This sort of flip-flopping makes no sense when viewed from the outside, but if you look at the internal politics, it does. [..] Anyone that expects a corporation to behave logically and consistently over a period of years has never sat in a boardroom and seen the petty politics and childish score-setting that goes on.
Oh, I agree entirely- I've no doubt that's a plausible explanation too.
Point is that the decision smacked of internal positioning and politics- whether it was some mediocrity trying to increase their prominence or importance or (as you suggested) internal factionalising and displays of power, or whatever- rather than being about what was best from a marketing point of view. Because it wasn't!
I posted a comment several years back explaining how the well-known contradiction of MS employing countless talented researchers but never being able to translate that into anything more than safe, uninnovative mediocrity was significantly due to their internal structure and politics.
All the pissing, moaning and groaning by a few YouTube content creators makes for nice click bait video to drive their revenue streams for their videos. Wait a few months... They will find something else to piss, moan and groan about for another click bait video. It's not censorship, it's opportunism.
Indeed, such attempts to play up issues purely for the sake of cash-ins are quite disgusting.
That's why it's essential that you watch this video, where I explain how such bottom-feeding cynicism will lead to the downfall of the narcissistic attention whoring community, the decline of YouTube and the end of Western civilisation itself.
It's not, it's just another case of too many marketers spoiling the broth.
A similar example is the revived Pentium brand. This was fine when it originally when it represented Intel's "mainstream" x86 line, with Celeron being the cut down models and Xeon the server versions. Simple. Then they ditched the name when the Core brand came out. Whatever; except that instead of sticking with the new hierarchy, they decided to bring the Pentium brand back.
Only now its old place had been taken and there was no clear need for it, so (from what I can tell), they sort of fudged a gap that didn't exist between the Celeron and the mainstream Core lines. That appears to be the poorly-defined and generally pointless market positioning for the post-resurrection Pentium brand (and one that is at odds with its previous "main line" positioning).
There was absolutely no need for this.
Ironically I'm pretty sure the people with the least understanding of (and interest in) Intel's chips are those likely to be buying computers based around upper-entry-level chips like the "Pentium".
You can argue whether or not they should have ditched the name in the first place, but having done so, it was an absolutely stupid idea to bring it back. It smacks of someone in marketing trying to justify their salary (and get noticed) by waving about some market research showing that the Pentium name still had value and they should use it again.
Of course, it could be that Intel know *exactly* what they're doing and were/are deliberately making the naming of their chips more opaque and confusing in an attempt to exploit rational ignorance.
First thing I thought when I saw this and read the summary was "That's not the style of story Slashdot would normally run".
Reading the "story" itself confirmed it.
Either the new owners don't get Slashdot, they want to turn it into something more profitable or that someone somewhere had a vested interest in running this story.
Bingo! I much preferred it *before* Google started moving all their annoying animated ads to HTML5. Primarily because I was running Flashblock- i.e. click-to-play- and didn't have to see them if I didn't want to (which- spoiler ahead- I didn't!)
Lynx and Gopher sucked mostly [..] Telnet on the other hand was pretty cool and could do a lot, but was massively underused.
I'm not sure that comparing Gopher and Telnet in that way is even meaningful. Perhaps I misunderstood the point you're trying to make, but the fact that you say Telnet "could do a lot" suggests you don't realise you're comparing apples with oranges.
Telnet itself was little more than a text-based terminal facility for accessing remote systems; that's not a criticism, since this is what it was meant to do. Of course, you can provide pretty much any (text-based) facility you like over that connection- which I guess is why one might say you can do "a lot" with it- but telnet itself is still just a remote access facility for all that.
Technically and functionally, it's not the same thing (nor intended to be the same) as Gopher, or the World Wide Web.
If you added so much to it that it became anything plausibly akin to Flash, then I'm not sure it would be Telnet as we recognise it any more.
(#) And Lynx was just a browser that happened to support both Gopher and the Web; it wasn't a protocol in itself. Unless you're referring to the unrelated modem protocol, in which case the comparison makes even less sense.
That appears to be a relative comparison, and appears to include a weighting for (e.g.) prices.
That's not to say that such concerns aren't legitimate. For example, housing in the UK is generally expensive, reaching ludicrous and obscene levels in the South East of England and especially London. It means that anyone who isn't on a well-paid job in that area is going to have serious problems finding affordable accommodation. (FWIW, I'm disgusted that the UK economy is so obsessed with ever-increasing house prices and the fact that this is assumed to be a good thing. Not if you're looking for your first bloody house, it isn't.)
