(Not as good a story as the poster below, but still I found it interesting...)
I brought some people over to play the Wii, some first timers, some geeks that knew about it, and most of them were interested in picking one up of their own. Being like one week left before christmas, 'wii-mania' was coming to a panic and the only way to score one retail was to stand in line early morning at your local target or bestbuy. My friends went on to coordinate for a hunt, so they split up and scouted ahead to roughly 10 stores to see how the lines were. They left at 11pm the night before, to find out that the 3 bestbuys were already camped out. Gamestop, EBgames, those were out too. Around midnight, they found a Target that had only 8 people in line, 15 units.
So all 4 of my friends stood in line, keeping warm playing games to pass the next 7 hours. More and more people started showing up afterwards. Soon the line grew to around 30 people. The first 15 people ahead told the people behind them that there are only 15 units available, so they would be wasting their time. Some people turned around and left upon hearing the news, but not too many. During the course of the night, the manager would walk out making an announcement stating the same, still to no real effect. Eventually the line grew to around 50 people.
At roughly 4am, the manager came out, stating that there were 20 units of the PS3 also available (the 60 gig model), and told them to start a new line. He also stated to the people 16-50th in line that they were NOT going to get a Wii, but if they wanted a PS3, they could get one. 8 people moved on over. There were 12 slots still available. Meanwhile there were still 26 more people standing in line for a Wii that were not about to get one. Seeing how the line to the PS3 was still short, two of my geek guy friends decided not to pass up on an opportunity to pick up a PS3 and ran on over to the PS3 line(the other two were girls clearly not interested in a ps3). That still left 10 units left for anybody to come pick up a PS3, and 24 hopeful people bent on getting a Wii.
At 6:30AM, the manager comes out, starts handing out tickets. By this time, the Wii line grew 'pretty large.' After the 15 tickets were handed out, the manager threw up his hands and stated, "No more!!" which got the remaining people standing in line pretty angry (especially the 16th person, she freaked out trying to build up an excuse on why some people ahead of her didnt' deserve to get a ticket). After about 20 mins of tension, they left in anger.
"There were still 10 units left for the PS3!" the manager shouted. But the crowd shouted obscenities at him and went home. My guy friends were absolutely baffled, and the girls were thrilled that they scored a Wii. After I woke up and met them for lunch, they told me the story of the remaining PS3 units, so I headed on over there - only to find out they were sold out by that time. I offered to trade my wii(plus remaining cash)for the PS3 to my guy friends only to be met with "Hell no!" because they were going to pick up a wii later on anyway. I wish I knew about the PS3... *sigh*
It never really crossed my mind, but from the way you've written it, it sure sounds like Nintendo took some pages out of Apple and their approach to the ipod.
I wonder what makes the system sell so well is the 'gimmicky' interface, or the price. Now that I think of it, I'm curious to find out if physical _size_ take away from the intimidation factor as well (you thought the XBOX360 was big? Compare it to a PS3; it's almost as large as my stereo receiver. The Wii looks like a external CDROM drive). I'm sure that it's a combination of one those factors (and a whole slew of unforseen ones that I haven't thought about during my breakfast right now), but it interests me from a marketing perspective, along with a 'attract-new-users-like-my-sister-who-hates-videog ames' perspective.
DOM has nothing to do with javascript itself, other than the fact that a lot of browsers have their own implementation how to interface the DOM via. If there is anybody to blame on the poor DOM documentation, you should be pointing fingers at the browsers' lack of standardization. Coupled with the fact that different browsers have different levels of support for different version of the DOM, that becomes a headache.
For the actual javascript implementation across all browsers itself, you cannot deny that it's pretty solid across the board. How the different browsers decide to interface the DOM with it - aside from that level of support for the dom itself, that's been largely ignored up untill even a year ago. As we see more widespread support for it and start seeing bigger and badder web-based apps for it is when js will start getting some real popularity.
