If we aren't careful video games are going to end up like comics/graphic novels
Meaning that tbey would have learned how to tell a strong story visually. Use dialog and special effects economically.
Frnnk Miller's Sin City and 300 worked rather well on film. It should be interesting to see what he makes of Will Eisner's The Spirit.
The industry needs to grow out of this impression that video games are for kids. The average gamer is in his 30's, they need to wake up to the huge market base out there they are missing out on.
But is the gamer in his thirties really interested in disembowelment as home entertainment? Perhaps in the context of a film like Kill Bill. But the core audience for gross-out horror has always been adolescent.
I think the fundamental problem of the "mature" - "adult" - video game is that producers - and gamers - almost never look beyond the cheap thrills of the exploitation flick.
Much of the asshatery that is going on can be traced back to the influence of Jack Thompson who, as a snake-bellied moral grandstander, has cozied up to a number of politicians who should know better and fired them up over the hot coffee scandal.
It is ridiculous to focus on Thompson when in Clinton you have a potent vote-getter both in the inner city and the suburbs.
There are huge constituencies in both major parties that profoundly distrust the level of violence - some would call it depravity - exposed in a game like Manhunter 2 and have come to despise the gangster-game genre in particular.
Wouldn't take much to cook up a campaign where tough ESRB ratings are used to sell even more games.
Forbidden fruit and all.
I am not convinced.
Bioshock hits the market with an M rating amd without a whiff of scandal soars to the #1 spot on the Amazon.com sales charts.
The movies had a $4 billion dollar North American box office this summer. Die Hard 4, Ratatouille, 1408 - these movies and a dozen others all did just fine within the limits of a PG rating.
Hollywood has known for generations that you can reap a quick profit on a low-budget exploitation film. But Hollywood has also learned that in marketing a freak show it is first to the gate that wins.
That the latecomers will ramp up the nastiness until the audience is exhausted and rebellious.
In Linux if something pisses you off, you can fix it yourself or contact the developer directly and talk about (or collaborate on) a fix!
This assumes you are a geek or know how to communicate with a geek. This assumes that the geek will listen to what you have to say. That the project isn't "his baby."
Eliminate nuclear and coal power in favor of solar and wind power, and replace the stupid cars with bikes.
The bicycle as a commuter vehicle works only under ideal conditions and only for the young and fit. You won't be taking a bicycle into Buffalo, NY in mid-winter. You won't be taking a bicycle into Houston, TX in mid-summer.
God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use.
The contract will say that you are paying for a shared residential connection with no rights to run a server and no guarantee of performance or quality of service.
Wrong. Intelligent design is a thesis, a philosophical position. It's not testable.
Which is exactly why that nonsense has no place in a science classroom.
But that doesn't mean "Intelligent Design" can be successfully excluded from discussion in other settings, other classrooms.
In a society as increasingly complex and multi-cultural as the U.S. insisting on science as the only path to knowledge or understanding doesn't take you very far. It certainly hasn't taken the Geek very far - at least in national politics. While the re-invigorated Democrats are finding common cause with many Evangelical Christians.
you are innocent until proven guilty. the RIAA has failed to charge anyone
If you can't make the most elementary distinctions between civil and criminal law then anything you say about the law is worthless.
All the rights agencies have to do as a plaintiff in a civil case is to persuade the finder of fact that it is reasonable to believe that you infringed on the copyright of one of its members. Nothing more than that.
In order to show that an individual has committed unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA would have to catch the individual in the act of transferring the copyrighted content to another individual who has not been authorized, by fair use or otherwise, to obtain a copy of the IP
This is like saying you can't take the pirate broadcaster into court because you don't know and can't know who - if anyone - was listening to his station. Judges and juries don't think this way.
It is precisely the reckless and indiscriminate nature of distribution through the P2P nets that destroys any defense of "fair use."
What concerts are you going to that are only 74 minutes long? At ticket prices these days, I would be pissed about such a short concert.
after seventy-five minutes of continuous performance someone in the audience is certainly going to need to take a piss. it's as good a time to schedule a break as any.
Judging by the lack of Philip's logo on most music media sold today (due to the inclusion of DRM efforts violating the standards), I'm not altogether sure CD-DA has lived long enough to reach 25
In twenty-five years, how many people have ever heard of the Red Book?
