Whoever the submitter is, he/she seems to have a pretty rosy view of a merger would result in. It doesn't mean that both XM and Sirius would fuse into one all encompassing uber service where you would get every existing channels for the same monthly fee. It just means that XM/Sirius would be owned under a single corporate umbrella. I would not be shocked to see increased monthly fees post-merger. One thing keeping subscription fees at their current level is the fierce competition with each other and fear that a price increase would be met with a flood of subscribers jumping to the competition.
If anything, they would try to differentiate each service in the market *even more* and remove redundancy, so to get the whole variety of channels, you would have to subscribe to both. It makes sense from a shareholders perspective; if XM and Sirius are both the same company, why spend resources having nearly identical Rock stations on both carriers? But if you put 80's and Metal Rock stations on XM and Top 40 and Punk Rock stations on Sirius, then listeners who enjoy all genres of rock have to make some painful decisions or (ideally) subscribe to both. And if you owned the entire satellite radio market, then there's no fear of your customers jumping to the competition, because there is none.
From the keynote, they are hoping for a mere 1% of the phone market by 2008. Sony, OTOH is hoping to be the market leader by then, and for that to happen, $599 is insanity.
I'm not at all concerned about getting eaten by Asimo or TMX Elmo.
If the Matrix , the Terminator, and Futurama have taught me anything, is that robots would be more likely to farm me, shoot me, or steal from me first.
I'd be more worried about getting eaten by *you*, should the robo-apocalypse ever come to pass...
I have to disagree with this example. The whole Aeris thing is a pre-rendered cut scene with no interactivity. It's just a movie and we all know that movies can make people cry.
The question posed here is can a *game* make you cry. Not a video stuck into the middle of a game, but from the actual gameplay. How many times have you cried while actually playing a game as opposed to sitting there with the controller in your lap watching some CGI whose trigger and resolution you had absolutely no control over? Not many, I'd wager.
probably for the same reason that they watch Lost. Replace Eon8 with Dharma Initiative, and the similarities are marked.
It's mysterious, has dead ends and redirections, uses cryptic codenames and strings of alphanumeric characters that hints at something much larger and sinister behind it, complete with a countdown to boot.
Interesting too, is how people also came up with all sorts of wild theories and found connections that the creators didnt originally intend (like the 8th eon being the end of the world).
"The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information."
Yeah, that seems to describe Lost pretty well too:)
Most of the games on the list are quite old. They come off as being silly/stupid but still amusing. 'Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom'? Sounds like a game I tried to write on my old C-64. But with modern media blasting us with ad-driven content, we get to see new lows in game-naming space. Here's a fairly recent entry that should have made the list:
Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
Make fun of Ninja Hamster and Cacoma Knight in Bizyland all you want, but at least those game titles dont sound like a press release to some merchandising tie-in.
If there is one thing that annoys me is that Apple never allows the option of configuring the lowest model laptop with a DVD burner. They didnt allow it with the iBook and now they dont allow it with the Macbook.
With these new revisions, the 1.83Ghz & 2.0Ghz models are nearly the exact same machine, yet only the 2.0Ghz has the Superdrive dvd burner. Go to the online Apple store link and no, you cannot add the Superdrive to the lower speed model.
You have to pay the premium for the speed bump for the privelege of burning DVDs? WTF is up with that? Burning DVDs isnt exactly power user territory; and it certainly doesnt rely on having 2.0Ghz vs 1.83Ghz.
So why limit the Superdrive to only the higher end model, Apple? Does the higher model offer such a negligible real world performance boost for the extra $300, you're afraid that you'll completely poach 2.0Ghz sales by giving the 1.83Ghz the option for DVD burning?
Hold on, it wasn't mainly the modding that they got nailed for.
Yes it was. Read the article:
The three men are being accused of "conspiring to traffic in a technology used to circumvent a copyright protection system and conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement," in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
It sounds like that's exactly what they were busted for...
If you RTFA'd or read about it earlier, they were selling the modded Xboxes with pirated games. I hate the DMCA as much as anyone else, but these guys are in the wrong here.
Waitaminnit, we cant just say 'they broke the law and they deserve whatever they get'. We really need to look at this a little more deeply.
They illegally distributed 77 copies of games. You dont need the DMCA to bust people for that, copyright law already covers that infraction, right? So why invoke the unholy spectre of the DMCA?
These guys are facing 5 years prison for this. What sort of punishments would these dudes be receiving if they had sold modded Xboxen with no pre-loaded games? Or what if they had sold the 77 games on DVD-R, without also providing the mod-chips and hard-drives? IOW, are prosecuters using DMCA as a way of going after harsher punishments that would otherwise be impossible under plain-old copyright law?
Currently, mod-chips are technically illegal under the DMCA, but it begs the question 'Should mod-chips themselves be illegal'? If not, then doesnt that throw this whole story in a different light? These guys deserve punishment, without a doubt, but they deserve fair punishment.
