The BBC is well known for its tv classics. Two of them, Doctor Who and Dad's army have been going on for a long time. In fact they are so old there first episodes are from the days when filming was done on magnetic tape wich was very expensive but apparently saved a lot of costs because you could re-use them.
Yup, all over the world early tv was recorded, edited and then erased because who on the world would want ever to see it again eh?
Oh there are other reasons as well but the simple result is that the early seasons of some of the best shows have holes in them.
Just in the last decade both shows I mentioned however have had lost episodes recovered. How? Because somewhere in england somebody had enough money to have the earliest VCR style equipment and made home recordings of them. Badly eroded and of course not exactly made with broadcast level equipment and recorded from a for consumer source it isn't exactly WOW! Except they are the only copies around.
So the BBC took those tapes, thanked the family that offered them and put them through some magic and then aired the lost episodes. TV history came back to life.
Of course nowadays we are smarter and everything is archived BUT the fact remains, home recordings were used by a gratefull BBC to make up for its screwups.
Ah but homerecording wasn't actually illegal? Well not for want of trying and what certainly is illegal is to make a homerecording for anything but private use. Giving it back to the original content owner IS NOT private use. Yeah I know it is in "normal" terms but not in lawyer speak.
Frankly the entire problem with the media is one that this guy touches upon but doesn't seem to realize. It is the whole 4 minute idea to get a point across. If an issue is complex and can't be made in 4 minutes THEN USE MORE MINUTES!
This is not the first time the BBC and newsnight spouted the ??AA crap without fact checking. If they added all those crap 4 minutes segments together they could have made a evening filling in depth report on a changing world.
But no, that doesn't sell.
Frankly all this article tells me is what I know has been true of the BBC for a long time. Only intrested in selling copy in short flashes to keep the punters happy. For in depth, look elsewhere. The net for instance. What exactly stopped the canal owners from investing in rail networks?
The same thing that stopped the ??AA from investing in the digital music stores when they had the chance.
Oh well, at least one person seems to realize that the BBC is old and obsolete. Pity he seems unable to then take the next step and so do something about it.
Gameplay wise the first weakness it that of course you can't be the hero. Nor can you alone affect the world.
Yet that is what 'makes' most RPG's, you the Hero! saves the day, rescues the princess (or prince according to sex and/or preferrence) and slay the evil XXXXX.
But in an MMORPG you can't do that. In fact 99.99% of the time you are in a que of other people getting the same quest from the same NPC while another que is reporting that they completed the quest. Just how many blue stones does that merchant in Everquest 2 have anyway?
EQ2 did something world altering recently. One area was altered to include griffon towers (mass transport system) and the building of them was a world event. It worked because EQ2 was/is dying and there weren't all that many people around and it was mid level so many of the high levels were not even aware of it or couldn't be bothered.
Still for the maybe 3 dozen players in the evil realm on my shard it was a lot of fun. Especially since I was really to low level but still ended up saving a high levels ass:P Good fun when a level 18 beats a level 24 enemy owning a level 28 player. Granted he was busy crafting and the enemy never hit me but still.
Anyway, that is what makes real gameplay. Not doing grind missions but reshaping the world.
But even if you could do these events constantly for year after year how do you deal with popularity?
The griffon event was split as it happened in both the evil and good area of the world and was further split by 3 towers being built at the same time. And still it was laggy in a underpopulated game at odd hours in a low level realm (level 20-30 when most are at level 60-70)
If you had a full game or worse a non-sharded world like eve-online you would have to be extremely carefull not to create areas people have or want to be in.
SWG tried this. Early on when you created your character you could select your starting planet and city. Considering the size of the planets this would have allowed a huge number of players spread out over the planets and cities so that you would have a huge playerbase but without the crowding.
Pity it never worked out. Because of some borked design decisions everyone gathered together in one city wich was then lagged and bitched about while other cities on the same planet were deserted. Hell at peak times you could go to the outer planets and be completly and utterly alone while the main city (name escapes me but is on correlia) was to laggy to play.
Frankly I think current game design is to hung up still on the single player design rules. The central city, the market place where all the goods are sold. The central hero around wich everything revolves.
In fact MMO games should be 'designed' more like goverments trying very hard to spread out employment and stop everyone wanting to move to the big city. There is a reason not everyone lives in New York or London. Part 'natural' causes like high rent and part artificial stuff like moving goverment offices to less populated areas.
Yet this seems to be completly missing in games. You want to ply your wares in the main capital of correlia? Why certainly my lad. That will be a 1000cr hourly fee thank you very much. Entertainer tax that goes up by the number of entertainers?
EQ2 doesn't even seem to make an attempt at spreading people out other then by level.
If a MMO is ever going to be truly massive it is going to have to figure out either a new way to handle thousands of connections to the same 'sphere'. Might be done, IRC does something like it and usually for free. Or they are going to have to find ways to spread their user population out across the realm.
Holding events that can only be enjoyed from one spot certainly seems not the way to do it.
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG. Just as soon as we figure out what that is anyway.
First of all is the name. Yeah yeah napster was once a very famous name in certain circles. It even made the 'real' news but that was mostly AFTER it died. Problem? Well simply put, Napster was famous among 'pirates'. Then it died for several years and came back as something completly different. Napster was buggy, filled with crap, slow, often useless but free 'illegal' music. How does this sell you pay to listen music service? The whole brand name is worthless.
Then their is the pricing model. Anyone with a brain knows that this is worse even then the bookclub model (I don't know if americans have it so let me explain, bookclubs sign people up on the street (nowadays mostly immigrants or other people who ain't very street smart) to be able to buy books/cds/dvds cheaply from their catalog. The scam? You have to buy 2 books every period minimum and the contract lasts for 2 years. Since their catalog is really limited you end up buying stuff you do not want).
At least you get to keep the books from bookclub after you cancel (and paid for two years worth of stuff you don't want).You loose all your napster music if you ever cancel.
You are also locked in to only using their service with hardware that supports their DRM. It only works on Windows. (iTunes works on Mac and Windows) Oh and the format used is often reviewed as the worst of the bunch.
There is also no 'gifting' it. You can buy somebody some iTunes songs for their birthday. But napster? Oh, wow, one month of listening to music except I can't listen to them on my iPod, gee thanks.
As for their complaint that MS software ain't up to it. Well fucking duh. NOBODY uses MS software. How do you think the whole winamp model works eh? Because MS own software is to crap for words.
So you got a name that lost its meaning, trying to sell stuff people can't use, by artist people don't want, for a price people are not prepared to pay, on conditions that people don't like, using software people loathe, to be played on a tiny handfull of devices that people don't like.
Gee, yeah that sounds like a good business plan to me.
Then again all this MS funded fud is not meant to be a real business. MS doesn't have to own the online music store market. All it has to do is delay anyone else from doing so until inertia takes over.
In fact that is what Napster seems to be banking on. That MS can pull another IE and that somehow their inferior product will become the norm.
IE vs Netscape happened because IE was bundled. Perhaps MS should sponsor Dell to give a free MP3 player with their PC's? Pre loaded with Napster?
Apple isn't a monopoly. Go to the average computer store and you will have a hardtime buying another OS then MS. Hell you will even have a hardtime buying a PC without MS pre-installed/pre-payed.
Now go into your average electronic store and OOOOOH, a dozen different brands of portable media players. Even different formats. Minidisc, AAC, MP3, WMA, CD, WAV.
Yeah sure, the iPod's sell best BUT that is not what makes a monopoly. Nobody in their right mind would call Dell a monopoly even if they are one of the biggest players in the market.
Apple has done nothing to stop other players from entering the field. It doesn't have exclusive contracts with the artists (you can still buy their CD's even if no other online store happens to carry them).
Oh and the biggest proof that Apple isn't MS. iTunes works on windows. Does MS drm work on apple? So Apple doesn't even abuse its non-monopoly just big market share to force people to use its OS.
Frankly Apple can be bashed for a lot but calling it a monopoly is just silly.
Oh and the smaller players aren't having troubles at all. Just ask the iRivers of this world or the creative labs.
No the ones having problems are the ones who banked on MS winning an easy victory and now finding that people will not buy that MS drm crap.
Bought by goverments thinking they bought a safe closed source product and bam! some patent creeps in and threathens to shut it all down.
