...I would point out that friends may have similar tastes and thus the expectation match between a friend's review will be higher than with a magazine/website review. In other words it is highly likely that the buyer will increasingly trust friends from experience, so the result is to be expected.
It's probably a mini-itx motherboard, bc it has integrated SIS graphics. I'm running on one of those right now. It's very good for office work, internet, and 2D gaming. But if you plan to do anything 3D that's beyond directx6, forget it. Even old games like SimCoaster crawl here! On the other hand, Diablo2 runs fine.
The price is still interesting though if it's a 1 Ghz model. For $299 I could only get the mobo/cpu, the ram and the case. I still had to add a hard drive, cd-rom, keyboard, etc.
"reptilian brain" has very little to do with behavior
You are right... humans do have some kind of "animal instict" behavior, but indeed, it is probably rooted in another place. I have used the term somewhat loosely in this respect...
almost every single study conducted on the cathartic process has concluded that acting out anger only furthers it since the excitation
But for how long is this excitement high ? Is it measured immediately after the experiment or in the long term? Studies with kids and videogames have shown that the arousement levels decrease considerably in time... only because all the violent latent energy was acted out. So if you stop a gamer in mid-session, he'll be aggressive, but if you don't, he will be calm.
Although it is true that Catharsis was defined for passive violence (i.e. seeing a theatre play), so it may not hold for active, there is definetely a calming long-term effect of "harmless" active violence. For example, rugbymen are reputed to be very good husbands because they do all their "macho/violent things" in the field, so they don't feel the psychological need to do them at home.
It's called "catharsis". Do whatever you want in fiction, so that you are not tempted to do it in real life. Since we all have reptilian brains, we are all violence-prone (regardless of education), so cathartic gaming is really a good idea.
Besides there is the issue of relavance of trying to impose morals in a virtual and furthermore non-persistant world, where its inhabitants are granted immortality by the power of continue or restart game...
All depends of what you want about in a video-game inspired movie, especially considering that it is very hard to fit all the "what-if" complexities of a video game in a 2-hour movie.
I only expect one of two things from a videogame movie, e.g. either:
A - the movie is faithful to its origins, even if it sucks if you don't know the game (Wing Commander is a good example, so I don't consider it to be so bad). B - the movie stands on its own merits but maybe alienates the hard-core fans.
Sometimes you can get both. Resident Evil kind of met both requirements. On the other hand, Street Fighter, Mario, and MK Annihilation completely sucked because they did not even stick to the original story from the game, thereby failing to meet any of the two criteria!
reviewers just never give bad reviews for anything
That's not true. I have worked as a reviewer for a major magazine, and gave some negative reviews for some games. The other reviewers didn't say anything, howevers readers complained. They only wanted to see what games were the best, and not "waste page space to review crap" (actual quote from a letter!).
So, readers get what they want... but the amount of games (and space too, I have to admit) is limited. As result, "negative" reviews are very unpopular with both readers and game publishers.
Other than that I have never seen any blatant attempt to "corrupt" the reviewers from game companies, unless you count the croissants and orange juice that they give you during their demo.:-)
"It's not good to charge people for using something which is like a social infrastructure. It also inhibits the development of the computer industry. The very basic infrastructure should be free," he said.
Good idea. I want my free phone, my free internet, and my free electricity as well.
Seriously though, it seems that he's not making a distinction between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer"...
Re:oops - forgot to mention the capture card
on
New Linux PVR Box
·
· Score: 1
It depends on how the power connectors are for the slim drives (I don't have one, my drive is a standard drive in a cheap USB2 casing). However the power cable has one "normal" IDE cable (for my HDD), and two smaller connectors that I had never seen before. I suppose that they are for the slim optical drives since it the case does have a slim drive bay.
A word of warning though: you have to make sure to have RAM that is not very high... or else your drive won't fit horizontally (it may fit tilting it a little. Some people have sandusted the plastic on their RAMs PCB to make everything fit... but I know that there are "shorter" RAMs out there).
Let me know if you find a cheaper slim drive:-) The problem is that for that price you can get something external to use in every machine that you own - good for DVD burners for example (assuming that in every computer you have enough speed via USB2 or firewire).
