Why is this modded funny at all? Have you kids seriously never used a computer without a hard drive? IBM PC? Amiga? Not even a Commodore 64? Come on!
Indeed... back in the early 8-bit days- and indeed throughout the 8-bit era in most countries outside the US- most home computers didn't even have a *floppy* drive, let alone a hard drive.
I got an 8-bit Atari and floppy drive bundle in the mid-80s, and this was very good at the time because the other one's I'd been interested in didn't include the floppy (and would have been outside my price range if they had). Loading from tapes sucked.
Next we'll be hearing autotune in everyday speech.
Er, I'm not sure that I'd dismiss that possibility *entirely* out of hand. (*) While I'm not sure how Autotune (**) would translate to speech- since it's used for *singing*- the same could be said for this supposed "vocal fry", which started out as a singing technique, and I'm not sure how *that* got transferred to speech. Autotune is pretty damn common, so really, if vocal fry can make the jump, we shouldn't dismiss that Autotune might have *some* effect on speech, even if it's hindered by the fact that most people don't have a box of digital electronics in their voicebox.:-)
Anyway, as for this "vocal fry's" *singing* origins- having checked out what they mean via YouTube- IMHO it sounds less like "a way to reach low notes" and more like what has *always* happened when people *can't* reach those low notes properly, i.e. "it's not shitty singing, it's a vocal technique".... Yeah, right!
Not sure if I have any opinion about vocal fry as a speech pattern, as I haven't heard enough of it to figure out if it's an annoying affectation, just part of the natural mutation of language... or both.;-)
(*) Then again, what do I know. While I don't- or didn't- hate Autotune misuse (**) per se, as an interesting technique in itself (I've heard some quite good examples), my problem is its overuse *everywhere*. I got bored of it ages ago, and predicted the fad would have died at least a year ago now. Since this clearly hasn't happened, I've also considered the possibility that it may indicate a permanent change in music tastes- and, as if sods' law wanted to prove how out of touch I am- it will probably turn out to be a fad that goes massively out of fashion at some point after all. Or not- as I said, what do I know, I'm way too old for chart music anyway.:-)
(**) As opposed to the original intended purpose of Autotune, which was to simply correct imperfections in singing. Ironically when people talk about "Autotune" now, it's usually to mean the deliberate misuse/overuse of it for effect- and not simple correction- because the latter is so prevalent (and the former should not stand out if done correctly).
The Conservatives view the government as a way to fund commercial enterprises
Sounds pretty much like the previous Labour with their enthusiasm for the Private Finance Initiative and such like.
Even if we're "charitable" and assume a "best case" scenario that they were only doing it for cynical accounting and political reasons, to hide costs in the short term (rather than because they wanted to pander to private business interests), the end result is that the scheme was bordering on evil. Labour politicians knew full well that it would work out grossly more expensive in the medium and long term, any supposed "efficiencies" of the private sector vastly outweighed by the lucrative creaming off of profits funded by inflated running costs- *and* even in the short term, the private companies' ability to dictate how the various facilities were run had damaging effects on (e.g.) education.
Despite some wanting to paint them as the "loony left", it's useful to remember that Blair and post-Blair Labour were still a bunch of (IMHO) big-business-pandering sell-outs that continued the post-Thatcher consensus in a similar direction to the point that I wouldn't consider them left-wing at all, unless we redefine "left" and "right" to account for the post-Blair "spot the difference" centre-right consensus. Like adjusting the white and black points in a digital image that has virtually no contrast, to extract some marginal detail. (Such a process would make pre-Blair Kinnock/Smith-era Labour look like Maoist extremists by comparison).
Anyway, back on topic, the Conservatives bleated about the obscene costs of PFI at first, but they've quietened down over that recently, perhaps because they recognise the short-term political usefulness (to them) of it, even if it screws everyone over in every other respect.
Kodak is far from the crappiest out there. Polaroid is definitely worse
Yeah, but remember that the current Polaroid bought the name (and much of the business rights) when the original Polaroid Corporation went bankrupt around a decade back.
