I don't see how DRM can be solved at the BIOS level. Unless the media player and file system are completely controlled by hardware with no OS intervention, there will always be a piece of software asking "Is this file OK to play/copy?" As long as this query exists, there is an opportunity for a programmer to fake the response and play the file anyways.
Sometimes it's not as simple as not using the feature. My sister-in-law's Verizon phone (not sure what brand) sucks down batteries because of her bells and whistles (color LCD, fancy speaker for ring tones, etc). My old Nokia can last much longer without needing to recharge. That comes in handy for situations like when I'm out on my boat.
Why would I want to SSH my server from a bus? My company doesn't know my cell number for a reason.
I can get a league going at Real Time Sports for $10 cheaper than $99 and they actually have some years experience under their belt. rtsports and yahoo are both pretty good sites so EA had better have something pretty good to offer. I think their best strategy is to bundle discounts with their Madden line of games.
I do think this is a good idea for the person who is interested in fantasy football and doesn't have a group to join, but I'm curious how they'll work such public leagues. There are only so many players in the NFL to choose from.
I stand corrected. I looked this up and you are right. It was always explained to me (way back when I worked for a rental company) that the new release VHS were $70 - $120 merely to keep people from buying copies for the first few months a video was avaiable to rent.
The overexposure was probably caused by the Dick estate being in probate for so many years. The only reason Total Recall got made when it did was because the rights were acquired before Dick died. There are probably just a lot of producers and directors who wanted to do Philip K Dick movie adaptations who can now actually do so. It also helps that the estate is willing to sell off movie rights to anything and everything instead of being too picky about it.
That was my point. Sorry for not being clearer. So far, Do Androids Dream... and Scanner Darly are the only novels I am aware of that have movie adaptations.
Thinking of "not much SF in it," one of my favorite parts of Man in the High Castle (which would be my #1 choice for movie adaptation) was when they debated if Grasshopper Lies Heavy was indeed SF.
Keanu's spaced out like acting will be perfect for the last half of the novel. I just hope he can do a decent job of the first half where Arctor is still somewhat sane. I always pictured either Peter Weller as Bob Arctor though.
I was picturing the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons as Barris.
I had no specific person in my head as Donna, but I agree that Winona Rider just isn't what I had in mind. However, I think that Courtney Love would be an equally bad choice.
I agree. Also, Ubik had to be a lot more action-oriented to be made into the Matrix (especially so that the filemakers would have plenty of opportunity to use their new camera tricks) and Time Out of Joint had to come off the Cold War undertones to make a viable Truman Show.
If this movie IS faithful to the novel and you're expecting something like Dazed and Confused, then you'll be very disappointed. A Scanner Darkly is really more of a descent into insanity novel. The drugs are merely the means of descent. It's a very good book. I'd like to see more of Dick's novels get made into movies. I am much more familiar with them than his short stories which typically get made into movies.
I remember back when Blockbuster had just about any title you were looking for new or old. The vast increase in the number of new releases they stocked forced them to cut the number of older releases each store carried. In fact I remember the day I noticed that they didn't have their Evil Dead or Doctor Who titles anymore at the Blockbuster in my hometown so they could make room for new releases of such crap as Tin Cup.
I don't think it would bother them terribly to ditch the rest of their older release library so they can stock the thousands of copies they would need of each title, but I do think it would put a crimp in their late fees that they make so much money off of.
If I'm not mistaken, movie studios cannot bar movie rental companies from buying a copy of a video in a format that Joe Public can get. I'm not sure how it works with DVDs, but back in the VHS days the copyright restrictions were no different on the rental tapes than the store bought tapes. Rental companies did have to pay more per copy of VHS tapes, but only because they bought them while they were still $70 per tape. Anyone could buy them at that point, but it was not popular since they typically dropped to $15 - $20 within two months. I used to get a catalog selling the $70 tapes that were still new releases in video stores but not available to buy in stores yet. Stores that sold VHS movies wouldn't stock VHS titles until the drop to $15 - $20 was made.
FOX's distributors might not sell directly to a video rental store, but the store can simply buy the videos elsewhere. I'm sure some store would be more than happy to sell Blockbuster the thousands of each video they want and there's not much FOX or its distributors can do about it.
It says that you don't know too many people who own an X-Box, but that's about all. Sales numbers are sales numbers. Microsoft doesn't have to check to see if you know someone before they sell a console to them.
As long as X-Box and Gamecube are still actively pushing their consoles, the PS2 is taking some form of heat from them. X-Box's monthly sales are dangerously close to PS2, but PS2 has a sizeable lead in overall sales. If PS2 throttles their console sales by making their console significantly more expensive, X-Box will have a legitimate opportunity to overtake them in monthly sales and maybe become the dominant market force.