What Wikipedia says on javascript. Here's an excerpt that may interest some:
The standardization effort for JavaScript also needed to avoid trademark issues, so the ECMA 262 standard calls the language ECMAScript, three editions of which have been published since the work started in November 1996. The object model of browser-based JavaScript, the Document Object Model (DOM), is not part of the ECMAScript standard. It is defined in a set of separate standards developed by the W3C, and is applicable to the access and manipulation of HTML and XML documents in many computer languages and platforms.
if you look up ECMA, you will see a lot of browsers listed supporting the ECMA262 standard.
Here is a pdf on the ECMA262 spec. Warning: it's a big long winded, but it's pretty detailed. Good spec.
About the golf game, I've noticed that a lot of people were having issues playing it.
This past weekend I brought my Wii over and played 9 holes of with some of my friends. One was trying to swing by flicking his wrist sitting on the couch, holding the wiimote pointed up. Another decided to do an actual 'full swing' by standing in front of the tv and holding the controller in both hands.
You probably don't even have to guess who was able to get a much more consistent desired power out of each swing.
The one sitting on the couch kept on complaining his swings were all over the place. He tried to compensate by flicking his wrists at various speeds, nothing seemed to work correctly. At a certain point he was putting away, and I decided to take on over because he just plain sucked. I stood up, held the controller in both hands, and performed a tiny swing. Oops, it was way too strong. My other friend standing there laughed his ass off, and told me, "It's a PUTTER, don't swing the damn thing. I just line up correctly, and push off. Just like you would with an actual putter - if it helps, focus less on the power meter."
So I lined up, and just literally pushed off keeping my arms and wrists straight. It worked.
I beleive most people are having a hard time with the golf game because they beleive they have figured out the controller game mechanics. For a lot of us, we're going to have to 'unlearn what we have learned' in videogames.
Ms. Garrison: (speaking of evolution) It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this. In the beginning we were all fish, okay, swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its...mutant fish hands...and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something, and made this...retard frog-squirrel...and then that had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog...and then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey...that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey and...that made you. So there you go. You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel. Congratulations.
OS: You keep using that word. I do not...
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You keep using that word...
I do not think it means what you think it means.:-)
That said, why would google be interested in their own OS? To increase their marketshare? That doesn't make any sense.
I just saw the video. That kid was being a total ass. You couldn't count the number of times security was telling him to get up. He didn't, not becuase he couldn't. He just did not because that was his choice. You could even hear other students in the background yelling at him to "just get up!"
This was not an unsolicited behavior by security, he was the one causing the scene, being disruptive and disobeying authority. If he had is ID everything would have been fine, but he didn't, and he refused to leave. You thing security asked him once and he was on his way out when they decide to stun him? You could tell he was throwing the dramatics out in full force. It was enough yelling and screaming on his part to get students to whip out their video phones, at least.
Not too sure about that. Marketing should have no real responsibility to try to tell you the 'deep meaning' of the message being conveyed. The core responsibility should be to illicit a response in order to increase retention of recognition of said brand - whether it be positive or negative. The ad's success is from the rather freaky nature of the ad itself - people remember the ad indefinately; the meaning behind the ad is where the marketing dept went to have a little fun.
This isn't the first time sony came out with these ads, but it is one of the rare moments where this style of advertisement got such wide recognition. There were some really straight up wierd PS2 ads a few years back, but I can't seem to find them at the moment.
This arguement is a prime example of what happens when an individual with an artistic mentality goes head to head with one with scientific mentality, thinking that they are discussing the same thing. Unfortunately the original poster came up with a question that was poorly worded and was interpreted different by different parties.