AFAIK, the generic digital point-and-shoots released under the "Polaroid" name in the past few years have simply been rebranded models from distributors using the name under license- ditto rebranded poor-quality LCD TVs- and only the (now discontinued) traditional film Polaroids were actually sold by them (IIRC).
More recently however, they seem to be attempting to restore some credibility to the name, becoming a digital version of what the original Polaroid once was (e.g. selling Zink-based printers and cameras with integrated printers).
You got that right. EVERY television studio used BetaCams and Betamax in the 80s and early 90s. Sony lost out on nothing.
Er, very wrong- they "lost out on" the entire mass market to VHS.
Successful as Betacam- not the original Betamax- was in the professional arena, that's still a very small market compared to the consumer one at which Betamax was aimed. Even accounting for the fact that (I'm guessing) professional-oriented equipment has far higher profit margins, there simply can't have been enough buyers there to come close to making up for the loss of the sheer number of consumer sales.
Kodak is pretty much a north american name. In Europe, if anyone thinks about cameras, it's not really Kodak, that comes to mind.
Kodak *is* (or was) a very well-known name in the UK at least, even if it was more associated with film. In fact, it was almost certainly the best-known brand of film here.
Kodak cameras are (or again, were) still well reasonably common here, though primarily associated with the low end- though I doubt that situation was/is any different in the US either.
My first camera in the early 1980s was a Kodak 126 "Instamatic", and pretty sure that my Dad talked about having a Box Brownie (pretty much the 1950s equivalent to my Instamatic) when he was younger.
Gouging? Really? A company trying to protect its profits is gouging? If you don't like it, don't buy it. That's your right as a consumer. It's Sony's right as a company to set their prices. That's part of how a free market economy works. If lots of people don't like it, Sony will change their model. Until then you need to weigh up whether or not their offer is worth your hard earned. It is not your human right to be able to afford a play station.
No, but it's everyone's human right to be able to slag off Sony's proposed system and its cynical pricing model, whether or not they intend buying it.
This implied reasoning ("if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it, and therefore you have no right to criticise [manufacturer X].") pops up on Slashdot quite a lot. The first half is correct, but no-one was complaining about *having* to buy it anyway. The second half obviously isn't correct. The notion of a free market (and a free country) says nothing about stifling criticism from those who choose not to buy- indeed, the free exchange of information and opinion is required for one to work efficiently.
I'm sure a lot of companies would rather this weren't the case, but then... tough s**t for them. The flipside of what you said is that if *they* don't like that, they don't have to sell their products. A lot of companies, I'm sure, would rather operate in a non-free market if it was non-free in their favour(!), but that's their problem, not ours.
They're following the "Gillette" model where they take a loss with their actual product, but make up the money in the sale of accessories.
I hear this a lot, but I will note that nowadays when I see those Gillette razor "starter" kits, (typically the metal handle, a couple of blades, and a mini can of foam), they don't seem to be *that* cheap. Not saying they're expensive, but given that the metal and plastic handles can't cost *that* much to make, I honestly don't think they're taking a loss on them.
That said, I do remember getting sent something similar free of charge (and unsolicited) from Gillette around my 16th birthday, and I'm still using their overpriced blades today, so go figure...
They got away with it in the '80s and '90s because they actually made good hardware and the concept of interoperability barely existed.
Not quite, remember Betamax? That was a fairly large case of interoperability- or at least support- being an issue, and Sony *not* getting away with it.
The only time they've had any real success with it was Blu-Ray
AFAIK, that isn't proprietary to the same extent, at least not in the sense that Sony almost unilaterally own and are pushing it. (Though I appreciate that they have one of the largest stakes in that business).
Today the reverse is true - their products tend to be sub-par and we increasingly expect stuff to work across our devices, but they're still stuck in the past.
Sony squandered what could have been a major lead in what became the MP3 audio market, and ended up being left behind.
In theory, MiniDisc could have been something akin to a proto-MP3 player almost a decade before (worthwhile versions of) the latter became commonplace. Some sort of very basic filesystem- just enough to let music files be copied to and from the device- would probably have been doable without increasing the technological complexity of the MiniDisc that much. Given that most people didn't have computers with enough storage to benefit from that back then, perhaps that was an understandable omission.
