Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
Not to sound too simplistic about this naming business, but as far as the English language is concerned, Wii just sounds ridiculous - for the simple reason that "Wii" conjures up images of either a) pee b) peeing c) penis. Wee, weeing, or wee-wee. Get it? Of course you do. Why the hell Nintendo couldn't is beyond me.
I mean they thought that us English speakers would see "wii" and think "we", as in "community", "friendship", "everyone". First of all, that is cheesy. It just rings of Japanese schlock marketing right there. One thing I've noticed is that their marketing techniques grant a level of self-referential corniness and easy puns that comes across as cheesy in the West.
As long as the games are good, it doesn't matter. I certainly plan to by one of those Nintendo weenies. But I'm going to make fun of it for a loooong time I think (unfortunately).
There are so many different artists that are pushing the envelope these days in the electronic music scene. You can be a great fan of electronica and very effectively ignore all the 4-on-the-floor house crap that electronic music is often confined to in people's minds.
In fact, you can readily remove the urge to listen to a "beat" altogether - Vidna Obmana comes to mind, or even Phillip Glass and Brian Eno, one of the "pioneers".
To listen to artists that push the envelope without the pretentious disharmony crap "artsy" electronic is known for, try Boards of Canada, Biosphere, Autrechre, Pete Namlook, Bill Laswell, Aphex Twin, Lustmord, even Underworld.
You know what is a positive sign? While the reviewer hadn't read or listened to Hitchhiker's in the past, his writing reflects he caught Adam's sardonic, existentialist British humor:
For those of you who don't know this is your basic boy meets girl, boy loses girl to president of the galaxy, boy's planet is destroyed, boy finds girl and travels through the galaxy in search of the ultimate question. You know, the usual.
Looks like the spirit of the books is present in the movies, for the author to obviously have caught the "bug" - that's the most important thing.
I know another Slashdot discussion of Steam will lead to more dissing of Steam, much of it justified, but think about it this way. Steam is a great example of how a product can be distributed and not need the dreaded middle-man. The dreaded middle-man is the distributor. Vivendi. Next time around, maybe the won't even have a mega-corp involved, maybe they'll release it directly to consumers.
This is what needs to happen in the Music industry. Cut out the middle-man, cut out the need for the RIAA, etc.
By the way, people preloading HL2 didn't have a problem playing it, only those who bought retail (Vivendi's domain) requiring activation.
What's a little silly about the Forbes list is that one of the criteria is whether each dormitory has computer access in their LOBBIES. Uh, large universities that have hundreds of lobby areas like UB, aren't going to get that checkmark unless they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, whereas a small school can spend a fraction.
Another thing: I would find having a laptop expense part of my tuition to be very obnoxious. What if I don't want one? What if I already have a desktop that I prefer to use? The only reason I can see the benefit of this is for taking notes, but who wants to be in a lecture hall with the click-clacking of hundreds of simultaneous keys being typed echoing off the walls?
Remember how excessive advertising was one of the things that made Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Diamond Age and Snow Crash so convincing, in that you had whole commercial avenues that were bloated with "mediotrons" flashing advertising imagery and holographs, etc?
If a game company develops a game that tries to incorporate this type of futuristic corporate "feel", they could do so by using legitimate, actual advertisors. You could have commercial streets that flash billboards just like in "Blade Runner" with the giant billboard of the Asian women drinking Coke, or imitate the impression of a busy city street with blazing pixellated neon-framed ads. I think this could be a symbiotic relationship here that works.
As a web developer / designer, I've been using Mozilla and the like for a long time. But what interests me is what the majority of people use - I need to design stuff that works for everything. Since Explorer has ALWAYS been a pain when it comes to CSS compliance, myself and every designer out there have had to bend over backward to write code that has all these little IE fixes built in. I'm sick of having to play with code and then check both Netscape and Explorer for consistency. Please, oh please, give IE 7 some decent fricken CSS compliance!! That way, I will KNOW that it will all look the bloody same, just like it should for pete's sakes.
Remember that Slashdot just recently updated their code (this was like a few weeks ago) and they mentioned that there would be some serious bug issues for a bit.
Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? That's a great place to go to get form letters to send out to your congressmen, find out about copyright law and digital rights, and, of course, donate or become a member to an organization that has professionals involved, including lawyers.