That's why this topic should be discussed on slashdot. If you really hate the DMCA, as you claim, then you should closely examine every application of it.
So naming a gene whose function that one in a thousand people couldnt even begin to describe is harming their image, but blackening the skies with lawyers over what most people would consider a non-issue doesnt?
Nintendo should protect their brand, but come on. This 'intrusion' on thier namespace is pretty obscure. It's not as if the research facility is using the name to get grants or sell drugs.
Personally I think it's cool. There is actually a gene named after Sonic the hedgehoge that has a role in developmental biology. I'd think that companies would be amused that they are being recognized in important scientific work.
Of course the researchers backed down. They have far more important things to spend their money on than defending pointless lawsuits. They should have renamed the gene NLCBMSMA (Nintendo Lawyers Can Bite My Shiny Metal Ass) or would they have been sued by Fox instead?
Check out the movie's ratings on www.rottentomatoes.com
Aeon Flux is currently running about 10%, which even amongst other craptastic cgi-fests, is suprisingly poor. That rating puts it about even with movies like Catwoman, and Elektra, which should tell you all you need to know.
MS wanted to release this season so they could capitalize on having the Xmas season all to themselves and jump on as much early marketshare as possible in the next-gen console wars. Next Xmas will be too late. All three consoles will be available and it will be a free-for-all at retail. Thier window of mega-opportunity is right now, and they are failing to maximize on it.
Now the $500 purchases that would have gone to MS are now being spent on other gifts (not necessarily console related) and come January, people are going to be worrying about paying off holiday bills, not spending even more. How much in sales, and more importantly marketshare, have they thrown right out the window simply by not having an adequate supply?
Microsoft is all about ubiquity, not scarity. Having consumers not being able to buy however much MS product whenever they want is totally counter to thier MO. The admission by Ballmer about poor yields as quite telling. Publicly, they are disappointed. Behind the scenes, they are probably furious and ready to vomit with rage. The supply issues may not be thier fault, but that doesnt lessen the damage...
The MPAA is not preventing you from playing DVDs under linux. AFAIK, anyone can license the DVD codecs and release a commercial player. In fact Linspire has done just that:
Of course it wouldnt make much sense to give away a licensed DVD player for free if you have to still pay the royalties for each copy, so yeah, they have to charge for it. There are other companies that are also working on linux based DVD players, though I dont follow it, so I dont know what state they are at. Maybe someone can post some links.
However, I would wager that even the most wonderful commercial DVD player for linux would sell like crap and people would still gripe about playing DVDs under linux. The thing that prevents people from legally playing commercial DVDs under linux is their aversion to paying for software, not some MPAA/DMCA conspiracy.
Which is quite silly really. Have you bought a stand-alone DVD player? Then you have paid the royalties for that capability. Even the windows-based DVD app that came with your video card probably wasnt bundled for free either...
This was a nifty piece of investigation, but doesnt address the largest cause of firefox memory usage. Namely, memory is not freed when tabs are closed.
Try a test. Fire up a clean FF and note memory usage. Go to somewhere like fark.com and open 50 links in tabs and note mem usage. Close every tab and see if mem usage goes down. It doesnt. Most people visit dozens of pages a day. Hundreds per week. After a while, the memory footprint of FF can grow to epic proportions (ie hundreds of megs) even with only a few tabs open because FF cannot release memory of closed tabs. I have to restart FF every week or so because I'm tired of it using 200MB for no good reason.
It doesnt bother me so much that FF stores uncompressed images for tabs which are active (ie. open, even if not visible). The article itself mentions a performance hit when storing compressed images. But why the f*** cant it free the memory when I close that tab? The fact that I explicity closed it should indicate that I dont want it anymore. FF developers have acknowledged the problem but have said that there is no easy fix. Probably a poor design in the underlying architecture, though no one associated with the project would state it that bluntly.
BTW, this article reminds me of one of the best reasons to use some sort of adblocking software. You save quite a bit of memory when you arent caching a dozen useless images with every new web page you visit. Especially in light of the above bug, you can significantly slow down the expanding memory footprint with adblocking.
Can you make a copy of a car, download a 'car crack', then sell the car while still retaining the full use of said car? No? Then stop comparing this with selling a used car. A slightly closer analogy would be buying Harry Potter, then scanning / photocopying it before reselling it. And even that's a poor comparison because it takes a lot of effort to scan a huge novel and the resulting copy is less convienent to use than the original.
That said, I dont think publishers should have any say in what happens to a copy of a brand new game that somone bought. Nor do they deserve any of the revenue generated by the resale. But if they think that profits are being seriously impacted by second hand sales, that's just going to make them move all the quicker to Steam type DRM. Where 'one custumer = one sale' and transferring ownership is nigh impossible.
