Actually, you have to prove that the statement is false; prove that it was intended to cause harm; and prove that the statement in fact inflicted harm that was directly responsible for noticeable damage to the recipient's reputation and/or finances. I am not a lawyer.
He's gonna get flamed to the point of carbonization. Good lord, how could someone be so dense? Supporting evidence? Nope. Just reprehensibly lazy speculation. What some people will do for traffic. The man stains his entire publication with such drivel. I don't even use Linux much, and I am disgusted.
Sci-fi and Stark Trek have been mentioned several times in this discussion, and it reminds me of how, when I watched ST:TNG with my father, my mother could barely stand to hang with us because she was constantly rolling her eyes and groaning. This was mostly because of how the alien races typically spoke perfect English, not because of the sketchy physics of teleporting and energy shields (which may be possible but were dealt with in solidly fictional terms), or the constant battles against difficult and powerful opponents where the Enterprise always scraped by, time after time.
The sci-fi components themselves were acceptable, as were the near-miraculous victories, rescues, and whatnot, but flawless English broke the illusion every time. I think this has a lot to do with self-selection, as she is by no means a sci-fi buff, whereas I and my father love the stuff. We're more willing to let some details slide in our quest to soak up the adventure.
Except for when it comes to Independence Day, which I thought was some rollicking entertainment right up until they introduced the patently ridiculous virus. And if that wasn't enough, it boggled my mind that the aliens were using what should have been Stone Age technology by their measure: two-dimensional monitors observed by living creatures. I would have expected some extremely intelligent AI to be automating most functions, and would have expected multi-dimensional holographic projections, not 20th-century computer monitors. Perhaps the budget was strained to its limits, but this seemed to me where the creator didn't go far enough to create internal consistency, rather than going overboard, as is usually the case.
"I also have enough sense to know that these are videogame representations of people, not real people..."
That's it right there, but legislators like Leiberman seem to think that this game is targeted to little kids--or would like his constituents to think that, so that he's just "doing it for the children." In his world, adults don't play videogames and don't have videogames geared toward them, despite the fact that the average gamer is 28 or 29 years old.
I don't know if Lieberman's statements are outright disingenuous or merely the result of yet more incompetent research about this game, but he grossly mischaracterizes this element of the game. No, GTA3 won't be mistaken for Barbie Horse Adventure anytime soon, but you don't get "rewarded" for brutally murdering a woman and mutilating her dead body. If you kill a pedestrian, which requires no more amount of violence than it would in real life, then they drop whatever money they had on them, the amount of which is a tinkle in the bucket compared to what you can earn even by driving people around in (violence-free) taxi missions.
You can choose to kill them with a bat or sword instead of a gun, and the result is appropriately gruesome enough for most normal people to either opt for a cleaner way to do it, or to just not do it altogether. You can be brutal, but there isn't a significant benefit, and it often gets you in trouble with the police--a fact that these people always fail to mention whenever this subject comes up.
I have yet to see a headline about this that avoided making it sound like the perspective had been changed to only third-person. It's not really that hard though. "Thief III to Include Third-Person Perspective." There you go, free of charge.
Sorry, but for $5000 at the lowest price point, synth action is not acceptable, even if it's integrated with a computer. Weighted hammer action (like a true piano) is the only way to go. The Triton they compare it to has this feature, yet of course it's not mentioned in their comparison.
Plus, the Motif ES *does* actually have 128 note polyphony, thank you. I could put together a decent DAW with an M-Audio or Terratec audiocard and Cakewalk Sonar and still come in under budget. Plus, I would have a real, easily upgradeable computer.
The nail in the coffin, however, is the almost complete lack of keyboard specifications. What is the sampling frequency? Can it record at 24-bit, or only play back at 24-bit? Number of presets, user patterns, multisamples, arpeggiator...where the hell is all that info? Is it a proprietary audio card? Et cetera.
It runs almost completely silent and keeps things impressively cool. Didn't have to buy special thermal grease, either. It's also compatible with Pentium 4's and the Athlon 64. It really is teh uber, and comes with a free fanmate to manually adjust fan speed. However, it is huge and doesn't fit on all motherboards, so buyer beware.
However, I was a little dissapointed by the price of the new iPod mini. At $250 (just $50 less than the (now) 15Gb iPod) I can't really see how it's worth it. I'll just pay another $50 and get an iPod that can hold my entire music library. Not sure what they were thinking with that price.
