Thankfully, expansion discs should be available in the future so I can get my Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera groove goin'.
Yay! Another proprietary format! Because singing along with my stereo is SOOOO stupid without a PlayStation to guide me! I actually like the concept of this game, but 35 songs will get old REAL fast, especially if it isn't a custom list for the gamer.
The author uses two pretty low-quality examples. Just as people are loathe to pay $20 shareware for software worth about $5, the two examples (.10 for PowerPoint slides) don't sound worth it either. When valuable content comes priced at or below their value--that's when Micropayments have a chance to succeed. Not when people continue to follow the paradigm of overcharging customers, just on a smaller scale now.
I thought McCloud's comic was well worth the 25 cents and BitPass was pretty easy to use. I might experiment with it on a future project of my own--alongside free content.
I don't remember exactly what separates a "micropayment" from a "small payment," but consider the apparent success of iTunes. I've talked to a lot of people who are amazed at how easy it is to click and buy--at $.99 even--and they're more willing to spend than they thought they were. Can people find these same songs for free? Probably. But they're paying for how much more convenient the paid service is to them than the free version.
I'd love to see how well or how poorly McCloud has done with his comic. Here's someone who has demonstrated his value to the consumer in the past with both free and priced content. I think finding out if people were willing to follow HIM from free to.25 will be more telling than this article.
Wow. Not that anyone but me will care about this. But I used to live right near that address. My girlfriend and a bunch of friends lived in Heritage Woods, the community where Hunt Club is located. The person's name doesn't sound familiar though.
I think there's a McDonald's right next to the the W. Market address; where Cleveland-Massillon meets West Market. I don't remember any b2b offices there--it's all stripmalls. Maybe there's a MailBoxes Etc. or something there now and that's a box, not an apartment.
Superman and Batman are DC characters, not Marvel's.
I know that. And Dennis the Menace was published by someone else. I meant to give examples of non-Marvel characters there.
And DC has a much better record of making their characters evolve. Aquaman grew a beard, lost his hand, replaced it with a harpoon and became all mean and gritty.
That sounds more like flavor than character, but okay. I think the distinction was largely in Marvel's earlier days. By the time I stopped reading Marvel and DC, I wouldn't have said that one had any "advantage" over the other.
Green lantern and Green Arrow are already on their Nth incarnation (The originals have either died or retired).
I've only read one or two issues of either book so I'm basing this only on what you tell me here. But that to me sounds like the characters are so flat (too everyman) that they're almost interchangeable, so long as the powers stay the same. That said, I do admire any company willing to kill off popular characters (until they bring them back to life, of course).
The flagship characters haven't experienced that much change, as you mention, but DC is still a more adventurous company writing wise.
This wasn't the case (not clearly at least) when I was reading them (with the obvious exceptions of Sandman, Watchmen, and what little I heard about Preacher, but they were the exception, not the rule--and I could find Marvel "exceptions" as well). But I'm willing to take your word for it that this is how it is now, especially since I haven't picked up a DC or Marvel comic published in the last eight years or so.
I believe there was a clear difference (in Marvel's favor) in character development and willingness to have characters with flaws and such in Marvel's earlier days, but I don't think they held on to such distinction very long. I wouldn't classify either one of them as particularly willing to risk when it comes to their breadwinning heroes--not character-wise anyway. Sure they'll kill off Superman or Spider-man for a saga or two, but how much will they let them grow as a people?
A lot of characters historically _didn't_ change or develop (think Batman and Superman, for a looong time) and that's one of the things that set Marvel apart for a while. A description of Superman and Dennis the Menace that was true in the early days of both comics stayed true for decades or more.
And even those that did demonstratably change evolved very slowly or digressed back into older patterns, especially when an earlier "version" of a character was more popular. How many times as a kid, after reading Wolverine's painful process of controlling his aggressive tendencies in 100 issues of Claremont's X-Men, did he have a cameo in another book where he was portrayed as a mindless, undisciplined, trigger-happy madman?