Re:oops - forgot to mention the capture card
on
New Linux PVR Box
·
· Score: 1
it depends - are you sure we are talking about the same case? AFAIK there are two cubids types, one for "basic" Epias (500/800 Mhz) and one for "Epia M"s (933Mhz). However, there is something that looks like a slim drive bay on top of the hdd (maybe it's for an internal compact flash card reader), and I guess you would have to remove it to have enough room.
Be sure to let me know which TV tuners cards you did try and what case you are using... so I don't buy something too big...:-)
From the research I have done on the effects of videogames, it's all a matter of social perception. Women are just not motivated, a priori by their social environment, to play games. However, a study made to test whether or not girls are good game players proved that they are as good as boys, as long as they don't perceive the software as being a game! (see bibliography in link for more details).
oops - forgot to mention the capture card
on
New Linux PVR Box
·
· Score: 1
I forgot to mention the need for your favorite brand of (PCI) TV tuner card. Furthermore, the Mini-itx motherboard has integrated TV-out and 5.1 surround connectivity.:-)
I have a mini-itx box that is cheaper and (subjectively) cooler looking. I just don't have a remote, but who cares with a RF keyboard/mouse combo... Now what I want to know is, if that is based on Linux, then is there any way to get the software so that I can turn my own box into a PVR? Now that's an OSS I'm looking forward to!:-)
How strong is the "lost sales" argument that copyright holders usually make when prosecuting "not-for-profit" copyright infringement? Especially when the product is not tangible (software and music, not CDs)?
Although it is often mediatic, any student of accounting will immediately recognize that the number is merely an estimate of available infringing copies, further inflated by the assumption that every copy would have been bought. Both can be easily altered to craft an alarming number.
(Disclaimer: this question is not seeking to invalidate these numbers, but seeking to know how strongly they are considered from a legal standpoint).
Is a distinction made between different levels of IP infringement?
I imagine that, from a legal standpoint, there should be a different point of view between a student that copies one software for personal use and a blatant thief who makes money out of selling the same copied software.
However, this question has two assumptions: - The student would not use the software if it was not available (i.e. it is not a lost sale) - Both activities are infringing (i.e. this question is not seeking to justify the first case)
I think this question is especially relevant since there are reports that the RIAA is now prosecuting students for "infringements" that are mostly gray areas (i.e. the infringement does not seem proven beyond a reasonable doubt, at least to the public).
It may be a no-brainer for many of you, but can somebody enlighten me on why the name is C++0x? AFAIK C++ was named as such to indicate it was "more than C" [C++ is C = C+1 for the unlikely few who wouldn't know]. Is this the same kind of nomenclature (0x is zero in Hex), or is it something pronunciation-based ("plusox"?)...
Make me miniature RF-controlled mechas, controlled by a PC, so that I can have a real-life table-top equivalent to Battlechess and Carnage Hearts (PS1). Of course, they should repair themselves, I don't want to have to clean up and glue them together after every match.:-)
If they're under $100, I'll buy more than one. Under $50, I'll buy a lot. Under $10, I'll buy tons.:-)
Ok time to stop dreaming.:-)
the credits of the rap thing are interesting...
on
Random Humor
·
· Score: 1
First I thought it was weird that the "game designers" are people from AOL, which AFAIK (at least at the time) was more of an ISP. But probably they had the odd game on their pages.
A much more interesting thing is that later they thank "all the companies that donated software". In other words, they didn't pay a cent for any of the software used to make that video!:-)
From the article: "you can't blame Microsoft for following strategies that don't help the hardware community."
That sentence opened a whole new perspective on the subject for me... OSS "saves" hardware but I would say the savings occur in the consumer's pockets (us, so, it's good:-) ). However, there seems to be an underlying struggle between the hardware and content-creating industries. The latter are lobbying for legislation that, aside from effects on freedom and rights of everybody, will also result in loss of profits from hardware companies. For example, they could be forced to implement a "controller" technology (e.g. v-chip) that not only makes the product less desirable, but also increases the sale price (or reduces margin).