Of course it turns out that the patents are no good but if they had been would this lawfirm claim that buying closed source products is a huge risk since you never know if some patent abuser doesn't decide to shut you down?
Lawyers are like nukes. If the other guy has them you got to have them as well but on the whole the world would be a better place without them.
What happens mostly in the food industry is that the 'lesser' brand gets the 'lesser' choice product.
Food is not an binary product, the quality can vary widely between 'excellent' and 'not fit for human consumption'.
Sugar is perhaps the simplest. During production you end up with several different crystal sizes. This is a 'good' thing as some industrial uses require smaller or larger sizes. Sugar coating on a cookie for instance is usually far larger then then the sugar that is used inside cake.
The 'top' brands of sugar for household consumption come in a size that can still easily desolve in coffee/thee.
Get the 'cheap' brand and you never know what size you are going to get. One day it might be so small it is almost powdered sugar the next time it is 2 crystals per pack.
Same with peas. The quality brands label their cans according to the size and mean it. The 'cheap' brand can have giant peas for chernobyl or so tiny they could be the balls of a mouse.
Of course the real quality of the product is exactly the same.
The 'cheap' food brands are often the lesser choice using the ingredients that are the wrong size or color or are just surplus.
Soap is even simpler. There the cheap brands are just the old production plants. Today's cheap soap was yesterday's top brand.
There are of course exceptions to this. Some 'house brands' are really entirely different products from their brand name competitors. They just can be cheaper because they combine their advertising with store advertising while the brand name needs very costly commercials just to advertise one product.
Then again the lesser choice being the lesser brand is not unknown in IT either is it? Weren't Celerons just regular intel chips wich had an error in one of the caches leading it to be disabled? In fact aren't all chips of a generation of the same design and the clockspeed difference is just that some chips just come out better then others?
Was accepted into one of the final beta's, played it for a bit and just went.....
Suprisingly it wasn't very buggy. A few crashes was all but compared to other MMO's who have been released for years (Hello SOE) it was like a linux kernel so stable.
What was wrong with it then? Well there is an odd level design. The starter level (after the tutorial) has no healing potion merchant. If you screw up during the first mission and use all your potions to keep alive then you are stuck. You can't get healed and some classes find that first 'real' mission really really hard.
The problem is that it has about 10 kobolds in it who it is next to impossible to sneak by for a thief and completely impossible for other classes. So you have to fight your way through. It is do-able but usually you end up getting hurt. That is when the game spawns the end boss who seems to be insanely hard for your level 1 non-fighter/cleric.
Healing potions are the normal single player rpg answer and levelling up through some grinding is the MMO answer. Neither of wich is possible in this game. I ended up with several characters owning a small fortune but completly unable to move on.
I was not the only one with that problem.
Perhaps I and a lot of others just sucked but DDO expects us to pay them and then having a non-passable starter level is a criminal offence.
And all just because they didn't have someone selling potions. What the fuck does that tell you about the rest of the game?
Other parts of the game that sucked. Well have you ever played Jedi Knight Jedi Academy? Remember the lightsaber fighting? Well DDO fighting is like that. Except without the lightsabers, the force cool force actions, the jumping, the ai, the fun.
In fact the melee combat is just a giant click and turn fest. I am starting to realize something. Twitch on itself isn't fun. It is fun in a FPS when I am given the engine and the controls and the ai and the enviroment to make for a fast moving fight. DDO fighting isn't anything like it. It is just a turn around to keep facing that stupid monster that is jumping all over the place for no good reason.
I am reminded of the opening movie to Guild Wars. It shows some fantastic fighting moves that totally fail to be in the game. Same here. It is the same boring hack & slash as EQ and everyother fantasy MMO but now you got to move your mouse a lot.
Frankly the game is a big disappointment to me. It seemed to promise so much but delivers next to nothing. Worse it is in many ways unlearning a lot of the lessons from previous MMO's. It is not nice to say but this is actually a worse game then EQ2. At least in EQ2 if a mission was to hard you could do something else. Not in DDO.
Don't think for a moment that this is like the P&P D&D experience. It only shares the combat rules applied rigidly without a human dungeon master to make the experience fun (wich dungeon master would allow a party to get stuck for in the first 10 minutes of gameplay? Time to teleport in a wandering legendary hero to give the noobs a helping hand)
Stay well clear of this game unless you like laggy single user dungeons, endless twitching hack & slash, and boring level design.
This is software we are talking about. Not hardware. Lets say I need a van. Now most fans come with windows in the back and some seats so you can carry loads of people around. You of course pay for those windows and those seats because the manufacturer has to pay for them.
If you are only going to transport cargo you can forgo the rear seats and extra windows and end up with a cheaper van. Even more extreme, say you know exactly how your van is going to be used. You could even remove the passenger seat and end up with a Fedex (the brown parcel vans) style van that allows the driver to get out on the passenger side.
It makes sense in physical products to only get and pay for what you need. It saves the manufacturer in resources so you will pay less.
But software is totally different. It doesn't cost anything to give everyone a dvd with EVERYTHING because it costs the same to press a dvd with Vista Basic as Vista Ultimate.
The only 'cost' is the development costs. Wich in fact increase by having different versions. First of is the extra cost of development to get the different versions in the first place and then there is the support and marketting costs with having to explain it all.
Remember the economy of opensource. Why does it work? Because to cost of making a billion linux kernels is the same as the cost of making one. If I bake a delicious apple pie then I can share it with perhaps half a dozen people before the pie is up. Software (and other stuff that can be digitally reproduced for 'free') is different.
MS incurred extra costs by making XP Home and Pro and made support more costly while it would have cost them nothing to just sell everyone XP Pro.
But there has to be a reason. Of course there is. Think EVIL(TM).
Their are two ways to be evil with a fake system of a product range. It all deals with upsell. First, you sell people the cheap version wich you sell as low as you want so that it can cheaply included with each new PC. Then you clean up when people have to pay for the upgrade because the basic version doesn't do what they want.
This gives you:
Cheap version that can be included 'free' with each new PC.
Lots of upgraders who never figure out that it is the upgrade where the profit is (think fastfood supersizing)
You can effectivly raise the price of the next 'real' version because if people complain about the high cost (check dos -> windows 9x -> xp price rises) you can point out that the basic version is still very cheap.
Lots of money from everyone upgrading and fake low prices for your OS so that nobody can claim you are overcharging. What is not to like?
Software is a funny business. I can understand that I pay more for a car with a 3 liter engine then a 2 liter but what exactly makes a Windows wich runs on 1 cpu more expensive then one that runs on 2?
This is one of the reasons Linux is so popular. People who think costs of purchase often only think in terms of desktop but when you got a 32 cpu box free becomes a whole lot cheaper all of a sudden.
I seem to remember that the PS2 was a bitch to code for as well and that many of the early titles did not make full use of its capabilities. So?
All this meant that as the PS2 aged it could 'keep up' because the coders kept getting better and better.
Mere mortals do not write the latest graphics engines. I think there are a lot more tier1 people running around then/. seems to think. They are just to busy to comment here.
All that really matters is wether the launch titles will be 'good' enough. Then the full power of the system can be unleashed over its lifespan.
If your a game company and your faced with the choice of either making just another engine OR spending some money on the kind of people that code for super computers and get an engine that will blow the competition out of the water then it will be a simple choice.
Just because some guy on website finds it hard doesn't mean nobody can do it.
MS is scared shitless about the idea of even a single town (read up on munich and MS counter AND counter offer when they learned they were not the only bidder) going to an alternative OS. Can you imagine an entire country especially an economic powerhouse like South Korea?
Everytime some goverment somewhere even dares to think about going opensource MS moves in with special deals to keep them inline.
What would happen if MS indeed decided no longer to sell to South Korea. Well apart from the question of legallity. Companies do not rule the world yet even if you seem to think so and can't actually ban people from buying their products.
Even so, say it could happen, then what would South Korea do? Well either keep its old windows. That would be bad enough. Imagine if every company every goverment that did business with South Korea needed to keep sending its office documents in the old format that South Korea can use. MS is already pissed off that consumers won't upgrade fast enough making the latest office useless as you still need to send docs in the old formats supported by Office of the last century. Imagine now if an entire country says Oh, an XP document, nice, resend in in 98 format please.
And they would have to resend the document in a format that the South Koreans understand. The real world is not the silly place you seem to think it is. If you deal with multinationals or goverments you accomadate the other EVEN if you think your the more powerfull party. In short, you will communicate with the South Korean goverment/businesses in the format they can handle.