Then you have the simplification element. In the first few pages of most issue of most books, they have to find a way to reiterate who this person is, what his/her power is, and what the heck is going on. I'm reminded of the last few episodes of the last season of Buffy and they're trying to bring newer viewers up-to-speed . Not an easy task, especially since comic book makers, like filmmakers and TV producers, rarely trust their audiences to be able to figure things out contextually or subtextually.
The other part of it is just another symptom of non-readers of comics unwilling to view them as anything other than kid stuff, and otherwise define comics as what they were when the comic book format first emerged.
I was looking for a laptop in early 2001 and couldn't find what I wanted. Battery life was a big problem. Not saying this is right for everybody, but you should lay out all your options on the table. Take the best (and closest to what you're looking for) configuration from Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Alienware, Apple, HP, Sony, etc., and then decide among those. You've got options; just don't expect to find them all in one place. I ended up being happiest with an Apple notebook, and it was a suprising and drastic move for me to switch from Windows. But the price and feature set was right and I've been very happy with my decision. I think my second choice was a Dell, because I figured if they didn't have what I wanted, at least I wouldn't be spending a fortune only to be broke when my "perfect" laptop came out. Still hasn't happened, though that 12" TiBook is getting closer.
So my recommendation is to line up your options from the various websites and pick your favorite. At least you don't have to go store to store; you can do all your comparison shopping online.
There's nothing I can do about full accounts, so I wouldn't have the autorespond to those.
I just did a test, searching for stuff like
"This message has been rejected because it has a potentially executable attachment"
AND
"However, your email has been held for quarantine, because the attachment you sent may contain virus or is against our company's policy. For our protection, quarantined email can be deleted anytime."
in the text and subjects like:
"Norton AntiVirus detected and quarantined a virus in a message yo u sent."
and autoresponded. I let the autoresponder run for about ten minutes, and then turned it off. It turns out that the FROM address sending me those virus warning messages aren't real! Those messages bounce back to me, and my system found the text again and autoresponded back, creating an endless loop. One of the emails was passed back and forth five times in that small timespam, err, span,
Glad I didn't leave it on all night. Now I'll just send those emails to the trash. Same filter parameters, different result. Doesn't catch everything, but it should make a dent.
Maybe we should bombard antivirus email software providers with complaint emails?
Memory Stick, SD card (2 brands Lexar and SanDisk), and I want to say SmartMedia for the camera. I've also used one of those keychain-type USB jobs. Memory Stick was probably the most reliable of the bunch (though not without problems), but none of my current stuff uses Memory Stick.
I cross my fingers (no, not literally) every time I've inserted a piece of Flash Media into my camera, PDA, or USB drive. I find that about one in every 20 times the disk comes up empty. I take good care of them (three different media types), but I don't find them reliable at all. I'd sooner use CD-Rs (though now I might start backing those up every 2 years on new CD-Rs.
So... any creative ideas as to what can be done about this? I am now getting as many bounced emails as I am copies of the sobig virus. Used to be a 1:3 ratio.
And it's not just bounced emails. I get personal responses. Someone actually took the time to write me: "You sent me a virus, you fag."
I thought about making an autoresponder for virus notification bounce-headlines (I'm on a Mac--I'm pretty sure it's not me), but wouldn't sending emails back just add to the net-congestion?
The book's first weakness, though, is that it starts too far down the learning curve in my opinion. The first few chapters of TYA could be read by someone almost totally new to the Macintosh -- they cover such basics as running the scripts installed with the OS and getting new scripts from Apple and installing them.
Most Mac users I know don't know or do anything with AppleScript, so I don't think it's a mistake to start where it does. I have the old O'Reilly book which is still great as a quick reference, but I'll have to see this one for myself before recommending it to people. IMO, a lot of people who could really benefit from using AppleScript daily aren't because they feel it's too techy for them. Maybe this book is what those people need. On the other hand, I haven't heard anything about 1-2-3, but I've had good experience with a few of Peachpit's books.
