I'm sorry, I just have to pull you out of geek fantasy land here...
The number of people for whom this will be a really big issue is miniscule. Why?
Because this is a curiosity. Because, with a bunch of effort, now I can take my Gamecube, which currently does very different things from my computer, and turn it into something that does the same things as my computer. And while, yes, now I can run MAME on my Cube, I can already run MAME on my computer, and just hook a controller into it via USB.
So, yeah. Running Linux on consoles - neat proof of concept. Absolutely useless in almost every sense of the word. Virtually no one is really going to run out and buy a Cube because they can run Linux on it.
In terms of trademark, not so much - Microsoft got the trademark in first. Whether his name is Mike Rowe or not is irrelevent under trademark law - if he wants to use that name in terms of software and computers, then he'd better come up with a different company name, or else he infringes on Microsoft's trademark.
All analysis, of course, applies to US law - you're on your own for Canada.
I just looked up the cartridge for my printer, at least, (A Samsung ML-1710 - the cheapest laser printer money can buy) and found them for $40 more than I can get them with a simple Froogle search. Similarly scaled differences on a few other random cartridges I searched for.
This is hacking under the new, modern definition of hacking, whereby hacking is doing anything to a computer that the computer's owner doesn't understand.
See, there are these people in the world called idiots...
Wolves aren't really so much "dangerous predators" as "your basic carnivores in the wild." They're not going to attack humans unless their other food options are totally depleted and they're starving.
Mad Wolf Disease would not cause this situation so much as make the wolf infirm and eventually dead. You're not going to have sudden blood-lusted and violent wolves. You're going to have very dead wolves who can't function.
Meanwhile, absurd paranoia like this will lead to an incrase in programs like the one they're trying really hard to put into place in Alaska, whereby they will slaughter all wolves in a given area with a 100 mile radius. By shooting them from helicopters. And sometimes, by chasing them via helicopter to the point of exhaustion, and then shooting them. Because apparently the helicopter and machine gun aren't enough on their own.
Short form - the "wolves are dangerous" myth is both ignorant and destructive, and whoever submitted this article (As well as whoever approved it) should be ashamed - spreading crap like this on as widely read a site as/. is just wrong, and I'd encourage whoever is responsible to go to a site like www.defenders.org and donate a but of money to try to push the tide of public opinion back away from myth and towards truth.
The first Monty Python computer game? Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, I think it was. The object of the game was to get to the actual game, and you had to suffer through Pythonesque inconvenience to do so.
Intellipoint is what those CDs you never installed have on them.
It's the driver/configuration utility for Microsoft pointing products. It's what let you make the middle button not send you into the weird and rather useless auto-scroll mode under Windows, and instead reliably act as a third button, which is what was being complained about.
Like, they did not scan with interesting rhythm, they did not offer enlightening insights into the nature of being, or even into the nature of the games, and they were, at several points, slightly offensive.
The fact that so many gaming sites seem to be head over heels from them really heightens the lack of geekiness I sometimes feel from being a humanities person.
Oh well. I have a girlfriend, and I bet he doesn't.
I'm sorry, what are they supposed to do with the games on the shelves now? Release magic DVD fairies that will change the dialogue to less offensive dialogue?
What this amounts to is that the censor-happy idiots weren't able to block the game because fo the sex and violence like they wanted to, and so they had to resort to getting it on a crap charge like this./shrug
I got a Pentax Asahi off of eBay, and have loved it. Very nice camera.
The reason not to go digital, incidentally, is that digital cameras still come nowhere near the resolution of regular film. Also, if you have access to a darkroom, there's lots of stuff you can do there that's just not the same done on photoshop.
It's the same reason not all artists grabbed their styluses and switched to the tablet PC.
Way back when he infamously said "We don't listen to players. They only fuck us up."
You want proof? Go watch a few episodes of a TV show. Say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then go read some Buffy fanfiction.
Do the same with Star Trek. Try it with some comic books.
Look at what happened to a TV show like Doctor Who when it explicitly became "for the fans" (Clue: There's a reason the news is that Doctor Who is back on the air)
Listening to the fans is not a smart idea. Even if they have computers and post on message boards.
Anyone who believes that the railroad industry has died should spend a night in my apartment, which has railroad tracks about 15 feet from my bedroom window.
Your lack of sleep will prove you wrong.
The railroad companies were very wise to declare that they're in the railroad business. It turns out that the railroad business was and still is a very useful business - huge amounts of US product are shipped via rail.
It turns out that although trains make crappy methods of transportation nowadays, (Planes do the transport to a limited number of points faster, and cars can go anywhere), they're still the best thing if you want to, say, move several tons of coal, lumber, etc. I mean, trucking is nice for some things, but, really, there are some things that railroads can do that no one else can do.