Either way they (hardware manufacturers) can lose along with the consumer. That for example explains why Apple had their campaign of "rip mix and burn": the mere possibility of those activities is an incentive that drives purchases of CD-R and DVD-R drives, new hardware, more powerful computers, etc. Of course some of these activities may be legal gray areas, but it's not a matter of doing them or not, but rather of knowing that they can be done, like having a sports car and still drive at 70mph. In other words the features may be useless or even misunderstood [for that particular person, not power users], but it makes people [joe sixpack] want to buy hardware.
If you take a paranoid point of view you could say we haven't lost all of our rights yet because another industry has something at stake... personally I think it's more of a side effect rather than a direct cause - since where there are liberties there's always somebody that can make a business out of them.
It seems that nobody has told the media executives what is a "screener". And with tripods, high-def DV cameras, and increasingly-better sound recording equipment, they're likely to improve in quality.
This holds for music as well, although "microphoner" or "subwooferer" is not as sexy as a name.:-)
So, as other have posted, "as long as we can see/hear it, we can record it"...
unless you use animation, you can't reproduce the action of the game
I can suggest a simpler answer. It's not really the representation that matters (after all Matrix is a video-game inspired movie and it was well received), but rather, the target audience.
Usually videogames movies are either:
1 - Very close to the original game 2 - Try to carry the game story to a "generic audience" 3 - Main famous actor/director wants the script changed
Now, 1 and 2 may make a good movie IF you consider the point of view from the target audience. Examples of 1 are Wing Commander or Resident Evil. Example of 2 is Final Fantasy. In both cases, it doesn't need to suck.
But of course 3 produces the worst of its kind (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, etc). The audience "1" feels cheated because the movie is not relevant to the game, and audience "2" just finds that the movie (as a stand-alone product) plainly sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
...I would point out that friends may have similar tastes and thus the expectation match between a friend's review will be higher than with a magazine/website review.
In other words it is highly likely that the buyer will increasingly trust friends from experience, so the result is to be expected.
Ask them to add the explanation to the FAQ :-)
Seriously though, maybe it's just a way for HP technicians to be able to say "RTFM" in a more polite way to their customers.
A Via CPU and motherboard
SIS graphics card
It's probably a mini-itx motherboard, bc it has integrated SIS graphics. I'm running on one of those right now. It's very good for office work, internet, and 2D gaming. But if you plan to do anything 3D that's beyond directx6, forget it. Even old games like SimCoaster crawl here! On the other hand, Diablo2 runs fine.
The price is still interesting though if it's a 1 Ghz model. For $299 I could only get the mobo/cpu, the ram and the case. I still had to add a hard drive, cd-rom, keyboard, etc.
"reptilian brain" has very little to do with behavior
You are right... humans do have some kind of "animal instict" behavior, but indeed, it is probably rooted in another place. I have used the term somewhat loosely in this respect...
almost every single study conducted on the cathartic process has concluded that acting out anger only furthers it since the excitation
But for how long is this excitement high ? Is it measured immediately after the experiment or in the long term? Studies with kids and videogames have shown that the arousement levels decrease considerably in time... only because all the violent latent energy was acted out. So if you stop a gamer in mid-session, he'll be aggressive, but if you don't, he will be calm.
Although it is true that Catharsis was defined for passive violence (i.e. seeing a theatre play), so it may not hold for active, there is definetely a calming long-term effect of "harmless" active violence. For example, rugbymen are reputed to be very good husbands because they do all their "macho/violent things" in the field, so they don't feel the psychological need to do them at home.
It's called "catharsis". Do whatever you want in fiction, so that you are not tempted to do it in real life. Since we all have reptilian brains, we are all violence-prone (regardless of education), so cathartic gaming is really a good idea.
Besides there is the issue of relavance of trying to impose morals in a virtual and furthermore non-persistant world, where its inhabitants are granted immortality by the power of continue or restart game...
I once had to extract cheese from a 5 inch floppy drive in a public computer. I have no idea by what logic it got in there...
All depends of what you want about in a video-game inspired movie, especially considering that it is very hard to fit all the "what-if" complexities of a video game in a 2-hour movie.