Even worse if they went opensource. Imagine if all those businesses suddenly deciced they would only communicate in open document formats. Then it could easily spread.
It is the story of IE. Not so long ago IE was the only browser that many sites would be tested on. Use something else and a lot of sites would simply break or even refuse to load. So IE had to be used. And because everyone used IE sites only tested against IE so you had to use IE. Then something broke and IE's market share has decreased. By a fraction and yet MS response shows how scared they are of even losing 10% of a market. IE7 is going to copy everything the other browsers did because no longer can MS just rely on the fact that you need to use their browser to view site X.
MS certainly doesn't want the same thing to happen to its OS and Office markets.
No, if any country actually does ban MS from use by the goverment and large businesses then you can be sure that Bill Gates himself will be flying over to smooth things out. Just check the countless examples of MS responses to goverments considering opensource solutions.
Your view of the world suggests to me your a 12yr old windows script kiddy who idolizes Billy because he gave you free porn popups.
Maybe you will grow out of it as you learn about the real world but in the meantime get an account on myspace instead and leave slashdot to those who got a clue.
They were okay, on their own. Their style was something you can either accept or not.
The biggest problem arrises when you already have an idea what the style should be like. Dexter labs and the other originals stand on their own and so their very stylised art can be allowed to work.
Clone wars however clashed for me with my perception of what star wars should be like. Not that much since I grew up with far worse art massacres in the form of the early star wars comics but still it clashed.
But the Dark Crystal art is totally different. I only seen the movie and the art book and that created in my mind a very detailed dreamlike world with beautifull sets with lots and lots of detail and realism.
EXACTLY opposite of all the cartoons this guy has done. Oh of course he is the director, not the artist but it strikes me as significant that all his cartoons share the same art style, hard simple lines giving the characters an almost deformed look. Clone wars is the most realistic and , well just google for the images. Now compare them to the artwork for the dark crystal. Not exactly a match now is it?
Yeah the guy is a great creator of cartoons. That is nothing to sneer at considering how much crap others make, he does very well. BUT we have seen with game movies that just because a director is good at one type of entertainment they don't have to be any good at another. Especially if it calls for a style change.
Can he recapture the magic that was the Dark Crystal? I doubt it. The fact they are going to use CGI has me worried. Sure a puppet made of fire would probably be hard to do but still. CGI. In a muppet movie. Ewh.
Oh well at least it is not a prequel. Dark Crystal, the phantom menace anyone?
Don't get me wrong I loved the movie and a sequel would be nice in theory just because it means we might get a fantasy movie. We are not exactly being flooded by them.
But I am also reminded what happens time and time again when some non-movie director gets his paws on a famous property. Usually it is some guy who did some music videos who gets to do a full movie and screws up.
This time it is a cartoon director. I only seen dexters lab and powerpuff girls. Dexters lab was okay powerpuffs was a bit to much for me. The others I only seen and episode or two off.
None of them are exactly, how shall I put this nicely, the kind of stuff you want to watch as a full length movie.
They are good cartoons but would make lousy movies especially of the slow dreamlike fantasy stuff that is the dark crystal.
The style mismatch doesn't give me high hopes. Just because someone has awards in one style doesn't mean they are any good in another.
As for making the dark crystal into an animated series. Oh boy, either Henson studios is swimming in cash or it is going to suck so bad it will stagger believe.
Current cartoons are drawn in a simple way, part style and part because it saves a bundle of cash. That is okay if it suits the story but the dark crystal was in a large part the beautifull enviroments. Super stylised (ala powerpuff girls) dark crystal? Ewh.
Nice to see they are trying, hope it turns out better then the last few muppet movies, but couldn't they have gotten a director who has some experience with this kinda stuff.
Because if any one of the questions had been by any person ever asked to design a site it would have included something like the following:
Hi fucktard, are you bunch of fucktards ever going to fucking support the goddman fucking standard like bloody PNG and position: fixed and other basic stuff?
Who cares about security, if windows users did they wouldn't use windows. Who cares about hot new features. If people wanted cutting edge they wouldn't use windows. Sadly all those windows users do want websites that work in their browser so you are stuck supporting the crap that is IE.
It is very simple, very basic support for simple standards that IE just isn't capable of it. I can only think of the following reasons, A, they are really just not capable of it. MS can't hire any people who can hack up PNG support or do proper CSS. B, they want to hold the web back so they can launch their own new version. C, they want to wind me up and get me an ulcer.
Not that it matters ifI IE7 becomes a passable browser (yeah I considered the possibility that IE7 might become a good browser but who am I kidding) we will still have to support craptastic IE6 for years to come. Hell IE5 only now is starting to disappear.
If you are not a webdesigner you cannot understand.
You can make a beautifull page that truly shines that the customer finds enchanting and the users drool about and then you test it in IE and it all falls to pieces.
Ajax is the new buzzword so lets us that as an example to show how bad IE is. First the code for a real browser (anything not produced by MS):
if (!xmlHttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest != 'undefined') { xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); }
Oh and line 1 and 3 are only there to keep IE happy. 2nd line would be all that is needed if you coded only for real browsers. But for IE you need that while IF statement. PLUS:
/* Create a new XMLHttpRequest object to talk to the Web server */ var xmlHttp = false; /*@cc_on @*/ /*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5) try { xmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) { try { xmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e2) { xmlHttp = false; } } @end @*/
The code is from IBM btw so I figure it is pretty pretty efficient example.
Can you start to understand why IE is hated so much by web developers?
No doubt IE7 will cause this simple code to expand yet more.
For my own personal sites I have long since stopped adding IE support. Get a real browser or fuck off. Sadly that is not acceptable in business sites. Not even the customer service section.
So next time you ask a fucking IE developer questions less sucking up please and more 'are you finally going to do some real work or do I have to get a contract on your kids'.
They said the hack added the game and then had to admit the minigame was there all the time. The hack did not add it, just made it available. That means it was on the disk.
So unless they lied, then lied about lying your version is wrong.
Wether you agree with outrage is not the point. It is all a bunch of crap but thanks to their screwup games have once again come under a lot of bad press and the censors live by that. Each time this happens they get new powers.
So I stick with my point, thank you very fucking much rockstar. Next time just release a japanese porn game.
To explain the dutch broadcasting system completly would take more space then the/. servers have but simply, we got multiple broadcasters who share stations according to popularity. Each broadcaster usually comes from a certain background, socialist VARA, Christian EO, Youth BNN.
Because they survive partly on goverment grants they got to make responsible programming. So lots of boring talkie news programs and very little pure mindless entertainment to compete with the commercial stations.
This was thought up by dutch politicians as a way to ensure that some quality news tv would remain. All that has happened is that it shows that politicians are stupid dumbfucks who should be hung from the neck.
Why? Well they still got to compete because the other part of the income comes from ads and from people subscribing to them (well the tv magazine each one sells) so they still got to be popular?
How do you become popular when you have to produce only news programs and other reponsible stuff? You make it as lightweight as possible so it can compete with the mindless entertainment. The 8 o'clock news used to be 30 minutes. Last time I watched it was 5.
The worst? The KRO (catholics) has a new magazine that came after the news that highlighted current events. It used to be okay. they had a nasty bit years ago where a reporter faked a scandal with human heads being for sale but otherwise were okay.
What was on last time I watched? 30 minutes of drivel following the dutch royal family (americans, you may be fat lardass gassguzzling warmongering idiots but at least you got no royalty. Applause for yourselve) in the most moronic way. Not even a hint of critism, the entire thing look like an informerical except that even then you usually got someone asking, "but this can't be true can it". None of that.
I was litteraly dumbstruck. I don't watch a lot of tv (the internet takes up all my mindless entertainment time) and haven't watch dutch tv in months but I had no idea things had gotten so bad.
It was about as good a news story as to MTV reports on the latest movie.
Oh and it seems this program was part of a sequel, at least one before and one coming next week. At least. A minimum of 1.5 hours of meaningless royalty worshipping. On a news program.
Perhaps people in China are better off. At least they can only improve. In the west we can only sit back and watch things collapse. When you protest you hear stuff, but we got to attract viewers or there are plenty of places worse in the world.