I think Nintendo offers a kind of game that no one else offers. When I pick up Zelda, or Metroid, or even one of their B-titles like Mario Sunshine, the game has a particular feel that other game companies don't match. I'm not sure what it is - I've hypothesized several times, but I'm never happy with the answer.
If I want to play a Nintendo-type game, though, the fact of the matter is that I need a Nintendo-made game. So, more than simply being in the video game business, I think Nintendo is in the Nintendo business. And I think that they're "who are you?" marketing, as odd as it is, is a conscious move in that direction.
And that was my point - aside from the way in which this particular bit of trash talk is utterly illogical, I don't understand why they're going after Nintendo with such vigor - it's far from their major competitor, and it's not as though Nintendo's audience is going to go XBox anytime soon - XBox has very little to offer the gamer who really enjoys Metroid Prime, Zelda, and Eternal Darkness. It's riding on Live. And Nintendo is so far from similar to that strategy that I fail to see why Microsoft would think it's customers are "in play".
Almost every interview with XBox people that makes it onto/. contains a few lines in which they make comments about how Nintendo is hopelessly behind the times, doomed, unworthy, etc.
This is a pattern with them - they trash talk Nintendo. They do it professionally, but it's still clearly trash talk.
And, I mean, really, the silent-movie directors analogy seems to pretty clearly signal a "They are going to get left behind because of their lack of voice acting."
And that's just ridiculous. Nintendo got left behind because of a bad decision on hardware. They will remain behind because they are not altering their software design to compete directly with Sony.
They will not care, because they are capable of looking at the other tech company that has any sort of obsession with multiple colors of cases, and realizing that, hey, maybe being a niche product isn't all that bad.
I also run WindowsXP. On both of my computers. I use a QWERTY keyboard. I buy from Gateway and Dell. I also never majored in any of the sciences, and vehemently dislike coding.
My girlfriend goes one step further from all of this, and does not even know what/. is.
We both play Nethack.
A lot.
So, yeah, I think you may be a little bit off on your grasp of Nethack's target audience.
OK, this is a new one. I mean, I've read more anti-Nintendo stuff than anyone sane should have to read, but I've never heard Nintendo criticized for their lack of voice acting before.
On top of that, I have trouble thinking of a game that anyone ever said "Yeah, the voice acting on that game was great! Buy the game for the voice acting!" Kingdom Hearts is the closest to that I can come up with.
And why is Microsoft doing the criticism? DO they really think they have more to gain by attacking Nintendo than by going after Sony? Sony is at least pursuing the same market they are - Nintendo is not. If they manage to get Nintendo out of the business, it will probably not substantively increase their sales.
Some days, I think small niche products offend Microsoft more than actual large competition. I wonder why that is.
That's the thing. J.Lo is safe in this case, even if you do that, because it's really easy for J.Lo to prove she never heard your song.
You, on the other hand, have no such protection. If you don't have the notarized version, you can get reamed.
Because, fundamentally, copyright is going to favor the corporate artists with huge distribution over the small ones. Just because it's much, much easier to show a small artist heard a big artist's song than the other way around.
Put another way, no human being on Earth can provide reasonable evidence that they've never heard Jenny From the Block. Lots of people can provide reasonable evidence that they've never heard some garage band.
Actually, no, I feel like this is another blow for those who see intellectual property as the artificially created sham it is.
I mean, let's stop for a moment and play "let's pretend". Today, we'll pretend that there's a guy in California with an acoustic guitar. He writes a song. He uses a particular hook in it. He's a poor college student, so, having written this song, he puts it in a notebook and plays it occasionally when he's in his room fiddling on the guitar.
Two years later, some folks in New York are working on the next J. Lo album, and use that same hook. They put out their record.
Now, since poor guy in California has no notarized version of his song, hasn't played it live, hasn't recorded it, etc, he no longer owns that hook. In fact, if he keeps using this bit of intellectual property that he invented, he can be sued.
And don't give me crap about how he should have notarized it. You don't really believe a college student should have to go notarize every fucking song and poem they write. The problem here is simpler than that.
Unlike a physical object, which by necessity only exists in one place at a time, and can only be created once, intellectual property can transmit without labor, independently generate in multiple places, and all sorts of other things.
It's not property. It cannot rationally be property. And it needs to stop being given the legal status of property.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I just have to pull you out of geek fantasy land here...
The number of people for whom this will be a really big issue is miniscule. Why?
Because this is a curiosity. Because, with a bunch of effort, now I can take my Gamecube, which currently does very different things from my computer, and turn it into something that does the same things as my computer. And while, yes, now I can run MAME on my Cube, I can already run MAME on my computer, and just hook a controller into it via USB.
So, yeah. Running Linux on consoles - neat proof of concept. Absolutely useless in almost every sense of the word. Virtually no one is really going to run out and buy a Cube because they can run Linux on it.
In terms of copyright, you'd be right.
