Let's say you're about 12 years old, parents have just mysterious disappeared, you have your grandfather's sword, the girl next door is showing remarkable talent as a mage, and then someone defeats the ultimate evil and ushers in a thousand years of peace and properity. Well, damn. A thousand years? No more god emperors, no unholy army of steadily increasing difficultly, airships are only neat if you've got the latest model with the built in navigation system and the bitching sound system.
Better take up gardening, there ain't no future in adventuring any more. The final fantasy is over...
If you go into a store and ask for a TiVo the salesmonkey will know what you mean and sell you a Sony or a Phillips PVR, but you're not really buying "a TiVo" any more than you buy a Windows or an Internet when you get a PC.
My point was that TiVo isn't necessarily in competition with the settop box manufactures you say will drive them out of business. Some such companies are choosing to roll their own software, but they universally suck when compared to the real thing. And if anything, they're good for TiVo, somebody with a crippled PVR is a lot more likely to realize the value in a good one than someone who thinks TiVo's only useful function is to pause live TV.
And yes you can use them without the service. They revert to dumb DVR mode (time and channel) if you cut them off from guide data.
TiVo doesn't sell hardware. They sell a subscription service to some end users, and they sell the TiVo software to hardware manufactures that want to make a non-crappy PVR (including several cable and satalite providers, DirecTV in particular).
Re:Semi-OT: Don't whine. Do something about it.
on
Buying a New TV?
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· Score: 1
Yeesh, we don't know anything about this guy's finances, maybe he can afford to buy the TV and still go to China afterwards. We didn't all lose our jobs when the bubble burst, there are still people for whom a thousand dollars is not a life changing amount of money.
I may look wistfully back at the days when my stock options were worth a couple of extra zeroes, but I bet I spend a fair bit more than that when I finally go buy a new TV (been meaning to for years, I bought a half decent Sony a few days after graduation just to have something other than the 11" deal that lived in my bedroom through college), and I won't have to live on Raman to do it. And if we can't talka bout expensive geek toys on Slashdot, where can we?
That's why today's console makers don't let everyone and their mother produce games for their consoles. They haven't since the NES days just after the Atari crash (remember the Seal of Quality?). So why are they relaxing their standards now, and why are we letting them?
Sounds like a perfect reproduction to me, 10 years ago my DOS games could never find the right memory or talk to any hardware more complicated than the PC speaker either.
Most of the article wasn't devoted to outright insider trading like you're describing, but the shady but very common industry practice of not recognizing revenue as soon as it comes in.
Let's say you're Acclaim. You've just put out Turok, and times are good. Wall Street was predicting you'd make $0.10 per share, and instead you made $0.12. So do you announce that you've beat by two cents? Of course not, you can the same amount of good press with $0.11, and the rest goes in the CEO's mattress for a rainy day.
It's two years later, you've just put out Turok 7 and the kids who loved Turok are starting to get old enough to tell quality games from the crap you're putting out, and now you're about to miss expectations by a penny. The rainy day is here, time to dip into the savings and bump up earning a bit. Yeah, it's a bit artificial, but who's it hurting...
Don't forget - 50% of all lawyers graduate in the bottom half of their class.
Ok, I'm being excessively nitpicky, but graduating law school does not make you a lawyer. There's a whole bar exam in place specifically to make your statistic untrue...
He's right about everything except Utah. Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the State Board of Education in 2000, and you don't have to be Utah to have issues with mail-order porn kings in such a position.
Still, the ostensible reason Tivo has this info in the first place is to provide a service to a paying customer. It would have been possible to put the "season pass" and "thumbs up" logic on the client, but they decided to implement it serverside where they can have access to the data.
Umm, they are implemented on the client. Unplug the phone line and both of those will continue to work just fine. For a several days anyway, before the guide data runs out or the TiVo decides you're not paying for your account.
If you were still playing RPGs like Everquest, you would have heard of Shadowbane. There's a ton of people out there happy to tell any EQ player all about how (Asheron's Call | Anarchy Online | Dark Age of Camelot | Shadowbane | Star Wars: Galaxies | real life | whatever's due out next week) is the doom of Everquest and everyone should just quit playing now.
It was actually Veeshan's Peak, this happened towards the end of the Kunark era in late 2000. It wasn't Veeshan herself, obviously, but anything in that zone can kill an unprepared solo player even today.
That's about the worst a rampaging guide can do in EQ. A GM could be meaner (they are actually Sony employees in San Diego), but not even they have the tools to pull off the wholesale destruction like what happened in Shadowbane. The game design just doesn't allow it.
The problem isn't the game, it's their sales model. For instance, I'm part of the Earth & Beyond curve, I bought the game about a month after release, played three characters for a couple months, and then canceled. E&B recognizes that I was one user who is no longer player, Lineage would have me down as three users until the end of time.
