igor Hiller, 17, a freshman at University of California, Santa Barbara is organizing a real-world demonstration next Monday at Facebook's downtown Palo Alto headquarters."
Has he really nothing better to do with his time? If you don't like facebook, just trash your account and leave. Find something worthwhile to get upset about.
entertain this notion? This card is doomed.
The PhysX card is doomed
Multicore CPUs are here - no longer some weird expensive ninja-component, they merely cost a few $/£ more than a single core.
Currently nothing (non-industrial) really takes advantage of multi-core systems - the spiel for them currently seems to be 'Run an AV scan without slowing your game' - that's it.
*rubs crystal ball*
What's going to happen is the established middle-ware (i.e those with a product people use now) will develop engines that 'run on a core'. Current core #1 will run the game and core #2 will run the physics and eventually core #3 will be the AI, #4 will run the procedural graphics, #5 will do the 12.1 audio etc.
If you look what's being developed for the PS3 (the most insanely multicored CPU so far), the cores are being divided up by function - one for the OS menu, one for the lead characters hair etc. Threading a single function across multiple cores is not only insanely hard, but hinders cross-platform porting.
Middleware is just going to be sold to run on one core and ported per platform - and I'm fine with that.
"Perhaps more than pop music or Hollywood blockbusters, even the top video games traditionally have been limited in their appeal to the specific regional culture that produced them. For example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe.
They're taking GTA as an example of a game that hasn't appealed outside it's 'regional culture' - it quite clearly has, it was made in the UK and appeals to the US.
A better point would be that some cultures just don't 'like' contemporary settings for their games - I can't think of a single Japanese game that attempts to 'simulate' modern day Japan - they prefer more escapism.
Also if we're going to say 'games don't travel' - then what about the entire Mario series?
I *think* what the article meant to say was that WOW is one of the very few western produced games that's taken off in the East.
He thought stickers on cars 'work'
Majority of his company is republican
He is democrat
They made everybody remove political stickers from all the cars
SURELY - this stupid rule meant more potential republican stickers were blocked than democrat ones - so this would be a 'good' thing.
"or example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe."
Would that be Grand Theft Auto, the game (every single version of which) has been made in the UK (a part of Europe).
is to have two mail servers. One with a spam-blocker that is provided to end users by default - and an unfiltered server that people who wish to use can switch to.
This way most of your customers who object to spam can carry on as before and those who wish to run their own protection (or buy massive quantities of generic viagra) can.
and lets block all non-80 ports, possibly remove admin access, installer loggers on the machines etc etc. They'll then all waste days and weeks hacking away to their machines, probably killing a few along the way, to get their machine working properly.
Actually that's maybe not a bad idea, like powerpoint, beating back restrictions and punching firewalls are also valuable skills any coporate cog worth their salt requires.
Is this what the Vista bashing has come down to?
We're all capable of swapping the startup.wav for an empty file, should we so wish.
'Think of the children' has reached a new low as we wring out hands over the harm that others listening to a jingle might cause.
towards the end there - surely it's f'in obvious that media doesn't cause this level of behaviour, it's the behaviour creates the demand that creates the media.
For example look at a magazine rack in a huge store - huge variety of magazines covering every topic under the sun. If you asked a random person why they were buying a particular magazine (let's say Steam-powered touring caravan monthly) - it'd be because they were interested in Steam-powered touring caravans. I think it's highly unlikely they'd say they have no interest - but suddenly feel the inexplicable desire to develop one.
If you like something, you're attracted to media about it. It may introduce you to something related, suggest something you hadn't thought of - but that's it.
they used 0845 dialling codes - non-geographic number, billed as a local call that gave a very small (fractions of a penny) kickback per minute to calls made to them on it.
FFS - I really do want to buy it, but that's taking the piss.
I made an effort a year or so back when i started earning to pay for the stuff I used a lot (Nero, FlashFXP and half a dozen other bits and bobs I'd been pirating for years).
