Yet another article where a bunch of know-it-alls put down an invention for not being the status quo. "It's too expensive. It looks dangerous. Ride a bicycle. Ride an electric bike. Ride a motorcycle."
It was easily adaptable to male and female riders.
The notion that girls would benefit from vigorous exercise as much as any boy evolves along with the bicycle - and you begin to see active "sports wear" becoming available to women.
The cyclist could make good time and good distance even on an unpaved road - and his kids could keep pace.
Small parcels become manageable.
But it isn't obvious what there is to gain beyond incremental improvements and customization.
The cyclist of 1890 bought a closed car in 1910 - and an after-market electric starter in 1915.
In contrast to the Linux roll-out party, which is free but takes place under an overpass and is hosted by homeless people.
I disagree.
The true Linux roll-out draws a half-dozen or so sophomores out on the campus green for an interminable afternoon of second-rate street theater starring a paunchy, balding, middle-aged geek.
This is most certainly religion based. Everyone should bear in mind that North America was originally colonized by people kicked out of Britain for being too uptight.
The religious exiles left voluntarily.
But at least a third of the colonists were "transported" as prisoners - settlement on the Australian plan, if you like.
The plantation south with its Cavalier roots was notorious for its sexually predatory males.
The diarist Mary Chesnut would later write that Harriet Beecher Stowe had missed her most telling point by casting Simon Legree as a bachelor.
This is what you get in any fundamentalist country.
That Rockstar was headed for a crack-up was perfectly clear to anyone outside the hard-core gaming community.
Hot Coffee was no more an aberration than the later dust-ups over Bully and Manhunt 2.
Hot Coffee is button mashing arcade sex play for adolescents. Not far removed from Custer's Revenge. [1982]
The fundamentalist could argue that* the geek hasn't the least idea of how to introduce mature sexual themes and content into PC and console gaming. That he can't think beyond rape and prostitution.
Hot Coffee was easy to access in every version of the game. It was not a third party mod or a patch in any ordinary meaning of the word.
Rockstar has a reputation for pushing the limits of public tolerance for content in a M rated game.
Hot Coffee suggested a means by which AO content could be slipped past editorial review and unlocked later -- with a hint and a wink from the developers:
A method that removed the game's censoring code of the M rated PSP and PS2 version thus restoring parts of the AO state was released by a group of PSP crackers. ESRB commented on this crack stating that it was not Rockstar's fault that this occurred and stuck with the M rating. Later, it was discovered the same method also works on the Wii version of the game. In September 2007, an uncensored PAL PS2 copy of the game was leaked onto the internet by an employee of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, who was later fired.Manhunt 2
That can't be allowed to happen.
It is too big a political risk for the console manufacturers. Too big a risk for the online distributors like Valve. Retailers like WalMart. Too big a risk for the financial stake-holders - the bankers, the shareholders.
a hacker is simply a skilled computer technologist and it is only the media that has twisted the term to mean something like 'evil child killer whose probably a communist'.
Once such a usage becomes common there is no hope of reclaiming it.
This is drearily likely to be the driving force behind the growth of the technology. Look at history. Video cassettes, the Internet, silicone rubber formulae...
It would be closer to the truth to say that Disney's support of VHS put a VCR in every home.
E.g., does that mean other people are free to design a similar interface? Of course not. In which case, they share the same property of other kinds of patents that people disagree with.
The geek will borrow freely from Apple, Microsoft and Google and in his next breath complain that everything in FOSS has begun to look like something out of Apple, Microsoft and Google.
It's the same with books, music and the movies.
The geek's notion of creativity and invention begins and ends with the clearly derivative work - he is at heart a writer of fan-fiction.
His duty to help them by giving them passwords and other confidential information ALSO ended when his employment contract ended. That's what the law says.
I want to see some solid proof for this. Because I am betting there are residual obligations under his contract - or that his contract was never properly terminated.
I'm pretty sure he isn't laughing his ass off while sitting in jail after 14 months. Although there's a good chance he will be once this is done, and he's won his lawsuit against the city and gotten the DA disbarred.
The court sided with the D.A. and the city.
