Hmmm. In Chicago, New York, Washington DC and others guns are all but illegal and they have very heavy crime problems. But, in places like Vermont and many other places that allow folks to walk around with loaded firearms crime is down.
I've got to agree on this one.
I lived in Vancouver, BC for three years. There was a huge problem with what they called "home invasions," where a couple of thugs would break into a house, then use knives to intimidate the residents into being tied up, then walk off with all of the valuables.
While it's not *unheard* of for something like that to happen in the US, the few people stupid enough to do it will get picked off by gun owners down here, meaning it will never reach the epidemic proportions that Vancouver had when I lived there.
It is pretty cool. The impression I get is that there was a limited release of transparent Saturns released in Japan, and this is a modified version of one of those.
The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.
I wish they had gone one step further and included an option to auto-configure a gamepad with the XBox controls.
I've been playing almost exclusively console games lately, and trying out the demo made me realize just how much I hate using a keyboard and mouse as a controller.
Production costs for a modern top-40 cd are nowhere NEAR the costs to produce a motion picture. Maybe 1/100th the costs.
Where in my post did I say the production costs were the same?
If a top-40 CD costs $1 million, that's still a million dollars that the record label has to shell out and hope they make back on sales.
Pretty much any major film is going to at least break even just on ticket sales at the theatre.
This is not that hard to figure out. Look at the box office figures for the next few big name films, then figure out why they're the same price as a CD when they come out on DVD.
Also, if it were that simple, then why is 10-year old music STILL sold for $12.99 per cd?
$12.99. The same price as a DVD of a ten year old film. It sounds reasonable to me, especially given that newly-released CDs generally cost closer to $18.
I mean, doesn't it seem odd that the Two-Towers extended version, which has 4 DVDs and cost millions to make, costs roughly the same as new release music CDs?
No.
Because by the time a film has been released on DVD, it has already generally made back its production costs and turned a profit. DVD sales are just additional profit, which is why they can be sold cheaply.
The record industry doesn't have an equivalent of movie theatres. They make all their money from album sales, although apparently some of the big labels are trying for a cut of concert profits now.
Blu-Ray uses a cartridge to hold the discs. I imagine that if it had caught on you could get caddies like the ones that old CD-ROM drives use, but maybe not.
I'm really disappointed that it was not selected. DVDs are fragile enough in terms of potential for damage by scratching. HD-DVDs will probably stop being readable if you breathe on them or handle them without wearing protective gloves.
I'm really surprised that more manufacturers haven't jumped on selling replacement transparent and/or coloured cases made to otherwise look like the originals for the most recent wave of consoles.
It's easy to find them for the PS1 and Dreamcast, so why not the current ones?
The world is full of stuff we don't like, it takes some bad karma to have to go to the trouble of putting together a comment to express one's dissatisfaction with something, especially one that isn't humourous or satirical.
Oh come on, that was the funniest thing I've seen all week. If I had mod points, they'd be going to the parent post.
It would also be nice if game makers would have enough taste *not* to make games based on snuff films, or at the very least if the ESRB would rate this one Adults Only.
America's priorities are totally screwed up if Manhunt ends up in the same ratings group as Deus Ex, the new Legacy of Kain game, and even GTA (all three of which I wouldn't have a problem with highschoolers playing), while a hypothetical sexually-themed game would immediately be dropped into Adults Only.
How is it more appropriate for young people to play a game involving suffocating people with bags and sodomizing them with crowbars than one involving the type of act which let them exist in the first place?
Or don't pay for any music and support the freedom of music. Bands that don't care about the money and seem to care about the music are the bands you should be for.
Why, because there's something wrong with wanting to get paid for your life's work?
The Republicans are now the liberals, wanting to change every damned law in a way that contradicts their original purpose so they can micromanage people's lives. The democrats are now the conservatives fighting to keep the laws as they were intended.
I don't think this is really a liberal/conservative difference, more like a regular-person/fascist-totalitarian-bent-on-creati ng-a-New-American-Empire-that-the-sun-never-sets-o n difference.