However, their tying it down beyond what people would have seen was technologically possible and desirable even then- i.e. forcing real-time dubbing, restricting what could be done digitally with copying, etc.- blatantly crippled the potential of the system for their own reasons, making it a slightly improved digital version of the standard cassette, but little more. The Japanese went for it, but its success was limited elsewhere.
Then when MP3 came along, they dragged their feet for ages- maybe because they saw this as a paradigm-shift threat to their existing portable players, not realising that the *real* threat was that the market was going that way anyway, and that they could join it ASAP or lose their lead. Of course, they *did* lose their market-leading position, to Apple. "iPod" was the success story of the first decade of this millennium, not some next-generation solid-state "Walkman".
Even after all this, they joined in in a half-baked cynical manner, trying to play things the old way while looking like they were embracing the new. Remember those stupid pseudo-MP3 players that required you to convert all your files to ATRAC via their crappy software before they'd support them? (No, I don't care whether that version of ATRAC was better than MP3 or not- by that point everyone had settled on MP3, Sony had *already* lost their opportunity to dictate what the market would use, and this move was just a mixture of NIH and arrogance).
So, Sony lost the portable audio market through their own arrogance, short-termist self interest, NIHism and generally blinkered short-sightedness... and they really, *really* have no-one to blame but themselves.
I know you're trying hard, but "Pastor Jake" is just a little too obvious to be the next Doctor Bob, as I suspect it is meant to be. That's on top of the fact that these things never work as well the second time round. Sorry!
They really shot themselves in the foot with the whole CD single thing, that was gouging pure and simple.
CDs always used to be grossly overpriced in the days before the original Napster and online retailers like Amazon selling them much cheaper. But CD singles were the worst of all, in the UK at least.
Circa the mid-90s, while you used to sometimes be able to get them for £1.99 on the first week (when they wanted them to get into the charts), they were usually £3.99 otherwise.
They usually included more tracks than a traditional vinyl single, but those were still essentially B-sides (occasional hidden gem, but mostly second-rate filler or crap remixes). Oh, and they usually released two versions of the single with different bonus tracks, to get the fans to buy both and push it up the charts.
Most people buy singles for the A-side anyway though, so you were basically paying £3.99 for the song you wanted. In today's money, that's almost £6 FOR ONE DAMN SONG! (Over $9 (US) if then converted at today's rates).
Sigh, all that intelligence and so much ignorance to show for it. You live today to enjoy what you think you have because others died for you to have it.
It's not an issue of intelligence. Maybe he/she understands what you said very well, but just doesn't care, being happy to reap the benefits of those that came before while being enough of a self-centred p***k to not give a toss about behaving the same way for the benefit of future generations.
On the other hand, one *could* hold the opinion that if cayenne8's "short ride in time" were to come to a premature end tomorrow, it'd be no great loss to the human race.
How many people 35 and under in your circle regularly purchase magazines or maintain active subscriptions, even to papers?
I'm just outside your target range, and I haven't bought a magazine for around 2 1/2 years. And I remember *that* because it was the first time I'd bought a magazine in a while.
OTOH, I still read and buy newspapers, despite the fact that the news is often (annoyingly) out of date by the time I read them properly. The analysis often makes up for this, and I just prefer reading papers for longer articles.
The big sign which ultimately lead to me allowing my EGM subscription to run out was the point when I was receiving the following month's issue early each month (i.e. getting a May issue in early April, maybe even the end of March), and the content inside was still dated compared to everything I'd already read about online.
Well, the fact that they put it out much earlier than the cover date (*) doesn't imply that the news is going to be any more up-do-date when you actually get it. It's just a line of text on the front cover after all, it's not like they can beat the Internet by putting a date six months ahead on it (maybe if they push that far enough they can predict things before they happen;-))
(*) This isn't new- I remember when I bought Amiga magazines in the early 90s, they often came out exactly as you describe, i.e. over a month in "advance".