The anniversary is important because the audio CD introduced digital media into the home.
But the VP of Sony decided this was unacceptable, since it would not be long enough to allow uninterrupted playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a disc change
This kind of thinking could have saved Betamax. One CD equals one concert-length performance. One video cassette equals one feature-length movie.
How do I get in this class? Do I pose as someone downloading music? Can I turn myself into the riaa in the hopes that they can include me in the pay out?
Don't play with fire.
The class action does not go forward unless a court allows it to go forward.
If a judge decides that the affected class is ill-defined as a matter of law, unwieldy, unworkable and open to fraudulent claims this is not going to happen.
On a level playing field (Linux = free, Pirated Windows = free), people overwhelmingly choose Windows. If Linux was anywhere near as good as Windows it would be far more popular than it is today.
It isn't simply that people are turning their backs on Linux - they are choosing Windows over the typical Linux distribution with its 20,000 or so free and open source apps. That is a hell of a comment on the perceived value of F/OSS.
Just because one does not exist does not mean that one will not exist.
How many millions or tens of millions has Sun put into StarOffice and OpenOffice? That would be entry level for this market segment.
StarOffice was #20 in Windows Office Suite sales at Amazon. #655 overall - a piss-poor showing for its investment no matter how you choose to look at it.
StarOffice is now a free download from Google.
Sales through Amazon have - predictably - sunk like a rock in less than a week. What I find more interesting is the persistence of the stand-alone office suite. That there is no rush to a web-based solution.
That inhibit, rather than promote the progress that justifies the Constitution's original compromise with our inalienable freedom to express ourselves, even by copying another's content.
The early American writer struggled to get into print. It was cheaper to pirate from the English or the French.
The seventeenth century colonial writer was a cleric like Cotton Mather. The eighteenth century American writer a landed aristocrat like Jefferson or a middle-class merchant like Franklin.
The defining quality well into the nineteenth century will be that he will have an independent source of income. He could - if it came down to it - afford go the vanity press route and self-publish.
He will not be working class. He will not be inclined in any way to rock the boat. He will be living in Boston. Perhaps a gentleman-scholar like Parkman -- and, more or less, the living embodiment of the social and political elite.
If this seems to you crabbed and incestuous, than perhaps you will understand why I am not in sympathy with the Geek's obsession with his unlimited right to copy rather than his unlimited freedom to create.
Yeah, they might not be that much cheaper, just a few hundred bucks (compared to the cost of the rest of the machine which can easily be over a grand), but thats about how much Windows costs.
Walmart - with its enormous purchasing power - couldn't undersell OEM Windows by $75 - by $50. On systems with marketable specs and something approaching a recognizable brand name.
My mother did fine for years on a Linux box I set up (in 1998) and she was and still is computer illiterate.
The key words here are "mother" and "I set up the box."
The words that frame almost every conversion story posted to Slashdot. The problem is the most people don't have a reisdent Geek on 24-hr call.
They aren't accustomed to looking to IRC or Google for support.
What they do have is a toll-free number, a service contract or a desktop help link, an icon for Dell, for RoadRunner and so on.
Fedora claims few hundred thousands installations of their recent Fedora 7.
--- and Microsoft Windows is approaching one billion on the desktop. 124 million in China alone.
Then, there are local small businesses who buy those components and make whole PCs from them.
But not as many as there used to be.
The shift to laptops [true portables] and desktop replacements is a killer. The laptop isn't user-serviceable in any meaningful way - which means the no-name custom builder is out of the picture.
You can buy a $350 Dell and then add $150-$400 for Office. I'm not sure if non-students qualify for the $150.
The OEM price is available to anyone.
For all practical purposes, the high-end OEM edition is a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
MS Office Home 2007 is $120 from Amazon.com.
Retail boxed. Three seat license. No academic ID required. #1 in software sales at Amazon.
#1 in Windows Office Suite sales at Amazon. Last week, OpenOffice on CD at 49 cents ranked #20 in Windows Office Suite sales. Sandwiched between $270 DVD upgrade to Office 2007 pro and Word Perfect 11 at $30.
Also I've heard some schools require kids to do work in MS Office at home. Are they really telling parents they have to go out and spend $150-$400?
If your school or employer has a volume licensing deal with Microsoft the price to the home or student will likely be one-tenth of that.