Brick-and-mortar retailers often employ a tactic of putting a lower-priced but feature-anemic version right next to the high-margin item, in order to make the latter look reasonably priced. Suddenly, it's "only" $299 for a 15GB iPod, even though there are numerous competitors that offer much more space and superior sonic reproduction.
I've found metacritic to be a better barometer than gamerankings.com, because metacritic is far more selective with its sources. In fact, as far as I can tell, gamerankings takes every score it can get its hands on, from the mom-and-pop indie shop to the major sites and magazines. No offense to the indie shops, but you can get some very uninformed and often gushing evaluations that skew the overall rating several points.
Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89, while gamerankings has it at 92.5. Note that the reader score at gamerankings is an 89. The PC version of Prince of Persia gets a 92 at gamerankings while metacritic gives it an 88. The gameranking reader score is an 86.
Both times the difference is about half a review point (on a ten point scale) which is pretty significant. And both times the high metascore goes to gamerankings. And both times the reader score is closer to Metacritic's metascore.
Actually, I think what the Wired article meant to say was, "Big music, follow the money 8 of 9 adults beyond student age still pay for songs instead of ripping them off." It's just a badly written sentence that's trying to say, "Record labels overcharge."
When this toad comes strutting back to his column for the next installment, he'll preen for a good paragraph about the huge reader response and quote some eloquent people who agreed with him, thereby implying that the response was largely positive, never mind the legion of people, gamers or otherwise, who express confusion and outrage at him favorably comparing pedophilia to playing a videogame.
I did a little research on this guy, and he has several non-fiction books under his belt with the same hellfire-and-brimstone invective. They also didn't cause so much as a blip on the cultural radar. Yet in an interview at Salon.com, he has the gall to say, in response to asking why he had no problem with saying in his column that Martha Stewart had a nice ass, "One of the things I try to do in these columns that I write -- I consider this as kind of a personal mission -- is to try to purge our language of political correctness. It just stultifies. Isn't that what provocative, memorable language does? It forces back the frontiers of expression."
So this guy sees his newspaper column as the beacon of a lingual crusade? I think what we're dealing with here is delusions of granduer, which goes partway towards explaining his vehemence about GTA: Vice City. (But I will not pick apart what he wrote about the game, not for a Bill O'Reilly nutball of the print world.) That, and the fact that he's no spring chicken or versed in videogames, otherwise he couldn't claim the game's visuals were almost photorealistic.
For PCs, the Opteron is probably the way to go for enterprise-level computing. However, I've seen some very impressive benches for the 512KB cache version of the Athlon 64 3000+. It's a bang-for-the-buck I haven't seen since the highly-overclockable Celeron 300a. You can OC an Athlon XP 2500+ quite nicely, but the percentage gain pales in comparison. The 300a could go to 400MHz without flinching, and up to 450MHz before you had to make any hardware adjustments.
Personally, I think AMD's 64-bit line of chips is getting very crowded, but that means you're bound to find a good value in there somewhere. I think we'll see some shakeup there, as when nVidia dropped the Ti4400 and ATi is already dropping the 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro in favor of the XT cards, from what I've heard.
Not only a fraction of the price, but a fraction of the megahertz as well. I used to disregard the MHz Myth as Apple told it, but a gap like this, with apples-to-apples benchmarks showing them neck-and-neck, is kind of astonishing. I understand now why AMD is trying to push away from MHz speed to determine overall speed, into more of a video card model, where benchmarks determine the top performer, not specs. nVidia cards are always clocked higher than their direct competitors, yet you almost never see this point brought up as an argument in their favor--because the benchmarks show that both GPUs are on the same level.
Also, as Moore's Law seems to be finally bending--"faster" chips aren't coming out with steady increases as before--it becomes more difficult to find an upgrade with a clear performance increase, without spending big bucks for the uber chip. This is a clear performance increase over Intel chips clocked hundreds of MHz faster, and is a true return to accurate PR ratings that we haven't seen, in my opinion, since the 2400+.