I thought the last x86 processor produced was the Pentium Pro
Assuming I understand your pseudo-purist definition of "x86" correctly, one minor pedantry...
The Pentium Pro wasn't the *last* of Intel's "real" x86 processors, it was the *first* of the RISC-with-x86-wrapper (*) designs that make up all chips today. AFAIK the original Pentium line was the last.
(*) Some have claimed that the core isn't actually that RISC-like; the point here is that it's not native x86.
I'm just curious, where does that leave games like, say, Minesweeper?
Just my personal view, but one could argue that, regardless of the theoretical nature of Minesweeper, for most humans, it still requires some thought and keeping track of things (i.e. skill at some level) to get it right, unlike many Skinneresque browser games.
Intel went about 2 years without any pentium branded products before reintroducing it.
Unless the dates on this article are wrong, there doesn't appear to be anything approaching a two year gap.
And to make it worse, that 2 year gap was after the brand had taken a serious beating with years of Pentium-4 CPUs being greatly inferior to AMD offerings.
I doubt the man in the street knew diddly-squat about AMD- beyond maybe knowing they were Intel's competitor, and a small proportion of people possibly having heard of their smart new 64-bit chip- though they'd probably have known "Intel Inside" and "Pentium" quite well back then.
You're confusing your own knowledge of the situation with that of Joe Public that Intel seem to design their name for.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. There's no question Pentium was a damaged brand. YOU are the one who wants to paint it as an idiotic move with no thought put into it.
If (as was apparent elsewhere) the intended significance of the Pentium brand was unclear to a significant proportion of Slashdot readers, it sure as hell isn't going to be clear to Joe Sixpack!
then they still happen to have dummied their way into a mostly-correct decision, keeping the brand alive.
The problem was they made that decision too late, after they'd replaced it with the "Core" name and couldn't backtrack. Hence the stupid new non-segment they shoehorned it into. They should have just kept it- what the hell was the point of a stupidly-confusing name like "Core" anyway?
I don't think Zynga makes very good games, but the elitist snobbery of gamers against them is irritating. It's like more 'hardcore' videogamers are trying to redefine the definition of the entire media so as to exlude Zynga just because they don't like them.
I was the OP, and you couldn't be more wrong if you think I'm a hardcore gamer (I'm barely even a casual gamer (*)), so if you think my viewpoint is an expression of elitism, you're very mistaken.
The essence of it is that such "games" don't have any real or significant skill component- they're essentially designed to tickle people's response/reward circuits in such a way that they will be willing to perform a certain behaviour.
This person already got quite a good part of it- though IMHO I don't even think that a "real" game needs to *necessarily* feature new problems to be valid- it might simply get more difficult in a way that requires progressively more skill.
A "game" that is *designed* so that you don't need any real skill to progress, just the willingness to keep pushing a particular combination of buttons (or whatever) or invest time and/or money isn't a real game.
(*) As in, occasionally plays Tetris or Angry Birds. Bought a Nintendo DS for its "casual" approach and still hardly use it. Never paid more than £10 for a PC game (and no, I haven't pirated a game since the Amiga days). One new controller in the past 10 years (hardly used), etc.... I'm really just not into computer games any more.
I'm shocked, *shocked* that a job involving writing human Skinner boxes masquerading as games is less than spiritually satisfying.
I'm equally shocked that a company whose business revolves around getting money from people via human Skinner boxes masquerading as games might be a bunch of worthless dicks and not that much fun to work for.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this modded funny at all? Have you kids seriously never used a computer without a hard drive? IBM PC? Amiga? Not even a Commodore 64? Come on!
Indeed... back in the early 8-bit days- and indeed throughout the 8-bit era in most countries outside the US- most home computers didn't even have a *floppy* drive, let alone a hard drive.
;-)
I got an 8-bit Atari and floppy drive bundle in the mid-80s, and this was very good at the time because the other one's I'd been interested in didn't include the floppy (and would have been outside my price range if they had). Loading from tapes sucked.
Incidentally, some company *did* offer a 20MB (yes, twenty MEGAbyte) hard drive for the Atari 8-bits around that time. It cost £750 back then (including the interface), equivalent to almost £1500 (or over US $2300) in today's money. Surprisingly, not everyone owned one.