There are plenty of people with good points on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide. Unfortunately, the Plan for a New American Century has wormed its members into so many key positions that it doesn't matter anymore.
What people need to realize is that voting for Bush isn't voting Republican, except in name. There won't be a real Republican candidate next year, only a Neo-Conservative one.
A lot of people are mocking this post unnecessarily.
Do any of you *know* any actual independent musicians? This kind of situation (minus the having to order CDs from mp3.com) is not unbelievable.
One of my friends in Vancouver is an industrial musician. When he goes on tour, he sleeps in his car on the side of the road, because independent musicians don't generally make enough from a tour to afford a hotel.
CD sales are a huge part of an independent tour. Most of the local bands I know are paid - maybe - $100 for a show. That's enough for gas, and dinner, and not much else. Selling CDs and merchandise might let them put $50 into their wallets.
The part about losing her master copies is a little extreme, but also not unheard of. Again, my friend in Vancouver had his PC stolen and lost the entire album he had been working on for years.
I have the ring part of one of these in storage somewhere. It's actually kind of cool looking, another relic of the 80s future that never was. I never tried it out as a game controller, assuming it would be as hard to use as the Powerglove (which I do not like despite the "it's so bad" factor), and the Konami voice-activated lightgun headset.
The new Legacy of Kain game supports 16x9 480p on the XBox. I wish I could give it a try - I've been wanting to see a widescreen game in this series since I found an unfinished option for it buried in the code for Soul Reaver 2 - but I am stuck with a regular TV set for now.
...any form of entertainment that allows you to experience something that you've never experienced before automatically has value.
I disagree. Would you buy my hypothetical kidnap-and-rape game for that same reason? Would you buy a game where the goal was to vivisect realistically-modelled babies? There are some things that simply have no inherent value to humanity, and I think that games like this fit into that category.
I mean, you should clearly be skipping the Lord Of The Rings films because New Line Cinema also put out Seven...
I haven't seen Seven, but if it's like most psychological thrillers then the killer isn't portrayed as the protagonist. The reason Manhunt disturbs me is because it is the player's character who is doing the brutal murdering for someone else's entertainment.
...do we really need this kind of "entertainment"?
I don't have anything against videogame violence when it makes sense, or even when it doesn't make sense but is done in an over-the-top comic book style, but a game where you sodomize your enemy with a crowbar while a freak with a videocamera tapes it? What next, one where the objective is to kidnap and rape as many women as possible?
This is a new low. I love the GTA series (one of the over-the-top comic book variety I mentioned), but I am unlikely to buy the next one because it would be giving money to the same company responsible for this.
Soul Reaver for the Dreamcast has all the excellent Metroid-style exploration, story, and quality voice acting of the original, but the character models, environments, and camera work during the cinematics were all greatly improved over the Playstation and PC versions.
Virtual On is another good pick, although it can be tough to find used for a decent price.
First of all, if the music COMPANIES go out of business, then I don't really care. Musicians will still make music because they love to, not because they make money at it.
Only someone who wasn't a musician would say that.
You are of course, speaking from experience, right?
Yes, actually, I am. I work for a Fortune 500 company that uses mainframe, Windows, and Unix systems.
Not only are nightly batch cycles still used in mainframe environments
If you read my post again, I said "I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles."
I didn't say "no one uses nightly batch cycles anymore!!!!!"
However, I think for the most part it *is* generally only companies with mainframes that still use them. It's an old mindset. Nightly batch data can be up to 24 hours old, or older if the batch jobs don't run every day. That's less than useful for a lot of situations, and certainly less than desirable.
Our mainframe has a whole huge mass of nightly batch jobs running on it, for example, but if I were building a similar company from the ground up, I would build it on technology that isn't thirty years old, and can handle it in real-time. It better serves the people who use that data to make decisions about the business.
but I have also seen them in PC based SQL environments.