I only expect one of two things from a videogame movie, e.g. either:
A - the movie is faithful to its origins, even if it sucks if you don't know the game (Wing Commander is a good example, so I don't consider it to be so bad).
B - the movie stands on its own merits but maybe alienates the hard-core fans.
Sometimes you can get both. Resident Evil kind of met both requirements. On the other hand, Street Fighter, Mario, and MK Annihilation completely sucked because they did not even stick to the original story from the game, thereby failing to meet any of the two criteria!
the game characters look like Playmobil figurines...
reviewers just never give bad reviews for anything
:-)
That's not true. I have worked as a reviewer for a major magazine, and gave some negative reviews for some games. The other reviewers didn't say anything, howevers readers complained. They only wanted to see what games were the best, and not "waste page space to review crap" (actual quote from a letter!).
So, readers get what they want... but the amount of games (and space too, I have to admit) is limited. As result, "negative" reviews are very unpopular with both readers and game publishers.
Other than that I have never seen any blatant attempt to "corrupt" the reviewers from game companies, unless you count the croissants and orange juice that they give you during their demo.
"It's not good to charge people for using something which is like a social infrastructure. It also inhibits the development of the computer industry. The very basic infrastructure should be free," he said.
Good idea. I want my free phone, my free internet, and my free electricity as well.
Seriously though, it seems that he's not making a distinction between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer"...
It depends on how the power connectors are for the slim drives (I don't have one, my drive is a standard drive in a cheap USB2 casing). However the power cable has one "normal" IDE cable (for my HDD), and two smaller connectors that I had never seen before. I suppose that they are for the slim optical drives since it the case does have a slim drive bay.
:-)
A word of warning though: you have to make sure to have RAM that is not very high... or else your drive won't fit horizontally (it may fit tilting it a little. Some people have sandusted the plastic on their RAMs PCB to make everything fit... but I know that there are "shorter" RAMs out there).
Let me know if you find a cheaper slim drive
The problem is that for that price you can get something external to use in every machine that you own - good for DVD burners for example (assuming that in every computer you have enough speed via USB2 or firewire).
it depends - are you sure we are talking about the same case? AFAIK there are two cubids types, one for "basic" Epias (500/800 Mhz) and one for "Epia M"s (933Mhz). However, there is something that looks like a slim drive bay on top of the hdd (maybe it's for an internal compact flash card reader), and I guess you would have to remove it to have enough room.
:-)
Be sure to let me know which TV tuners cards you did try and what case you are using... so I don't buy something too big...
From the research I have done on the effects of videogames, it's all a matter of social perception. Women are just not motivated, a priori by their social environment, to play games. However, a study made to test whether or not girls are good game players proved that they are as good as boys, as long as they don't perceive the software as being a game! (see bibliography in link for more details).
I forgot to mention the need for your favorite brand of (PCI) TV tuner card. Furthermore, the Mini-itx motherboard has integrated TV-out and 5.1 surround connectivity. :-)
I have a mini-itx box that is cheaper and (subjectively) cooler looking. I just don't have a remote, but who cares with a RF keyboard/mouse combo... Now what I want to know is, if that is based on Linux, then is there any way to get the software so that I can turn my own box into a PVR? Now that's an OSS I'm looking forward to! :-)
Bonus: look for the following and you too can build a Tivo out of your old PC's spare parts: Via Epia M 933 Mhz, Cubid 2699R mini-itx case (also in black), IBM Wireless Navigator Pro. (note: all these links point to pictures, not shops). Add the appropriate Linux distro, and voila, cheap PVR.
How strong is the "lost sales" argument that copyright holders usually make when prosecuting "not-for-profit" copyright infringement? Especially when the product is not tangible (software and music, not CDs)?
Although it is often mediatic, any student of accounting will immediately recognize that the number is merely an estimate of available infringing copies, further inflated by the assumption that every copy would have been bought. Both can be easily altered to craft an alarming number.
(Disclaimer: this question is not seeking to invalidate these numbers, but seeking to know how strongly they are considered from a legal standpoint).
Is a distinction made between different levels of IP infringement?