The OP was never asking about how to generate bitmaps. What he was asking was whether or now there could be a method for an *artist* to come in(that has no understanding of how the texture is generated) and create good looking textures. The reason why photoshop was mentioned in the first place, was merely because it's a tool that a LOT of digital artists have on their computer - which would mean from a marketshare/distribution standpoint, getting them to install a plugin would be less intimidating (and more marketshare penetrating) than having them install a whole new app that does the same thing. Nobody is talking about going into photoshop and applying a couple of filters to a bitmap and then saving it to a file. I beleive what they are talking about is using photoshop as a tool to see how the artist's tweaks to the procedure will result in an appropriate texture generation that will suit the artists's needs so that the artists can show their project manager in an experience that is familiar to them - albeit which is not the 'natural' way a user would be using photoshop in the first place, but in the business world, familiarity counts.
Telling the computer to "create me a partially reflective white hardtop marble surface with some scratches made from a shopping cart, with EXTRA grit and grime" may be a cool (and beautiful) novelty at first, but over time if every game uses the same generation then there is going to have a certain look of generic artificiality that truly lacks an 'artists touch.' I don't mean "use less grime" or "this portion dirty and this portion coated in blood," I mean certain stylistic decisions that cannot be easily deciphered by concrete values.
And to reiterate what the above posters have stated, photoshop's text editing/layout tools have indeed come a long way. It even has a spell checker. I'm pretty sure you _can_ download wordprocessor plugins for photoshop - which does not necessarily make it a good idea. But it is entirely possible.:-P
Let's say they started production in august, in order to get 4 million units by march, they are going to need to produce 500,000 units per MONTH, which would be on average of 16,000 units per DAY. That's 16,000 final, completed units. WTF? Did Nintendo manage to find Santa's elves looking for work or something?
Sorry, but if IE7 Just Works, then moving to FF (and getting others to move to FF) is not going to be worth the effort. I'll work with whatever is most convenient (from a user perspective), and if the answer is IE7, then I'm going for IE7. As of right now, my ass is deeply rooted in FF, so I don't have any immediate plans to swith to IE7. But if FF2 starts to crash out on me or bork out when it tries to load a flash file (which it's actaully done today incidentally), I'm going to drop FF like a bad habit in favor for something else. Maybe IE7, maybe Opera, who knows. In the mean time I'm not going to do anything untill the browser starts to crash on me with certain regularity up to the point where I just get annoyed.
Love for a brand has no place in the software world, be it OSX, Ubuntu, Visual Studio or Firefox. It's all about convenience.
I beleive there is a little more marketing evil genius going on here. (well, perhaps not so genius, ebbing on the side of 'duh' in fact).
The are well aware of one and one thing only:
The launch on the holiday season is not going to boost their sales. Why would that be? Simply because everybody that is projected to buy the expansion already has been playing WoW for some time. The expansion is not meant to increase their subscription, but rather to strengthen subscriber retention. Blizzard pretty much knows how many people are going to buy the expansion (my guess is 5 million copies:-), so why try and sell as many copies during the holiday to the customers that keep coming back, when you can have the opportunity to sell WoW to brand new customers and increase their subscription pool?
It looks like some marketing dolt probably at Vivendi went over to Blizzard and tried to strong arm a holiday launch, simply because sales tend to do better during that time frame. But someone in that company got smart. Nothing is going to hype that game more than word of mouth, and of course right before launch they are probably going to do an 'open beta' where everybody can try out the new races, new content, and new items. Just like maintaining drug junkies, the best way to keep them coming back is to offer them the first taste for free.
Heh, I thought you were just trying to emphasize your arguement on the "javascript will close the tags for you" thing. I was gonna comment on it joking about not adding in a closing tag but I was afraid of being downmodded for not being clever enough to catch that.
that makes me wonder: where there some really cool things you guys would have liked to have added support for (rss, podcatching, bittorrent - I don't know if any of these are supported, so forgive my ignorance) that was shot down by the powers that be due to some wierd legal implications?
Like for example: bittorrent support in particular would be pretty snazzy for largish files, like podcasts, but with the RIAA/MPAA lawyers looming by, would your bosses have said "Perhaps that is not such a good idea..." thus preventing you from adding in support for such tech?