Social exclusion is another area that's very relative; if most people have a higher income and social life revolves around activities requiring that level of income, someone earning less is going to be socially excluded. In fact, that's probably true regardless of the level of absolute income- it's the amount of inequality that's more likely to be important there.
But in absolute financial terms, it's utterly misleading to compare any region or country within the United Kingdom to Romania or Bulgaria.
Star Trek's budget really wasn't that much higher, but the space scenes, ships and effects looked far more realistic than anything in B5.
Whether Star Trek's budget was 2.5 times higher ($2 M) or only 1.6 times ($1.3 M), the fact remains that it had far fewer (and generally much less complex) space scenes than B5.
As I said, you couldn't do scenes of B5-level complexity using models on a Star Trek TV budget, let alone a B5 one.
And you keep going on about video game FMV being supposedly better than B5; I saw the pre-rendered intro sequence for (the CD versions of) the infamous Rise of the Robots on YouTube a couple of months back (see here) and noting that while it was probably impressive at the time, it looked a bit synthetic now. It certainly isn't any better than B5.
(#) FWIW, I understand that DS9 latterly used CGI to augment the model shots; that doesn't count as we were discussing whether B5 would have been better off using models.
I could never take those crappy CGI scenes in B5 seriously. They would have been better just using models.
On B5's budget? Not a chance in hell.
The only reason it was possible to do space scenes that were *far* more extensive and three-dimensional than those of the Star Trek series despite having a smaller budget was because they used the new, cheaper CGI that came along in the early 90s.
I'm guessing that to do the equivalent scenes using traditional models would have pushed the cost into Hollywood movie territory. That obviously wasn't going to happen, not even on Star Trek's budget.
I appreciate that it's probably dated by modern standards and might not always have compared favourably at the time, but the flipside is that CGI made it possible *at all* for a series set in space to actually have a significant amount of footage showing events taking place there, as opposed to the limited number of static shots and viewscreen images that Star Trek had at the time.
I'm already vaguely aware of parts of these (including the basic idea that there are different levels of infinity) but while I can "accept" the logic, I don't really "get" it and part of my brain is still telling me I'm being complicit in fooling myself or that there's a logical paradox at some level.:-/
Nanometers may be small, but they're not infinitely small, which is what infinitesimal means. They're barely even any closer to infinitely small than centimeters.
Well, FWIW, *both* of them are infinitely larger than infinitesimal despite the fact that nanometres are closer. So does this mean that the "infinity" between centimetres and infinitesimal is larger than the infinity between nanometres and infinitesimal? Hmmmmmm......
Also, imagine a line of people standing single-file, extending infinitely in both directions. There are, of course, an infinite number of people. Now, imagine each of these people is joined by a partner. Are there twice as many people now? Does this mean there are "2 x infinity" people? But surely you can't do that to infinity. Er...
After your noodle has been baked in the oven at gas mark 5 for 45 minutes, remove and place on a wire tray to cool down. (^_^)
Spoiler; I'm not a mathematician, and don't have the answers, I'm just throwing this out here for amusement. Though I guess someone who knows more about this than I do could explain it if they could be arsed.:-)
Seriously, this is a nerd site, and nerds care about performance.
Some do, some don't.
Maybe some of you want to spend your days looking through open source video driver code, but real nerds want to actually do stuff and get good video performance.
So, someone's not a "real nerd" if they want to spend "days looking through open source video driver code" (sounds pretty stereotypically nerdish to me) rather than just getting stuff done (which was traditionally associated with ordinary, non-nerdish users who saw the technology as just a means to an end)?
Let's face it; you're trying to force a definition of "nerd" that supports your own point of view, a la "No true Scotsman".
The 3.5" floppy format was already inconveniently small for most uses by the late 90s- the typical PC hard drive around that time was several gigabytes- and any viable replacement was likely to take off as soon as it reached a comparable price, regardless of what Apple did.
Flash pen drives didn't get to that point until several years later, and even writable optical drives which- while getting rapidly cheaper by the late 90s- still cost enough more than the read-only equivalent that the first-generation iMac only included a CD-ROM.
The idea that everyone would share files entirely using the Internet in the days when that meant dial-up and it was far enough from universal that relying on it to exchange files with others would be a problem? Not practical in the real world.
Simple fact is that Apple did the easy part of ditching the floppy, but *didn't* bother to include a proper replacement because they knew damn well it couldn't be done without increasing the price. Why do you think virtually every first-generation iMac you saw had a colour-matched external floppy drive hanging off the side?!
So, no. I don't think they deserve credit for killing the floppy at all. It died when it would have done, regardless.
Neither of those games feature Sonic or were created by anyone who had anything to do with Sonic.