But the fact that we, as a society, have convinced ourselves that we HAVE to use Office and make our own policies enforcing it's use... well, it drives me nuts! It is such a cliche by now, but still so valid- most people don't use 10% of the features in Word or Excel.
This isn't how an office manager thinks.
He sees 15 to 1500 desktops and an ungodly mix of temps, full and part-time staff, student interns, senior volunteers, some with significant physical disabilities, men, women and girls, ages eighteen to seventy-five, and a mountain of paperwork that has to be cleared by the close of business this afternoon.
What his people need will be in Office, what his people know will be in Office.
As far as not committing illegal acts, how would you like to have your door kicked in at 2 in the morning because you happened to be standing around outside a bank while it was being robbed?
a witness to a bank robbery or a car bomb has more immediate things to worry about. like maybe whether he'll still be among the living tomorrow morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Meaning that tbey would have learned how to tell a strong story visually. Use dialog and special effects economically. Frnnk Miller's Sin City and 300 worked rather well on film. It should be interesting to see what he makes of Will Eisner's The Spirit.
But is the gamer in his thirties really interested in disembowelment as home entertainment? Perhaps in the context of a film like Kill Bill. But the core audience for gross-out horror has always been adolescent.
I think the fundamental problem of the "mature" - "adult" - video game is that producers - and gamers - almost never look beyond the cheap thrills of the exploitation flick.
It is ridiculous to focus on Thompson when in Clinton you have a potent vote-getter both in the inner city and the suburbs. There are huge constituencies in both major parties that profoundly distrust the level of violence - some would call it depravity - exposed in a game like Manhunter 2 and have come to despise the gangster-game genre in particular.
Forbidden fruit and all.
I am not convinced.
Bioshock hits the market with an M rating amd without a whiff of scandal soars to the #1 spot on the Amazon.com sales charts.
The movies had a $4 billion dollar North American box office this summer. Die Hard 4, Ratatouille, 1408 - these movies and a dozen others all did just fine within the limits of a PG rating.
Hollywood has known for generations that you can reap a quick profit on a low-budget exploitation film. But Hollywood has also learned that in marketing a freak show it is first to the gate that wins.
That the latecomers will ramp up the nastiness until the audience is exhausted and rebellious.
This assumes you are a geek or know how to communicate with a geek. This assumes that the geek will listen to what you have to say. That the project isn't "his baby."
The bicycle as a commuter vehicle works only under ideal conditions and only for the young and fit. You won't be taking a bicycle into Buffalo, NY in mid-winter. You won't be taking a bicycle into Houston, TX in mid-summer.
"terms of service subject to change without notice"
The contract will say that you are paying for a shared residential connection with no rights to run a server and no guarantee of performance or quality of service.
It's called a business or professional account. You want it? You pay for it.
Which is exactly why that nonsense has no place in a science classroom.
But that doesn't mean "Intelligent Design" can be successfully excluded from discussion in other settings, other classrooms.
In a society as increasingly complex and multi-cultural as the U.S. insisting on science as the only path to knowledge or understanding doesn't take you very far. It certainly hasn't taken the Geek very far - at least in national politics. While the re-invigorated Democrats are finding common cause with many Evangelical Christians.
the RIAA has failed to charge anyone
If you can't make the most elementary distinctions between civil and criminal law then anything you say about the law is worthless.
All the rights agencies have to do as a plaintiff in a civil case is to persuade the finder of fact that it is reasonable to believe that you infringed on the copyright of one of its members. Nothing more than that.
In order to show that an individual has committed unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA would have to catch the individual in the act of transferring the copyrighted content to another individual who has not been authorized, by fair use or otherwise, to obtain a copy of the IP
This is like saying you can't take the pirate broadcaster into court because you don't know and can't know who - if anyone - was listening to his station. Judges and juries don't think this way. It is precisely the reckless and indiscriminate nature of distribution through the P2P nets that destroys any defense of "fair use."
after seventy-five minutes of continuous performance someone in the audience is certainly going to need to take a piss. it's as good a time to schedule a break as any.
In twenty-five years, how many people have ever heard of the Red Book?
The anniversary is important because the audio CD introduced digital media into the home.
This kind of thinking could have saved Betamax. One CD equals one concert-length performance. One video cassette equals one feature-length movie.
Don't play with fire.
The class action does not go forward unless a court allows it to go forward.