Were there legal implications that prevented you guys from adding in more support for CSS or other standards like PNG or SVG? Or were they merely ignored and put on the backburner simply because they were considered 'small fry' at the time? I am aware of the png support that is added in IE7, but working with pngs in the current IE left such a bad taste in my mouth (especially that rediculous bug that prevented you from putting in anchor text in an object that contained pngs in the background when the object did not have a predefined height/width value - arrgh!)
What's going on with DOM support? I hear conflicted reports about not that much support, including buggy support for ECMAscript. WTF?
Sometimes I wonder if certain standards were deliberately ignored simply because IE didn't want to be a 'standard' browser, thus the reasoning why certain tech that is commonly supported by most other browsers that happens to be oddly missing in IE. Would I be going out in a limb to say that this was not too far from the truth? I'm honestly not trying to bash you guys, far from it, but there are times when I'm just baffled by the direction you guys take and the effort and money involved in an attempt to try and be different, thus causing the headaches we have now, instead of embracing a common standard to which everybody can enjoy.
Seriously. To the average person, Usenet is the internet equivalent to a dump: people just leave crap lying around, and if you are willing to spend the time digging, you *may* find something you want, and get it up and running even. Usenet is totally inconvenient, especially considering the alternatives. Why should the MPAA go after the blue collar piracy when they can go after the high profile white collar ones? There is no money in going after the ghetto pirates; the MPAA has to pay it's lawyers too - it's just more cost effective to curb piracy where the most money is being lost. *wink* *wink*
Indeed, 70 days/played is a lot, but IMO that is a pretty average amount for what qualifies as a lot. I know plenty of people that have broken the 100 day barrier, and a few more ppl that have even passed 150 days. Some consider themselves 'hardcore' gamers, and others are regular mom and pop types. The only difference between the 'hardcore' and the mom and pop types that have 100+ days/played, is the gear differential. That's it.
I myself have played on and off since beta, and would roughly estimate my total play time to be around 30 days spread thruout all my characters. Considering wow came out almost 2 years ago, I would have logged on average of one hour a day of gaming since. For 70 days played, that's a little more than 2-2.5 hours a day of gaming. That's not a lot.
I'm pretty sure we can find someone that watches more tv than that a day on average.
Somewhat offtopic: Most of my wow gaming nowadays is regulated to pvp only since the latest patch, so I play probably on average of 3 games of warsong gulch (a "capture the flag" scenario for ppl unfamiliar with WoW) a night after work, with each game lasting anywhere from 10 mins-40 mins. Considering how long it takes to run thru instances to finish quests or obtain loot, I would never put myself thru doing pve again due to the time constraint, unless I've allocated a good chunk of time to commit with some friends beforehand. PVP is where the short gaming sessions are at. And while my roommate and other RL friends run around in their T2 epics, I really don't have that difficult a time standing toe-to-toe with them in the battlegrounds.
I know it's been said repeatedly in different sites, but if you live in NYC you can just walk on over to the Nintendo World store near Rockefeller Center and place a preorder. They've been taking preorders for a few weeks already, to which I've done mine during lunch. Plus I have a hunch that they are less likely to overcommit and fail to deliver on launch date, something EB and Gamestop have been notorious for.
Maybe as a society we should stop focusing on blame quite so much and focus MORE on the 'why' surrounding the behavior. The principal's blaming the students for supposed 'improper' behavior, and the students' retribution for it are really part of the same problem.
If you are unable to think of any reason on why a student would possibly put up a fake myspace account impersonating a teacher(or in this case an assistant principal) they have been disciplined by in attempts to humiliate them, then I don't know what to tell you. Let's try and come up with a few conclusions:
1) The student(s) probably don't like their assistant principal
2) The student(s) probably don't like being disciplined by their assistant principal
3) The student(s) probably felt like they were being wronged for being disciplined by their assistant principal
4) The student(s) probably felt some form of vindication by trying to humiliate their assistant principal using a medium they are versed in - in this case, myspace
Remember the days when students would get angry towards their supervisors, go to their house late at night and vandalize stuff? Things like toilet papering their house, trying to uproot plants and throwing rocks at windows in attempts to destroy property? This is merely a new form of vandalism, except it is in more public view, and with the potential to be more destructive to the victim than merely a broken window.