This surprises me, but I can see it happening. I still think for most larger corporations it would make more sense to spend the money to get hardware that can do it in real-time. It will still end up being less than the cost of a mainframe.
And I think you are missing the point; x86 servers may have plenty of CPU, you can even build clusters, but you simply don't have the I/O capacity.
My point is that if you distribute processing across more than one system, the I/O capacity isn't a concern.
You don't even need a cluster for this. You just parallel-process your data by running different tasks on different servers. One server (or one cluster) may not have the I/O throughput of a mainframe, but the 100 high-end x86 servers you can buy for the same cost as a mainframe sure would.
The reason mainframes need to be such fault-tolerant, reliable, high-throughput machines is because people run *everything* on them, all at once.
I think that a server (or cluster for fault tolerance) for payroll, another for reporting, et cetera is a much more logical way to organize data processing now.
Where is the software that is going to turn it into a unified fault-tolerant system?
I don't know about Linux, because I don't work with it.
Windows has clustering capabilities. We have old NT4 clusters in part of our production environment where we needed fault tolerance. There are two servers clustered together, with a shared RAID array for the data. I am unaware of any time that this has not sufficed for keeping our business-critical data for those systems intact.
IO throughput will destroy your performance and your nightly batches will take 2 days to run.
If you ran it all on one machine, maybe. Fortunately, because x86 servers cost about 1% the cost of a mainframe per year, you can split up processing between them.
I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles, because all of their reporting is done in real-time, the way it should be in the 21st century.
Slashdot Mirror
Homeopathic Medicine: I'd give this one a 5 on the 4 cuckoo scale.
Given the premises of homeopathy, wouldn't it be more appropriate to give it something like one part per five hundred billion on the 4 cuckoo scale?
=)
Hmmm. In Chicago, New York, Washington DC and others guns are all but illegal and they have very heavy crime problems. But, in places like Vermont and many other places that allow folks to walk around with loaded firearms crime is down.
I've got to agree on this one.
I lived in Vancouver, BC for three years. There was a huge problem with what they called "home invasions," where a couple of thugs would break into a house, then use knives to intimidate the residents into being tied up, then walk off with all of the valuables.
While it's not *unheard* of for something like that to happen in the US, the few people stupid enough to do it will get picked off by gun owners down here, meaning it will never reach the epidemic proportions that Vancouver had when I lived there.
This is the modified Saturn.
It is pretty cool. The impression I get is that there was a limited release of transparent Saturns released in Japan, and this is a modified version of one of those.
The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.
I wish they had gone one step further and included an option to auto-configure a gamepad with the XBox controls.
I've been playing almost exclusively console games lately, and trying out the demo made me realize just how much I hate using a keyboard and mouse as a controller.
I just picked up an adapter from Lik-Sang that lets me use my PS2 gamepad as a PC controller (with force feedback!), and I was hoping to try it out on this demo. I think I'll just get the console version instead when it comes out.
Production costs for a modern top-40 cd are nowhere NEAR the costs to produce a motion picture. Maybe 1/100th the costs.
Where in my post did I say the production costs were the same?
If a top-40 CD costs $1 million, that's still a million dollars that the record label has to shell out and hope they make back on sales.
Pretty much any major film is going to at least break even just on ticket sales at the theatre.
This is not that hard to figure out. Look at the box office figures for the next few big name films, then figure out why they're the same price as a CD when they come out on DVD.
Also, if it were that simple, then why is 10-year old music STILL sold for $12.99 per cd?
$12.99. The same price as a DVD of a ten year old film. It sounds reasonable to me, especially given that newly-released CDs generally cost closer to $18.
The record industry does have an equivalent, it's called a concert.
Uh, as I said...
They make all their money from album sales, although apparently some of the big labels are trying for a cut of concert profits now.
I mean, doesn't it seem odd that the Two-Towers extended version, which has 4 DVDs and cost millions to make, costs roughly the same as new release music CDs?
No.
Because by the time a film has been released on DVD, it has already generally made back its production costs and turned a profit. DVD sales are just additional profit, which is why they can be sold cheaply.