To see what Titan looks like we'll have to wait for Cassini to start making its closer fly-bys. I think the article said Cassini will do 45 or so fly-bys in the next 4 years and they'll get to around 600 miles away. That'll allow some very high resolution images of Titan and will be really interesting - this is still too far away to make any really revealing below-atmospheric level observations, as the atmosphere is so opaque and dense.
Exactly. There are of course many people who still live within an exlusive disc-media world and other "physical" media, and haven't even bridged that gap into the purely "digital" divide.
It's therefore a bit premature for record labels to celebrate mainstream "acceptance" of these horrid anti-copying devices, when the mainstream still doesn't give a hoot as they don't know / don't care / know specifically what that entails or how it infringes on their rights.
Mp3's are generally still a college level / nerd / for-the-privalaged medium with expensive doo-hickey devices to play them - Ipod costs $250 - $300 for crying out loud! - you can buy a CD-Player for $10 at Walmart, Target, or Radio Shack.
Copy protection is the kind of thing that will be slaughtered once MP3's become more actual mainstream. Then let's see about such "acceptance". The whole point of MP3s is the flawless and svelte transfer from one medium to another, without the junk of big goofy disks to carry around. The magic word is "transfer". We have the right to transfer and convert the content to any medium we wish. Once people become aware of the possibility of such freedom, they're really going to get as pissy as the rest of us and to hell with "mainstream acceptance".
Just FYI, here are some addresses in case you wish to speak your mind about copy-protection issues in general. I find that writing letters is a better way to create some sort of stir opposed to firing off an email. EA and Atari are bigwigs, some sort of "political" response has to start somewhere.
Electronic Arts Inc. 209 Redwood Shores Parkway Redwood City, CA 94065-1175 U.S.A.
don't forget to send one to their "report piracy" address:
Electronic Arts Inc. 915 - 118th Avenue SE, Suite 370 Bellevue, WA 98005
Atari: Head Office Atari, Inc. 417 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10016 Tel: +1 212-726-6500
it will be interesting to see what affect the monopoly's entrance makes when this goes down in the 2nd half of this year
Microsoft's entrance will probably destroy and conquer half of the market when it steamrolls in, and obliterate the more innovative ones. They have an unlimited supply of free marketing and advertising, with everybody with a Windows machine installed has MSN.com as their home link. How can they lose - as parent said, shortcut on desktop. 2)Big section devoted to it on MSN.com. 3)Have it be a standard program already pre-installed on new computers like Media Player.
I think it would help the author of the article to see past the "video game" visage for a moment. See it instead as "interactive fiction". Video games encompass anything that is interactive and electronically transmitted in some way.
Media are gradually getting away from the whole idea that games are just for nerds. This article, while humorously written, is kind of a callback to when adults were bewildered by all this button-mashing phenemenon in like, the 80's. Time to move on folks, interactive fiction in the form of video games is here to stay. And it will continue to evolve and encompass a ridiculous amount of reality; the lines between the two will become fuzzy.
Already government agencies are investing in projects to map reality in video games as a training, simulation tool. ONline worlds in the form of MMORPGs are dynamic and social-oriented (while still needing lots of work), and games are as entertaining and much more involving than movies could be. Try exploring an online world for once, like Dark Ages of Camelot. Humans love exploring frontiers and seeing new things. Thankfully, because of video games, we don't have to dwell on the age of cowyboys and pilgrims or vikings, we can explore on our own and have our own, unique, and original experiences.
Or instead of buying the x-arcade cabinet, which doesn't look that authentic, buy a Slikstik Arcade cabinet with control panel for $1500, then go over to Wells Gardner and pick up a D9200 which happens to fit perfectly into it.
Go to Retroblast.com and see how gorgeous this combination looks. It's the stuff of dreams, ladies and gentlemen.
I hate to sound like a radical, which I'm not, but I'm currently reading "1984" so that's kind of slanting my opinion on this and brings up some (unfair I admit) analogies.
Simliarities? If you own something as general as a "fact" you're becoming close outright declaration of possessing ideas, and who owns ideas sounds frighteningly simliar to what you're allowed to think and thus act on, which sounds reminiscent of "thought policing". Insert "idea expression policing" perhaps in this scenario, because under these rules something as intangible and ambiguous as "facts" will be copyrighted. Thus, you better be careful what facts you use and access - that notion is sounding more and more preposterous the more I think about it.
It's not a slippery slope analogy, because owning the rights to general "facts" is close enough to warrant outright concern in and of itself.