So why are people doing things like this? Simply because they think they can get away with it.
I've taken a quick glance at TFA, and it doesn't look like Schwartz is attacking the existence of the datacenter per se, but rather questioning the direction of computing as hardware gets more powerful while shrinking in size. As he says, the primary reason a datacenter exists in the first place is not to house all that hardware, but rather to keep all the smart people running it in one consolidated area, probably for logistical/managerial purposes.
But as technology advances, and you need less and less people to manage such a big system, why is it necessary to keep all the machines in one area?
And why are you so quick to call the purchase "stupid"? You don't think that the folks at Google can come up with a good advertising strategy for YouTube?
I wouldn't say the purchase of Youtube is stupid, rather the purchase of Youtube for $1.65 Billion. Considering the bandwidth costs, I honestly don't think that ad revenue is going to cut it. No, I beleive they bought Youtube simply becuase they didn't want anybody else grabbibg it first. As of right now Youtube is money going down the drain and while the potential is there, so I'm merely curious to see how this pans out.
Thanks for referring to my post, I've had a good laugh. Too bad I got modded redundant, but it's cool; I'm more interested in the dialogue and (I think) I have karma to burn.
Slashdot Mirror
(Not as good a story as the poster below, but still I found it interesting...)
I brought some people over to play the Wii, some first timers, some geeks that knew about it, and most of them were interested in picking one up of their own. Being like one week left before christmas, 'wii-mania' was coming to a panic and the only way to score one retail was to stand in line early morning at your local target or bestbuy. My friends went on to coordinate for a hunt, so they split up and scouted ahead to roughly 10 stores to see how the lines were. They left at 11pm the night before, to find out that the 3 bestbuys were already camped out. Gamestop, EBgames, those were out too. Around midnight, they found a Target that had only 8 people in line, 15 units.
So all 4 of my friends stood in line, keeping warm playing games to pass the next 7 hours. More and more people started showing up afterwards. Soon the line grew to around 30 people. The first 15 people ahead told the people behind them that there are only 15 units available, so they would be wasting their time. Some people turned around and left upon hearing the news, but not too many. During the course of the night, the manager would walk out making an announcement stating the same, still to no real effect. Eventually the line grew to around 50 people.
At roughly 4am, the manager came out, stating that there were 20 units of the PS3 also available (the 60 gig model), and told them to start a new line. He also stated to the people 16-50th in line that they were NOT going to get a Wii, but if they wanted a PS3, they could get one. 8 people moved on over. There were 12 slots still available. Meanwhile there were still 26 more people standing in line for a Wii that were not about to get one. Seeing how the line to the PS3 was still short, two of my geek guy friends decided not to pass up on an opportunity to pick up a PS3 and ran on over to the PS3 line(the other two were girls clearly not interested in a ps3). That still left 10 units left for anybody to come pick up a PS3, and 24 hopeful people bent on getting a Wii.
At 6:30AM, the manager comes out, starts handing out tickets. By this time, the Wii line grew 'pretty large.' After the 15 tickets were handed out, the manager threw up his hands and stated, "No more!!" which got the remaining people standing in line pretty angry (especially the 16th person, she freaked out trying to build up an excuse on why some people ahead of her didnt' deserve to get a ticket). After about 20 mins of tension, they left in anger.
"There were still 10 units left for the PS3!" the manager shouted. But the crowd shouted obscenities at him and went home. My guy friends were absolutely baffled, and the girls were thrilled that they scored a Wii. After I woke up and met them for lunch, they told me the story of the remaining PS3 units, so I headed on over there - only to find out they were sold out by that time. I offered to trade my wii(plus remaining cash)for the PS3 to my guy friends only to be met with "Hell no!" because they were going to pick up a wii later on anyway. I wish I knew about the PS3... *sigh*
It never really crossed my mind, but from the way you've written it, it sure sounds like Nintendo took some pages out of Apple and their approach to the ipod.