I believe Pixar's first feature film work was in The Wrath of Khan. They did the exploding planet with the Enterprise flying away. This was when they were still a part of Lucas's empire. Lucas had to sell some divisions of LucasFilm when he got a divorce, since California law says spouses must split things 50-50. That's when Steve Jobs bought it and named it Pixar. I'm pretty sure Lasseter was a part of it even then.
I believe the tax applies where charges are made for the actual communication, not the equipment itself.
Otherwise I think there'd have to be a nine percent tax on styrofoam cups and a question at the register, "Sir, do you plan on tying a string between two of these so your kids can play in their tree fort?"
This doesn't tell us much. It's almost a teaser.
"Are you going to die tomorrow? The answer may surprise you. Stay tuned for News at 11."
I have some CDRs that stopped working within days and others that have lasted over 4 years now--same brand from the same spindle even. I wonder if the full Dutch article gives specifics or if they found _any_ CDs that were still working fine after twenty months. The teaser seems to suggest that they're all terrible.
I do know that I get fewer duds now that I use Toast than I did when I used "Easy CD Creator." Beyond that, I don't know anything that makes a difference.
CDRs stop working. DVD-Rs are crazy fragile. Hard drives fail. Paper burns. Maybe my data wasn't supposed to last forever.
Alex.
The article seems to say that we've finally found some carbon-bearing minerals, but some people in Arizona don't think it means anything. What's the story here? Is it new that we found some carbon-bearing minerals or is it new that the group in Arizona has made some conclusions based on the data?
It's such a shallow article it's hard to tell if this is significant. It makes me think of someone saying over and over and over again that there's absolutely no evidence to suggest x. When someone comes up with some evidence that does suggest x, the naysayer quickly fires back, "Well, that's only a little bit of evidence, so it's still not true." Maybe, maybe not.
I agree with the NASA guy. It's too early to tell.
Haven't all new media forms tried to emulate its predecessors? Early films were little more than stage plays. Early television was just radio plays with pictures.
What exactly is the obstacle to you being a full time employee working in Japan? You say it's "very difficult, if not impossible, to do so," but is it just a matter of a lot of paperwork and figuring it out? Can you negotiate with HR? If you agree to do all the filing you can and possibly even take a paycut in exchange for them jumping through the legal hoops they have to to "open an office" in Japan?
Alex.
Could you use a friend's or family member's address for a bank account and legal residence in California, and your employer could auto-deposit your checks into the account?
Just treat this like college students do when they go to school in a different state and keep their parents' house as residence.
The biggest problem I see (and I became a Mac user in 2001, so beige Apple boxes make me think of the Apple IIe) is how much OS X needs RAM. 512MB minimum. Really.
Not saying it's impossible, but how would you benefit by running Jaguar? You'd be running slower, you'd have to upgrade your software--I mean you're not going to slow down your system by installing Jaguar just to run Photoshop under Classic are you? Kind of defeats the purpose. Upgrades for Photoshop and Quark alone will run you $400 (don't remember how much Quark is, but PS upgrades are typically $200), not to mention whatever other software you use day-to-day. And the $100 or so for Jaguar. That's $500 there. You can buy a used iMac for that much and be a lot happier even if you're running your current programs in Classic (but this time on a machine that's able to handle Jaguar in the first place).
At any rate, you're better off asking this question on a Mac site. Mac OS X FAQ at http://www.macosxfaq.com is a good place to start. Best of luck if you try it, but I wouldn't bother. Especially if you want to get any work done.
They're playing sports with high risk of injury and they're pushing their bodies to the limits (which is what gets them on the covers in the first place), and then they think it's a curse when they get hurt?
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
Thankfully, expansion discs should be available in the future so I can get my Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera groove goin'.