When the high bail was granted and when the high bail was sustained.
Spending 14 months in a 6x8 cell fantasizing over the pot over the nonexistent pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is just plain nuts.
When you add up the cost of upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, along with all of its associated applications (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office)...
The reality is that almost everyone upgrades hardware and software when the mass market OEM Windows system bundle looks right.
Many of them out of the market for years and more than ready to make the big leap from 32 bit XP to 64 bit Win 7.
The reality is that almost no one pays retail list for MS Office.
The price the geek always quotes. Their employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program. They have student ID...
One of my favorite things to do when I'm showing off Ubuntu to people is to open the package manager application.
Ubuntu needs a package manager because there is no such thing as a distribution-independent Linux installer.
No universal Linux repository.
One of my favorite things is Gog.com. Budget priced classic MSDOS and Windows games ready to run on Vista and Win 7.
There is almost nothing of interest in FOSS for Linux that isn't ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
But it can be a real struggle to find a FOSS replacement for the proprietary - closed-source - Windows app, and I am not just talking games here.
but that thanks to DRM systems incorporated into Windows 7 and Mac OS X, they are artificially restricted from doing so because some third party has decided to "manage their digital rights" for them, it definitely gets their attention.
It is also gets their attention when the HP from Walmart has a Blu-Ray drive and HDMI out.
That Netflix streams flawlessly from both their PC and Samsung player.
That there still ain't no iTunes for Linux.
why a lot of commercial closed-source software these days that might otherwise cost hundreds or thousands of dollars is sold for really low cost or given away for free because of how hard it is to compete with volunteer work, it also gets their attention.
What I see when I look at OpenOffice.org what is an organization staffed and funded by Sun and aligned with its own corporate interests. The marquee projects of Open Office are often far removed from the volunteer - "non-profit" model.
the person who wrote my browser isn't beholden to financial interest or corporate mandates
and Google expects nothing in return for its payouts to the Moz Foundation?
I mean holy crap they hate parents apparently they are either dead or MIA!
Character animation at the highest level is an extraordinarily rare talent. It takes a long time, it eats up a lot of money:
hermonir: What is the animation quota? How much final character animation does an animator produce in a week? aorrelle: Four feet per week - about three seconds.Working for Pixar
Characters who contribute nothing essential to the story are cut.
Disney characters aren't bound by canon but by the needs of the story.
Mickey can be the innocent of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. He can be equally adept playing mind games with The Phantom Blot on the daily comic pages.
DC and Marvel blow things up every ten years or so when continuity has become a trap. It doesn't always work out they way they plan.
Readers remain loyal to the dearly departed.
The classic Disney tale is a "coming of age" story:
Pinocchio can have the life of a boy or the immortality of the puppet.
He can't have both.
The decision is the most important he will ever make and it is essential that it make it on his own.
That is why the parent or guide or guardian must be removed from the picture.
Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature.
Limiting the number of applications that can be opened on a system with very limited resources can make a great deal of sense when the market is the novice user without technical support:
If you have more than one activity running, you can switch to it by clicking on the appropriate icon in the ring.
The size of the ring segment that an activity occupies is intended to represent its overall memory usage, but that feature does not work yet. When the ring fills up, no additional activities may be launched until some resources are freed up. In today's XO laptops, only a few activities can be started at the same time, and when memory is exhausted, one of them will die suddenly without any warning. Note: it is possible that work or play that is in progress may be lost.Switching Between Activities
The simple fact of the matter is this: like you said, there are a HUGE NUMBER of great Teen-rated or lower games out there. And yet a small number of M-rated games get so much of the attention. Why are you blaming developers for that?
There are a small core of developers - Rockstar comes first to mind - that push the M rating to extremes - beyond the limits of public tolerance - generating a backlash that sweeps across the entire industry.
It has become almost impossible to introduce genuinely adult themes into video gaming because the "M" rating universally translates as blood, gore and adolescent soft-core porn: The button mashing sex play of "Hot Coffee."
I feel so much safer now knowing the streets are clean of those terrible video games.