I do want to buy Vista - and obviously I want the pretty pretty version - but...aggggghhhhhh
I know the OEMs get huuge discounts. I can get hold of the media myself, I'm never going to call MS support blah blah. Surely it can't be too much effort for me to say give Bill $100 from my credit card and him to give me a serial number that'll just mean I get a warm fuzzy inner glow, and don't have to fart around with activation systems and corporate serial keys.
I've seen half a dozen documentaries about the case, and the parents always seemed creepy
(alright maybe there was some ominous music whenever they spoke and a good previous 30 minutes of child-pageant/paedofest comparisons made etc etc - but hey, free speech)
You've missed the point - this is the outraged clamour of a somewhat myopic American public just falling over themselves to spread their (obviously superior) laws to the rest of the world.
I'm doubly locking my door tonight in-case a passing US platoon decides to liberate me from this tyranny and give me 'democracy'
News International owns shit-loads of media sources - and each one is sold with it's one special flavour to a particular target demographic.
Compare and contrast Fox News and Sky News.
In the UK we NI owns both The Times (old respected paper) and The Sun (biggest and most typical editorial-ridden British tabloid) - the politics behind both papers are similar (i.e. which way does Rupert want you to vote - but one will have article on mis-handling of NHS IT contracts and the other will say the government is letting 'paedos' roam the streets.
The UK could just block the paper - like the Chinese.
We can all read newspaper articles, decide on guilt/innocence based on the bias of a writer, get called for jury duty and have the case thrown out.
Or we could ask them nicely to restrict the article until a fair trial is under way - and they could do so.
top, despite what we might have thought (cheap evil makers of bits by the million) is that they sell huge volumes into offices worldwide. It tends to be companies that have to follow EU or national recycling guidelines on equipment - whereas the home user can just take his old monitor to the dump.
Makes sense if in the future you're going to have to dispose of a few thousand monitors, you'd ensure they offered disposal.
I am surpised Apple was quite so low on the list, but I guess as they're mainly selling directly to individual consumers, there's no real pressure on them to provide an ecologically sound(er) product - and if you were after a MAc, as they're the only seller.... (i.e. I could see a green company say choosing Dell over HP on that basis, but if you need a Mac, Apple have your sale).
with the total price of the game. I also like online distribution, not only as it costs less, but I can get it NOW (age has not made me any more patient).
My main gripe with paid for updates is that it is at the expense of what we used to get free. For example in Oblivion I can now pay a few pounds to get some new buildings, locations, items etc - a while back these would have just been chucked in for free in a patch.
The same goes for the PC, I play Battlefield2 - some of the early patches included some new levels to play. Then we had the SpecOps pack which was sold (online and offline - bizarrely cheaper to buy from amazon, than download from EA) and had an updated engine - I was happy to pay and was bouncing around on ropes in no time.
Then we had Euroforce and the latest (I've even forgotten the name of now) - all these were were a few extra maps and vehicles - wooo (that was sarcasm).
These have shifted to online only distribution and it's not even as if you can ignore them. You're playing a few rounds online, the server then loads a map from a pack you haven't paid for and *click* you're disconnected.
I just feel this is going to get worse as the publishers pick up on this, we'll fondly look back at the day we paid £30 for a game and that was it forever.
I don't care too much if it overthrows the iPod, I just hope it gives Apple a kick up the arse to actually do something innovative. Their monopoly (both hardware and contentwise) bores me.
The wireless thing is a definite plus though. I listen to my ipod as I walk to and from work, and it mainly lives in my laptop bag. My itunes gets my podcasts, but I keep on forgetting to synch, or forgetting to put it back in my bag afterwards - annoying.
If the Zune can synch wirelessly, or just connect to my Wifi directly, that's a definite plus.
but concluded that it was impossible to do. Maybe the best solution would be for some mobile maker, just to shove an extra LED into one of their handsets and flog it as working as a BT mouse?