In terms of trademark, not so much - Microsoft got the trademark in first. Whether his name is Mike Rowe or not is irrelevent under trademark law - if he wants to use that name in terms of software and computers, then he'd better come up with a different company name, or else he infringes on Microsoft's trademark.
All analysis, of course, applies to US law - you're on your own for Canada.
I just looked up the cartridge for my printer, at least, (A Samsung ML-1710 - the cheapest laser printer money can buy) and found them for $40 more than I can get them with a simple Froogle search. Similarly scaled differences on a few other random cartridges I searched for.
Nice domain name, though.
This is hacking under the new, modern definition of hacking, whereby hacking is doing anything to a computer that the computer's owner doesn't understand.
See, there are these people in the world called idiots...
Wolves aren't really so much "dangerous predators" as "your basic carnivores in the wild." They're not going to attack humans unless their other food options are totally depleted and they're starving.
/. is just wrong, and I'd encourage whoever is responsible to go to a site like www.defenders.org and donate a but of money to try to push the tide of public opinion back away from myth and towards truth.
Mad Wolf Disease would not cause this situation so much as make the wolf infirm and eventually dead. You're not going to have sudden blood-lusted and violent wolves. You're going to have very dead wolves who can't function.
Meanwhile, absurd paranoia like this will lead to an incrase in programs like the one they're trying really hard to put into place in Alaska, whereby they will slaughter all wolves in a given area with a 100 mile radius. By shooting them from helicopters. And sometimes, by chasing them via helicopter to the point of exhaustion, and then shooting them. Because apparently the helicopter and machine gun aren't enough on their own.
Short form - the "wolves are dangerous" myth is both ignorant and destructive, and whoever submitted this article (As well as whoever approved it) should be ashamed - spreading crap like this on as widely read a site as
That would be "work all day".
The lumberjack sketch is arguably Monty Python's most famous sketch, vying only really with the parrot sketch.
Stop by your local Blockbuster and grab Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different. Expand your cultural knowledge.
The first Monty Python computer game? Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, I think it was. The object of the game was to get to the actual game, and you had to suffer through Pythonesque inconvenience to do so.
Yeah. It's less funny after 6 years of DNF.
Sure, as soon as you explain why someone who doesn't know who Heinlein is would read /. at all.
Intellipoint is what those CDs you never installed have on them.
It's the driver/configuration utility for Microsoft pointing products. It's what let you make the middle button not send you into the weird and rather useless auto-scroll mode under Windows, and instead reliably act as a third button, which is what was being complained about.
Wow.
Those were some truly terrible poems.
Like, they did not scan with interesting rhythm, they did not offer enlightening insights into the nature of being, or even into the nature of the games, and they were, at several points, slightly offensive.
The fact that so many gaming sites seem to be head over heels from them really heightens the lack of geekiness I sometimes feel from being a humanities person.
Oh well. I have a girlfriend, and I bet he doesn't.
Open Intellipoint
Take that function off of the button.
ALL DONE!
I'm sorry, what are they supposed to do with the games on the shelves now? Release magic DVD fairies that will change the dialogue to less offensive dialogue?
/shrug
What this amounts to is that the censor-happy idiots weren't able to block the game because fo the sex and violence like they wanted to, and so they had to resort to getting it on a crap charge like this.
The censors never win in the long run.
I got a Pentax Asahi off of eBay, and have loved it. Very nice camera.
The reason not to go digital, incidentally, is that digital cameras still come nowhere near the resolution of regular film. Also, if you have access to a darkroom, there's lots of stuff you can do there that's just not the same done on photoshop.
It's the same reason not all artists grabbed their styluses and switched to the tablet PC.
Way back when he infamously said "We don't listen to players. They only fuck us up."
You want proof? Go watch a few episodes of a TV show. Say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then go read some Buffy fanfiction.
Do the same with Star Trek. Try it with some comic books.
Look at what happened to a TV show like Doctor Who when it explicitly became "for the fans" (Clue: There's a reason the news is that Doctor Who is back on the air)
Listening to the fans is not a smart idea. Even if they have computers and post on message boards.
Anyone who believes that the railroad industry has died should spend a night in my apartment, which has railroad tracks about 15 feet from my bedroom window.
Your lack of sleep will prove you wrong.
The railroad companies were very wise to declare that they're in the railroad business. It turns out that the railroad business was and still is a very useful business - huge amounts of US product are shipped via rail.
It turns out that although trains make crappy methods of transportation nowadays, (Planes do the transport to a limited number of points faster, and cars can go anywhere), they're still the best thing if you want to, say, move several tons of coal, lumber, etc. I mean, trucking is nice for some things, but, really, there are some things that railroads can do that no one else can do.
I think Nintendo offers a kind of game that no one else offers. When I pick up Zelda, or Metroid, or even one of their B-titles like Mario Sunshine, the game has a particular feel that other game companies don't match. I'm not sure what it is - I've hypothesized several times, but I'm never happy with the answer.