It's not that far off. Look how gamers have eaten up HL2 and Steam in droves and are begging for more.
I think we can all appreciate the extra resources required to port a game to a different OS. The size of the current linux market may not make a native linux port financially attractive, though Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri did see a linux version, so the idea of a linux SM game is not without precedence. If no native Linux version is planned, have you ever given consideration to working with the Transgaming people to get Civ IV running under Linux using Cedega?
Even if not officially supported, that would enable you to reach a larger segment of the gaming market yet not require the level of resources of a full blown port.
I dont doubt your observations, but you make it sound like publishers dont have the first clue what makes a good game, when in fact they are just following the market/money. "Safe" -> more predictable sales, while "innovative" -> uncertain revenue. It's not hard to see which route most companies are going to want to take. I'm sure there are publishers out there that are so dumb as to believe 'eXXXTreme Back-Alley Bumfights' would make a good foundation for a game, but I dont believe the industry on the whole can be that ignorant about what makes a quality game..
If anyone is to blame, wouldnt you point the finger at the millions of people who just eat up all the derivative crap we see rehashed again and again? When the likes of a Katamari Damacy consistently outsells Madden and the Sims, maybe then we would see a change in how games are selected and developed. Until then, you'll have to look to the independent publishers to bring you those cool offbeat titles.
It reminds me of Disgaia, a tactical RPG for the PS2. I've never played it, but everyone who has it raves about it and the reviews are fantastic. IIRC correctly, the company that did the North American release did an intitial manufacturing run of ~10,000 units (someone correct me if I'm wrong). It sold so well, they had to make more and it paved the way for more similar games.
By all accounts, Disgaia is considered to be a success, but if you approached EA with a wonderfully made game that would appeal to 20,000 people, they would laugh in your face. Not because the game sucks, but because that's the very definition of 'niche'.
...for mediocre quality shows. At least, that's how I've heard it described.
Let's face it, whether it be anime, tv, movies, or games, probably 10% are great, 30% are mediocre, and the rest are not worth the time of day.
With the top 10%, they could be the most pirated shows of all time, but will still do amazing numbers at retail. Think Star Wars ep III, The Incredibles, Halo, or Evangelion. These are franchises that fans will spend oodles of money on, and even the most rampant piracy could not render them unprofitable.
The problem fansubbing brings is with the mediocre shows. I've rented and borrowed games and movies that I wanted to try out, but afterwards would not have a hope in hell of spending $20-$50 dollars for, because they simply were not that good. I was/am a big Evangelion fan, and that was one series I had no problem dropping the bucks on. I dont really follow the anime scene anymore, but I'd imagine most anime would not be able to pry $20 per disc out of my wallet nowadays.
Fansubbing can indeed generate excitement around a lesser known series, and I'd go so far as to suggest that some series' North American popularity was built on fansubs. But unless the show is of exceptional quality, I'd imagine most people would not be inclined to buy a pricey DVD set for a ho-hum show having already seen it.
If a publisher has to spend X dollars to distribute a product while competing with a free (and illegal) source of the exact same thing on the internet, unless there is some reason to expect brisk sales (like a large rabid fanbase), then it would not be a stretch to decide you may be financially better off not releasing it at all.
The article is somewhat light on facts. From what I recall, during drowning or suffocation, brain damage occurs in humans quite soon (10 minutes?). How is it that this process negates the lack of oxygen to the brain, allowing no damage to occur? Is it the temperature of the liquid used for replacing the blood?
There was a recent article in Scientific American* talking about suspended animation that may give clues as to how this works. Cell damage does indeed take place during low oxygen states (hypoxia) when the cell's metabolism continues without sufficient oxygen available and allows free radicals to build up and cause cellular damage. It appears that in some organisms, when you reduce the oxygen to an even lower state or remove it completely (anoxia), the cells can essentially shut down thier metabolism into a state of suspended animation. In other words, either normal oxygen or no oxygen can be tolerated, but there is a 10 fold window of low oxygen concentration that can be deadly. I believe this is where the brain damage occurs. If you stopped breathing right now, your blood still contains oxygen which would get slowly depleted as the cells continue to respirate. Perhaps the key to this technique is to rapidly replace the blood with a no/very low oxygen content fluid that will transition the cells from normal oxygen to anoxia as quickly as possible an minimize the amount of time spent in hypoxia.
This procedure has already been demonstrated in animals like mice though it is unknown whether humans can safely undergo the same conditions, as we (obviously) dont normally go into hibernation. Though we've all heard stories of martial arts masters lowering their breathing rates and body temps for extended periods, so maybe it is possible. It would be an absolutely amazing breakthrough, though I wouldnt volunteer to be the first human test subject;)
* I am not remotely an expert in this field, but my background is in biology. I hope my memory has recalled the facts of the SciAm story without too much error.