I imagine that, from a legal standpoint, there should be a different point of view between a student that copies one software for personal use and a blatant thief who makes money out of selling the same copied software.
However, this question has two assumptions:
- The student would not use the software if it was not available (i.e. it is not a lost sale)
- Both activities are infringing (i.e. this question is not seeking to justify the first case)
I think this question is especially relevant since there are reports that the RIAA is now prosecuting students for "infringements" that are mostly gray areas (i.e. the infringement does not seem proven beyond a reasonable doubt, at least to the public).
Finally, they cannot discuss ongoing cases, investigations or related hypotheticals.
What do they mean by "related hypotheticals"?
If they mean "implications of the new laws", then it makes the whole interview slightly pointless...
It may be a no-brainer for many of you, but can somebody enlighten me on why the name is C++0x? AFAIK C++ was named as such to indicate it was "more than C" [C++ is C = C+1 for the unlikely few who wouldn't know]. Is this the same kind of nomenclature (0x is zero in Hex), or is it something pronunciation-based ("plusox"?)...
if the property is under $10, why not... ;-)
Make me miniature RF-controlled mechas, controlled by a PC, so that I can have a real-life table-top equivalent to Battlechess and Carnage Hearts (PS1). Of course, they should repair themselves, I don't want to have to clean up and glue them together after every match. :-)
:-)
:-)
If they're under $100, I'll buy more than one. Under $50, I'll buy a lot. Under $10, I'll buy tons.
Ok time to stop dreaming.
First I thought it was weird that the "game designers" are people from AOL, which AFAIK (at least at the time) was more of an ISP. But probably they had the odd game on their pages.
:-)
A much more interesting thing is that later they thank "all the companies that donated software". In other words, they didn't pay a cent for any of the software used to make that video!
From the article: "you can't blame Microsoft for following strategies that don't help the hardware community."
:-) ). However, there seems to be an underlying struggle between the hardware and content-creating industries. The latter are lobbying for legislation that, aside from effects on freedom and rights of everybody, will also result in loss of profits from hardware companies. For example, they could be forced to implement a "controller" technology (e.g. v-chip) that not only makes the product less desirable, but also increases the sale price (or reduces margin).
That sentence opened a whole new perspective on the subject for me... OSS "saves" hardware but I would say the savings occur in the consumer's pockets (us, so, it's good
Either way they (hardware manufacturers) can lose along with the consumer. That for example explains why Apple had their campaign of "rip mix and burn": the mere possibility of those activities is an incentive that drives purchases of CD-R and DVD-R drives, new hardware, more powerful computers, etc. Of course some of these activities may be legal gray areas, but it's not a matter of doing them or not, but rather of knowing that they can be done, like having a sports car and still drive at 70mph. In other words the features may be useless or even misunderstood [for that particular person, not power users], but it makes people [joe sixpack] want to buy hardware.
If you take a paranoid point of view you could say we haven't lost all of our rights yet because another industry has something at stake... personally I think it's more of a side effect rather than a direct cause - since where there are liberties there's always somebody that can make a business out of them.
It seems that nobody has told the media executives what is a "screener".
:-)
And with tripods, high-def DV cameras, and increasingly-better sound recording equipment, they're likely to improve in quality.
This holds for music as well, although "microphoner" or "subwooferer" is not as sexy as a name.
So, as other have posted, "as long as we can see/hear it, we can record it"...
unless you use animation, you can't reproduce the action of the game
I can suggest a simpler answer. It's not really the representation that matters (after all Matrix is a video-game inspired movie and it was well received), but rather, the target audience.
Usually videogames movies are either:
1 - Very close to the original game
2 - Try to carry the game story to a "generic audience"
3 - Main famous actor/director wants the script changed
Now, 1 and 2 may make a good movie IF you consider the point of view from the target audience. Examples of 1 are Wing Commander or Resident Evil. Example of 2 is Final Fantasy. In both cases, it doesn't need to suck.
But of course 3 produces the worst of its kind (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, etc). The audience "1" feels cheated because the movie is not relevant to the game, and audience "2" just finds that the movie (as a stand-alone product) plainly sucks.