A, if you want to attract viewers do the naked news, Real News with Real Nudes. As for their being worse place in the world. Yeah so? There are worse things then me sticking your microphone up your ass but I bet you will still scream when I do it!
Oh and the next time I see some journalist reporting LIVE! from a location where nothing is happening talking like WW3 is about to start I am going to scream./me flips to the BBC news AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHH
A. Some chinese people are doing very well financially. People with good pay checks don't riot unless they are under threath to loose them. The LA riots did not take place in the hills.
B. There are those who claim China is becoming more capatalist. Yeah right. Only those who do not have a clue as to what it means believe that. China very much has its own system and it isn't what you think it is.
C. They only got to look to the west. No not the US, Russia to see what happens when the communist leave. Do they want that? See point A. and D.
D. Variant of point A. It is hard to get upset by unjustice to someone else especially when protesting about gets you in trouble and you are doing fairly well while the unjustice is going on but stand to really loose by stopping it.
Recap, It is hard to get upset about say tibet for a chinese person when doing so can get you in serious trouble when you do not succeed in overthrowing the goverment and when you do your country becomes a slum like russia.
The chinese at the moment got a unique system that is making a lot of people rich (well except the poor but who cares about them) and as long as the repression is happening to other people people are reluctant to loose a good thing.
Yeah it is nasty but if mothers can live with the husband who gives them a good income while he rapes their kids then I am not suprised people can happily live under a system that kills some total strangers hundreds of miles away. (A very real example to proof this? Female circumsion. It is being battled in the simplest way, get the fathers to do it. They are fine when it happens outside their visions but when they are asked to hack up their crying daughters they suddenly become very reluctant to keep up the old ways (meanwhile keep the kid away from grandmothers cause they will have no troubles, women are evil). Seen it on tv so it must be true.)
Will the system ever collapse? Perhaps. Nothing is forever but lets examine Cuba. It is still there despite not being america's favorite trading partner. Being in a dictarorship is not all that bad apparently if you are not the one being trampled on.
and lets be honest, who in the west who is upset about western goverments support for the war on terror is really prepared to overthrow those goverments? Complain all you want about Bush and call him Hitler 2 but unless you are currently practising your sniping skills you are meaningless, as meaningless as this journalists protest.
I see this as just another attempt by the chinese goverment to keep control. Some will fail of course but others will stick. Just like in the west and every attempt to get in stuff like mandatory ID's and camera's. I seen a lot of that stuff and lots spark a huge protest and yet over the 35 years of my live I have switched from not even owning a passport to carrying one all the time and there is a camera in the highstreet around the corner.
Because I am not ready to give up my okay live to battle it.
The chinese goverment chance of falling is about the same as that of the current western goverments. Except the chinese economy at the moment is doing well.
Geez, if you wanted to do a porn mini game just fucking produce one. But no, some fuckwad makes a very poor stupid game, doesn't check his code and now we get stupid clampdown on games worldwide because you fuckwads.
Well and the fuckwads who elect the goverments in question but they are to many so I just insult rockstar.
So ehm, okay. Japanese games eh. Well why it is very nice knowing what age limits apply to each category this doesn't actually tell us anything. What is important for a rating system is to know what will be rated as what.
Where exactly would current well known games fit? Oh sure all the H games will probably be Z (although with the japanese you never know) but what about more common titles?
Is this just a renaming of the rating system or will this mean games that are currently for everyone will suddenly have a 18+ sticker slapped on them?
Will this then affect sales? Rockstar losts lots of money (serves them right) on the GTA: SA debacle by not being sold by the big retailers. Will japanese retailers do the same and make it economically impossible to make risque games?
At the moment japan seems to be far less strict about for instance nudity in games then the US (then again who isn't) is this going to chance?
In short, will I have to look elsewhere for my pedo tentacle date rape sims (with sister character)? I need to know!
The goodies are there to give you the feel of opening a new game. Geez I can remember games with special made postcard even pins and god knows what else. Manuals that came with exteneded discussions about the history it is set in. Well done stuff too that was worth reading.
It is the new car smell idea and it clearly seperates you from the pirate. Remove the goodies and what seperates the buyer from the pirate is that the pirate doesn't have to hunt for the CD or to worry about loosing the key to play the game. Oh and that the pirate has 50 dollar bills still in his pants to stuff down the strippers panties.
WHAT? Yeah like you never had to choose between a game or a stripper. Geez.
First, if you are this careless or uneducated with your primary language of communication, how careful or educated will you be with a computer language?
Secondary. English is not my first language.
Then of course there is the fact that a computer language is totally different then a natural language. Computer language needs to be parsed by extremely simple tools, natural language is parsed by humans who are far better at it. Did you understand what I tried to say? Then I succeeded. Oh and didn't I just say that the uni students failed at programming? Their english is no doubt much better then mine but what do you call a programmer who include a 100 line long switch wich does the same in every case as well as in the default? It was perfect in grammar and spelling. Just not good coding.
But sure, you can hire people whose CV and letter of application doesn't contain single spelling mistake. Never heard of a spellchecker or peer review? I am not going to bother with that for a slashdot post.
Judging a programmer on his english is exactly the problem I am talking about. Judge the programmer by his code.
But that I guess is hard because no company I worked for ever did. One asked if I had some available and I have them a guest account on my server so they could have a look but they never logged in. I was hired by them so I guess they used magic to review the code.
But yeah your right, what usually landed me a job was when I managed to convince the person hiring me that I can get the job done. I have only ever been hired by a semi-tech person who did at least bother to look at my portfolio and (still active) sites.
It is kinda off putting to get responses like on performance reviews like "yeah why haven't you taken that course we offered you?" when it has been cancceled because you had to assist on another project where some graduate was just pissing about without a clue. Even worse when they are then made your manager for having pulled through on that project even in great difficult. (Wise lesson, it is better to pull a project in over the deadline then just complete it without fuss on time and on budget, managers like crises.)
But back to your critism
First, if you are this careless or uneducated with your primary language of communication, how careful or educated will you be with a computer language? Second, I will have to worry about every memo leaving your desk making my organization look questionable? Every good thinker I know uses English as a primary tool, does it well, and immediately recognizes the difference in those that do and do not.
This one is clearly laughable for whole number of reasons. Lets say I communicate in bad english with a customer, that will be to a other techie who won't give a shit and if it is to a higherup fire your sales staff for allowing this to happen in the first place. Keep the programmers locked up. Second, check all those humerous stories about some idiot cocking things up by sending the wrong email or saying the wrong thing. Now check how often that is a uni graduate. Don't worry about spelling when some frat boy decides to email his ass to all the contacts in his outlook address book. I already told you about security and uni students
Moreover, I would need to see more than just 'I'm so much better than Jack and Joe with their degrees'. I see good enthusiasm and 'get it done' attitude, but I'd need to see more evidence of precision, rigor and forethought in your work (not that it doesn't exist, but it is not evident here).
That is what I am saying, ask for my portfolio and examine it. Oh and I mean examine it on copyright information. Copy and pasting from opensource does not make a good developer. (This problem is getting bigger and bigger. I sat in one interview where the guy tried to pass of running phpnuke as his own work.)
But hey, since I always the one who ends up finishing up projects after all the people with precision and rigor and forethough have gotten us ove
But if you read the conditions for the korean developers then it seems to translate pretty much as, we ownerz you. But with more leet speak.
No wonder they are offended. Oh well, sony getting public relations wrong. Gee, that is a new one.
What I find odd is that no mention is made of how the bloody hell you are going to download games on a machine with no HD. Oh yeah there will an add on but that makes it hardly a tool to deter pirating is it now. Have the game for free OR get a small discount on the game + buy an expensive addon. Now that is an easy choice. I got a great new idea to deter PC pirating. How about you have to upgrade to vista and an ALL new DRM PC and if you do that we knock 10% of the game price.
There is a far simpler move to combat piracy. It involves 3 steps. First game length related to price. Full price == baldur gate type length. 8 hour play time == $4.95... canadian. Second, don't fuck with paying consumers, there is no point copy protection, only paying customers are affected. Finally, make it worth buy the fucking game. I am old but I remember the days when games game with full manuals with listed not just the keys but also had background info. Make it worth opening that box and getting that magic feeling of holding a new game. Who ever invented PDF manual on CD should be shot.
It has been a long time since I was really excited about a new game. Perhaps I am getting to old to game or perhaps recent games just are to meh.