In the American system, violent crimes are almost always prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government usually takes the lead in the prosecution of economic crimes with an interstate or international dimension.
GTA IV grossed $500 million in sales in its first week of release.
The geek can't hype the game industry as a high tech employer - a $10 billion dollar economic powerhouse - and expect the feds to ignore the pirate - the counterfeiter. Video Game Industry
Slashdot Mirror
Other than the fact that you had to patch the game, using a hack that did not come from Rockstar, of course.
Can you be certain the hack didn't come from Rockstar?
Hot Coffee was burnt to disk - complete and playable - in every console and PC release of the game.
No third party content required.
Hot Coffee could be unlocked in every console and PC release of the game.
That strains coincidence.
Or used an old fashioned card catalog?
The old fashioned card catalog was cross-indexed by subject and I miss it.
What a waste of resources they are: The growing and cutting of trees. The inks. The printing, etc. And all the room they take up!
What you see as waste, I see as craft.
I discovered a long time ago that I cared about materials and workmanship. Color. Illustration. Design. Typography.
There are books on these shelves more than a century old - and others that should remain intact and readable for 250 years.
thousands of years ago there was the issue of moving from trusty clay tablets to this new fangled technology called papyrus.
The Gilgamesh Epic survives to this day on 12 clay tablets. Epic of Gilgamesh
The first modern translation was in 1880. The Andrew George edition was published for general readers by the Penguin Classics in 2003.
The Penguin Classics have the virtue of being readable and read.
You can't really say that for the surviving fragments of ancient Egyptian literature. The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians [1914]
More insulting than seeing the job go to a younger, less experienced, less capable candidate?
In five years or ten will you even make it to the interview?
Yet another article where a bunch of know-it-alls put down an invention for not being the status quo. "It's too expensive. It looks dangerous. Ride a bicycle. Ride an electric bike. Ride a motorcycle."
There are reasons why standards become standard.
The safety bicycle takes recognizable form no later than 1887. ca. 1887 Safety Bicycle
It was easily adaptable to male and female riders.
The notion that girls would benefit from vigorous exercise as much as any boy evolves along with the bicycle - and you begin to see active "sports wear" becoming available to women.
The cyclist could make good time and good distance even on an unpaved road - and his kids could keep pace.
Small parcels become manageable.
But it isn't obvious what there is to gain beyond incremental improvements and customization.
The cyclist of 1890 bought a closed car in 1910 - and an after-market electric starter in 1915.
I disagree.
The true Linux roll-out draws a half-dozen or so sophomores out on the campus green for an interminable afternoon of second-rate street theater starring a paunchy, balding, middle-aged geek.
It looks something like this: Windows 7 Sins
Win 7 has had broad exposure and is pretty well understood. There is a substantial base of experienced users:
The Net Applications stats for August show Win 7 with a 1.18% share. Linux at 0.94%. Windows 7 Breaks 1% Share
There is no reason why a carefully targeted presention shouldn't succeed - and that is all a Tupperware Party really is, when you get down to it.
For the true meaning of pathetic - consider this video of the Boston Commons' launch of the Win 7 Sins campaign:
Free Software Foundation - Windows 7 Sins
189 views.
MPAA, listen closely: when it comes to TV, there is no such thing.
If the geek truly believed this, why is he so obsessed with downloading the latest in music, movies and videos?
The law already says "for limited Times" which ostensibly means temporary
In practical terms, it means "definable," always has.
The framers of the constitution refused to make policy decisions binding on future legislators or the executive.
That is why the document is short, focuses on the structure of the federal government - the balance of powers - and is only rarely amended.
This is most certainly religion based. Everyone should bear in mind that North America was originally colonized by people kicked out of Britain for being too uptight.
The religious exiles left voluntarily.
But at least a third of the colonists were "transported" as prisoners - settlement on the Australian plan, if you like.
The plantation south with its Cavalier roots was notorious for its sexually predatory males.
The diarist Mary Chesnut would later write that Harriet Beecher Stowe had missed her most telling point by casting Simon Legree as a bachelor.
This is what you get in any fundamentalist country.