And at a little over $200, it's practically a steal, although you do have to buy a new motherboard, which usually means having to format and reinstall your OS partition. I think, though, 64-bit "future proofing," the apparent stability and lack of heat issues, and the reasonable price will convince many people to make the switch. It's also an opportunity to get a motherboard with built-in gigabit LAN, audio, RAID, FireWire and whatever other nice features you've been doing without while saving for that next upgrade.
I'd liken "The Da Vinci Code," because, while it definitely has some significant "airport novel" tendencies, it really has some fascinating observations about the early Christian church that led me to do some illuminating research. Of course, I've always been intrigued by various conspiracies. If you can get past some clunky characterization and plotting (I almost choked when the main character happened to catch his reflection in a mirror right at the beginning), it's a fun litle caper and a quick read.
It was blue-sky enthusiasm that drove these imaginings, not reasoned extrapolation. Meanwhile, none of them imagined the World Wide Web. Even the Internet was just an inkling, at least by the mid-1960's, if the ARPA project was any indication. But you forget the inherent impracticality of flying cars and the decadent silliness of robot maids.
In addition to the WWW, there's video-on-demand, TiVO, open source, shirt pocket-sized cell phones and digicams, Aquatred tires, night vision goggles, cordless drills, instant messaging, e-mail, Usenet, IRC, astonishingly photorealistic videogames, Pixar, digital 7.1 surround sound, plasma displays, flu vaccines, Viagra, DVD movies, compact discs, kinetically recharged watches and flashlights, LCD monitors, the iTunes Music Store, the iPod...technological evolution is a gradual thing. But when you add it all up, it's pretty damn cool.
Joe or Jane Gamer, being on the outside of development, isn't able to take into account budgetary contraints, time constraints, and the talent of the dev team to execute the envisioned ideas. Plus, what Joe or Jane Gamer wants to see in a game isn't necessarily something that would make the game better, only better in theory for that person. Seeing it in practice, he or she might realize that the idea was better left on the drawing board. And a large number of armchair coders might only slow down the time to market.
Overall, most suggestions presuppose unrealistic dev resources. Plus the devs will recieve hate mail for each popular suggestion that doesn't make it into the game. Plus, the devs want to make it their game and just might not want to take many suggestions, no matter how interesting or helpful. And often an idea comes in too late in the process, or too early.
Yes, you are a potential customer and are thereby an important element to be considered when creating the product, and nothing should be created in a white tower, but since you can't actually play with the creation or even see it in action, your help would be only sporadically useful.
The Hobbit takes place decades before LotR, so it would be difficult to make Ian Holme look signifcantly younger, since he's significantly old. The reason the Ring of Power was was able to stay relatively hidden in the Shire for so long was because the Dunedain (Aragorn's people, descendants of the Numenorean kings who once ruled Gondor and Arnor) protected the area from snoopers, IIRC. But eventually the Ring called out to its master.
Cool bit of info revealed in the Two Towers extended DVD: Aragorn is 87 years old when LotR takes place...so I wonder if they could fit him in as a cameo in the Hobbit.
Furthermore, the cost of the 3d tech has to be more than "the low hundreds of dollars," which we will peg at $300. I just priced an Alienware laptop which has:
--1024MB of RAM vs. 512MB
--Mobility Radeon 9600 128MB vs. GeForce4 440 Go (64MB?), the mobile version of the MX cards
--8MB cache 60 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi vs. standard generic 60GB drive
--4x2x8x DVD-RW vs. DVD-RAM drive
--16.1" 1600x1200 UXGA vs. 15" 1024x768 XGA
...and it was still about $125 less!!!
So either the tech costs a lot more than they're willing to admit, or they're hiking the price because people will pay for the gimmick. I think Sharp has confused themselves with The Sharper Image.
Looks like they hobbled themselves by choosing a niche format DVD burner, a full-sized Pentium 4 Volcano, and 2 hours of battery time--and almost 12 pounds of travel weight for only a 15" screen. Hopefully this product won't fail and they won't blame the failure on the tech instead of their unappetizing hardware loadout.
Of course, total cost per unit is much cheaper for Sharp as they gather up second-tier parts to keep the MSRP down, but it's those second-tier parts that cast a shadow over the 3d gimmick. Once you've showed off the new toy to all your friends, you're still stuck with a niche format DVD burner, a full-sized Pentium 4 Volcano, 2 hours of battery time, and a travel weight that's difficult to justify.