I wonder what makes the system sell so well is the 'gimmicky' interface, or the price. Now that I think of it, I'm curious to find out if physical _size_ take away from the intimidation factor as well (you thought the XBOX360 was big? Compare it to a PS3; it's almost as large as my stereo receiver. The Wii looks like a external CDROM drive). I'm sure that it's a combination of one those factors (and a whole slew of unforseen ones that I haven't thought about during my breakfast right now), but it interests me from a marketing perspective, along with a 'attract-new-users-like-my-sister-who-hates-videog ames' perspective.
DOM has nothing to do with javascript itself, other than the fact that a lot of browsers have their own implementation how to interface the DOM via. If there is anybody to blame on the poor DOM documentation, you should be pointing fingers at the browsers' lack of standardization. Coupled with the fact that different browsers have different levels of support for different version of the DOM, that becomes a headache.
For the actual javascript implementation across all browsers itself, you cannot deny that it's pretty solid across the board. How the different browsers decide to interface the DOM with it - aside from that level of support for the dom itself, that's been largely ignored up untill even a year ago. As we see more widespread support for it and start seeing bigger and badder web-based apps for it is when js will start getting some real popularity.
I call dibs on 0!
What Wikipedia says on javascript. Here's an excerpt that may interest some:
if you look up ECMA, you will see a lot of browsers listed supporting the ECMA262 standard.
Here is a pdf on the ECMA262 spec. Warning: it's a big long winded, but it's pretty detailed. Good spec.
They put the Old Testament in the Bible because it's the only source that supports the Church's arguements that Jesus is from a divine lineage.
Oh, and he was supposed to fulfill some prophecy written in the Old Testament as well.
This past weekend I brought my Wii over and played 9 holes of with some of my friends. One was trying to swing by flicking his wrist sitting on the couch, holding the wiimote pointed up. Another decided to do an actual 'full swing' by standing in front of the tv and holding the controller in both hands.
You probably don't even have to guess who was able to get a much more consistent desired power out of each swing.
The one sitting on the couch kept on complaining his swings were all over the place. He tried to compensate by flicking his wrists at various speeds, nothing seemed to work correctly. At a certain point he was putting away, and I decided to take on over because he just plain sucked. I stood up, held the controller in both hands, and performed a tiny swing. Oops, it was way too strong. My other friend standing there laughed his ass off, and told me, "It's a PUTTER, don't swing the damn thing. I just line up correctly, and push off. Just like you would with an actual putter - if it helps, focus less on the power meter."
So I lined up, and just literally pushed off keeping my arms and wrists straight. It worked.
I beleive most people are having a hard time with the golf game because they beleive they have figured out the controller game mechanics. For a lot of us, we're going to have to 'unlearn what we have learned' in videogames.
Ms. Garrison: (speaking of evolution) It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this. In the beginning we were all fish, okay, swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its...mutant fish hands...and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something, and made this...retard frog-squirrel...and then that had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog...and then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey...that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey and...that made you. So there you go. You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel. Congratulations.
You keep using that word...
I do not think it means what you think it means. :-)
That said, why would google be interested in their own OS? To increase their marketshare? That doesn't make any sense.
This was not an unsolicited behavior by security, he was the one causing the scene, being disruptive and disobeying authority. If he had is ID everything would have been fine, but he didn't, and he refused to leave. You thing security asked him once and he was on his way out when they decide to stun him? You could tell he was throwing the dramatics out in full force. It was enough yelling and screaming on his part to get students to whip out their video phones, at least.
This isn't the first time sony came out with these ads, but it is one of the rare moments where this style of advertisement got such wide recognition. There were some really straight up wierd PS2 ads a few years back, but I can't seem to find them at the moment.