That Rockstar was headed for a crack-up was perfectly clear to anyone outside the hard-core gaming community.
Hot Coffee was no more an aberration than the later dust-ups over Bully and Manhunt 2.
Hot Coffee is button mashing arcade sex play for adolescents. Not far removed from Custer's Revenge. [1982]
The fundamentalist could argue that* the geek hasn't the least idea of how to introduce mature sexual themes and content into PC and console gaming. That he can't think beyond rape and prostitution.
*- apart from the singular success of The Sims
a third party patch
Hot Coffee was easy to access in every version of the game. It was not a third party mod or a patch in any ordinary meaning of the word.
Rockstar has a reputation for pushing the limits of public tolerance for content in a M rated game.
Hot Coffee suggested a means by which AO content could be slipped past editorial review and unlocked later -- with a hint and a wink from the developers:
A method that removed the game's censoring code of the M rated PSP and PS2 version thus restoring parts of the AO state was released by a group of PSP crackers. ESRB commented on this crack stating that it was not Rockstar's fault that this occurred and stuck with the M rating. Later, it was discovered the same method also works on the Wii version of the game.
In September 2007, an uncensored PAL PS2 copy of the game was leaked onto the internet by an employee of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, who was later fired. Manhunt 2
That can't be allowed to happen.
It is too big a political risk for the console manufacturers. Too big a risk for the online distributors like Valve. Retailers like WalMart. Too big a risk for the financial stake-holders - the bankers, the shareholders.
Once such a usage becomes common there is no hope of reclaiming it.
This is drearily likely to be the driving force behind the growth of the technology. Look at history. Video cassettes, the Internet, silicone rubber formulae...
It would be closer to the truth to say that Disney's support of VHS put a VCR in every home.
E.g., does that mean other people are free to design a similar interface? Of course not. In which case, they share the same property of other kinds of patents that people disagree with.
The geek will borrow freely from Apple, Microsoft and Google and in his next breath complain that everything in FOSS has begun to look like something out of Apple, Microsoft and Google.
It's the same with books, music and the movies.
The geek's notion of creativity and invention begins and ends with the clearly derivative work - he is at heart a writer of fan-fiction.
His duty to help them by giving them passwords and other confidential information ALSO ended when his employment contract ended. That's what the law says.
I want to see some solid proof for this. Because I am betting there are residual obligations under his contract - or that his contract was never properly terminated.
I'm pretty sure he isn't laughing his ass off while sitting in jail after 14 months. Although there's a good chance he will be once this is done, and he's won his lawsuit against the city and gotten the DA disbarred.
The court sided with the D.A. and the city.
When the high bail was granted and when the high bail was sustained.
Spending 14 months in a 6x8 cell fantasizing over the pot over the nonexistent pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is just plain nuts.
Windows 7 Breaks 1% Share
XP 71.79%
Vista 18.8%
OSX 10.5 3.45%
Win 7 1.18%
OSX 10.4 0.99%
Linux 0.94%
W2K 0.92%
iPhone 0.33%
Operating System Market Share [August]
Browser Version Market Share [August]
IE 6 25%
IE 7 21%
IE 8 15%
FFX 3 12%
FFX 3.5 9%
Safari 2.6%
Chrome 2.0 2.5%
IE 8 Compatability Mode 2.5 %
Opera 9.x 1.8%
Search Engine Market Share [August]
Google 76%
Yahoo 12%
Bing 8% [Up about 1% since July]
AOL 2%
IE doesn't seem to be in any immediate danger. That can't be said for the "alternative browsers."
If I were the Moz Foundation, I would be out looking for other sources of revenue. Just to be on the safe side.
When you add up the cost of upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, along with all of its associated applications (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office)...
The reality is that almost everyone upgrades hardware and software when the mass market OEM Windows system bundle looks right.
Many of them out of the market for years and more than ready to make the big leap from 32 bit XP to 64 bit Win 7.
The reality is that almost no one pays retail list for MS Office.
The price the geek always quotes. Their employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program. They have student ID...
One of my favorite things to do when I'm showing off Ubuntu to people is to open the package manager application.