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Actually, you have to prove that the statement is false; prove that it was intended to cause harm; and prove that the statement in fact inflicted harm that was directly responsible for noticeable damage to the recipient's reputation and/or finances. I am not a lawyer.
He's gonna get flamed to the point of carbonization. Good lord, how could someone be so dense? Supporting evidence? Nope. Just reprehensibly lazy speculation. What some people will do for traffic. The man stains his entire publication with such drivel. I don't even use Linux much, and I am disgusted.
The sci-fi components themselves were acceptable, as were the near-miraculous victories, rescues, and whatnot, but flawless English broke the illusion every time. I think this has a lot to do with self-selection, as she is by no means a sci-fi buff, whereas I and my father love the stuff. We're more willing to let some details slide in our quest to soak up the adventure.
Except for when it comes to Independence Day, which I thought was some rollicking entertainment right up until they introduced the patently ridiculous virus. And if that wasn't enough, it boggled my mind that the aliens were using what should have been Stone Age technology by their measure: two-dimensional monitors observed by living creatures. I would have expected some extremely intelligent AI to be automating most functions, and would have expected multi-dimensional holographic projections, not 20th-century computer monitors. Perhaps the budget was strained to its limits, but this seemed to me where the creator didn't go far enough to create internal consistency, rather than going overboard, as is usually the case.
That's it right there, but legislators like Leiberman seem to think that this game is targeted to little kids--or would like his constituents to think that, so that he's just "doing it for the children." In his world, adults don't play videogames and don't have videogames geared toward them, despite the fact that the average gamer is 28 or 29 years old.
You can choose to kill them with a bat or sword instead of a gun, and the result is appropriately gruesome enough for most normal people to either opt for a cleaner way to do it, or to just not do it altogether. You can be brutal, but there isn't a significant benefit, and it often gets you in trouble with the police--a fact that these people always fail to mention whenever this subject comes up.
That is all.
Huh. Interesting bit of info!
...like several games have already. Meaning, your aim will waver and make it difficult to hit distant targets unless you're lying prone.
Plus, the Motif ES *does* actually have 128 note polyphony, thank you. I could put together a decent DAW with an M-Audio or Terratec audiocard and Cakewalk Sonar and still come in under budget. Plus, I would have a real, easily upgradeable computer.
The nail in the coffin, however, is the almost complete lack of keyboard specifications. What is the sampling frequency? Can it record at 24-bit, or only play back at 24-bit? Number of presets, user patterns, multisamples, arpeggiator...where the hell is all that info? Is it a proprietary audio card? Et cetera.
Reminds me to much of the Phantom PC console.
It runs almost completely silent and keeps things impressively cool. Didn't have to buy special thermal grease, either. It's also compatible with Pentium 4's and the Athlon 64. It really is teh uber, and comes with a free fanmate to manually adjust fan speed. However, it is huge and doesn't fit on all motherboards, so buyer beware.
However, I was a little dissapointed by the price of the new iPod mini. At $250 (just $50 less than the (now) 15Gb iPod) I can't really see how it's worth it. I'll just pay another $50 and get an iPod that can hold my entire music library. Not sure what they were thinking with that price. Brick-and-mortar retailers often employ a tactic of putting a lower-priced but feature-anemic version right next to the high-margin item, in order to make the latter look reasonably priced. Suddenly, it's "only" $299 for a 15GB iPod, even though there are numerous competitors that offer much more space and superior sonic reproduction.
Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89, while gamerankings has it at 92.5. Note that the reader score at gamerankings is an 89. The PC version of Prince of Persia gets a 92 at gamerankings while metacritic gives it an 88. The gameranking reader score is an 86.
Both times the difference is about half a review point (on a ten point scale) which is pretty significant. And both times the high metascore goes to gamerankings. And both times the reader score is closer to Metacritic's metascore.
Actually, I think what the Wired article meant to say was, "Big music, follow the money 8 of 9 adults beyond student age still pay for songs instead of ripping them off ." It's just a badly written sentence that's trying to say, "Record labels overcharge."
The article you linked to said the album was already recorded. I guess the worst part is over, though. Those poor, poor people.