I mean how much extra could that possibly cost - and it'd definitely be one less thing to shove into my laptop bag (which is always a good thing).
Another thing on my wish list is just an extendible prong I could flick out of my phone that goes into a USB socket (not a proper usb, just a board with contacts on it, you can put it on an SD card, you can put it on my phone). Would hardly take any space and I could dump the synch/recharge cable from my bag as well.
First off - I'm convinced YouTube will 'make it' (myspace won't, which I'll leave for another day).
YouTube simply 'works', I know there's all manner of bugs and flailing codec conversions under the surface, but to a user visiting their site it works perfectly and better than anything else they've seen by a mile. If end-user made video is going to survive (and with bandwidth costs falling and broadband takeup rising, why wouldn't it?), then youtube will remain the gorilla.
As for the questioning of the business model, what choice did they have and where are they perceived to have gone wrong?
All sites start off grabbing eyeballs and then once the eyeballs have reached critical mass, you then ramp up the revenue. There's no choice here. You could create the greatest site the world has ever know - if you hide it behind a $10 signup screen, you're doomed. Nobody will ever show up.
One observation on youtube at the moment is that it's very low-res and web based. Maybe for a couple of dollars a month you could get higher-res video, automatic podcasting of your favourite people/top rated vids etc (even dump the sub and just stick an advert on the front of the clip). Clearly what they have at the moment is their attempt to get to critical mass - you don't think they're thought about making money? You don't think any of my suggestions have occured to them? Maybe you think they're not capable of delivering them? FFS.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm supporting the digital distibution model. I buy m4p tracks and convert them to m4a.
Record companies don't notice, they got their money and I'm not sharing the unprotected files.
Only person that should care is Apple, as I can now shift from ipod when the whim takes me. Currently I'm not in a huge rush, I'm perfectly happy with it by and large, but I hated the feeling of being trapped.
1) I am on Facebook. 2) I have no friends. 3) I want some Facebook people to put as my Facebook friends. Facebook protest probably isn't too bad a place to try - would all have been a lot simpler if his mum had just breast-fed the retard.
"a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques"
You'll probably get the education in the end, it'll probably work fine - just might find a few subjects get dropped as they were a bit harder than your teachers thought when they started teaching you and you'll find your graduation slips by a few years.
Private operators competing, with serious regulators with f'in big teeth.
Look at airlines - we might all bitch and complain about the odd late flight, but by and large (especially considering the technology/logistics etc) involved they work/are safe/and cheap(ish).
" Igor Hiller, 17, a freshman at University of California, Santa Barbara is organizing a real-world demonstration next Monday at Facebook's downtown Palo Alto headquarters."
Has he really nothing better to do with his time? If you don't like facebook, just trash your account and leave.
Find something worthwhile to get upset about.
would anybody be upset to see HP die any more?
entertain this notion? This card is doomed.
The PhysX card is doomed
Multicore CPUs are here - no longer some weird expensive ninja-component, they merely cost a few $/£ more than a single core.
Currently nothing (non-industrial) really takes advantage of multi-core systems - the spiel for them currently seems to be 'Run an AV scan without slowing your game' - that's it.
*rubs crystal ball*
What's going to happen is the established middle-ware (i.e those with a product people use now) will develop engines that 'run on a core'. Current core #1 will run the game and core #2 will run the physics and eventually core #3 will be the AI, #4 will run the procedural graphics, #5 will do the 12.1 audio etc.
If you look what's being developed for the PS3 (the most insanely multicored CPU so far), the cores are being divided up by function - one for the OS menu, one for the lead characters hair etc. Threading a single function across multiple cores is not only insanely hard, but hinders cross-platform porting.
Middleware is just going to be sold to run on one core and ported per platform - and I'm fine with that.
"Perhaps more than pop music or Hollywood blockbusters, even the top video games traditionally have been limited in their appeal to the specific regional culture that produced them. For example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe.
They're taking GTA as an example of a game that hasn't appealed outside it's 'regional culture' - it quite clearly has, it was made in the UK and appeals to the US.