Hmmm, cool looking product but from looking at the last page of the article, the reviewer rates the ease of setup on WindowsXP 10/10 but gives the ease of linux setup as a measly 2/10.
The reviewer said he had to ask the Sonos community (maybe a web forum?) for help getting it to work under Suse. Apparantly you need to run Samba for the Sonos controller to be able to access the music and gave the reviewer enough trouble that he writes:
"For Linux wizards, this is probably just another opportunity to play and have fun, but for me it was some serious work, and I would not have been able to do it but for the graciousness of the Sonos community. "
It seems that they haven't put a lot of polish on the linux support for the server end yet. I'm wondering why is there no NFS support which should do away with needing Samba... I have my entire music collection on an NFS share, and I'd expect any linux client to simply mount it over the network and away we go.
Should we be giving much credit to a product just because it runs linux if it's really that difficult to make it play nicely with existing linux networks?
One thing that's always irked me about the prequels that I've only recently put my finger on is the gratuitous use of lightsabers compared to what we saw in 4-6.
In Ep 4, lightsabers were shown quite sparingly:
Luke in Obi-Wan's house Obi Wan in the Cantina Luke practicing on the M.Falcon Obi-Wan vs Vader
In the scene when Obi-Wan gives Anakin's lightsaber to Luke, he makes a point of telling Luke that it's a warrior's weapon that represents honour and grace. You would not expect a samurai to use his sword to cut sandwiches; merely drawing your weapon is a significant act in itself. Contrast with episode 1 when in the opening scene, all it took for Obi-Wan and Anakin to whip 'em out was a loud noise.
Of course, in 1977, the technology level wasnt there, so every second of lightsabre screen time cost a lot more than now when CGI is just a commodity, which probably explains it's scarcity in eps 4-6. However, Lucas' often gratuitous use of lightsabre battles in the prequels totally smacks of fan service. IMHO it really dilutes the mystique and significance of the lightsaber and makes the jedi look like gang members who think running around with dual beretta's held sideways is cool. Nothing at all like the introspective and disciplined order the jedi are supposed to represent.
... I wouldnt be watching Lost now. It's a densely packed storyline and I missed a couple episodes a while back. When I finally got back to it, someone who I thought was dead was alive and I didnt know what the f**k was going on.
I was able to catch up on BT, and now I can follow it when it broadcasts. Otherwise I would have said to hell with it, and they would have lost a viewer (no pun intended).
If past episodes were made available for download at a reasonable price, I would have paid for a handful of previous shows. I wouldnt even care if it was full commercials and DRM'd up the wazoo. For $2-$3 per episode, I would consider it just like a rental or buying a movie ticket. ie. a disposable purchase.
Though I wonder how many people would download torrents instead of buying the inevitable DVD release. The quality of the episodes I saw was so poor that if I was really such a big fan of the show, a 300 MB divx would be no substitute for the proper DVD boxset. For many people though, if the downloaded episodes are 'good enough', then I could see how it could potentially impact DVD sales.
The problem you do run into is length. Most books -- especially these days with the customer demand for thicker books for the buck -- are far too long to squeeze everything into a two-hour movie.
Thanks, this was part of my point that I did a poor job of getting across. I also made a mistake in using the babelfish passage as an example. It's so famous, that it would probably inevitably be in the movie.
My point was that an Adams book has *many* such well written passages, and not all of them are guide entries that you can do a CGI cut-scene with.
In a movie you cant possibly try to do film equivalents of them all, but the more you leave out, the more you drift away from what makes the HHG2TG books so enjoyable.
I've always been skeptical about using HHG2TG as a foundation of a movie. The enjoyment in the books isnt so much in the plot, but the writing and delivery. Personally, I love how Adams goes off track on diatribes that have nothing to do with the plot but make for some fun reading.
An example from the famous babelfish passage:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
How the heck are you supposed to film that and keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet passages like this are a defining feature of an Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they attempted to put passages like this in the movie and if they can pull it off.
Compare with LOTR, or Harry Potter, or any Michael Crichton novel, which are more plot driven works and thus can translate to a visual medium like movies and still capture the spirit of the original text much better. At least IMHO
Still, I'm intent on seeing the movie and hope it retains some of the classic Adams humour...
"On the other hand, manufacturers of photographic film certainly keep the chemical makeup, etc of their products secret. Why shouldn't digital camera makers be able to hide the methods of RAW storage for their products? "
Not remotely the same thing. Film makers might have a 'special formula' that they either 1) file a patent to protect it's process and composition for a specified length of time or 2) not disclose the information and protect it as a trade secret.
If they go route #2 and you independantly stumble across the 'secret' to making that film, there is nothing they can do to stop you from making and selling film based on that process. That's what patents are for. If you dont file a patent and someone else 'discovers' your invention, then tough luck.