This arguement is a prime example of what happens when an individual with an artistic mentality goes head to head with one with scientific mentality, thinking that they are discussing the same thing. Unfortunately the original poster came up with a question that was poorly worded and was interpreted different by different parties.
The OP was never asking about how to generate bitmaps. What he was asking was whether or now there could be a method for an *artist* to come in(that has no understanding of how the texture is generated) and create good looking textures. The reason why photoshop was mentioned in the first place, was merely because it's a tool that a LOT of digital artists have on their computer - which would mean from a marketshare/distribution standpoint, getting them to install a plugin would be less intimidating (and more marketshare penetrating) than having them install a whole new app that does the same thing. Nobody is talking about going into photoshop and applying a couple of filters to a bitmap and then saving it to a file. I beleive what they are talking about is using photoshop as a tool to see how the artist's tweaks to the procedure will result in an appropriate texture generation that will suit the artists's needs so that the artists can show their project manager in an experience that is familiar to them - albeit which is not the 'natural' way a user would be using photoshop in the first place, but in the business world, familiarity counts.
Telling the computer to "create me a partially reflective white hardtop marble surface with some scratches made from a shopping cart, with EXTRA grit and grime" may be a cool (and beautiful) novelty at first, but over time if every game uses the same generation then there is going to have a certain look of generic artificiality that truly lacks an 'artists touch.' I don't mean "use less grime" or "this portion dirty and this portion coated in blood," I mean certain stylistic decisions that cannot be easily deciphered by concrete values.
And to reiterate what the above posters have stated, photoshop's text editing/layout tools have indeed come a long way. It even has a spell checker. I'm pretty sure you _can_ download wordprocessor plugins for photoshop - which does not necessarily make it a good idea. But it is entirely possible. :-P
Let's say they started production in august, in order to get 4 million units by march, they are going to need to produce 500,000 units per MONTH, which would be on average of 16,000 units per DAY. That's 16,000 final, completed units. WTF? Did Nintendo manage to find Santa's elves looking for work or something?
Love for a brand has no place in the software world, be it OSX, Ubuntu, Visual Studio or Firefox. It's all about convenience.
The are well aware of one and one thing only:
The launch on the holiday season is not going to boost their sales. Why would that be? Simply because everybody that is projected to buy the expansion already has been playing WoW for some time. The expansion is not meant to increase their subscription, but rather to strengthen subscriber retention. Blizzard pretty much knows how many people are going to buy the expansion (my guess is 5 million copies :-), so why try and sell as many copies during the holiday to the customers that keep coming back, when you can have the opportunity to sell WoW to brand new customers and increase their subscription pool?
It looks like some marketing dolt probably at Vivendi went over to Blizzard and tried to strong arm a holiday launch, simply because sales tend to do better during that time frame. But someone in that company got smart. Nothing is going to hype that game more than word of mouth, and of course right before launch they are probably going to do an 'open beta' where everybody can try out the new races, new content, and new items. Just like maintaining drug junkies, the best way to keep them coming back is to offer them the first taste for free.
Heh, I thought you were just trying to emphasize your arguement on the "javascript will close the tags for you" thing. I was gonna comment on it joking about not adding in a closing tag but I was afraid of being downmodded for not being clever enough to catch that.
Like for example: bittorrent support in particular would be pretty snazzy for largish files, like podcasts, but with the RIAA/MPAA lawyers looming by, would your bosses have said "Perhaps that is not such a good idea..." thus preventing you from adding in support for such tech?
Were there legal implications that prevented you guys from adding in more support for CSS or other standards like PNG or SVG? Or were they merely ignored and put on the backburner simply because they were considered 'small fry' at the time? I am aware of the png support that is added in IE7, but working with pngs in the current IE left such a bad taste in my mouth (especially that rediculous bug that prevented you from putting in anchor text in an object that contained pngs in the background when the object did not have a predefined height/width value - arrgh!)
What's going on with DOM support? I hear conflicted reports about not that much support, including buggy support for ECMAscript. WTF?