Yay! Another proprietary format! Because singing along with my stereo is SOOOO stupid without a PlayStation to guide me! I actually like the concept of this game, but 35 songs will get old REAL fast, especially if it isn't a custom list for the gamer.
Alex.
The author uses two pretty low-quality examples. Just as people are loathe to pay $20 shareware for software worth about $5, the two examples (.10 for PowerPoint slides) don't sound worth it either. When valuable content comes priced at or below their value--that's when Micropayments have a chance to succeed. Not when people continue to follow the paradigm of overcharging customers, just on a smaller scale now.
.25 will be more telling than this article.
I thought McCloud's comic was well worth the 25 cents and BitPass was pretty easy to use. I might experiment with it on a future project of my own--alongside free content.
I don't remember exactly what separates a "micropayment" from a "small payment," but consider the apparent success of iTunes. I've talked to a lot of people who are amazed at how easy it is to click and buy--at $.99 even--and they're more willing to spend than they thought they were. Can people find these same songs for free? Probably. But they're paying for how much more convenient the paid service is to them than the free version.
I'd love to see how well or how poorly McCloud has done with his comic. Here's someone who has demonstrated his value to the consumer in the past with both free and priced content. I think finding out if people were willing to follow HIM from free to
The Korg Pandora PXR4.
Alex.
Wow. Not that anyone but me will care about this. But I used to live right near that address. My girlfriend and a bunch of friends lived in Heritage Woods, the community where Hunt Club is located. The person's name doesn't sound familiar though.
I think there's a McDonald's right next to the the W. Market address; where Cleveland-Massillon meets West Market. I don't remember any b2b offices there--it's all stripmalls. Maybe there's a MailBoxes Etc. or something there now and that's a box, not an apartment.
Alex.
Send a bunch of query letters to publications, online and off. There's definitely a market for articles like this.
Alex.
If anyone's interested, Geoffrey's story is still up on the Analog website: Falling Onto Mars.
Alex.
I know that. And Dennis the Menace was published by someone else. I meant to give examples of non-Marvel characters there.
And DC has a much better record of making their characters evolve. Aquaman grew a beard, lost his hand, replaced it with a harpoon and became all mean and gritty.
That sounds more like flavor than character, but okay. I think the distinction was largely in Marvel's earlier days. By the time I stopped reading Marvel and DC, I wouldn't have said that one had any "advantage" over the other.
Green lantern and Green Arrow are already on their Nth incarnation (The originals have either died or retired).
I've only read one or two issues of either book so I'm basing this only on what you tell me here. But that to me sounds like the characters are so flat (too everyman) that they're almost interchangeable, so long as the powers stay the same. That said, I do admire any company willing to kill off popular characters (until they bring them back to life, of course).
The flagship characters haven't experienced that much change, as you mention, but DC is still a more adventurous company writing wise.
This wasn't the case (not clearly at least) when I was reading them (with the obvious exceptions of Sandman, Watchmen, and what little I heard about Preacher, but they were the exception, not the rule--and I could find Marvel "exceptions" as well). But I'm willing to take your word for it that this is how it is now, especially since I haven't picked up a DC or Marvel comic published in the last eight years or so.
I believe there was a clear difference (in Marvel's favor) in character development and willingness to have characters with flaws and such in Marvel's earlier days, but I don't think they held on to such distinction very long. I wouldn't classify either one of them as particularly willing to risk when it comes to their breadwinning heroes--not character-wise anyway. Sure they'll kill off Superman or Spider-man for a saga or two, but how much will they let them grow as a people?
Alex.
A lot of characters historically _didn't_ change or develop (think Batman and Superman, for a looong time) and that's one of the things that set Marvel apart for a while. A description of Superman and Dennis the Menace that was true in the early days of both comics stayed true for decades or more.
And even those that did demonstratably change evolved very slowly or digressed back into older patterns, especially when an earlier "version" of a character was more popular. How many times as a kid, after reading Wolverine's painful process of controlling his aggressive tendencies in 100 issues of Claremont's X-Men, did he have a cameo in another book where he was portrayed as a mindless, undisciplined, trigger-happy madman?