What makes the Nikon situation different is the DMCA applies to copyright and has no equivalent in the patent world.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever the submitter is, he/she seems to have a pretty rosy view of a merger would result in. It doesn't mean that both XM and Sirius would fuse into one all encompassing uber service where you would get every existing channels for the same monthly fee. It just means that XM/Sirius would be owned under a single corporate umbrella. I would not be shocked to see increased monthly fees post-merger. One thing keeping subscription fees at their current level is the fierce competition with each other and fear that a price increase would be met with a flood of subscribers jumping to the competition.
If anything, they would try to differentiate each service in the market *even more* and remove redundancy, so to get the whole variety of channels, you would have to subscribe to both. It makes sense from a shareholders perspective; if XM and Sirius are both the same company, why spend resources having nearly identical Rock stations on both carriers? But if you put 80's and Metal Rock stations on XM and Top 40 and Punk Rock stations on Sirius, then listeners who enjoy all genres of rock have to make some painful decisions or (ideally) subscribe to both. And if you owned the entire satellite radio market, then there's no fear of your customers jumping to the competition, because there is none.
Single pixel images will revolutionize the efficiency of porn sharing.
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:(
Are you into hentai? Here you go!
Barely legal teens? Coming right up
Even goatse freaks dont need to be left out:
.
Though I'll probably get modded down for that last one
From the keynote, they are hoping for a mere 1% of the phone market by 2008. Sony, OTOH is hoping to be the market leader by then, and for that to happen, $599 is insanity.
Not if the robots are vegan.
I'm not at all concerned about getting eaten by Asimo or TMX Elmo.
If the Matrix , the Terminator, and Futurama have taught me anything, is that robots would be more likely to farm me, shoot me, or steal from me first.
I'd be more worried about getting eaten by *you*, should the robo-apocalypse ever come to pass...
I have to disagree with this example. The whole Aeris thing is a pre-rendered cut scene with no interactivity. It's just a movie and we all know that movies can make people cry.
The question posed here is can a *game* make you cry. Not a video stuck into the middle of a game, but from the actual gameplay. How many times have you cried while actually playing a game as opposed to sitting there with the controller in your lap watching some CGI whose trigger and resolution you had absolutely no control over? Not many, I'd wager.
probably for the same reason that they watch Lost. Replace Eon8 with Dharma Initiative, and the similarities are marked.
:)
It's mysterious, has dead ends and redirections, uses cryptic codenames and strings of alphanumeric characters that hints at something much larger and sinister behind it, complete with a countdown to boot.
Interesting too, is how people also came up with all sorts of wild theories and found connections that the creators didnt originally intend (like the 8th eon being the end of the world).
"The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information."
Yeah, that seems to describe Lost pretty well too
Most of the games on the list are quite old. They come off as being silly/stupid but still amusing. 'Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom'? Sounds like a game I tried to write on my old C-64. But with modern media blasting us with ad-driven content, we get to see new lows in game-naming space. Here's a fairly recent entry that should have made the list:
Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
Make fun of Ninja Hamster and Cacoma Knight in Bizyland all you want, but at least those game titles dont sound like a press release to some merchandising tie-in.
If there is one thing that annoys me is that Apple never allows the option of configuring the lowest model laptop with a DVD burner. They didnt allow it with the iBook and now they dont allow it with the Macbook.
With these new revisions, the 1.83Ghz & 2.0Ghz models are nearly the exact same machine, yet only the 2.0Ghz has the Superdrive dvd burner. Go to the online Apple store link and no, you cannot add the Superdrive to the lower speed model.
You have to pay the premium for the speed bump for the privelege of burning DVDs? WTF is up with that? Burning DVDs isnt exactly power user territory; and it certainly doesnt rely on having 2.0Ghz vs 1.83Ghz.
So why limit the Superdrive to only the higher end model, Apple? Does the higher model offer such a negligible real world performance boost for the extra $300, you're afraid that you'll completely poach 2.0Ghz sales by giving the 1.83Ghz the option for DVD burning?
Yes it was. Read the article:
The three men are being accused of "conspiring to traffic in a technology used to circumvent a copyright protection system and conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement," in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
It sounds like that's exactly what they were busted for...
If you RTFA'd or read about it earlier, they were selling the modded Xboxes with pirated games. I hate the DMCA as much as anyone else, but these guys are in the wrong here.
Waitaminnit, we cant just say 'they broke the law and they deserve whatever they get'. We really need to look at this a little more deeply.
They illegally distributed 77 copies of games. You dont need the DMCA to bust people for that, copyright law already covers that infraction, right? So why invoke the unholy spectre of the DMCA?