It is always about what the other guys did, not about what you are doing. Granted the current islam vs the west thing is setting new records for going over the top for being Mr Sensitive but it is in itself nothing new.
Just take the americans who take exception against europeans (or rather euro's) thinking all yanks are fat lardasses. Of course americans making fun of french women who don't shave is perfectly alright.
The recent bad sales of the X-box 360 in japan stories had a lot of stories claiming that the japanese were to nationalist to buy foreign hardware and instead preffered to buy from their own companies. This totally ignored that sony (japanese) mp3 players do not sell where as apples (chinese, I am kidding, american) iPod is selling like hotcakes. Or that the easiest way into a japanese woman's panties is to bring some brandname merchandise from europe.
Anyway the same people who said the japanese are nationlist happily accept their own american tv stations heavily censoring japenese tv shows to remove any hint of japanese origin.
Pot calling kettle black?
In the more serious story of Islam vs the west this is especially true since the west is terrified of calling the muslims out on their double standards. You would be suprised how few westerners are willing to stand up to this weird kind of terrorism (What are they saying? Stop publising cartoons or we burn our own towns? So far the only people killed are other muslims. Then again what do you expect from people who can't tell the danish from the swiss flag?)
In an argument you can only meet the other person halfway if the other person does the same. If he does not all you have done is moved in range for him to throw stones at you.
Of course the entire current farce is not real. The cartoons were published months ago, then all of a sudden they turned up in the east with handy translations. Oh yeah, can you say organised rioting?
Then again we should also realise that until recently most terrorist attacks in the US were from christians. Check out attacks on abortion clinics. Perhaps muslims and christians ain't that different after all eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, all over the world early tv was recorded, edited and then erased because who on the world would want ever to see it again eh?
Oh there are other reasons as well but the simple result is that the early seasons of some of the best shows have holes in them.
Just in the last decade both shows I mentioned however have had lost episodes recovered. How? Because somewhere in england somebody had enough money to have the earliest VCR style equipment and made home recordings of them. Badly eroded and of course not exactly made with broadcast level equipment and recorded from a for consumer source it isn't exactly WOW! Except they are the only copies around.
So the BBC took those tapes, thanked the family that offered them and put them through some magic and then aired the lost episodes. TV history came back to life.
Of course nowadays we are smarter and everything is archived BUT the fact remains, home recordings were used by a gratefull BBC to make up for its screwups.
Ah but homerecording wasn't actually illegal? Well not for want of trying and what certainly is illegal is to make a homerecording for anything but private use. Giving it back to the original content owner IS NOT private use. Yeah I know it is in "normal" terms but not in lawyer speak.
Frankly the entire problem with the media is one that this guy touches upon but doesn't seem to realize. It is the whole 4 minute idea to get a point across. If an issue is complex and can't be made in 4 minutes THEN USE MORE MINUTES!
This is not the first time the BBC and newsnight spouted the ??AA crap without fact checking. If they added all those crap 4 minutes segments together they could have made a evening filling in depth report on a changing world.
But no, that doesn't sell.
Frankly all this article tells me is what I know has been true of the BBC for a long time. Only intrested in selling copy in short flashes to keep the punters happy. For in depth, look elsewhere. The net for instance. What exactly stopped the canal owners from investing in rail networks?
The same thing that stopped the ??AA from investing in the digital music stores when they had the chance.
Oh well, at least one person seems to realize that the BBC is old and obsolete. Pity he seems unable to then take the next step and so do something about it.
Just ask them to take their call outside. Along with the smokers and people with kids.
Yet that is what 'makes' most RPG's, you the Hero! saves the day, rescues the princess (or prince according to sex and/or preferrence) and slay the evil XXXXX.
But in an MMORPG you can't do that. In fact 99.99% of the time you are in a que of other people getting the same quest from the same NPC while another que is reporting that they completed the quest. Just how many blue stones does that merchant in Everquest 2 have anyway?
EQ2 did something world altering recently. One area was altered to include griffon towers (mass transport system) and the building of them was a world event. It worked because EQ2 was/is dying and there weren't all that many people around and it was mid level so many of the high levels were not even aware of it or couldn't be bothered.
Still for the maybe 3 dozen players in the evil realm on my shard it was a lot of fun. Especially since I was really to low level but still ended up saving a high levels ass :P Good fun when a level 18 beats a level 24 enemy owning a level 28 player. Granted he was busy crafting and the enemy never hit me but still.
Anyway, that is what makes real gameplay. Not doing grind missions but reshaping the world.
But even if you could do these events constantly for year after year how do you deal with popularity?
The griffon event was split as it happened in both the evil and good area of the world and was further split by 3 towers being built at the same time. And still it was laggy in a underpopulated game at odd hours in a low level realm (level 20-30 when most are at level 60-70)
If you had a full game or worse a non-sharded world like eve-online you would have to be extremely carefull not to create areas people have or want to be in.
SWG tried this. Early on when you created your character you could select your starting planet and city. Considering the size of the planets this would have allowed a huge number of players spread out over the planets and cities so that you would have a huge playerbase but without the crowding.
Pity it never worked out. Because of some borked design decisions everyone gathered together in one city wich was then lagged and bitched about while other cities on the same planet were deserted. Hell at peak times you could go to the outer planets and be completly and utterly alone while the main city (name escapes me but is on correlia) was to laggy to play.
Frankly I think current game design is to hung up still on the single player design rules. The central city, the market place where all the goods are sold. The central hero around wich everything revolves.
In fact MMO games should be 'designed' more like goverments trying very hard to spread out employment and stop everyone wanting to move to the big city. There is a reason not everyone lives in New York or London. Part 'natural' causes like high rent and part artificial stuff like moving goverment offices to less populated areas.
Yet this seems to be completly missing in games. You want to ply your wares in the main capital of correlia? Why certainly my lad. That will be a 1000cr hourly fee thank you very much. Entertainer tax that goes up by the number of entertainers?
EQ2 doesn't even seem to make an attempt at spreading people out other then by level.
If a MMO is ever going to be truly massive it is going to have to figure out either a new way to handle thousands of connections to the same 'sphere'. Might be done, IRC does something like it and usually for free. Or they are going to have to find ways to spread their user population out across the realm.
Holding events that can only be enjoyed from one spot certainly seems not the way to do it.
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG. Just as soon as we figure out what that is anyway.
Then their is the pricing model. Anyone with a brain knows that this is worse even then the bookclub model (I don't know if americans have it so let me explain, bookclubs sign people up on the street (nowadays mostly immigrants or other people who ain't very street smart) to be able to buy books/cds/dvds cheaply from their catalog. The scam? You have to buy 2 books every period minimum and the contract lasts for 2 years. Since their catalog is really limited you end up buying stuff you do not want).
At least you get to keep the books from bookclub after you cancel (and paid for two years worth of stuff you don't want).You loose all your napster music if you ever cancel.
You are also locked in to only using their service with hardware that supports their DRM. It only works on Windows. (iTunes works on Mac and Windows) Oh and the format used is often reviewed as the worst of the bunch.
There is also no 'gifting' it. You can buy somebody some iTunes songs for their birthday. But napster? Oh, wow, one month of listening to music except I can't listen to them on my iPod, gee thanks.
As for their complaint that MS software ain't up to it. Well fucking duh. NOBODY uses MS software. How do you think the whole winamp model works eh? Because MS own software is to crap for words.
So you got a name that lost its meaning, trying to sell stuff people can't use, by artist people don't want, for a price people are not prepared to pay, on conditions that people don't like, using software people loathe, to be played on a tiny handfull of devices that people don't like.
Gee, yeah that sounds like a good business plan to me.
Then again all this MS funded fud is not meant to be a real business. MS doesn't have to own the online music store market. All it has to do is delay anyone else from doing so until inertia takes over.
In fact that is what Napster seems to be banking on. That MS can pull another IE and that somehow their inferior product will become the norm.
IE vs Netscape happened because IE was bundled. Perhaps MS should sponsor Dell to give a free MP3 player with their PC's? Pre loaded with Napster?
Now go into your average electronic store and OOOOOH, a dozen different brands of portable media players. Even different formats. Minidisc, AAC, MP3, WMA, CD, WAV.
Yeah sure, the iPod's sell best BUT that is not what makes a monopoly. Nobody in their right mind would call Dell a monopoly even if they are one of the biggest players in the market.