Now get off my LAN!
Next we'll be hearing autotune in everyday speech.
Er, I'm not sure that I'd dismiss that possibility *entirely* out of hand. (*) While I'm not sure how Autotune (**) would translate to speech- since it's used for *singing*- the same could be said for this supposed "vocal fry", which started out as a singing technique, and I'm not sure how *that* got transferred to speech. Autotune is pretty damn common, so really, if vocal fry can make the jump, we shouldn't dismiss that Autotune might have *some* effect on speech, even if it's hindered by the fact that most people don't have a box of digital electronics in their voicebox. :-)
;-)
:-)
Anyway, as for this "vocal fry's" *singing* origins- having checked out what they mean via YouTube- IMHO it sounds less like "a way to reach low notes" and more like what has *always* happened when people *can't* reach those low notes properly, i.e. "it's not shitty singing, it's a vocal technique".... Yeah, right!
Not sure if I have any opinion about vocal fry as a speech pattern, as I haven't heard enough of it to figure out if it's an annoying affectation, just part of the natural mutation of language... or both.
(*) Then again, what do I know. While I don't- or didn't- hate Autotune misuse (**) per se, as an interesting technique in itself (I've heard some quite good examples), my problem is its overuse *everywhere*. I got bored of it ages ago, and predicted the fad would have died at least a year ago now. Since this clearly hasn't happened, I've also considered the possibility that it may indicate a permanent change in music tastes- and, as if sods' law wanted to prove how out of touch I am- it will probably turn out to be a fad that goes massively out of fashion at some point after all. Or not- as I said, what do I know, I'm way too old for chart music anyway.
(**) As opposed to the original intended purpose of Autotune, which was to simply correct imperfections in singing. Ironically when people talk about "Autotune" now, it's usually to mean the deliberate misuse/overuse of it for effect- and not simple correction- because the latter is so prevalent (and the former should not stand out if done correctly).
Great... I wasted my space in my head on Star Trek...
Obligatory XKC... er, I mean "Married to the Sea".
It's really starting to grate, because everyone should know that this XKCD is more relevant in any case.
In fact, if anything fossile fuels are more renewable than solar
Er, weren't fossil fuels originally created, indirectly, by plants absorbing the sun's energy- which would bring us back to solar being non-renewable?
The Conservatives view the government as a way to fund commercial enterprises
Sounds pretty much like the previous Labour with their enthusiasm for the Private Finance Initiative and such like.
Even if we're "charitable" and assume a "best case" scenario that they were only doing it for cynical accounting and political reasons, to hide costs in the short term (rather than because they wanted to pander to private business interests), the end result is that the scheme was bordering on evil. Labour politicians knew full well that it would work out grossly more expensive in the medium and long term, any supposed "efficiencies" of the private sector vastly outweighed by the lucrative creaming off of profits funded by inflated running costs- *and* even in the short term, the private companies' ability to dictate how the various facilities were run had damaging effects on (e.g.) education.
Despite some wanting to paint them as the "loony left", it's useful to remember that Blair and post-Blair Labour were still a bunch of (IMHO) big-business-pandering sell-outs that continued the post-Thatcher consensus in a similar direction to the point that I wouldn't consider them left-wing at all, unless we redefine "left" and "right" to account for the post-Blair "spot the difference" centre-right consensus. Like adjusting the white and black points in a digital image that has virtually no contrast, to extract some marginal detail. (Such a process would make pre-Blair Kinnock/Smith-era Labour look like Maoist extremists by comparison).
Anyway, back on topic, the Conservatives bleated about the obscene costs of PFI at first, but they've quietened down over that recently, perhaps because they recognise the short-term political usefulness (to them) of it, even if it screws everyone over in every other respect.
Kodak is far from the crappiest out there. Polaroid is definitely worse
Yeah, but remember that the current Polaroid bought the name (and much of the business rights) when the original Polaroid Corporation went bankrupt around a decade back.