The record industry doesn't have an equivalent of movie theatres. They make all their money from album sales, although apparently some of the big labels are trying for a cut of concert profits now.
Blu-Ray uses a cartridge to hold the discs. I imagine that if it had caught on you could get caddies like the ones that old CD-ROM drives use, but maybe not.
I'm really disappointed that it was not selected. DVDs are fragile enough in terms of potential for damage by scratching. HD-DVDs will probably stop being readable if you breathe on them or handle them without wearing protective gloves.
I'm really surprised that more manufacturers haven't jumped on selling replacement transparent and/or coloured cases made to otherwise look like the originals for the most recent wave of consoles.
It's easy to find them for the PS1 and Dreamcast, so why not the current ones?
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The world is full of stuff we don't like, it takes some bad karma to have to go to the trouble of putting together a comment to express one's dissatisfaction with something, especially one that isn't humourous or satirical.
Oh come on, that was the funniest thing I've seen all week. If I had mod points, they'd be going to the parent post.
It would also be nice if game makers would have enough taste *not* to make games based on snuff films, or at the very least if the ESRB would rate this one Adults Only.
America's priorities are totally screwed up if Manhunt ends up in the same ratings group as Deus Ex, the new Legacy of Kain game, and even GTA (all three of which I wouldn't have a problem with highschoolers playing), while a hypothetical sexually-themed game would immediately be dropped into Adults Only.
How is it more appropriate for young people to play a game involving suffocating people with bags and sodomizing them with crowbars than one involving the type of act which let them exist in the first place?
Or don't pay for any music and support the freedom of music. Bands that don't care about the money and seem to care about the music are the bands you should be for.
Why, because there's something wrong with wanting to get paid for your life's work?
"Live free or die" is their state motto, as well. If they prove to really mean it, I'll be tempted to move there.
The Republicans are now the liberals, wanting to change every damned law in a way that contradicts their original purpose so they can micromanage people's lives. The democrats are now the conservatives fighting to keep the laws as they were intended.
i ng-a-New-American-Empire-that-the-sun-never-sets-o n difference.
I don't think this is really a liberal/conservative difference, more like a regular-person/fascist-totalitarian-bent-on-creat
There are plenty of people with good points on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide. Unfortunately, the Plan for a New American Century has wormed its members into so many key positions that it doesn't matter anymore.
What people need to realize is that voting for Bush isn't voting Republican, except in name. There won't be a real Republican candidate next year, only a Neo-Conservative one.
Heh, I thought of the same book, though I'm not sure it's really worth reading (it's OK, but kinda trashy).
Just because it's cyberpunk porn doesn't mean it's not worth reading.
It's a good story, although I thought the lyrics to the songs in it were kind of weak.
As far as I know, it's long out of print. I found my copy at a used book store years ago.
A lot of people are mocking this post unnecessarily.
Do any of you *know* any actual independent musicians? This kind of situation (minus the having to order CDs from mp3.com) is not unbelievable.
One of my friends in Vancouver is an industrial musician. When he goes on tour, he sleeps in his car on the side of the road, because independent musicians don't generally make enough from a tour to afford a hotel.
CD sales are a huge part of an independent tour. Most of the local bands I know are paid - maybe - $100 for a show. That's enough for gas, and dinner, and not much else. Selling CDs and merchandise might let them put $50 into their wallets.
The part about losing her master copies is a little extreme, but also not unheard of. Again, my friend in Vancouver had his PC stolen and lost the entire album he had been working on for years.
I have the ring part of one of these in storage somewhere. It's actually kind of cool looking, another relic of the 80s future that never was. I never tried it out as a game controller, assuming it would be as hard to use as the Powerglove (which I do not like despite the "it's so bad" factor), and the Konami voice-activated lightgun headset.
There's a couple for sale on eBay if you want to have a look.