Sometimes I wonder if certain standards were deliberately ignored simply because IE didn't want to be a 'standard' browser, thus the reasoning why certain tech that is commonly supported by most other browsers that happens to be oddly missing in IE. Would I be going out in a limb to say that this was not too far from the truth? I'm honestly not trying to bash you guys, far from it, but there are times when I'm just baffled by the direction you guys take and the effort and money involved in an attempt to try and be different, thus causing the headaches we have now, instead of embracing a common standard to which everybody can enjoy.
Seriously. To the average person, Usenet is the internet equivalent to a dump: people just leave crap lying around, and if you are willing to spend the time digging, you *may* find something you want, and get it up and running even. Usenet is totally inconvenient, especially considering the alternatives. Why should the MPAA go after the blue collar piracy when they can go after the high profile white collar ones? There is no money in going after the ghetto pirates; the MPAA has to pay it's lawyers too - it's just more cost effective to curb piracy where the most money is being lost. *wink* *wink*
I myself have played on and off since beta, and would roughly estimate my total play time to be around 30 days spread thruout all my characters. Considering wow came out almost 2 years ago, I would have logged on average of one hour a day of gaming since. For 70 days played, that's a little more than 2-2.5 hours a day of gaming. That's not a lot.
I'm pretty sure we can find someone that watches more tv than that a day on average.
Somewhat offtopic: Most of my wow gaming nowadays is regulated to pvp only since the latest patch, so I play probably on average of 3 games of warsong gulch (a "capture the flag" scenario for ppl unfamiliar with WoW) a night after work, with each game lasting anywhere from 10 mins-40 mins. Considering how long it takes to run thru instances to finish quests or obtain loot, I would never put myself thru doing pve again due to the time constraint, unless I've allocated a good chunk of time to commit with some friends beforehand. PVP is where the short gaming sessions are at. And while my roommate and other RL friends run around in their T2 epics, I really don't have that difficult a time standing toe-to-toe with them in the battlegrounds.
I know it's been said repeatedly in different sites, but if you live in NYC you can just walk on over to the Nintendo World store near Rockefeller Center and place a preorder. They've been taking preorders for a few weeks already, to which I've done mine during lunch. Plus I have a hunch that they are less likely to overcommit and fail to deliver on launch date, something EB and Gamestop have been notorious for.
Just mirror it over the internet, you silly goose! Bandwidth is cheap(ish)
If you are unable to think of any reason on why a student would possibly put up a fake myspace account impersonating a teacher(or in this case an assistant principal) they have been disciplined by in attempts to humiliate them, then I don't know what to tell you. Let's try and come up with a few conclusions:
1) The student(s) probably don't like their assistant principal
2) The student(s) probably don't like being disciplined by their assistant principal
3) The student(s) probably felt like they were being wronged for being disciplined by their assistant principal
4) The student(s) probably felt some form of vindication by trying to humiliate their assistant principal using a medium they are versed in - in this case, myspace
Remember the days when students would get angry towards their supervisors, go to their house late at night and vandalize stuff? Things like toilet papering their house, trying to uproot plants and throwing rocks at windows in attempts to destroy property? This is merely a new form of vandalism, except it is in more public view, and with the potential to be more destructive to the victim than merely a broken window.
So why are people doing things like this? Simply because they think they can get away with it.
But as technology advances, and you need less and less people to manage such a big system, why is it necessary to keep all the machines in one area?
Well, that's what I thought he was saying.
I wouldn't say the purchase of Youtube is stupid, rather the purchase of Youtube for $1.65 Billion. Considering the bandwidth costs, I honestly don't think that ad revenue is going to cut it. No, I beleive they bought Youtube simply becuase they didn't want anybody else grabbibg it first. As of right now Youtube is money going down the drain and while the potential is there, so I'm merely curious to see how this pans out.
Thanks for referring to my post, I've had a good laugh. Too bad I got modded redundant, but it's cool; I'm more interested in the dialogue and (I think) I have karma to burn.