Then you have the simplification element. In the first few pages of most issue of most books, they have to find a way to reiterate who this person is, what his/her power is, and what the heck is going on. I'm reminded of the last few episodes of the last season of Buffy and they're trying to bring newer viewers up-to-speed . Not an easy task, especially since comic book makers, like filmmakers and TV producers, rarely trust their audiences to be able to figure things out contextually or subtextually.
The other part of it is just another symptom of non-readers of comics unwilling to view them as anything other than kid stuff, and otherwise define comics as what they were when the comic book format first emerged.
Alex.
I was looking for a laptop in early 2001 and couldn't find what I wanted. Battery life was a big problem. Not saying this is right for everybody, but you should lay out all your options on the table. Take the best (and closest to what you're looking for) configuration from Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Alienware, Apple, HP, Sony, etc., and then decide among those. You've got options; just don't expect to find them all in one place. I ended up being happiest with an Apple notebook, and it was a suprising and drastic move for me to switch from Windows. But the price and feature set was right and I've been very happy with my decision. I think my second choice was a Dell, because I figured if they didn't have what I wanted, at least I wouldn't be spending a fortune only to be broke when my "perfect" laptop came out. Still hasn't happened, though that 12" TiBook is getting closer.
So my recommendation is to line up your options from the various websites and pick your favorite. At least you don't have to go store to store; you can do all your comparison shopping online.
Alex.
There's nothing I can do about full accounts, so I wouldn't have the autorespond to those.
I just did a test, searching for stuff like
"This message has been rejected because it has a potentially executable attachment"
AND
"However, your email has been held for quarantine,
because the attachment you sent may contain virus or is against our company's policy. For our protection, quarantined email can be deleted anytime."
in the text and subjects like:
"Norton AntiVirus detected and quarantined a virus in a message yo u sent."
and autoresponded. I let the autoresponder run for about ten minutes, and then turned it off. It turns out that the FROM address sending me those virus warning messages aren't real! Those messages bounce back to me, and my system found the text again and autoresponded back, creating an endless loop. One of the emails was passed back and forth five times in that small timespam, err, span,
Glad I didn't leave it on all night. Now I'll just send those emails to the trash. Same filter parameters, different result. Doesn't catch everything, but it should make a dent.
Maybe we should bombard antivirus email software providers with complaint emails?
Alex.
Memory Stick, SD card (2 brands Lexar and SanDisk), and I want to say SmartMedia for the camera. I've also used one of those keychain-type USB jobs. Memory Stick was probably the most reliable of the bunch (though not without problems), but none of my current stuff uses Memory Stick.
Alex.
I cross my fingers (no, not literally) every time I've inserted a piece of Flash Media into my camera, PDA, or USB drive. I find that about one in every 20 times the disk comes up empty. I take good care of them (three different media types), but I don't find them reliable at all. I'd sooner use CD-Rs (though now I might start backing those up every 2 years on new CD-Rs.
Alex.
So... any creative ideas as to what can be done about this? I am now getting as many bounced emails as I am copies of the sobig virus. Used to be a 1:3 ratio.
And it's not just bounced emails. I get personal responses. Someone actually took the time to write me: "You sent me a virus, you fag."
I thought about making an autoresponder for virus notification bounce-headlines (I'm on a Mac--I'm pretty sure it's not me), but wouldn't sending emails back just add to the net-congestion?
Alex.
Most Mac users I know don't know or do anything with AppleScript, so I don't think it's a mistake to start where it does. I have the old O'Reilly book which is still great as a quick reference, but I'll have to see this one for myself before recommending it to people. IMO, a lot of people who could really benefit from using AppleScript daily aren't because they feel it's too techy for them. Maybe this book is what those people need. On the other hand, I haven't heard anything about 1-2-3, but I've had good experience with a few of Peachpit's books.