Aside from the fact my original comment was very obviously tongue-in-cheek- no, I don't seriously consider those to be "Sonic" games(!)- it's still quite clear in both cases that the character is meant to be Sonic.
The first one is an official Sega release and it looks *really* like him, the second obviously isn't, but- as the video points out- given the ripping off of other mascots, it's quite clear that they've copied Sonic. (Granted, he doesn't move much like the real Sonic, but it's quite possible they hadn't even seen the original game at that point).
FWIW, the video is undeniably padded and a bit longer than it should be- as, to be fair, a lot of YouTube videos are- but it's still an interesting piece of video game history. (The background stuff on the company and game development is (ironically) probably more interesting to those of us who had an Amiga than Mega Drive owners).
You just won't believe how steamingly, thermally, mind- bogglingly hot it is. I mean, you may think it's a bit warm on a sunny day when you head down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to hot coffee.
You are confusing actors with writers. Writers decide who a character is and what they are about. Actors implement the writer's vision, actors communicate that vision through their performance.
It's true that actors don't "own" the character and often get too much credit for work on the part of the writers.
Still, your vision and understanding of actors as being mere conduits for the writer's work suggests an overly literal view of this sort of thing as an engineering-style process, rather than one with the blurred lines which often exist in reality.
Blurred lines such as the actor feeding back aspects of his performance and opinion to the writers and directors (#), longstanding actors' portrayal forming how the character develops, and so on.
(#) Famous geek example; Rutger Hauer's "Time to die" speech in Blade Runner.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of flip-flopping makes no sense when viewed from the outside, but if you look at the internal politics, it does. [..] Anyone that expects a corporation to behave logically and consistently over a period of years has never sat in a boardroom and seen the petty politics and childish score-setting that goes on.
Oh, I agree entirely- I've no doubt that's a plausible explanation too.
Point is that the decision smacked of internal positioning and politics- whether it was some mediocrity trying to increase their prominence or importance or (as you suggested) internal factionalising and displays of power, or whatever- rather than being about what was best from a marketing point of view. Because it wasn't!
I posted a comment several years back explaining how the well-known contradiction of MS employing countless talented researchers but never being able to translate that into anything more than safe, uninnovative mediocrity was significantly due to their internal structure and politics.
It might pose a problem if it goes viral though.
Don't worry, someone'll rip it off and post it to YouTube if that happens anyway. Then someone else'll rip that off and post it to Facebook.
All the pissing, moaning and groaning by a few YouTube content creators makes for nice click bait video to drive their revenue streams for their videos. Wait a few months... They will find something else to piss, moan and groan about for another click bait video. It's not censorship, it's opportunism.
Indeed, such attempts to play up issues purely for the sake of cash-ins are quite disgusting.
That's why it's essential that you watch this video, where I explain how such bottom-feeding cynicism will lead to the downfall of the narcissistic attention whoring community, the decline of YouTube and the end of Western civilisation itself.
How in the world is that less confusing?
It's not, it's just another case of too many marketers spoiling the broth.
A similar example is the revived Pentium brand. This was fine when it originally when it represented Intel's "mainstream" x86 line, with Celeron being the cut down models and Xeon the server versions. Simple. Then they ditched the name when the Core brand came out. Whatever; except that instead of sticking with the new hierarchy, they decided to bring the Pentium brand back.
Only now its old place had been taken and there was no clear need for it, so (from what I can tell), they sort of fudged a gap that didn't exist between the Celeron and the mainstream Core lines. That appears to be the poorly-defined and generally pointless market positioning for the post-resurrection Pentium brand (and one that is at odds with its previous "main line" positioning).
There was absolutely no need for this.
Ironically I'm pretty sure the people with the least understanding of (and interest in) Intel's chips are those likely to be buying computers based around upper-entry-level chips like the "Pentium".
You can argue whether or not they should have ditched the name in the first place, but having done so, it was an absolutely stupid idea to bring it back. It smacks of someone in marketing trying to justify their salary (and get noticed) by waving about some market research showing that the Pentium name still had value and they should use it again.
Of course, it could be that Intel know *exactly* what they're doing and were/are deliberately making the naming of their chips more opaque and confusing in an attempt to exploit rational ignorance.
First thing I thought when I saw this and read the summary was "That's not the style of story Slashdot would normally run".
Reading the "story" itself confirmed it.
Either the new owners don't get Slashdot, they want to turn it into something more profitable or that someone somewhere had a vested interest in running this story.
Honestly not sure which.
"Living forever isn't boring, you are."
-Me.
I'm suspicious as to whether or not you're qualified to judge if that's the case.
Do you have a birth certificate proving you've lived forever?