AFAIK, the generic digital point-and-shoots released under the "Polaroid" name in the past few years have simply been rebranded models from distributors using the name under license- ditto rebranded poor-quality LCD TVs- and only the (now discontinued) traditional film Polaroids were actually sold by them (IIRC).
More recently however, they seem to be attempting to restore some credibility to the name, becoming a digital version of what the original Polaroid once was (e.g. selling Zink-based printers and cameras with integrated printers).
You got that right. EVERY television studio used BetaCams and Betamax in the 80s and early 90s. Sony lost out on nothing.
Er, very wrong- they "lost out on" the entire mass market to VHS.
Successful as Betacam- not the original Betamax- was in the professional arena, that's still a very small market compared to the consumer one at which Betamax was aimed. Even accounting for the fact that (I'm guessing) professional-oriented equipment has far higher profit margins, there simply can't have been enough buyers there to come close to making up for the loss of the sheer number of consumer sales.
Kodak is pretty much a north american name. In Europe, if anyone thinks about cameras, it's not really Kodak, that comes to mind.
Kodak *is* (or was) a very well-known name in the UK at least, even if it was more associated with film. In fact, it was almost certainly the best-known brand of film here.
Kodak cameras are (or again, were) still well reasonably common here, though primarily associated with the low end- though I doubt that situation was/is any different in the US either.
My first camera in the early 1980s was a Kodak 126 "Instamatic", and pretty sure that my Dad talked about having a Box Brownie (pretty much the 1950s equivalent to my Instamatic) when he was younger.
Gouging? Really? A company trying to protect its profits is gouging? If you don't like it, don't buy it. That's your right as a consumer. It's Sony's right as a company to set their prices. That's part of how a free market economy works. If lots of people don't like it, Sony will change their model. Until then you need to weigh up whether or not their offer is worth your hard earned. It is not your human right to be able to afford a play station.
No, but it's everyone's human right to be able to slag off Sony's proposed system and its cynical pricing model, whether or not they intend buying it.
This implied reasoning ("if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it, and therefore you have no right to criticise [manufacturer X].") pops up on Slashdot quite a lot. The first half is correct, but no-one was complaining about *having* to buy it anyway. The second half obviously isn't correct. The notion of a free market (and a free country) says nothing about stifling criticism from those who choose not to buy- indeed, the free exchange of information and opinion is required for one to work efficiently.
I'm sure a lot of companies would rather this weren't the case, but then... tough s**t for them. The flipside of what you said is that if *they* don't like that, they don't have to sell their products. A lot of companies, I'm sure, would rather operate in a non-free market if it was non-free in their favour(!), but that's their problem, not ours.
They're following the "Gillette" model where they take a loss with their actual product, but make up the money in the sale of accessories.
I hear this a lot, but I will note that nowadays when I see those Gillette razor "starter" kits, (typically the metal handle, a couple of blades, and a mini can of foam), they don't seem to be *that* cheap. Not saying they're expensive, but given that the metal and plastic handles can't cost *that* much to make, I honestly don't think they're taking a loss on them.
That said, I do remember getting sent something similar free of charge (and unsolicited) from Gillette around my 16th birthday, and I'm still using their overpriced blades today, so go figure...
They got away with it in the '80s and '90s because they actually made good hardware and the concept of interoperability barely existed.
Not quite, remember Betamax? That was a fairly large case of interoperability- or at least support- being an issue, and Sony *not* getting away with it.
The only time they've had any real success with it was Blu-Ray
AFAIK, that isn't proprietary to the same extent, at least not in the sense that Sony almost unilaterally own and are pushing it. (Though I appreciate that they have one of the largest stakes in that business).
Today the reverse is true - their products tend to be sub-par and we increasingly expect stuff to work across our devices, but they're still stuck in the past.
Sony squandered what could have been a major lead in what became the MP3 audio market, and ended up being left behind.
In theory, MiniDisc could have been something akin to a proto-MP3 player almost a decade before (worthwhile versions of) the latter became commonplace. Some sort of very basic filesystem- just enough to let music files be copied to and from the device- would probably have been doable without increasing the technological complexity of the MiniDisc that much. Given that most people didn't have computers with enough storage to benefit from that back then, perhaps that was an understandable omission.