It kind of limits self-expression, doesn't it? I feel like this is sort of an ammendment issue almost. It's one thing for databases to charge fees for use, as harvesting information these days is a huge job. But *what* they harvest shouldn't belong to anybody, unless it's under a privacy issue or other disclosed / copyright issue / blah blah blah.
This is an interesting article, but the article misses the point. It's great that you have an exception to the rule and see women playing quake / counterstrike / gibbing-death-kill games but the truth of the matter is that online gaming, in general, is being swamped by female gamers but not in these kinds of games.
They're playing Sims, Dance Dance REvolution, and other social, simulation and interactivity-based games. That's where the real interest lies and the market is huge. Sims 2 will BLOW AWAY Far Cry and Pain Killer and maybe even DOOM 3 because 51% of the population that own a computer and play games are going to buy it.
This is a boon for many reasons, but it'll prove to be an economical choice to have availability on multiplte platforms.
Assault mode is back. Onslaught mode, simliar to capture-the-way-point like in Battlefield 1942 and Day of Defeat (HL mod) is addictive as caramal-covered crack bon-bons.
The weapons are already ridiculously balanced in the demo. The mini-gun is like the original UT. The gameplay feels like the original UT, and even the theme music is similar.
Something else to consider, perhaps more to the point in this case. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering the Betamax case as a previous legal blueprint to follow in this case. They are thus looking for an indication that at least a marginal percentage of usage is legal or non-copyright infringement use.
So how about this: what if a major company decided to use a p2p network as it's MAJOR outlet for file distribution. Say, a shareware program or game demo. This would be proof that p2p file-sharing programs are not exclusively used as "stolen-goods" transfers, it is a mainstream sharing network for permissable transfers. That would blow these cases wide open, as the judges are just looking for a reason to refer to Betamax here.
I hate SUV owners who decide to purchase their urban tanks for the wrong "safety" reasons. These people do assume that they will be safer in these vehicles, but it's also safe to assume they realize that their own personal safety will come at the cost of whomever they get into an accident WITH.
I've had my eye on those mini coopers for awhile, but sadly, I know that in off-kilter SUV to Econo-vehicles, a collision with an SUV would probably absolutly demolish the Cooper, while the SUV would drive away unhindered and safely cacooned in their 2 tons of metal.
It bothers me that SUV owners don't think of this simple fact - they are literally buying their safety away from others.
BUT let me add: if you acutally use an SUV for proper reasons, congratulations, get it dirty and drive over mountains and stuff. Otherwise, don't be selfish please, sell it. Save some gas, save a bloody miniture ocean of natural oil, and get to your shopping mall like any other sane, rational human being.
There's no point in a hardware company proclaiming the end of 32bit chips. It will be the demand of software that will push current processor capacities. Currently, we have no software on the horizon that would push mainstream markets to push out 32bit. Word Processors certainly aren't going to require 64bit anytime soon.
The only market I can see are games. Is that going to convince people to curtail their upgrading budget and shell out $2000 just to play doom3 and half-life2 and all those games at the best possible frame-rate? Maybe, but 2005 seems soon.
Yeah you're right. Reloaded was a horrible movie. As far as "cinematic" movie would go, this movie was a train-wreck.
But I think what the Wachowsky's were basically up to was simply using film as a vehicle for their philosophical treatsies. It doesn't make for a good movie, but maybe it wasn't trying to entertain as hard as the original Matrix was (and succeeded at).
Basically I kind of compare what the directors were doing in Reloaded to what philosophers used to do when spreading treatsies around on pamphlets. They used the popular medium of the day to distribute ideas. Kind of like Reloaded - it's shell is pure cinema, but the substance is not cinema at all, and if considered as such will be boring, convoluted, and episodic at best. But the ideas in it were actually pretty good, but mere heavy-handed philosophical clap-trap if considered from a "cinematic" perspective.
think the scariest thing is that I haven't heard a single, unqualified bit of praise for the film so far. It's not like people love it or hate it, just that they either hate it or can tolerate sitting through it...
Slashdot Mirror
I mean they thought that us English speakers would see "wii" and think "we", as in "community", "friendship", "everyone". First of all, that is cheesy. It just rings of Japanese schlock marketing right there. One thing I've noticed is that their marketing techniques grant a level of self-referential corniness and easy puns that comes across as cheesy in the West.
As long as the games are good, it doesn't matter. I certainly plan to by one of those Nintendo weenies. But I'm going to make fun of it for a loooong time I think (unfortunately).