A better point would be that some cultures just don't 'like' contemporary settings for their games - I can't think of a single Japanese game that attempts to 'simulate' modern day Japan - they prefer more escapism.
Also if we're going to say 'games don't travel' - then what about the entire Mario series?
I *think* what the article meant to say was that WOW is one of the very few western produced games that's taken off in the East.
He thought stickers on cars 'work'
Majority of his company is republican
He is democrat
They made everybody remove political stickers from all the cars
SURELY - this stupid rule meant more potential republican stickers were blocked than democrat ones - so this would be a 'good' thing.
"or example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe."
Would that be Grand Theft Auto, the game (every single version of which) has been made in the UK (a part of Europe).
is to have two mail servers. One with a spam-blocker that is provided to end users by default - and an unfiltered server that people who wish to use can switch to.
This way most of your customers who object to spam can carry on as before and those who wish to run their own protection (or buy massive quantities of generic viagra) can.
and lets block all non-80 ports, possibly remove admin access, installer loggers on the machines etc etc. They'll then all waste days and weeks hacking away to their machines, probably killing a few along the way, to get their machine working properly.
Actually that's maybe not a bad idea, like powerpoint, beating back restrictions and punching firewalls are also valuable skills any coporate cog worth their salt requires.
Is this what the Vista bashing has come down to?
We're all capable of swapping the startup.wav for an empty file, should we so wish.
'Think of the children' has reached a new low as we wring out hands over the harm that others listening to a jingle might cause.
towards the end there - surely it's f'in obvious that media doesn't cause this level of behaviour, it's the behaviour creates the demand that creates the media.
For example look at a magazine rack in a huge store - huge variety of magazines covering every topic under the sun. If you asked a random person why they were buying a particular magazine (let's say Steam-powered touring caravan monthly) - it'd be because they were interested in Steam-powered touring caravans. I think it's highly unlikely they'd say they have no interest - but suddenly feel the inexplicable desire to develop one.
If you like something, you're attracted to media about it. It may introduce you to something related, suggest something you hadn't thought of - but that's it.
they used 0845 dialling codes - non-geographic number, billed as a local call that gave a very small (fractions of a penny) kickback per minute to calls made to them on it.
FFS - I really do want to buy it, but that's taking the piss.
I made an effort a year or so back when i started earning to pay for the stuff I used a lot (Nero, FlashFXP and half a dozen other bits and bobs I'd been pirating for years).
I do want to buy Vista - and obviously I want the pretty pretty version - but...aggggghhhhhh
I know the OEMs get huuge discounts. I can get hold of the media myself, I'm never going to call MS support blah blah. Surely it can't be too much effort for me to say give Bill $100 from my credit card and him to give me a serial number that'll just mean I get a warm fuzzy inner glow, and don't have to fart around with activation systems and corporate serial keys.
I've seen half a dozen documentaries about the case, and the parents always seemed creepy
(alright maybe there was some ominous music whenever they spoke and a good previous 30 minutes of child-pageant/paedofest comparisons made etc etc - but hey, free speech)
You've missed the point - this is the outraged clamour of a somewhat myopic American public just falling over themselves to spread their (obviously superior) laws to the rest of the world.
I'm doubly locking my door tonight in-case a passing US platoon decides to liberate me from this tyranny and give me 'democracy'
News International owns shit-loads of media sources - and each one is sold with it's one special flavour to a particular target demographic.
Compare and contrast Fox News and Sky News.
In the UK we NI owns both The Times (old respected paper) and The Sun (biggest and most typical editorial-ridden British tabloid) - the politics behind both papers are similar (i.e. which way does Rupert want you to vote - but one will have article on mis-handling of NHS IT contracts and the other will say the government is letting 'paedos' roam the streets.
The UK could just block the paper - like the Chinese.
We can all read newspaper articles, decide on guilt/innocence based on the bias of a writer, get called for jury duty and have the case thrown out.