These guys are facing 5 years prison for this. What sort of punishments would these dudes be receiving if they had sold modded Xboxen with no pre-loaded games? Or what if they had sold the 77 games on DVD-R, without also providing the mod-chips and hard-drives? IOW, are prosecuters using DMCA as a way of going after harsher punishments that would otherwise be impossible under plain-old copyright law?
Currently, mod-chips are technically illegal under the DMCA, but it begs the question 'Should mod-chips themselves be illegal'? If not, then doesnt that throw this whole story in a different light? These guys deserve punishment, without a doubt, but they deserve fair punishment.
That's why this topic should be discussed on slashdot. If you really hate the DMCA, as you claim, then you should closely examine every application of it.
oh yeah, IANAL etc etc.
So naming a gene whose function that one in a thousand people couldnt even begin to describe is harming their image, but blackening the skies with lawyers over what most people would consider a non-issue doesnt?
Nintendo should protect their brand, but come on. This 'intrusion' on thier namespace is pretty obscure. It's not as if the research facility is using the name to get grants or sell drugs.
Personally I think it's cool. There is actually a gene named after Sonic the hedgehoge that has a role in developmental biology. I'd think that companies would be amused that they are being recognized in important scientific work.
Of course the researchers backed down. They have far more important things to spend their money on than defending pointless lawsuits. They should have renamed the gene NLCBMSMA (Nintendo Lawyers Can Bite My Shiny Metal Ass) or would they have been sued by Fox instead?
Check out the movie's ratings on www.rottentomatoes.com
Aeon Flux is currently running about 10%, which even amongst other craptastic cgi-fests, is suprisingly poor. That rating puts it about even with movies like Catwoman, and Elektra, which should tell you all you need to know.
MS wanted to release this season so they could capitalize on having the Xmas season all to themselves and jump on as much early marketshare as possible in the next-gen console wars. Next Xmas will be too late. All three consoles will be available and it will be a free-for-all at retail. Thier window of mega-opportunity is right now, and they are failing to maximize on it.
Now the $500 purchases that would have gone to MS are now being spent on other gifts (not necessarily console related) and come January, people are going to be worrying about paying off holiday bills, not spending even more. How much in sales, and more importantly marketshare, have they thrown right out the window simply by not having an adequate supply?
Microsoft is all about ubiquity, not scarity. Having consumers not being able to buy however much MS product whenever they want is totally counter to thier MO. The admission by Ballmer about poor yields as quite telling. Publicly, they are disappointed. Behind the scenes, they are probably furious and ready to vomit with rage. The supply issues may not be thier fault, but that doesnt lessen the damage...
The MPAA is not preventing you from playing DVDs under linux. AFAIK, anyone can license the DVD codecs and release a commercial player. In fact Linspire has done just that:
p hp?product_id=11804
http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details.
Of course it wouldnt make much sense to give away a licensed DVD player for free if you have to still pay the royalties for each copy, so yeah, they have to charge for it. There are other companies that are also working on linux based DVD players, though I dont follow it, so I dont know what state they are at. Maybe someone can post some links.
However, I would wager that even the most wonderful commercial DVD player for linux would sell like crap and people would still gripe about playing DVDs under linux. The thing that prevents people from legally playing commercial DVDs under linux is their aversion to paying for software, not some MPAA/DMCA conspiracy.
Which is quite silly really. Have you bought a stand-alone DVD player? Then you have paid the royalties for that capability. Even the windows-based DVD app that came with your video card probably wasnt bundled for free either...
This was a nifty piece of investigation, but doesnt address the largest cause of firefox memory usage. Namely, memory is not freed when tabs are closed.
5 6
See:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314
Try a test. Fire up a clean FF and note memory usage. Go to somewhere like fark.com and open 50 links in tabs and note mem usage. Close every tab and see if mem usage goes down. It doesnt. Most people visit dozens of pages a day. Hundreds per week. After a while, the memory footprint of FF can grow to epic proportions (ie hundreds of megs) even with only a few tabs open because FF cannot release memory of closed tabs. I have to restart FF every week or so because I'm tired of it using 200MB for no good reason.
It doesnt bother me so much that FF stores uncompressed images for tabs which are active (ie. open, even if not visible). The article itself mentions a performance hit when storing compressed images. But why the f*** cant it free the memory when I close that tab? The fact that I explicity closed it should indicate that I dont want it anymore. FF developers have acknowledged the problem but have said that there is no easy fix. Probably a poor design in the underlying architecture, though no one associated with the project would state it that bluntly.
BTW, this article reminds me of one of the best reasons to use some sort of adblocking software. You save quite a bit of memory when you arent caching a dozen useless images with every new web page you visit. Especially in light of the above bug, you can significantly slow down the expanding memory footprint with adblocking.