In fact, you can readily remove the urge to listen to a "beat" altogether - Vidna Obmana comes to mind, or even Phillip Glass and Brian Eno, one of the "pioneers".
To listen to artists that push the envelope without the pretentious disharmony crap "artsy" electronic is known for, try Boards of Canada, Biosphere, Autrechre, Pete Namlook, Bill Laswell, Aphex Twin, Lustmord, even Underworld.
This is what needs to happen in the Music industry. Cut out the middle-man, cut out the need for the RIAA, etc.
By the way, people preloading HL2 didn't have a problem playing it, only those who bought retail (Vivendi's domain) requiring activation.
The game, by the way, is amazing.
Another thing: I would find having a laptop expense part of my tuition to be very obnoxious. What if I don't want one? What if I already have a desktop that I prefer to use? The only reason I can see the benefit of this is for taking notes, but who wants to be in a lecture hall with the click-clacking of hundreds of simultaneous keys being typed echoing off the walls?
If a game company develops a game that tries to incorporate this type of futuristic corporate "feel", they could do so by using legitimate, actual advertisors. You could have commercial streets that flash billboards just like in "Blade Runner" with the giant billboard of the Asian women drinking Coke, or imitate the impression of a busy city street with blazing pixellated neon-framed ads. I think this could be a symbiotic relationship here that works.
As a web developer / designer, I've been using Mozilla and the like for a long time. But what interests me is what the majority of people use - I need to design stuff that works for everything. Since Explorer has ALWAYS been a pain when it comes to CSS compliance, myself and every designer out there have had to bend over backward to write code that has all these little IE fixes built in. I'm sick of having to play with code and then check both Netscape and Explorer for consistency. Please, oh please, give IE 7 some decent fricken CSS compliance!! That way, I will KNOW that it will all look the bloody same, just like it should for pete's sakes.
Remember that Slashdot just recently updated their code (this was like a few weeks ago) and they mentioned that there would be some serious bug issues for a bit.
Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? That's a great place to go to get form letters to send out to your congressmen, find out about copyright law and digital rights, and, of course, donate or become a member to an organization that has professionals involved, including lawyers.
To see what Titan looks like we'll have to wait for Cassini to start making its closer fly-bys. I think the article said Cassini will do 45 or so fly-bys in the next 4 years and they'll get to around 600 miles away. That'll allow some very high resolution images of Titan and will be really interesting - this is still too far away to make any really revealing below-atmospheric level observations, as the atmosphere is so opaque and dense.
It's therefore a bit premature for record labels to celebrate mainstream "acceptance" of these horrid anti-copying devices, when the mainstream still doesn't give a hoot as they don't know / don't care / know specifically what that entails or how it infringes on their rights.
Mp3's are generally still a college level / nerd / for-the-privalaged medium with expensive doo-hickey devices to play them - Ipod costs $250 - $300 for crying out loud! - you can buy a CD-Player for $10 at Walmart, Target, or Radio Shack.
Copy protection is the kind of thing that will be slaughtered once MP3's become more actual mainstream. Then let's see about such "acceptance". The whole point of MP3s is the flawless and svelte transfer from one medium to another, without the junk of big goofy disks to carry around. The magic word is "transfer". We have the right to transfer and convert the content to any medium we wish. Once people become aware of the possibility of such freedom, they're really going to get as pissy as the rest of us and to hell with "mainstream acceptance".
Just FYI, here are some addresses in case you wish to speak your mind about copy-protection issues in general. I find that writing letters is a better way to create some sort of stir opposed to firing off an email. EA and Atari are bigwigs, some sort of "political" response has to start somewhere.
Electronic Arts Inc.
209 Redwood Shores Parkway
Redwood City, CA 94065-1175
U.S.A.
don't forget to send one to their "report piracy" address:
Electronic Arts Inc.
915 - 118th Avenue SE, Suite 370
Bellevue, WA 98005
Atari:
Head Office
Atari, Inc.
417 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10016
Tel: +1 212-726-6500
Product PR
us.pr@atari.com
Tel: +1 978-921-3700
Microsoft's entrance will probably destroy and conquer half of the market when it steamrolls in, and obliterate the more innovative ones. They have an unlimited supply of free marketing and advertising, with everybody with a Windows machine installed has MSN.com as their home link. How can they lose - as parent said, shortcut on desktop. 2)Big section devoted to it on MSN.com. 3)Have it be a standard program already pre-installed on new computers like Media Player.