Or we could ask them nicely to restrict the article until a fair trial is under way - and they could do so.
top, despite what we might have thought (cheap evil makers of bits by the million) is that they sell huge volumes into offices worldwide. It tends to be companies that have to follow EU or national recycling guidelines on equipment - whereas the home user can just take his old monitor to the dump.
Makes sense if in the future you're going to have to dispose of a few thousand monitors, you'd ensure they offered disposal.
I am surpised Apple was quite so low on the list, but I guess as they're mainly selling directly to individual consumers, there's no real pressure on them to provide an ecologically sound(er) product - and if you were after a MAc, as they're the only seller.... (i.e. I could see a green company say choosing Dell over HP on that basis, but if you need a Mac, Apple have your sale).
with the total price of the game. I also like online distribution, not only as it costs less, but I can get it NOW (age has not made me any more patient).
My main gripe with paid for updates is that it is at the expense of what we used to get free. For example in Oblivion I can now pay a few pounds to get some new buildings, locations, items etc - a while back these would have just been chucked in for free in a patch.
The same goes for the PC, I play Battlefield2 - some of the early patches included some new levels to play. Then we had the SpecOps pack which was sold (online and offline - bizarrely cheaper to buy from amazon, than download from EA) and had an updated engine - I was happy to pay and was bouncing around on ropes in no time.
Then we had Euroforce and the latest (I've even forgotten the name of now) - all these were were a few extra maps and vehicles - wooo (that was sarcasm).
These have shifted to online only distribution and it's not even as if you can ignore them. You're playing a few rounds online, the server then loads a map from a pack you haven't paid for and *click* you're disconnected.
I just feel this is going to get worse as the publishers pick up on this, we'll fondly look back at the day we paid £30 for a game and that was it forever.
I don't care too much if it overthrows the iPod, I just hope it gives Apple a kick up the arse to actually do something innovative. Their monopoly (both hardware and contentwise) bores me.
The wireless thing is a definite plus though. I listen to my ipod as I walk to and from work, and it mainly lives in my laptop bag. My itunes gets my podcasts, but I keep on forgetting to synch, or forgetting to put it back in my bag afterwards - annoying.
If the Zune can synch wirelessly, or just connect to my Wifi directly, that's a definite plus.
but concluded that it was impossible to do. Maybe the best solution would be for some mobile maker, just to shove an extra LED into one of their handsets and flog it as working as a BT mouse?
I mean how much extra could that possibly cost - and it'd definitely be one less thing to shove into my laptop bag (which is always a good thing).
Another thing on my wish list is just an extendible prong I could flick out of my phone that goes into a USB socket (not a proper usb, just a board with contacts on it, you can put it on an SD card, you can put it on my phone). Would hardly take any space and I could dump the synch/recharge cable from my bag as well.
First off - I'm convinced YouTube will 'make it' (myspace won't, which I'll leave for another day).
YouTube simply 'works', I know there's all manner of bugs and flailing codec conversions under the surface, but to a user visiting their site it works perfectly and better than anything else they've seen by a mile. If end-user made video is going to survive (and with bandwidth costs falling and broadband takeup rising, why wouldn't it?), then youtube will remain the gorilla.
As for the questioning of the business model, what choice did they have and where are they perceived to have gone wrong?
All sites start off grabbing eyeballs and then once the eyeballs have reached critical mass, you then ramp up the revenue. There's no choice here. You could create the greatest site the world has ever know - if you hide it behind a $10 signup screen, you're doomed. Nobody will ever show up.
One observation on youtube at the moment is that it's very low-res and web based. Maybe for a couple of dollars a month you could get higher-res video, automatic podcasting of your favourite people/top rated vids etc (even dump the sub and just stick an advert on the front of the clip). Clearly what they have at the moment is their attempt to get to critical mass - you don't think they're thought about making money? You don't think any of my suggestions have occured to them? Maybe you think they're not capable of delivering them? FFS.