However, their tying it down beyond what people would have seen was technologically possible and desirable even then- i.e. forcing real-time dubbing, restricting what could be done digitally with copying, etc.- blatantly crippled the potential of the system for their own reasons, making it a slightly improved digital version of the standard cassette, but little more. The Japanese went for it, but its success was limited elsewhere.
Then when MP3 came along, they dragged their feet for ages- maybe because they saw this as a paradigm-shift threat to their existing portable players, not realising that the *real* threat was that the market was going that way anyway, and that they could join it ASAP or lose their lead. Of course, they *did* lose their market-leading position, to Apple. "iPod" was the success story of the first decade of this millennium, not some next-generation solid-state "Walkman".
Even after all this, they joined in in a half-baked cynical manner, trying to play things the old way while looking like they were embracing the new. Remember those stupid pseudo-MP3 players that required you to convert all your files to ATRAC via their crappy software before they'd support them? (No, I don't care whether that version of ATRAC was better than MP3 or not- by that point everyone had settled on MP3, Sony had *already* lost their opportunity to dictate what the market would use, and this move was just a mixture of NIH and arrogance).
So, Sony lost the portable audio market through their own arrogance, short-termist self interest, NIHism and generally blinkered short-sightedness... and they really, *really* have no-one to blame but themselves.
I know you're trying hard, but "Pastor Jake" is just a little too obvious to be the next Doctor Bob, as I suspect it is meant to be. That's on top of the fact that these things never work as well the second time round. Sorry!
They really shot themselves in the foot with the whole CD single thing, that was gouging pure and simple.
CDs always used to be grossly overpriced in the days before the original Napster and online retailers like Amazon selling them much cheaper. But CD singles were the worst of all, in the UK at least.
Circa the mid-90s, while you used to sometimes be able to get them for £1.99 on the first week (when they wanted them to get into the charts), they were usually £3.99 otherwise.
They usually included more tracks than a traditional vinyl single, but those were still essentially B-sides (occasional hidden gem, but mostly second-rate filler or crap remixes). Oh, and they usually released two versions of the single with different bonus tracks, to get the fans to buy both and push it up the charts.
Most people buy singles for the A-side anyway though, so you were basically paying £3.99 for the song you wanted. In today's money, that's almost £6 FOR ONE DAMN SONG! (Over $9 (US) if then converted at today's rates).
So yeah, f*** the CD single and good riddance.
Sigh, all that intelligence and so much ignorance to show for it. You live today to enjoy what you think you have because others died for you to have it.
It's not an issue of intelligence. Maybe he/she understands what you said very well, but just doesn't care, being happy to reap the benefits of those that came before while being enough of a self-centred p***k to not give a toss about behaving the same way for the benefit of future generations.
On the other hand, one *could* hold the opinion that if cayenne8's "short ride in time" were to come to a premature end tomorrow, it'd be no great loss to the human race.
How many people 35 and under in your circle regularly purchase magazines or maintain active subscriptions, even to papers?
I'm just outside your target range, and I haven't bought a magazine for around 2 1/2 years. And I remember *that* because it was the first time I'd bought a magazine in a while.
OTOH, I still read and buy newspapers, despite the fact that the news is often (annoyingly) out of date by the time I read them properly. The analysis often makes up for this, and I just prefer reading papers for longer articles.
The big sign which ultimately lead to me allowing my EGM subscription to run out was the point when I was receiving the following month's issue early each month (i.e. getting a May issue in early April, maybe even the end of March), and the content inside was still dated compared to everything I'd already read about online.
Well, the fact that they put it out much earlier than the cover date (*) doesn't imply that the news is going to be any more up-do-date when you actually get it. It's just a line of text on the front cover after all, it's not like they can beat the Internet by putting a date six months ahead on it (maybe if they push that far enough they can predict things before they happen ;-))
(*) This isn't new- I remember when I bought Amiga magazines in the early 90s, they often came out exactly as you describe, i.e. over a month in "advance".