Media are gradually getting away from the whole idea that games are just for nerds. This article, while humorously written, is kind of a callback to when adults were bewildered by all this button-mashing phenemenon in like, the 80's. Time to move on folks, interactive fiction in the form of video games is here to stay. And it will continue to evolve and encompass a ridiculous amount of reality; the lines between the two will become fuzzy.
Already government agencies are investing in projects to map reality in video games as a training, simulation tool. ONline worlds in the form of MMORPGs are dynamic and social-oriented (while still needing lots of work), and games are as entertaining and much more involving than movies could be. Try exploring an online world for once, like Dark Ages of Camelot. Humans love exploring frontiers and seeing new things. Thankfully, because of video games, we don't have to dwell on the age of cowyboys and pilgrims or vikings, we can explore on our own and have our own, unique, and original experiences.
Go to Retroblast.com and see how gorgeous this combination looks. It's the stuff of dreams, ladies and gentlemen.
Simliarities? If you own something as general as a "fact" you're becoming close outright declaration of possessing ideas, and who owns ideas sounds frighteningly simliar to what you're allowed to think and thus act on, which sounds reminiscent of "thought policing". Insert "idea expression policing" perhaps in this scenario, because under these rules something as intangible and ambiguous as "facts" will be copyrighted. Thus, you better be careful what facts you use and access - that notion is sounding more and more preposterous the more I think about it.
It's not a slippery slope analogy, because owning the rights to general "facts" is close enough to warrant outright concern in and of itself.
It kind of limits self-expression, doesn't it? I feel like this is sort of an ammendment issue almost. It's one thing for databases to charge fees for use, as harvesting information these days is a huge job. But *what* they harvest shouldn't belong to anybody, unless it's under a privacy issue or other disclosed / copyright issue / blah blah blah.
They're playing Sims, Dance Dance REvolution, and other social, simulation and interactivity-based games. That's where the real interest lies and the market is huge. Sims 2 will BLOW AWAY Far Cry and Pain Killer and maybe even DOOM 3 because 51% of the population that own a computer and play games are going to buy it.
Assault mode is back. Onslaught mode, simliar to capture-the-way-point like in Battlefield 1942 and Day of Defeat (HL mod) is addictive as caramal-covered crack bon-bons.
The weapons are already ridiculously balanced in the demo. The mini-gun is like the original UT. The gameplay feels like the original UT, and even the theme music is similar.
I love it.
So how about this: what if a major company decided to use a p2p network as it's MAJOR outlet for file distribution. Say, a shareware program or game demo. This would be proof that p2p file-sharing programs are not exclusively used as "stolen-goods" transfers, it is a mainstream sharing network for permissable transfers. That would blow these cases wide open, as the judges are just looking for a reason to refer to Betamax here.
Remember when Maestro was released to the Slashdot crowd? Big mistake. That poor rover was slashdotted!
I've had my eye on those mini coopers for awhile, but sadly, I know that in off-kilter SUV to Econo-vehicles, a collision with an SUV would probably absolutly demolish the Cooper, while the SUV would drive away unhindered and safely cacooned in their 2 tons of metal.
It bothers me that SUV owners don't think of this simple fact - they are literally buying their safety away from others.
BUT let me add: if you acutally use an SUV for proper reasons, congratulations, get it dirty and drive over mountains and stuff. Otherwise, don't be selfish please, sell it. Save some gas, save a bloody miniture ocean of natural oil, and get to your shopping mall like any other sane, rational human being.
The only market I can see are games. Is that going to convince people to curtail their upgrading budget and shell out $2000 just to play doom3 and half-life2 and all those games at the best possible frame-rate? Maybe, but 2005 seems soon.
Use Flash for the banners, rid yourselves of the annoyance of tables, and dive into div's! Yes, that pun was intended to be obnoxious.
But I think what the Wachowsky's were basically up to was simply using film as a vehicle for their philosophical treatsies. It doesn't make for a good movie, but maybe it wasn't trying to entertain as hard as the original Matrix was (and succeeded at).
Basically I kind of compare what the directors were doing in Reloaded to what philosophers used to do when spreading treatsies around on pamphlets. They used the popular medium of the day to distribute ideas. Kind of like Reloaded - it's shell is pure cinema, but the substance is not cinema at all, and if considered as such will be boring, convoluted, and episodic at best. But the ideas in it were actually pretty good, but mere heavy-handed philosophical clap-trap if considered from a "cinematic" perspective.
Actually, I found one.