Apple has done nothing to stop other players from entering the field. It doesn't have exclusive contracts with the artists (you can still buy their CD's even if no other online store happens to carry them).
Oh and the biggest proof that Apple isn't MS. iTunes works on windows. Does MS drm work on apple? So Apple doesn't even abuse its non-monopoly just big market share to force people to use its OS.
Frankly Apple can be bashed for a lot but calling it a monopoly is just silly.
Oh and the smaller players aren't having troubles at all. Just ask the iRivers of this world or the creative labs.
No the ones having problems are the ones who banked on MS winning an easy victory and now finding that people will not buy that MS drm crap.
Of course it turns out that the patents are no good but if they had been would this lawfirm claim that buying closed source products is a huge risk since you never know if some patent abuser doesn't decide to shut you down?
Lawyers are like nukes. If the other guy has them you got to have them as well but on the whole the world would be a better place without them.
Food is not an binary product, the quality can vary widely between 'excellent' and 'not fit for human consumption'.
Sugar is perhaps the simplest. During production you end up with several different crystal sizes. This is a 'good' thing as some industrial uses require smaller or larger sizes. Sugar coating on a cookie for instance is usually far larger then then the sugar that is used inside cake.
The 'top' brands of sugar for household consumption come in a size that can still easily desolve in coffee/thee.
Get the 'cheap' brand and you never know what size you are going to get. One day it might be so small it is almost powdered sugar the next time it is 2 crystals per pack.
Same with peas. The quality brands label their cans according to the size and mean it. The 'cheap' brand can have giant peas for chernobyl or so tiny they could be the balls of a mouse.
Of course the real quality of the product is exactly the same.
The 'cheap' food brands are often the lesser choice using the ingredients that are the wrong size or color or are just surplus.
Soap is even simpler. There the cheap brands are just the old production plants. Today's cheap soap was yesterday's top brand.
There are of course exceptions to this. Some 'house brands' are really entirely different products from their brand name competitors. They just can be cheaper because they combine their advertising with store advertising while the brand name needs very costly commercials just to advertise one product.
Then again the lesser choice being the lesser brand is not unknown in IT either is it? Weren't Celerons just regular intel chips wich had an error in one of the caches leading it to be disabled? In fact aren't all chips of a generation of the same design and the clockspeed difference is just that some chips just come out better then others?
Suprisingly it wasn't very buggy. A few crashes was all but compared to other MMO's who have been released for years (Hello SOE) it was like a linux kernel so stable.
What was wrong with it then? Well there is an odd level design. The starter level (after the tutorial) has no healing potion merchant. If you screw up during the first mission and use all your potions to keep alive then you are stuck. You can't get healed and some classes find that first 'real' mission really really hard.
The problem is that it has about 10 kobolds in it who it is next to impossible to sneak by for a thief and completely impossible for other classes. So you have to fight your way through. It is do-able but usually you end up getting hurt. That is when the game spawns the end boss who seems to be insanely hard for your level 1 non-fighter/cleric.
Healing potions are the normal single player rpg answer and levelling up through some grinding is the MMO answer. Neither of wich is possible in this game. I ended up with several characters owning a small fortune but completly unable to move on.
I was not the only one with that problem.
Perhaps I and a lot of others just sucked but DDO expects us to pay them and then having a non-passable starter level is a criminal offence.
And all just because they didn't have someone selling potions. What the fuck does that tell you about the rest of the game?
Other parts of the game that sucked. Well have you ever played Jedi Knight Jedi Academy? Remember the lightsaber fighting? Well DDO fighting is like that. Except without the lightsabers, the force cool force actions, the jumping, the ai, the fun.
In fact the melee combat is just a giant click and turn fest. I am starting to realize something. Twitch on itself isn't fun. It is fun in a FPS when I am given the engine and the controls and the ai and the enviroment to make for a fast moving fight. DDO fighting isn't anything like it. It is just a turn around to keep facing that stupid monster that is jumping all over the place for no good reason.
I am reminded of the opening movie to Guild Wars. It shows some fantastic fighting moves that totally fail to be in the game. Same here. It is the same boring hack & slash as EQ and everyother fantasy MMO but now you got to move your mouse a lot.
Frankly the game is a big disappointment to me. It seemed to promise so much but delivers next to nothing. Worse it is in many ways unlearning a lot of the lessons from previous MMO's. It is not nice to say but this is actually a worse game then EQ2. At least in EQ2 if a mission was to hard you could do something else. Not in DDO.
Don't think for a moment that this is like the P&P D&D experience. It only shares the combat rules applied rigidly without a human dungeon master to make the experience fun (wich dungeon master would allow a party to get stuck for in the first 10 minutes of gameplay? Time to teleport in a wandering legendary hero to give the noobs a helping hand)
Stay well clear of this game unless you like laggy single user dungeons, endless twitching hack & slash, and boring level design.
If you are only going to transport cargo you can forgo the rear seats and extra windows and end up with a cheaper van. Even more extreme, say you know exactly how your van is going to be used. You could even remove the passenger seat and end up with a Fedex (the brown parcel vans) style van that allows the driver to get out on the passenger side.
It makes sense in physical products to only get and pay for what you need. It saves the manufacturer in resources so you will pay less.
But software is totally different. It doesn't cost anything to give everyone a dvd with EVERYTHING because it costs the same to press a dvd with Vista Basic as Vista Ultimate.
The only 'cost' is the development costs. Wich in fact increase by having different versions. First of is the extra cost of development to get the different versions in the first place and then there is the support and marketting costs with having to explain it all.
Remember the economy of opensource. Why does it work? Because to cost of making a billion linux kernels is the same as the cost of making one. If I bake a delicious apple pie then I can share it with perhaps half a dozen people before the pie is up. Software (and other stuff that can be digitally reproduced for 'free') is different.
MS incurred extra costs by making XP Home and Pro and made support more costly while it would have cost them nothing to just sell everyone XP Pro.
But there has to be a reason. Of course there is. Think EVIL(TM).
Their are two ways to be evil with a fake system of a product range. It all deals with upsell. First, you sell people the cheap version wich you sell as low as you want so that it can cheaply included with each new PC. Then you clean up when people have to pay for the upgrade because the basic version doesn't do what they want.
This gives you:
Lots of money from everyone upgrading and fake low prices for your OS so that nobody can claim you are overcharging. What is not to like?
Software is a funny business. I can understand that I pay more for a car with a 3 liter engine then a 2 liter but what exactly makes a Windows wich runs on 1 cpu more expensive then one that runs on 2?
This is one of the reasons Linux is so popular. People who think costs of purchase often only think in terms of desktop but when you got a 32 cpu box free becomes a whole lot cheaper all of a sudden.
All this meant that as the PS2 aged it could 'keep up' because the coders kept getting better and better.
Mere mortals do not write the latest graphics engines. I think there are a lot more tier1 people running around then /. seems to think. They are just to busy to comment here.
All that really matters is wether the launch titles will be 'good' enough. Then the full power of the system can be unleashed over its lifespan.
If your a game company and your faced with the choice of either making just another engine OR spending some money on the kind of people that code for super computers and get an engine that will blow the competition out of the water then it will be a simple choice.
Just because some guy on website finds it hard doesn't mean nobody can do it.
Everytime some goverment somewhere even dares to think about going opensource MS moves in with special deals to keep them inline.
What would happen if MS indeed decided no longer to sell to South Korea. Well apart from the question of legallity. Companies do not rule the world yet even if you seem to think so and can't actually ban people from buying their products.
Even so, say it could happen, then what would South Korea do? Well either keep its old windows. That would be bad enough. Imagine if every company every goverment that did business with South Korea needed to keep sending its office documents in the old format that South Korea can use. MS is already pissed off that consumers won't upgrade fast enough making the latest office useless as you still need to send docs in the old formats supported by Office of the last century. Imagine now if an entire country says Oh, an XP document, nice, resend in in 98 format please.
And they would have to resend the document in a format that the South Koreans understand. The real world is not the silly place you seem to think it is. If you deal with multinationals or goverments you accomadate the other EVEN if you think your the more powerfull party. In short, you will communicate with the South Korean goverment/businesses in the format they can handle.
Even worse if they went opensource. Imagine if all those businesses suddenly deciced they would only communicate in open document formats. Then it could easily spread.