The new Legacy of Kain game supports 16x9 480p on the XBox. I wish I could give it a try - I've been wanting to see a widescreen game in this series since I found an unfinished option for it buried in the code for Soul Reaver 2 - but I am stuck with a regular TV set for now.
...any form of entertainment that allows you to experience something that you've never experienced before automatically has value.
I disagree. Would you buy my hypothetical kidnap-and-rape game for that same reason? Would you buy a game where the goal was to vivisect realistically-modelled babies? There are some things that simply have no inherent value to humanity, and I think that games like this fit into that category.
I mean, you should clearly be skipping the Lord Of The Rings films because New Line Cinema also put out Seven...
I haven't seen Seven, but if it's like most psychological thrillers then the killer isn't portrayed as the protagonist. The reason Manhunt disturbs me is because it is the player's character who is doing the brutal murdering for someone else's entertainment.
...do we really need this kind of "entertainment"?
I don't have anything against videogame violence when it makes sense, or even when it doesn't make sense but is done in an over-the-top comic book style, but a game where you sodomize your enemy with a crowbar while a freak with a videocamera tapes it? What next, one where the objective is to kidnap and rape as many women as possible?
This is a new low. I love the GTA series (one of the over-the-top comic book variety I mentioned), but I am unlikely to buy the next one because it would be giving money to the same company responsible for this.
Soul Reaver for the Dreamcast has all the excellent Metroid-style exploration, story, and quality voice acting of the original, but the character models, environments, and camera work during the cinematics were all greatly improved over the Playstation and PC versions.
Virtual On is another good pick, although it can be tough to find used for a decent price.
First of all, if the music COMPANIES go out of business, then I don't really care. Musicians will still make music because they love to, not because they make money at it.
Only someone who wasn't a musician would say that.
You are of course, speaking from experience, right?
Yes, actually, I am. I work for a Fortune 500 company that uses mainframe, Windows, and Unix systems.
Not only are nightly batch cycles still used in mainframe environments
If you read my post again, I said "I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles."
I didn't say "no one uses nightly batch cycles anymore!!!!!"
However, I think for the most part it *is* generally only companies with mainframes that still use them. It's an old mindset. Nightly batch data can be up to 24 hours old, or older if the batch jobs don't run every day. That's less than useful for a lot of situations, and certainly less than desirable.
Our mainframe has a whole huge mass of nightly batch jobs running on it, for example, but if I were building a similar company from the ground up, I would build it on technology that isn't thirty years old, and can handle it in real-time. It better serves the people who use that data to make decisions about the business.
but I have also seen them in PC based SQL environments.
This surprises me, but I can see it happening. I still think for most larger corporations it would make more sense to spend the money to get hardware that can do it in real-time. It will still end up being less than the cost of a mainframe.
And I think you are missing the point; x86 servers may have plenty of CPU, you can even build clusters, but you simply don't have the I/O capacity.
My point is that if you distribute processing across more than one system, the I/O capacity isn't a concern.
You don't even need a cluster for this. You just parallel-process your data by running different tasks on different servers. One server (or one cluster) may not have the I/O throughput of a mainframe, but the 100 high-end x86 servers you can buy for the same cost as a mainframe sure would.
The reason mainframes need to be such fault-tolerant, reliable, high-throughput machines is because people run *everything* on them, all at once.
I think that a server (or cluster for fault tolerance) for payroll, another for reporting, et cetera is a much more logical way to organize data processing now.
Where is the software that is going to turn it into a unified fault-tolerant system?
I don't know about Linux, because I don't work with it.
Windows has clustering capabilities. We have old NT4 clusters in part of our production environment where we needed fault tolerance. There are two servers clustered together, with a shared RAID array for the data. I am unaware of any time that this has not sufficed for keeping our business-critical data for those systems intact.
IO throughput will destroy your performance and your nightly batches will take 2 days to run.
If you ran it all on one machine, maybe. Fortunately, because x86 servers cost about 1% the cost of a mainframe per year, you can split up processing between them.
I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles, because all of their reporting is done in real-time, the way it should be in the 21st century.