If a judge decides that the affected class is ill-defined as a matter of law, unwieldy, unworkable and open to fraudulent claims this is not going to happen.
The legal environment for the class action lawsuit is increasingly hostile. High Court Reins in Class-Action Suits, Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
It isn't simply that people are turning their backs on Linux - they are choosing Windows over the typical Linux distribution with its 20,000 or so free and open source apps. That is a hell of a comment on the perceived value of F/OSS.
How many millions or tens of millions has Sun put into StarOffice and OpenOffice? That would be entry level for this market segment.
StarOffice was #20 in Windows Office Suite sales at Amazon.
#655 overall - a piss-poor showing for its investment no matter how you choose to look at it.
StarOffice is now a free download from Google.
Sales through Amazon have - predictably - sunk like a rock in less than a week. What I find more interesting is the persistence of the stand-alone office suite. That there is no rush to a web-based solution.
The early American writer struggled to get into print. It was cheaper to pirate from the English or the French.
The seventeenth century colonial writer was a cleric like Cotton Mather. The eighteenth century American writer a landed aristocrat like Jefferson or a middle-class merchant like Franklin.
The defining quality well into the nineteenth century will be that he will have an independent source of income. He could - if it came down to it - afford go the vanity press route and self-publish.
He will not be working class. He will not be inclined in any way to rock the boat. He will be living in Boston. Perhaps a gentleman-scholar like Parkman -- and, more or less, the living embodiment of the social and political elite.
If this seems to you crabbed and incestuous, than perhaps you will understand why I am not in sympathy with the Geek's obsession with his unlimited right to copy rather than his unlimited freedom to create.
Walmart - with its enormous purchasing power - couldn't undersell OEM Windows by $75 - by $50. On systems with marketable specs and something approaching a recognizable brand name.
OEM Linux at Walmart is dead and buried.
The key words here are "mother" and "I set up the box."
The words that frame almost every conversion story posted to Slashdot. The problem is the most people don't have a reisdent Geek on 24-hr call. They aren't accustomed to looking to IRC or Google for support.
What they do have is a toll-free number, a service contract or a desktop help link, an icon for Dell, for RoadRunner and so on.
--- and Microsoft Windows is approaching one billion on the desktop. 124 million in China alone.
Then, there are local small businesses who buy those components and make whole PCs from them.
But not as many as there used to be.
The shift to laptops [true portables] and desktop replacements is a killer. The laptop isn't user-serviceable in any meaningful way - which means the no-name custom builder is out of the picture.
Year 2000 Census Stats for Portland, Oregon:
Foreign born 13%
Language other than English spoken at home pct age 5+ 17%
Asian origin 6%
Hispanic origin 7%
The stats are for the city proper - but close enough to Greater Portland [population about 2,000,000] to be serviceable.
Portland QuickFacts
The state is gaining population in roughly equal numbers from immigration and migration from other states. Oregon
Well, duh. Limited liability company
The OEM price is available to anyone.
For all practical purposes, the high-end OEM edition is a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
MS Office Home 2007 is $120 from Amazon.com.
Retail boxed. Three seat license. No academic ID required. #1 in software sales at Amazon.
#1 in Windows Office Suite sales at Amazon. Last week, OpenOffice on CD at 49 cents ranked #20 in Windows Office Suite sales. Sandwiched between $270 DVD upgrade to Office 2007 pro and Word Perfect 11 at $30.
Also I've heard some schools require kids to do work in MS Office at home. Are they really telling parents they have to go out and spend $150-$400?
If your school or employer has a volume licensing deal with Microsoft the price to the home or student will likely be one-tenth of that. But the fact that we, as a society, have convinced ourselves that we HAVE to use Office and make our own policies enforcing it's use... well, it drives me nuts! It is such a cliche by now, but still so valid- most people don't use 10% of the features in Word or Excel.
This isn't how an office manager thinks.
He sees 15 to 1500 desktops and an ungodly mix of temps, full and part-time staff, student interns, senior volunteers, some with significant physical disabilities, men, women and girls, ages eighteen to seventy-five, and a mountain of paperwork that has to be cleared by the close of business this afternoon.
What his people need will be in Office, what his people know will be in Office.
a witness to a bank robbery or a car bomb has more immediate things to worry about. like maybe whether he'll still be among the living tomorrow morning.