It is the story of IE. Not so long ago IE was the only browser that many sites would be tested on. Use something else and a lot of sites would simply break or even refuse to load. So IE had to be used. And because everyone used IE sites only tested against IE so you had to use IE. Then something broke and IE's market share has decreased. By a fraction and yet MS response shows how scared they are of even losing 10% of a market. IE7 is going to copy everything the other browsers did because no longer can MS just rely on the fact that you need to use their browser to view site X.
MS certainly doesn't want the same thing to happen to its OS and Office markets.
No, if any country actually does ban MS from use by the goverment and large businesses then you can be sure that Bill Gates himself will be flying over to smooth things out. Just check the countless examples of MS responses to goverments considering opensource solutions.
Your view of the world suggests to me your a 12yr old windows script kiddy who idolizes Billy because he gave you free porn popups.
Maybe you will grow out of it as you learn about the real world but in the meantime get an account on myspace instead and leave slashdot to those who got a clue.
The biggest problem arrises when you already have an idea what the style should be like. Dexter labs and the other originals stand on their own and so their very stylised art can be allowed to work.
Clone wars however clashed for me with my perception of what star wars should be like. Not that much since I grew up with far worse art massacres in the form of the early star wars comics but still it clashed.
But the Dark Crystal art is totally different. I only seen the movie and the art book and that created in my mind a very detailed dreamlike world with beautifull sets with lots and lots of detail and realism.
EXACTLY opposite of all the cartoons this guy has done. Oh of course he is the director, not the artist but it strikes me as significant that all his cartoons share the same art style, hard simple lines giving the characters an almost deformed look. Clone wars is the most realistic and , well just google for the images. Now compare them to the artwork for the dark crystal. Not exactly a match now is it?
Yeah the guy is a great creator of cartoons. That is nothing to sneer at considering how much crap others make, he does very well. BUT we have seen with game movies that just because a director is good at one type of entertainment they don't have to be any good at another. Especially if it calls for a style change.
Can he recapture the magic that was the Dark Crystal? I doubt it. The fact they are going to use CGI has me worried. Sure a puppet made of fire would probably be hard to do but still. CGI. In a muppet movie. Ewh.
Oh well at least it is not a prequel. Dark Crystal, the phantom menace anyone?
But I am also reminded what happens time and time again when some non-movie director gets his paws on a famous property. Usually it is some guy who did some music videos who gets to do a full movie and screws up.
This time it is a cartoon director. I only seen dexters lab and powerpuff girls. Dexters lab was okay powerpuffs was a bit to much for me. The others I only seen and episode or two off.
None of them are exactly, how shall I put this nicely, the kind of stuff you want to watch as a full length movie.
They are good cartoons but would make lousy movies especially of the slow dreamlike fantasy stuff that is the dark crystal.
The style mismatch doesn't give me high hopes. Just because someone has awards in one style doesn't mean they are any good in another.
As for making the dark crystal into an animated series. Oh boy, either Henson studios is swimming in cash or it is going to suck so bad it will stagger believe.
Current cartoons are drawn in a simple way, part style and part because it saves a bundle of cash. That is okay if it suits the story but the dark crystal was in a large part the beautifull enviroments. Super stylised (ala powerpuff girls) dark crystal? Ewh.
Nice to see they are trying, hope it turns out better then the last few muppet movies, but couldn't they have gotten a director who has some experience with this kinda stuff.
Gmail all of sudden stopped complaining that I was using opera and just worked. So they do work on it. Just have to wait for it.
Hi fucktard, are you bunch of fucktards ever going to fucking support the goddman fucking standard like bloody PNG and position: fixed and other basic stuff?
Who cares about security, if windows users did they wouldn't use windows. Who cares about hot new features. If people wanted cutting edge they wouldn't use windows. Sadly all those windows users do want websites that work in their browser so you are stuck supporting the crap that is IE.
It is very simple, very basic support for simple standards that IE just isn't capable of it. I can only think of the following reasons, A, they are really just not capable of it. MS can't hire any people who can hack up PNG support or do proper CSS. B, they want to hold the web back so they can launch their own new version. C, they want to wind me up and get me an ulcer.
Not that it matters ifI IE7 becomes a passable browser (yeah I considered the possibility that IE7 might become a good browser but who am I kidding) we will still have to support craptastic IE6 for years to come. Hell IE5 only now is starting to disappear.
If you are not a webdesigner you cannot understand.
You can make a beautifull page that truly shines that the customer finds enchanting and the users drool about and then you test it in IE and it all falls to pieces.
Ajax is the new buzzword so lets us that as an example to show how bad IE is. First the code for a real browser (anything not produced by MS):
Oh and line 1 and 3 are only there to keep IE happy. 2nd line would be all that is needed if you coded only for real browsers. But for IE you need that while IF statement. PLUS:The code is from IBM btw so I figure it is pretty pretty efficient example.
Can you start to understand why IE is hated so much by web developers?
No doubt IE7 will cause this simple code to expand yet more.
For my own personal sites I have long since stopped adding IE support. Get a real browser or fuck off. Sadly that is not acceptable in business sites. Not even the customer service section.
So next time you ask a fucking IE developer questions less sucking up please and more 'are you finally going to do some real work or do I have to get a contract on your kids'.
IE, because Bill Gates hates the net.
WHAT? Oh like you never have.
So unless they lied, then lied about lying your version is wrong.
Wether you agree with outrage is not the point. It is all a bunch of crap but thanks to their screwup games have once again come under a lot of bad press and the censors live by that. Each time this happens they get new powers.
So I stick with my point, thank you very fucking much rockstar. Next time just release a japanese porn game.
Because they survive partly on goverment grants they got to make responsible programming. So lots of boring talkie news programs and very little pure mindless entertainment to compete with the commercial stations.
This was thought up by dutch politicians as a way to ensure that some quality news tv would remain. All that has happened is that it shows that politicians are stupid dumbfucks who should be hung from the neck.
Why? Well they still got to compete because the other part of the income comes from ads and from people subscribing to them (well the tv magazine each one sells) so they still got to be popular?
How do you become popular when you have to produce only news programs and other reponsible stuff? You make it as lightweight as possible so it can compete with the mindless entertainment. The 8 o'clock news used to be 30 minutes. Last time I watched it was 5.
The worst? The KRO (catholics) has a new magazine that came after the news that highlighted current events. It used to be okay. they had a nasty bit years ago where a reporter faked a scandal with human heads being for sale but otherwise were okay.
What was on last time I watched? 30 minutes of drivel following the dutch royal family (americans, you may be fat lardass gassguzzling warmongering idiots but at least you got no royalty. Applause for yourselve) in the most moronic way. Not even a hint of critism, the entire thing look like an informerical except that even then you usually got someone asking, "but this can't be true can it". None of that.
I was litteraly dumbstruck. I don't watch a lot of tv (the internet takes up all my mindless entertainment time) and haven't watch dutch tv in months but I had no idea things had gotten so bad.
It was about as good a news story as to MTV reports on the latest movie.
Oh and it seems this program was part of a sequel, at least one before and one coming next week. At least. A minimum of 1.5 hours of meaningless royalty worshipping. On a news program.
Perhaps people in China are better off. At least they can only improve. In the west we can only sit back and watch things collapse. When you protest you hear stuff, but we got to attract viewers or there are plenty of places worse in the world.
A, if you want to attract viewers do the naked news, Real News with Real Nudes. As for their being worse place in the world. Yeah so? There are worse things then me sticking your microphone up your ass but I bet you will still scream when I do it!
Oh and the next time I see some journalist reporting LIVE! from a location where nothing is happening talking like WW3 is about to start I am going to scream. /me flips to the BBC news AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHH
A. Some chinese people are doing very well financially. People with good pay checks don't riot unless they are under threath to loose them. The LA riots did not take place in the hills.
B. There are those who claim China is becoming more capatalist. Yeah right. Only those who do not have a clue as to what it means believe that. China very much has its own system and it isn't what you think it is.
C. They only got to look to the west. No not the US, Russia to see what happens when the communist leave. Do they want that? See point A. and D.
D. Variant of point A. It is hard to get upset by unjustice to someone else especially when protesting about gets you in trouble and you are doing fairly well while the unjustice is going on but stand to really loose by stopping it.
Recap, It is hard to get upset about say tibet for a chinese person when doing so can get you in serious trouble when you do not succeed in overthrowing the goverment and when you do your country becomes a slum like russia.