(Note; I posted the above comment, did not realise I was logged out at the time).
I thought the last x86 processor produced was the Pentium Pro
Assuming I understand your pseudo-purist definition of "x86" correctly, one minor pedantry...
The Pentium Pro wasn't the *last* of Intel's "real" x86 processors, it was the *first* of the RISC-with-x86-wrapper (*) designs that make up all chips today. AFAIK the original Pentium line was the last.
(*) Some have claimed that the core isn't actually that RISC-like; the point here is that it's not native x86.
You don't have to rest on the period key every time you pause or take a breath.
Either that, or he's channelling William Shatner.
I'm just curious, where does that leave games like, say, Minesweeper?
Just my personal view, but one could argue that, regardless of the theoretical nature of Minesweeper, for most humans, it still requires some thought and keeping track of things (i.e. skill at some level) to get it right, unlike many Skinneresque browser games.
As for the idea of watching porn during an airplane flight... the image on the screen is only the beginning of why doing that is frowned upon.
Earphones have already solved the audio side of the problem.
Joke I know, but does *anyone* seriously watch porn with the sound turned up anyway?
99% of it is unbearably badly dubbed (and cheesy, and unconvincing) crap that totally ruins the illusion. Urgh.
Intel went about 2 years without any pentium branded products before reintroducing it.
Unless the dates on this article are wrong, there doesn't appear to be anything approaching a two year gap.
And to make it worse, that 2 year gap was after the brand had taken a serious beating with years of Pentium-4 CPUs being greatly inferior to AMD offerings.
I doubt the man in the street knew diddly-squat about AMD- beyond maybe knowing they were Intel's competitor, and a small proportion of people possibly having heard of their smart new 64-bit chip- though they'd probably have known "Intel Inside" and "Pentium" quite well back then.
You're confusing your own knowledge of the situation with that of Joe Public that Intel seem to design their name for.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. There's no question Pentium was a damaged brand. YOU are the one who wants to paint it as an idiotic move with no thought put into it.
If (as was apparent elsewhere) the intended significance of the Pentium brand was unclear to a significant proportion of Slashdot readers, it sure as hell isn't going to be clear to Joe Sixpack!
then they still happen to have dummied their way into a mostly-correct decision, keeping the brand alive.
The problem was they made that decision too late, after they'd replaced it with the "Core" name and couldn't backtrack. Hence the stupid new non-segment they shoehorned it into. They should have just kept it- what the hell was the point of a stupidly-confusing name like "Core" anyway?
I don't think Zynga makes very good games, but the elitist snobbery of gamers against them is irritating. It's like more 'hardcore' videogamers are trying to redefine the definition of the entire media so as to exlude Zynga just because they don't like them.
I was the OP, and you couldn't be more wrong if you think I'm a hardcore gamer (I'm barely even a casual gamer (*)), so if you think my viewpoint is an expression of elitism, you're very mistaken.
The essence of it is that such "games" don't have any real or significant skill component- they're essentially designed to tickle people's response/reward circuits in such a way that they will be willing to perform a certain behaviour.
This person already got quite a good part of it- though IMHO I don't even think that a "real" game needs to *necessarily* feature new problems to be valid- it might simply get more difficult in a way that requires progressively more skill.
A "game" that is *designed* so that you don't need any real skill to progress, just the willingness to keep pushing a particular combination of buttons (or whatever) or invest time and/or money isn't a real game.
Really, if you're interested in the answer, you should take a look at this recent Slashdot discussion and read at least some of the (rather long) associated story.
(*) As in, occasionally plays Tetris or Angry Birds. Bought a Nintendo DS for its "casual" approach and still hardly use it. Never paid more than £10 for a PC game (and no, I haven't pirated a game since the Amiga days). One new controller in the past 10 years (hardly used), etc.... I'm really just not into computer games any more.
I'm shocked, *shocked* that a job involving writing human Skinner boxes masquerading as games is less than spiritually satisfying.
I'm equally shocked that a company whose business revolves around getting money from people via human Skinner boxes masquerading as games might be a bunch of worthless dicks and not that much fun to work for.