Ubuntu needs a package manager because there is no such thing as a distribution-independent Linux installer.
No universal Linux repository.
One of my favorite things is Gog.com. Budget priced classic MSDOS and Windows games ready to run on Vista and Win 7.
There is almost nothing of interest in FOSS for Linux that isn't ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
But it can be a real struggle to find a FOSS replacement for the proprietary - closed-source - Windows app, and I am not just talking games here.
but that thanks to DRM systems incorporated into Windows 7 and Mac OS X, they are artificially restricted from doing so because some third party has decided to "manage their digital rights" for them, it definitely gets their attention.
It is also gets their attention when the HP from Walmart has a Blu-Ray drive and HDMI out.
That Netflix streams flawlessly from both their PC and Samsung player.
That there still ain't no iTunes for Linux.
why a lot of commercial closed-source software these days that might otherwise cost hundreds or thousands of dollars is sold for really low cost or given away for free because of how hard it is to compete with volunteer work, it also gets their attention.
What I see when I look at OpenOffice.org what is an organization staffed and funded by Sun and aligned with its own corporate interests. The marquee projects of Open Office are often far removed from the volunteer - "non-profit" model.
the person who wrote my browser isn't beholden to financial interest or corporate mandates
and Google expects nothing in return for its payouts to the Moz Foundation?
I mean holy crap they hate parents apparently they are either dead or MIA!
Character animation at the highest level is an extraordinarily rare talent. It takes a long time, it eats up a lot of money:
hermonir: What is the animation quota? How much final character animation does an animator produce in a week?
aorrelle: Four feet per week - about three seconds. Working for Pixar
Characters who contribute nothing essential to the story are cut.
Disney characters aren't bound by canon but by the needs of the story.
Mickey can be the innocent of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. He can be equally adept playing mind games with The Phantom Blot on the daily comic pages.
DC and Marvel blow things up every ten years or so when continuity has become a trap. It doesn't always work out they way they plan.
Readers remain loyal to the dearly departed.
The classic Disney tale is a "coming of age" story:
Pinocchio can have the life of a boy or the immortality of the puppet.
He can't have both.
The decision is the most important he will ever make and it is essential that it make it on his own.
That is why the parent or guide or guardian must be removed from the picture.
I have a hard time believing Disney will allow 'PG-13+' animation to come from one of their properties - it's too close to the core.
The Incredibles out-Marveled Marvel.
Wall-E went home with the 2009 Hugo Award for best long form drama. Not to mention a Nebula, an Oscar and a Saturn.
Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature.
Limiting the number of applications that can be opened on a system with very limited resources can make a great deal of sense when the market is the novice user without technical support:
If you have more than one activity running, you can switch to it by clicking on the appropriate icon in the ring.
The size of the ring segment that an activity occupies is intended to represent its overall memory usage, but that feature does not work yet. When the ring fills up, no additional activities may be launched until some resources are freed up. In today's XO laptops, only a few activities can be started at the same time, and when memory is exhausted, one of them will die suddenly without any warning. Note: it is possible that work or play that is in progress may be lost. Switching Between Activities
Useful Down Below as well - for those who remember Grim Fandango.
The simple fact of the matter is this: like you said, there are a HUGE NUMBER of great Teen-rated or lower games out there. And yet a small number of M-rated games get so much of the attention. Why are you blaming developers for that?
There are a small core of developers - Rockstar comes first to mind - that push the M rating to extremes - beyond the limits of public tolerance - generating a backlash that sweeps across the entire industry.
It has become almost impossible to introduce genuinely adult themes into video gaming because the "M" rating universally translates as blood, gore and adolescent soft-core porn: The button mashing sex play of "Hot Coffee."
I feel so much safer now knowing the streets are clean of those terrible video games.
In the American system, violent crimes are almost always prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government usually takes the lead in the prosecution of economic crimes with an interstate or international dimension.
GTA IV grossed $500 million in sales in its first week of release.
The geek can't hype the game industry as a high tech employer - a $10 billion dollar economic powerhouse - and expect the feds to ignore the pirate - the counterfeiter. Video Game Industry