If I want to play a Nintendo-type game, though, the fact of the matter is that I need a Nintendo-made game. So, more than simply being in the video game business, I think Nintendo is in the Nintendo business. And I think that they're "who are you?" marketing, as odd as it is, is a conscious move in that direction.
I would imagine they do not so much get paid as scream in agony at the bandwidth charges of the site go higher, higher, higher.
I mean, figure the submission volume they get... and... ummm...
Yeah, you want to fact check it for them?
I did that. That wasn't the point.
The point was the snooty implication that anyone who didn't get his joke wasn't going to be reading this thread anyway.
Which was snobbish and untrue, and I resented the suggestion that all true geeks know X.
I was referring to the utter disaster of canning their planned CD-based ad-on to the Super Nintendo that they were developing with Sony.
Sony released it anyway. You may have heard of it. It was called the Playstation.
And that was my point - aside from the way in which this particular bit of trash talk is utterly illogical, I don't understand why they're going after Nintendo with such vigor - it's far from their major competitor, and it's not as though Nintendo's audience is going to go XBox anytime soon - XBox has very little to offer the gamer who really enjoys Metroid Prime, Zelda, and Eternal Darkness. It's riding on Live. And Nintendo is so far from similar to that strategy that I fail to see why Microsoft would think it's customers are "in play".
Almost every interview with XBox people that makes it onto /. contains a few lines in which they make comments about how Nintendo is hopelessly behind the times, doomed, unworthy, etc.
This is a pattern with them - they trash talk Nintendo. They do it professionally, but it's still clearly trash talk.
And, I mean, really, the silent-movie directors analogy seems to pretty clearly signal a "They are going to get left behind because of their lack of voice acting."
And that's just ridiculous. Nintendo got left behind because of a bad decision on hardware. They will remain behind because they are not altering their software design to compete directly with Sony.
They will not care, because they are capable of looking at the other tech company that has any sort of obsession with multiple colors of cases, and realizing that, hey, maybe being a niche product isn't all that bad.
Hi.
/. is.
I have no clue what the fuck rot13 is.
I also run WindowsXP. On both of my computers. I use a QWERTY keyboard. I buy from Gateway and Dell. I also never majored in any of the sciences, and vehemently dislike coding.
My girlfriend goes one step further from all of this, and does not even know what
We both play Nethack.
A lot.
So, yeah, I think you may be a little bit off on your grasp of Nethack's target audience.
OK, this is a new one. I mean, I've read more anti-Nintendo stuff than anyone sane should have to read, but I've never heard Nintendo criticized for their lack of voice acting before.
On top of that, I have trouble thinking of a game that anyone ever said "Yeah, the voice acting on that game was great! Buy the game for the voice acting!" Kingdom Hearts is the closest to that I can come up with.
And why is Microsoft doing the criticism? DO they really think they have more to gain by attacking Nintendo than by going after Sony? Sony is at least pursuing the same market they are - Nintendo is not. If they manage to get Nintendo out of the business, it will probably not substantively increase their sales.
Some days, I think small niche products offend Microsoft more than actual large competition. I wonder why that is.
That's the thing. J.Lo is safe in this case, even if you do that, because it's really easy for J.Lo to prove she never heard your song.
You, on the other hand, have no such protection. If you don't have the notarized version, you can get reamed.
Because, fundamentally, copyright is going to favor the corporate artists with huge distribution over the small ones. Just because it's much, much easier to show a small artist heard a big artist's song than the other way around.
Put another way, no human being on Earth can provide reasonable evidence that they've never heard Jenny From the Block. Lots of people can provide reasonable evidence that they've never heard some garage band.
Actually, no, I feel like this is another blow for those who see intellectual property as the artificially created sham it is.
I mean, let's stop for a moment and play "let's pretend". Today, we'll pretend that there's a guy in California with an acoustic guitar. He writes a song. He uses a particular hook in it. He's a poor college student, so, having written this song, he puts it in a notebook and plays it occasionally when he's in his room fiddling on the guitar.
Two years later, some folks in New York are working on the next J. Lo album, and use that same hook. They put out their record.
Now, since poor guy in California has no notarized version of his song, hasn't played it live, hasn't recorded it, etc, he no longer owns that hook. In fact, if he keeps using this bit of intellectual property that he invented, he can be sued.
And don't give me crap about how he should have notarized it. You don't really believe a college student should have to go notarize every fucking song and poem they write. The problem here is simpler than that.
Unlike a physical object, which by necessity only exists in one place at a time, and can only be created once, intellectual property can transmit without labor, independently generate in multiple places, and all sorts of other things.
It's not property. It cannot rationally be property. And it needs to stop being given the legal status of property.
More to the point, to the right of the addressbar is a Google search box...