So somehow you manage to build a smooth silicon sphere instead of a platinum bar. What exactly have you gained? Why won't it whither away like the platinum is doing?What advantage does silicon have over Platinum? Fewer isotopes, less reactive or something else?
Reproducibilty. If you accidently drop your Si sphere and break it in half, you can flip the switch on your sphere-making machine and get another exact kilogram.
Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
Most people who don't watch much television don't because they can't schedule their lives around the TV and they have a low tolerance for channel surfing when they do get free time (there's a few people who have decided that television doesn't fit the image they're trying to cultivate, but they're fairly rare).
These are the folks the TiVo was built to please. If you give them the option to fill their leisure time with decent TV, they'll take it. Until then, it's just as easy to switch to a medium that already gives them finer control of the content, whether it's a book, a net connection, a video game or some other hobby.
Because what you watch is being reported to your corporate masters...no thanks.
I wish my corporate masters would start paying attention to all this information they collect on me, but they keep canceling all my favorite shows anyway.
Sony already makes TiVos, so surely they'd used TiVo software if they were going to add PVR features to the Playstation line.
That could be the best thing to ever happen to them. Cable boxes, even DirecTV's, have only a limited market, but if everybody with a PS2 had a TiVo-capable machine right now...
If it gets too bad, citizens do have the right to revolt, and thanks to our gun laws, we may have the means to do it.
Flip on CNN, you can watch the US military take apart Iraqi militias who are much better armed and trained than all but the nuttiest American civilians. A civil war, maybe, but there will never be another revolution.
Farscape was Sci-Fi's longest running original series. At four seasons.
Even if Tremors is the best thing since the Sopranos, God's gift to TV, it's not worth getting involved in a show that's going to be gone in a couple years no matter how good it is.
Apple pandering to republicans would be like Ben & Jerry's courting Exxon. They may take your money, but don't ever expect to see a press release about it, it doesn't fit the image they're trying to put forward.
My mother is a pediatric nurse, and she said Slammer shut down their hospital network for more than a day. Forcing them to revert to paper and generally slowing things down.
This is a failure of the hospital's admin more than anything, but it points out that you can't just down every computer network connected to the Internet and expect there will be no "real" consequences. Somewhere, someone died because of Slammer.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you're about 12 years old, parents have just mysterious disappeared, you have your grandfather's sword, the girl next door is showing remarkable talent as a mage, and then someone defeats the ultimate evil and ushers in a thousand years of peace and properity. Well, damn. A thousand years? No more god emperors, no unholy army of steadily increasing difficultly, airships are only neat if you've got the latest model with the built in navigation system and the bitching sound system.
Better take up gardening, there ain't no future in adventuring any more. The final fantasy is over...
If you go into a store and ask for a TiVo the salesmonkey will know what you mean and sell you a Sony or a Phillips PVR, but you're not really buying "a TiVo" any more than you buy a Windows or an Internet when you get a PC.
My point was that TiVo isn't necessarily in competition with the settop box manufactures you say will drive them out of business. Some such companies are choosing to roll their own software, but they universally suck when compared to the real thing. And if anything, they're good for TiVo, somebody with a crippled PVR is a lot more likely to realize the value in a good one than someone who thinks TiVo's only useful function is to pause live TV.
And yes you can use them without the service. They revert to dumb DVR mode (time and channel) if you cut them off from guide data.
TiVo doesn't sell hardware. They sell a subscription service to some end users, and they sell the TiVo software to hardware manufactures that want to make a non-crappy PVR (including several cable and satalite providers, DirecTV in particular).
Yeesh, we don't know anything about this guy's finances, maybe he can afford to buy the TV and still go to China afterwards. We didn't all lose our jobs when the bubble burst, there are still people for whom a thousand dollars is not a life changing amount of money.
I may look wistfully back at the days when my stock options were worth a couple of extra zeroes, but I bet I spend a fair bit more than that when I finally go buy a new TV (been meaning to for years, I bought a half decent Sony a few days after graduation just to have something other than the 11" deal that lived in my bedroom through college), and I won't have to live on Raman to do it. And if we can't talka bout expensive geek toys on Slashdot, where can we?
Simoniker is the Games editor, I don't think he's ever posted a story outside the section. Just turn him off completely if you don't like this stuff.
That's why today's console makers don't let everyone and their mother produce games for their consoles. They haven't since the NES days just after the Atari crash (remember the Seal of Quality?). So why are they relaxing their standards now, and why are we letting them?
Sounds like a perfect reproduction to me, 10 years ago my DOS games could never find the right memory or talk to any hardware more complicated than the PC speaker either.
Most of the article wasn't devoted to outright insider trading like you're describing, but the shady but very common industry practice of not recognizing revenue as soon as it comes in.