Can you make a copy of a car, download a 'car crack', then sell the car while still retaining the full use of said car? No? Then stop comparing this with selling a used car. A slightly closer analogy would be buying Harry Potter, then scanning / photocopying it before reselling it. And even that's a poor comparison because it takes a lot of effort to scan a huge novel and the resulting copy is less convienent to use than the original.
That said, I dont think publishers should have any say in what happens to a copy of a brand new game that somone bought. Nor do they deserve any of the revenue generated by the resale. But if they think that profits are being seriously impacted by second hand sales, that's just going to make them move all the quicker to Steam type DRM. Where 'one custumer = one sale' and transferring ownership is nigh impossible.
It's not that far off. Look how gamers have eaten up HL2 and Steam in droves and are begging for more.
Maybe this could be tacked on as two parter:
I think we can all appreciate the extra resources required to port a game to a different OS. The size of the current linux market may not make a native linux port financially attractive, though Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri did see a linux version, so the idea of a linux SM game is not without precedence. If no native Linux version is planned, have you ever given consideration to working with the Transgaming people to get Civ IV running under Linux using Cedega?
Even if not officially supported, that would enable you to reach a larger segment of the gaming market yet not require the level of resources of a full blown port.
I dont doubt your observations, but you make it sound like publishers dont have the first clue what makes a good game, when in fact they are just following the market/money. "Safe" -> more predictable sales, while "innovative" -> uncertain revenue. It's not hard to see which route most companies are going to want to take. I'm sure there are publishers out there that are so dumb as to believe 'eXXXTreme Back-Alley Bumfights' would make a good foundation for a game, but I dont believe the industry on the whole can be that ignorant about what makes a quality game..
If anyone is to blame, wouldnt you point the finger at the millions of people who just eat up all the derivative crap we see rehashed again and again? When the likes of a Katamari Damacy consistently outsells Madden and the Sims, maybe then we would see a change in how games are selected and developed. Until then, you'll have to look to the independent publishers to bring you those cool offbeat titles.
It reminds me of Disgaia, a tactical RPG for the PS2. I've never played it, but everyone who has it raves about it and the reviews are fantastic. IIRC correctly, the company that did the North American release did an intitial manufacturing run of ~10,000 units (someone correct me if I'm wrong). It sold so well, they had to make more and it paved the way for more similar games.
By all accounts, Disgaia is considered to be a success, but if you approached EA with a wonderfully made game that would appeal to 20,000 people, they would laugh in your face. Not because the game sucks, but because that's the very definition of 'niche'.
...for mediocre quality shows. At least, that's how I've heard it described.
Let's face it, whether it be anime, tv, movies, or games, probably 10% are great, 30% are mediocre, and the rest are not worth the time of day.
With the top 10%, they could be the most pirated shows of all time, but will still do amazing numbers at retail. Think Star Wars ep III, The Incredibles, Halo, or Evangelion. These are franchises that fans will spend oodles of money on, and even the most rampant piracy could not render them unprofitable.
The problem fansubbing brings is with the mediocre shows. I've rented and borrowed games and movies that I wanted to try out, but afterwards would not have a hope in hell of spending $20-$50 dollars for, because they simply were not that good. I was/am a big Evangelion fan, and that was one series I had no problem dropping the bucks on. I dont really follow the anime scene anymore, but I'd imagine most anime would not be able to pry $20 per disc out of my wallet nowadays.
Fansubbing can indeed generate excitement around a lesser known series, and I'd go so far as to suggest that some series' North American popularity was built on fansubs. But unless the show is of exceptional quality, I'd imagine most people would not be inclined to buy a pricey DVD set for a ho-hum show having already seen it.
If a publisher has to spend X dollars to distribute a product while competing with a free (and illegal) source of the exact same thing on the internet, unless there is some reason to expect brisk sales (like a large rabid fanbase), then it would not be a stretch to decide you may be financially better off not releasing it at all.
There was a recent article in Scientific American* talking about suspended animation that may give clues as to how this works. Cell damage does indeed take place during low oxygen states (hypoxia) when the cell's metabolism continues without sufficient oxygen available and allows free radicals to build up and cause cellular damage. It appears that in some organisms, when you reduce the oxygen to an even lower state or remove it completely (anoxia), the cells can essentially shut down thier metabolism into a state of suspended animation. In other words, either normal oxygen or no oxygen can be tolerated, but there is a 10 fold window of low oxygen concentration that can be deadly. I believe this is where the brain damage occurs. If you stopped breathing right now, your blood still contains oxygen which would get slowly depleted as the cells continue to respirate. Perhaps the key to this technique is to rapidly replace the blood with a no/very low oxygen content fluid that will transition the cells from normal oxygen to anoxia as quickly as possible an minimize the amount of time spent in hypoxia.