The chinese at the moment got a unique system that is making a lot of people rich (well except the poor but who cares about them) and as long as the repression is happening to other people people are reluctant to loose a good thing.
Yeah it is nasty but if mothers can live with the husband who gives them a good income while he rapes their kids then I am not suprised people can happily live under a system that kills some total strangers hundreds of miles away. (A very real example to proof this? Female circumsion. It is being battled in the simplest way, get the fathers to do it. They are fine when it happens outside their visions but when they are asked to hack up their crying daughters they suddenly become very reluctant to keep up the old ways (meanwhile keep the kid away from grandmothers cause they will have no troubles, women are evil). Seen it on tv so it must be true.)
Will the system ever collapse? Perhaps. Nothing is forever but lets examine Cuba. It is still there despite not being america's favorite trading partner. Being in a dictarorship is not all that bad apparently if you are not the one being trampled on.
and lets be honest, who in the west who is upset about western goverments support for the war on terror is really prepared to overthrow those goverments? Complain all you want about Bush and call him Hitler 2 but unless you are currently practising your sniping skills you are meaningless, as meaningless as this journalists protest.
I see this as just another attempt by the chinese goverment to keep control. Some will fail of course but others will stick. Just like in the west and every attempt to get in stuff like mandatory ID's and camera's. I seen a lot of that stuff and lots spark a huge protest and yet over the 35 years of my live I have switched from not even owning a passport to carrying one all the time and there is a camera in the highstreet around the corner.
Because I am not ready to give up my okay live to battle it.
The chinese goverment chance of falling is about the same as that of the current western goverments. Except the chinese economy at the moment is doing well.
Well and the fuckwads who elect the goverments in question but they are to many so I just insult rockstar.
So ehm, okay. Japanese games eh. Well why it is very nice knowing what age limits apply to each category this doesn't actually tell us anything. What is important for a rating system is to know what will be rated as what.
Where exactly would current well known games fit? Oh sure all the H games will probably be Z (although with the japanese you never know) but what about more common titles?
Is this just a renaming of the rating system or will this mean games that are currently for everyone will suddenly have a 18+ sticker slapped on them?
Will this then affect sales? Rockstar losts lots of money (serves them right) on the GTA: SA debacle by not being sold by the big retailers. Will japanese retailers do the same and make it economically impossible to make risque games?
At the moment japan seems to be far less strict about for instance nudity in games then the US (then again who isn't) is this going to chance?
In short, will I have to look elsewhere for my pedo tentacle date rape sims (with sister character)? I need to know!
It is the new car smell idea and it clearly seperates you from the pirate. Remove the goodies and what seperates the buyer from the pirate is that the pirate doesn't have to hunt for the CD or to worry about loosing the key to play the game. Oh and that the pirate has 50 dollar bills still in his pants to stuff down the strippers panties.
WHAT? Yeah like you never had to choose between a game or a stripper. Geez.
Secondary. English is not my first language.
Then of course there is the fact that a computer language is totally different then a natural language. Computer language needs to be parsed by extremely simple tools, natural language is parsed by humans who are far better at it. Did you understand what I tried to say? Then I succeeded. Oh and didn't I just say that the uni students failed at programming? Their english is no doubt much better then mine but what do you call a programmer who include a 100 line long switch wich does the same in every case as well as in the default? It was perfect in grammar and spelling. Just not good coding.
But sure, you can hire people whose CV and letter of application doesn't contain single spelling mistake. Never heard of a spellchecker or peer review? I am not going to bother with that for a slashdot post.
Judging a programmer on his english is exactly the problem I am talking about. Judge the programmer by his code.
But that I guess is hard because no company I worked for ever did. One asked if I had some available and I have them a guest account on my server so they could have a look but they never logged in. I was hired by them so I guess they used magic to review the code.
But yeah your right, what usually landed me a job was when I managed to convince the person hiring me that I can get the job done. I have only ever been hired by a semi-tech person who did at least bother to look at my portfolio and (still active) sites.
It is kinda off putting to get responses like on performance reviews like "yeah why haven't you taken that course we offered you?" when it has been cancceled because you had to assist on another project where some graduate was just pissing about without a clue. Even worse when they are then made your manager for having pulled through on that project even in great difficult. (Wise lesson, it is better to pull a project in over the deadline then just complete it without fuss on time and on budget, managers like crises.)
But back to your critism
First, if you are this careless or uneducated with your primary language of communication, how careful or educated will you be with a computer language? Second, I will have to worry about every memo leaving your desk making my organization look questionable? Every good thinker I know uses English as a primary tool, does it well, and immediately recognizes the difference in those that do and do not.
This one is clearly laughable for whole number of reasons. Lets say I communicate in bad english with a customer, that will be to a other techie who won't give a shit and if it is to a higherup fire your sales staff for allowing this to happen in the first place. Keep the programmers locked up. Second, check all those humerous stories about some idiot cocking things up by sending the wrong email or saying the wrong thing. Now check how often that is a uni graduate. Don't worry about spelling when some frat boy decides to email his ass to all the contacts in his outlook address book. I already told you about security and uni students
Moreover, I would need to see more than just 'I'm so much better than Jack and Joe with their degrees'. I see good enthusiasm and 'get it done' attitude, but I'd need to see more evidence of precision, rigor and forethought in your work (not that it doesn't exist, but it is not evident here).
That is what I am saying, ask for my portfolio and examine it. Oh and I mean examine it on copyright information. Copy and pasting from opensource does not make a good developer. (This problem is getting bigger and bigger. I sat in one interview where the guy tried to pass of running phpnuke as his own work.)
But hey, since I always the one who ends up finishing up projects after all the people with precision and rigor and forethough have gotten us ove
No wonder they are offended. Oh well, sony getting public relations wrong. Gee, that is a new one.
What I find odd is that no mention is made of how the bloody hell you are going to download games on a machine with no HD. Oh yeah there will an add on but that makes it hardly a tool to deter pirating is it now. Have the game for free OR get a small discount on the game + buy an expensive addon. Now that is an easy choice. I got a great new idea to deter PC pirating. How about you have to upgrade to vista and an ALL new DRM PC and if you do that we knock 10% of the game price.
There is a far simpler move to combat piracy. It involves 3 steps. First game length related to price. Full price == baldur gate type length. 8 hour play time == $4.95... canadian. Second, don't fuck with paying consumers, there is no point copy protection, only paying customers are affected. Finally, make it worth buy the fucking game. I am old but I remember the days when games game with full manuals with listed not just the keys but also had background info. Make it worth opening that box and getting that magic feeling of holding a new game. Who ever invented PDF manual on CD should be shot.
It has been a long time since I was really excited about a new game. Perhaps I am getting to old to game or perhaps recent games just are to meh.
That precludes any use by leet speakers. Sorry. Come back when your balls have dropped.
Just take the americans who take exception against europeans (or rather euro's) thinking all yanks are fat lardasses. Of course americans making fun of french women who don't shave is perfectly alright.
The recent bad sales of the X-box 360 in japan stories had a lot of stories claiming that the japanese were to nationalist to buy foreign hardware and instead preffered to buy from their own companies. This totally ignored that sony (japanese) mp3 players do not sell where as apples (chinese, I am kidding, american) iPod is selling like hotcakes. Or that the easiest way into a japanese woman's panties is to bring some brandname merchandise from europe.
Anyway the same people who said the japanese are nationlist happily accept their own american tv stations heavily censoring japenese tv shows to remove any hint of japanese origin.
Pot calling kettle black?
In the more serious story of Islam vs the west this is especially true since the west is terrified of calling the muslims out on their double standards. You would be suprised how few westerners are willing to stand up to this weird kind of terrorism (What are they saying? Stop publising cartoons or we burn our own towns? So far the only people killed are other muslims. Then again what do you expect from people who can't tell the danish from the swiss flag?)
In an argument you can only meet the other person halfway if the other person does the same. If he does not all you have done is moved in range for him to throw stones at you.
Of course the entire current farce is not real. The cartoons were published months ago, then all of a sudden they turned up in the east with handy translations. Oh yeah, can you say organised rioting?
Then again we should also realise that until recently most terrorist attacks in the US were from christians. Check out attacks on abortion clinics. Perhaps muslims and christians ain't that different after all eh?