Let's say you're Acclaim. You've just put out Turok, and times are good. Wall Street was predicting you'd make $0.10 per share, and instead you made $0.12. So do you announce that you've beat by two cents? Of course not, you can the same amount of good press with $0.11, and the rest goes in the CEO's mattress for a rainy day.
It's two years later, you've just put out Turok 7 and the kids who loved Turok are starting to get old enough to tell quality games from the crap you're putting out, and now you're about to miss expectations by a penny. The rainy day is here, time to dip into the savings and bump up earning a bit. Yeah, it's a bit artificial, but who's it hurting...
Don't forget - 50% of all lawyers graduate in the bottom half of their class.
Ok, I'm being excessively nitpicky, but graduating law school does not make you a lawyer. There's a whole bar exam in place specifically to make your statistic untrue...
He must mean the best game since Burger Time.
He's right about everything except Utah. Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the State Board of Education in 2000, and you don't have to be Utah to have issues with mail-order porn kings in such a position.
You know the most beautiful thing about that Slate article? The advertisment I got at the bottom of the page...
Still, the ostensible reason Tivo has this info in the first place is to provide a service to a paying customer. It would have been possible to put the "season pass" and "thumbs up" logic on the client, but they decided to implement it serverside where they can have access to the data.
Umm, they are implemented on the client. Unplug the phone line and both of those will continue to work just fine. For a several days anyway, before the guide data runs out or the TiVo decides you're not paying for your account.
If you were still playing RPGs like Everquest, you would have heard of Shadowbane. There's a ton of people out there happy to tell any EQ player all about how (Asheron's Call | Anarchy Online | Dark Age of Camelot | Shadowbane | Star Wars: Galaxies | real life | whatever's due out next week) is the doom of Everquest and everyone should just quit playing now.
It was actually Veeshan's Peak, this happened towards the end of the Kunark era in late 2000. It wasn't Veeshan herself, obviously, but anything in that zone can kill an unprepared solo player even today.
That's about the worst a rampaging guide can do in EQ. A GM could be meaner (they are actually Sony employees in San Diego), but not even they have the tools to pull off the wholesale destruction like what happened in Shadowbane. The game design just doesn't allow it.
The problem isn't the game, it's their sales model. For instance, I'm part of the Earth & Beyond curve, I bought the game about a month after release, played three characters for a couple months, and then canceled. E&B recognizes that I was one user who is no longer player, Lineage would have me down as three users until the end of time.
So somehow you manage to build a smooth silicon sphere instead of a platinum bar. What exactly have you gained? Why won't it whither away like the platinum is doing?What advantage does silicon have over Platinum? Fewer isotopes, less reactive or something else?
Reproducibilty. If you accidently drop your Si sphere and break it in half, you can flip the switch on your sphere-making machine and get another exact kilogram.
Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
Most people who don't watch much television don't because they can't schedule their lives around the TV and they have a low tolerance for channel surfing when they do get free time (there's a few people who have decided that television doesn't fit the image they're trying to cultivate, but they're fairly rare).
These are the folks the TiVo was built to please. If you give them the option to fill their leisure time with decent TV, they'll take it. Until then, it's just as easy to switch to a medium that already gives them finer control of the content, whether it's a book, a net connection, a video game or some other hobby.
There are no finer controls than that? I don't normally read Apple or BSD stories, but I'm not sure I want to turn them completely off either.
Because what you watch is being reported to your corporate masters...no thanks.
I wish my corporate masters would start paying attention to all this information they collect on me, but they keep canceling all my favorite shows anyway.
Sony already makes TiVos, so surely they'd used TiVo software if they were going to add PVR features to the Playstation line.
That could be the best thing to ever happen to them. Cable boxes, even DirecTV's, have only a limited market, but if everybody with a PS2 had a TiVo-capable machine right now...
If it gets too bad, citizens do have the right to revolt, and thanks to our gun laws, we may have the means to do it.
Flip on CNN, you can watch the US military take apart Iraqi militias who are much better armed and trained than all but the nuttiest American civilians. A civil war, maybe, but there will never be another revolution.
Farscape was Sci-Fi's longest running original series. At four seasons.
Even if Tremors is the best thing since the Sopranos, God's gift to TV, it's not worth getting involved in a show that's going to be gone in a couple years no matter how good it is.
Apple pandering to republicans would be like Ben & Jerry's courting Exxon. They may take your money, but don't ever expect to see a press release about it, it doesn't fit the image they're trying to put forward.
My mother is a pediatric nurse, and she said Slammer shut down their hospital network for more than a day. Forcing them to revert to paper and generally slowing things down.
This is a failure of the hospital's admin more than anything, but it points out that you can't just down every computer network connected to the Internet and expect there will be no "real" consequences. Somewhere, someone died because of Slammer.