I did a little research on this guy, and he has several non-fiction books under his belt with the same hellfire-and-brimstone invective. They also didn't cause so much as a blip on the cultural radar. Yet in an interview at Salon.com, he has the gall to say, in response to asking why he had no problem with saying in his column that Martha Stewart had a nice ass, "One of the things I try to do in these columns that I write -- I consider this as kind of a personal mission -- is to try to purge our language of political correctness. It just stultifies. Isn't that what provocative, memorable language does? It forces back the frontiers of expression."
So this guy sees his newspaper column as the beacon of a lingual crusade? I think what we're dealing with here is delusions of granduer, which goes partway towards explaining his vehemence about GTA: Vice City. (But I will not pick apart what he wrote about the game, not for a Bill O'Reilly nutball of the print world.) That, and the fact that he's no spring chicken or versed in videogames, otherwise he couldn't claim the game's visuals were almost photorealistic.
Bah. Don't grace this hack with an e-mail.
Personally, I think AMD's 64-bit line of chips is getting very crowded, but that means you're bound to find a good value in there somewhere. I think we'll see some shakeup there, as when nVidia dropped the Ti4400 and ATi is already dropping the 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro in favor of the XT cards, from what I've heard.
Also, as Moore's Law seems to be finally bending--"faster" chips aren't coming out with steady increases as before--it becomes more difficult to find an upgrade with a clear performance increase, without spending big bucks for the uber chip. This is a clear performance increase over Intel chips clocked hundreds of MHz faster, and is a true return to accurate PR ratings that we haven't seen, in my opinion, since the 2400+.
And at a little over $200, it's practically a steal, although you do have to buy a new motherboard, which usually means having to format and reinstall your OS partition. I think, though, 64-bit "future proofing," the apparent stability and lack of heat issues, and the reasonable price will convince many people to make the switch. It's also an opportunity to get a motherboard with built-in gigabit LAN, audio, RAID, FireWire and whatever other nice features you've been doing without while saving for that next upgrade.
I'd liken "The Da Vinci Code," because, while it definitely has some significant "airport novel" tendencies, it really has some fascinating observations about the early Christian church that led me to do some illuminating research. Of course, I've always been intrigued by various conspiracies. If you can get past some clunky characterization and plotting (I almost choked when the main character happened to catch his reflection in a mirror right at the beginning), it's a fun litle caper and a quick read.
For the same reason there aren't any religious sims, either.
In addition to the WWW, there's video-on-demand, TiVO, open source, shirt pocket-sized cell phones and digicams, Aquatred tires, night vision goggles, cordless drills, instant messaging, e-mail, Usenet, IRC, astonishingly photorealistic videogames, Pixar, digital 7.1 surround sound, plasma displays, flu vaccines, Viagra, DVD movies, compact discs, kinetically recharged watches and flashlights, LCD monitors, the iTunes Music Store, the iPod...technological evolution is a gradual thing. But when you add it all up, it's pretty damn cool.
From the press release: "Both brands will remain separate entities."
Overall, most suggestions presuppose unrealistic dev resources. Plus the devs will recieve hate mail for each popular suggestion that doesn't make it into the game. Plus, the devs want to make it their game and just might not want to take many suggestions, no matter how interesting or helpful. And often an idea comes in too late in the process, or too early.
Yes, you are a potential customer and are thereby an important element to be considered when creating the product, and nothing should be created in a white tower, but since you can't actually play with the creation or even see it in action, your help would be only sporadically useful.
Cool bit of info revealed in the Two Towers extended DVD: Aragorn is 87 years old when LotR takes place...so I wonder if they could fit him in as a cameo in the Hobbit.
--1024MB of RAM vs. 512MB
--Mobility Radeon 9600 128MB vs. GeForce4 440 Go (64MB?), the mobile version of the MX cards
--8MB cache 60 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi vs. standard generic 60GB drive
--4x2x8x DVD-RW vs. DVD-RAM drive
--16.1" 1600x1200 UXGA vs. 15" 1024x768 XGA
So either the tech costs a lot more than they're willing to admit, or they're hiking the price because people will pay for the gimmick. I think Sharp has confused themselves with The Sharper Image.
Of course, total cost per unit is much cheaper for Sharp as they gather up second-tier parts to keep the MSRP down, but it's those second-tier parts that cast a shadow over the 3d gimmick. Once you've showed off the new toy to all your friends, you're still stuck with a niche format DVD burner, a full-sized Pentium 4 Volcano, 2 hours of battery time, and a travel weight that's difficult to justify.