87 comments and not a single mention of University of Pisa in Italy and their large collection of <ahem> photos?
"My God... is that a leaning tower?"
Bingo! I much preferred it *before* Google started moving all their annoying animated ads to HTML5. Primarily because I was running Flashblock- i.e. click-to-play- and didn't have to see them if I didn't want to (which- spoiler ahead- I didn't!)
Lynx and Gopher sucked mostly [..] Telnet on the other hand was pretty cool and could do a lot, but was massively underused.
I'm not sure that comparing Gopher and Telnet in that way is even meaningful. Perhaps I misunderstood the point you're trying to make, but the fact that you say Telnet "could do a lot" suggests you don't realise you're comparing apples with oranges.
Telnet itself was little more than a text-based terminal facility for accessing remote systems; that's not a criticism, since this is what it was meant to do. Of course, you can provide pretty much any (text-based) facility you like over that connection- which I guess is why one might say you can do "a lot" with it- but telnet itself is still just a remote access facility for all that.
Technically and functionally, it's not the same thing (nor intended to be the same) as Gopher, or the World Wide Web.
If you added so much to it that it became anything plausibly akin to Flash, then I'm not sure it would be Telnet as we recognise it any more.
(#) And Lynx was just a browser that happened to support both Gopher and the Web; it wasn't a protocol in itself. Unless you're referring to the unrelated modem protocol, in which case the comparison makes even less sense.
since I'm using 5G, bitches!
Er, okay. Guess they didn't publicise the fact that your shiny new 5G connection's latency is somewhat less impressive than its throughput then? ;-)
To get the benefits of facebook, without the main disadvantage (ads, that are easily circumvented).
You think that's the main disadvantage of Facebook? I'd have said it was the flagrant and obnoxious lack of respect for anyone's personal privacy.
That is comparable to Greece or Slovenia in absolute numbers.
Who mentioned anything about Greece or Slovenia? We were discussing your comparison of the United Kingdom with Romania and Bulgaria.
That appears to be a relative comparison, and appears to include a weighting for (e.g.) prices.
That's not to say that such concerns aren't legitimate. For example, housing in the UK is generally expensive, reaching ludicrous and obscene levels in the South East of England and especially London. It means that anyone who isn't on a well-paid job in that area is going to have serious problems finding affordable accommodation. (FWIW, I'm disgusted that the UK economy is so obsessed with ever-increasing house prices and the fact that this is assumed to be a good thing. Not if you're looking for your first bloody house, it isn't.)
Social exclusion is another area that's very relative; if most people have a higher income and social life revolves around activities requiring that level of income, someone earning less is going to be socially excluded. In fact, that's probably true regardless of the level of absolute income- it's the amount of inequality that's more likely to be important there.
But in absolute financial terms, it's utterly misleading to compare any region or country within the United Kingdom to Romania or Bulgaria.
If the UK is so prosperous, why it is a home of some of the poorest and least developed areas in the EU - worse than Romania or Bulgaria?
WTF? I'm an independence-inclined Scot with no patience for the rest of the United Kingdom that's dragging us out of the EU against our will.
And even I'm going to call BS on this unless you can elaborate on and substantiate your claim.
Star Trek's budget really wasn't that much higher, but the space scenes, ships and effects looked far more realistic than anything in B5.
Whether Star Trek's budget was 2.5 times higher ($2 M) or only 1.6 times ($1.3 M), the fact remains that it had far fewer (and generally much less complex) space scenes than B5.
As I said, you couldn't do scenes of B5-level complexity using models on a Star Trek TV budget, let alone a B5 one.
And you keep going on about video game FMV being supposedly better than B5; I saw the pre-rendered intro sequence for (the CD versions of) the infamous Rise of the Robots on YouTube a couple of months back (see here) and noting that while it was probably impressive at the time, it looked a bit synthetic now. It certainly isn't any better than B5.
(#) FWIW, I understand that DS9 latterly used CGI to augment the model shots; that doesn't count as we were discussing whether B5 would have been better off using models.
I could never take those crappy CGI scenes in B5 seriously. They would have been better just using models.
On B5's budget? Not a chance in hell.
The only reason it was possible to do space scenes that were *far* more extensive and three-dimensional than those of the Star Trek series despite having a smaller budget was because they used the new, cheaper CGI that came along in the early 90s.
I'm guessing that to do the equivalent scenes using traditional models would have pushed the cost into Hollywood movie territory. That obviously wasn't going to happen, not even on Star Trek's budget.
I appreciate that it's probably dated by modern standards and might not always have compared favourably at the time, but the flipside is that CGI made it possible *at all* for a series set in space to actually have a significant amount of footage showing events taking place there, as opposed to the limited number of static shots and viewscreen images that Star Trek had at the time.