Alex.
I believe Pixar's first feature film work was in The Wrath of Khan. They did the exploding planet with the Enterprise flying away. This was when they were still a part of Lucas's empire. Lucas had to sell some divisions of LucasFilm when he got a divorce, since California law says spouses must split things 50-50. That's when Steve Jobs bought it and named it Pixar. I'm pretty sure Lasseter was a part of it even then.
Alex.
zero.
I believe the tax applies where charges are made for the actual communication, not the equipment itself.
Otherwise I think there'd have to be a nine percent tax on styrofoam cups and a question at the register, "Sir, do you plan on tying a string between two of these so your kids can play in their tree fort?"
Alex.
This doesn't tell us much. It's almost a teaser. "Are you going to die tomorrow? The answer may surprise you. Stay tuned for News at 11." I have some CDRs that stopped working within days and others that have lasted over 4 years now--same brand from the same spindle even. I wonder if the full Dutch article gives specifics or if they found _any_ CDs that were still working fine after twenty months. The teaser seems to suggest that they're all terrible. I do know that I get fewer duds now that I use Toast than I did when I used "Easy CD Creator." Beyond that, I don't know anything that makes a difference. CDRs stop working. DVD-Rs are crazy fragile. Hard drives fail. Paper burns. Maybe my data wasn't supposed to last forever. Alex.
Well at least I'm influencing somebody...
The article seems to say that we've finally found some carbon-bearing minerals, but some people in Arizona don't think it means anything. What's the story here? Is it new that we found some carbon-bearing minerals or is it new that the group in Arizona has made some conclusions based on the data?
It's such a shallow article it's hard to tell if this is significant. It makes me think of someone saying over and over and over again that there's absolutely no evidence to suggest x. When someone comes up with some evidence that does suggest x, the naysayer quickly fires back, "Well, that's only a little bit of evidence, so it's still not true." Maybe, maybe not.
I agree with the NASA guy. It's too early to tell.
Alex.
Haven't all new media forms tried to emulate its predecessors? Early films were little more than stage plays. Early television was just radio plays with pictures.
Give it time. It's early yet.
Alex.
Yes. Next question.
Alex.
What exactly is the obstacle to you being a full time employee working in Japan? You say it's "very difficult, if not impossible, to do so," but is it just a matter of a lot of paperwork and figuring it out? Can you negotiate with HR? If you agree to do all the filing you can and possibly even take a paycut in exchange for them jumping through the legal hoops they have to to "open an office" in Japan? Alex.
Could you use a friend's or family member's address for a bank account and legal residence in California, and your employer could auto-deposit your checks into the account?
Just treat this like college students do when they go to school in a different state and keep their parents' house as residence.
Alex.
The biggest problem I see (and I became a Mac user in 2001, so beige Apple boxes make me think of the Apple IIe) is how much OS X needs RAM. 512MB minimum. Really.
Not saying it's impossible, but how would you benefit by running Jaguar? You'd be running slower, you'd have to upgrade your software--I mean you're not going to slow down your system by installing Jaguar just to run Photoshop under Classic are you? Kind of defeats the purpose. Upgrades for Photoshop and Quark alone will run you $400 (don't remember how much Quark is, but PS upgrades are typically $200), not to mention whatever other software you use day-to-day. And the $100 or so for Jaguar. That's $500 there. You can buy a used iMac for that much and be a lot happier even if you're running your current programs in Classic (but this time on a machine that's able to handle Jaguar in the first place).
At any rate, you're better off asking this question on a Mac site. Mac OS X FAQ at http://www.macosxfaq.com is a good place to start. Best of luck if you try it, but I wouldn't bother. Especially if you want to get any work done.
They're playing sports with high risk of injury and they're pushing their bodies to the limits (which is what gets them on the covers in the first place), and then they think it's a curse when they get hurt?
Alex.