This procedure has already been demonstrated in animals like mice though it is unknown whether humans can safely undergo the same conditions, as we (obviously) dont normally go into hibernation. Though we've all heard stories of martial arts masters lowering their breathing rates and body temps for extended periods, so maybe it is possible. It would be an absolutely amazing breakthrough, though I wouldnt volunteer to be the first human test subject ;)
* I am not remotely an expert in this field, but my background is in biology. I hope my memory has recalled the facts of the SciAm story without too much error.
Hmmm, cool looking product but from looking at the last page of the article, the reviewer rates the ease of setup on WindowsXP 10/10 but gives the ease of linux setup as a measly 2/10.
The reviewer said he had to ask the Sonos community (maybe a web forum?) for help getting it to work under Suse. Apparantly you need to run Samba for the Sonos controller to be able to access the music and gave the reviewer enough trouble that he writes:
"For Linux wizards, this is probably just another opportunity to play and have fun, but for me it was some serious work, and I would not have been able to do it but for the graciousness of the Sonos community. "
It seems that they haven't put a lot of polish on the linux support for the server end yet. I'm wondering why is there no NFS support which should do away with needing Samba... I have my entire music collection on an NFS share, and I'd expect any linux client to simply mount it over the network and away we go.
Should we be giving much credit to a product just because it runs linux if it's really that difficult to make it play nicely with existing linux networks?
One thing that's always irked me about the prequels that I've only recently put my finger on is the gratuitous use of lightsabers compared to what we saw in 4-6.
In Ep 4, lightsabers were shown quite sparingly:
Luke in Obi-Wan's house
Obi Wan in the Cantina
Luke practicing on the M.Falcon
Obi-Wan vs Vader
In the scene when Obi-Wan gives Anakin's lightsaber to Luke, he makes a point of telling Luke that it's a warrior's weapon that represents honour and grace. You would not expect a samurai to use his sword to cut sandwiches; merely drawing your weapon is a significant act in itself. Contrast with episode 1 when in the opening scene, all it took for Obi-Wan and Anakin to whip 'em out was a loud noise.
Of course, in 1977, the technology level wasnt there, so every second of lightsabre screen time cost a lot more than now when CGI is just a commodity, which probably explains it's scarcity in eps 4-6. However, Lucas' often gratuitous use of lightsabre battles in the prequels totally smacks of fan service. IMHO it really dilutes the mystique and significance of the lightsaber and makes the jedi look like gang members who think running around with dual beretta's held sideways is cool. Nothing at all like the introspective and disciplined order the jedi are supposed to represent.
... I wouldnt be watching Lost now. It's a densely packed storyline and I missed a couple episodes a while back. When I finally got back to it, someone who I thought was dead was alive and I didnt know what the f**k was going on.
I was able to catch up on BT, and now I can follow it when it broadcasts. Otherwise I would have said to hell with it, and they would have lost a viewer (no pun intended).
If past episodes were made available for download at a reasonable price, I would have paid for a handful of previous shows. I wouldnt even care if it was full commercials and DRM'd up the wazoo. For $2-$3 per episode, I would consider it just like a rental or buying a movie ticket. ie. a disposable purchase.
Though I wonder how many people would download torrents instead of buying the inevitable DVD release. The quality of the episodes I saw was so poor that if I was really such a big fan of the show, a 300 MB divx would be no substitute for the proper DVD boxset. For many people though, if the downloaded episodes are 'good enough', then I could see how it could potentially impact DVD sales.
Thanks, this was part of my point that I did a poor job of getting across. I also made a mistake in using the babelfish passage as an example. It's so famous, that it would probably inevitably be in the movie.
My point was that an Adams book has *many* such well written passages, and not all of them are guide entries that you can do a CGI cut-scene with.
In a movie you cant possibly try to do film equivalents of them all, but the more you leave out, the more you drift away from what makes the HHG2TG books so enjoyable.
An example from the famous babelfish passage:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
How the heck are you supposed to film that and keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet passages like this are a defining feature of an Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they attempted to put passages like this in the movie and if they can pull it off.
Compare with LOTR, or Harry Potter, or any Michael Crichton novel, which are more plot driven works and thus can translate to a visual medium like movies and still capture the spirit of the original text much better. At least IMHO
Still, I'm intent on seeing the movie and hope it retains some of the classic Adams humour...
"On the other hand, manufacturers of photographic film certainly keep the chemical makeup, etc of their products secret. Why shouldn't digital camera makers be able to hide the methods of RAW storage for their products? "
Not remotely the same thing. Film makers might have a 'special formula' that they either 1) file a patent to protect it's process and composition for a specified length of time or 2) not disclose the information and protect it as a trade secret.
If they go route #2 and you independantly stumble across the 'secret' to making that film, there is nothing they can do to stop you from making and selling film based on that process. That's what patents are for. If you dont file a patent and someone else 'discovers' your invention, then tough luck.
What makes the Nikon situation different is the DMCA applies to copyright and has no equivalent in the patent world.