I'm already vaguely aware of parts of these (including the basic idea that there are different levels of infinity) but while I can "accept" the logic, I don't really "get" it and part of my brain is still telling me I'm being complicit in fooling myself or that there's a logical paradox at some level. :-/
Nanometers may be small, but they're not infinitely small, which is what infinitesimal means. They're barely even any closer to infinitely small than centimeters.
Well, FWIW, *both* of them are infinitely larger than infinitesimal despite the fact that nanometres are closer. So does this mean that the "infinity" between centimetres and infinitesimal is larger than the infinity between nanometres and infinitesimal? Hmmmmmm......
:-)
Also, imagine a line of people standing single-file, extending infinitely in both directions. There are, of course, an infinite number of people. Now, imagine each of these people is joined by a partner. Are there twice as many people now? Does this mean there are "2 x infinity" people? But surely you can't do that to infinity. Er...
After your noodle has been baked in the oven at gas mark 5 for 45 minutes, remove and place on a wire tray to cool down. (^_^)
Spoiler; I'm not a mathematician, and don't have the answers, I'm just throwing this out here for amusement. Though I guess someone who knows more about this than I do could explain it if they could be arsed.
Seriously, this is a nerd site, and nerds care about performance.
Some do, some don't.
Maybe some of you want to spend your days looking through open source video driver code, but real nerds want to actually do stuff and get good video performance.
So, someone's not a "real nerd" if they want to spend "days looking through open source video driver code" (sounds pretty stereotypically nerdish to me) rather than just getting stuff done (which was traditionally associated with ordinary, non-nerdish users who saw the technology as just a means to an end)?
Let's face it; you're trying to force a definition of "nerd" that supports your own point of view, a la "No true Scotsman".
I credit Apple with killing the floppy drive
Oh, puh-leez, not this mouldy old chestnut.
The 3.5" floppy format was already inconveniently small for most uses by the late 90s- the typical PC hard drive around that time was several gigabytes- and any viable replacement was likely to take off as soon as it reached a comparable price, regardless of what Apple did.
Flash pen drives didn't get to that point until several years later, and even writable optical drives which- while getting rapidly cheaper by the late 90s- still cost enough more than the read-only equivalent that the first-generation iMac only included a CD-ROM.
The idea that everyone would share files entirely using the Internet in the days when that meant dial-up and it was far enough from universal that relying on it to exchange files with others would be a problem? Not practical in the real world.
Simple fact is that Apple did the easy part of ditching the floppy, but *didn't* bother to include a proper replacement because they knew damn well it couldn't be done without increasing the price. Why do you think virtually every first-generation iMac you saw had a colour-matched external floppy drive hanging off the side?!
So, no. I don't think they deserve credit for killing the floppy at all. It died when it would have done, regardless.
Neither of those games feature Sonic or were created by anyone who had anything to do with Sonic.
Aside from the fact my original comment was very obviously tongue-in-cheek- no, I don't seriously consider those to be "Sonic" games(!)- it's still quite clear in both cases that the character is meant to be Sonic.
The first one is an official Sega release and it looks *really* like him, the second obviously isn't, but- as the video points out- given the ripping off of other mascots, it's quite clear that they've copied Sonic. (Granted, he doesn't move much like the real Sonic, but it's quite possible they hadn't even seen the original game at that point).
FWIW, the video is undeniably padded and a bit longer than it should be- as, to be fair, a lot of YouTube videos are- but it's still an interesting piece of video game history. (The background stuff on the company and game development is (ironically) probably more interesting to those of us who had an Amiga than Mega Drive owners).
Yep.
I rate Sonic's first and second games.
Unfortunately, they jumped the shark with his third appearance, in a game called "Sonic the Hedgehog" IIRC. Don't think that one did very well...
Hot coffee is Really Hot.
You just won't believe how steamingly, thermally, mind- bogglingly hot it is. I mean, you may think it's a bit warm on a sunny day when you head down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to hot coffee.
You are confusing actors with writers. Writers decide who a character is and what they are about. Actors implement the writer's vision, actors communicate that vision through their performance.
It's true that actors don't "own" the character and often get too much credit for work on the part of the writers.
Still, your vision and understanding of actors as being mere conduits for the writer's work suggests an overly literal view of this sort of thing as an engineering-style process, rather than one with the blurred lines which often exist in reality.
Blurred lines such as the actor feeding back aspects of his performance and opinion to the writers and directors (#), longstanding actors' portrayal forming how the character develops, and so on.
(#) Famous geek example; Rutger Hauer's "Time to die" speech in Blade Runner.