The reason that it is coming to us yanks last is that Sony is still in a pretty tight race with X-Box here in the states. That is not true in Japan and I'm pretty sure that is also not true in Europe. I can the the fancy system coming out here, but I can't see it replacing the original system since Sony needs to have a (recently reduced) $150 model to remain competitive.
If you look at movie-based (or movie-inspired) games as a genre, the crap to good ratio is about the same as any other mature genre. Most of it is crap (ET, Rocketeer, Untouchables) but there are quite a few good games in the genre (Super Star Wars, Tron, Blade Runner). That's true for all genres.
What makes the movie-based genre different? The movies still get seen from time to time, especially the good ones. That makes us remember the games even if they were terrible. I can't remember most of the slew of crappy 1-on-1 fighter games from the mid-90's that were SF2/MK clones, but I can remember most of the NES movie conversions that were terrible (Total Recall, Three Stooges, Karate Kid, Rambo).
Movie-based games only seem worse because we actually remember the bad ones from this genre.
About 5 years ago, I built a 233 Mhz Pentium II machine for about $500. Each year, I put $100 - $200 into hardware upgrades and I have a machine that will very comfortably play today's games (ex. Tron 2.0, Vice City, UT2K4) and I still haven't spent more than $1500. On top of that, I was able to Frankenstein some parts from the old computer and buy a $30 case/power supply and I now have a spare computer that can read e-mail, surf the net, and play games along the age of RA2, Quake 3, and UT.
I agree that caching is a good thing in almost all circumstances. Generally, you would have to go out of your way to design a progam that makes caching inefficient.
I guess my point is that I was expecting ten really cool OS tricks that make their operating system run faster and after reading the article I feel somewhat let down that six of them invovled caching. Not to knock caching, but that's kind of a cureall for performance woes. From my training we've always looked at it like, "Well, we can't get it to run any faster so just throw a bigger cache on it."
Defrag is most certainly a form of caching. Placing data in a place where it is faster to access based on when the OS predicts it will be used is caching. The OS assumes (and with good reason) that a program accessing a sector off the disk will likely access other sectors belonging to the same file. Therefore the OS places all of these sectors in the same locality in order to access them faster when needed since sectors read insequentially off of the hard disk incurs a performance hit.
The only difference between this and memory caching is that the memory cache is a copy while the file system does not bother to keep a copy of the disk sector in two places since the medium has not changed (i.e. RAM to CPU cache) and the data storage is persistant.
...AdvanceMAME would support medium resolution monitors as easily as standard resoution so I can use it in my broken BOTSS cockpit (I think BOTSS machines all came from the factory already broken). That's too sweet a monitor to leave sitting there and I haven't made much progress on my Blitz 2000 cab lately.
Stratego is by and large my favortie board game. It's not got a lot of social interation as it's only a two person game, unless you count people watching the game. One thing I like about Stratego is that it is really fun to watch two people play who are good at it. It's like watching a really good game of poker because it's very easy to bluff both on offense and defense. I especially like the now-defunct Electronic Stratego just because you don't know the rank of a piece until that piece dies and the electronic bomb system is more challenging.
The other board games I love are Risk, Trivial Pursuit 80's Edition, and Clue.
I agree that the game stood on its own, but there is always room for improvement. The best part of the game was when you're chainsawing the boy scout kiddies and Ash says, "Kumbaya, baby."
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I don't see how DRM can be solved at the BIOS level. Unless the media player and file system are completely controlled by hardware with no OS intervention, there will always be a piece of software asking "Is this file OK to play/copy?" As long as this query exists, there is an opportunity for a programmer to fake the response and play the file anyways.
Sometimes it's not as simple as not using the feature. My sister-in-law's Verizon phone (not sure what brand) sucks down batteries because of her bells and whistles (color LCD, fancy speaker for ring tones, etc). My old Nokia can last much longer without needing to recharge. That comes in handy for situations like when I'm out on my boat.
Why would I want to SSH my server from a bus? My company doesn't know my cell number for a reason.
I can get a league going at Real Time Sports for $10 cheaper than $99 and they actually have some years experience under their belt. rtsports and yahoo are both pretty good sites so EA had better have something pretty good to offer. I think their best strategy is to bundle discounts with their Madden line of games.
I do think this is a good idea for the person who is interested in fantasy football and doesn't have a group to join, but I'm curious how they'll work such public leagues. There are only so many players in the NFL to choose from.
I stand corrected. I looked this up and you are right. It was always explained to me (way back when I worked for a rental company) that the new release VHS were $70 - $120 merely to keep people from buying copies for the first few months a video was avaiable to rent.
The overexposure was probably caused by the Dick estate being in probate for so many years. The only reason Total Recall got made when it did was because the rights were acquired before Dick died. There are probably just a lot of producers and directors who wanted to do Philip K Dick movie adaptations who can now actually do so. It also helps that the estate is willing to sell off movie rights to anything and everything instead of being too picky about it.
That was my point. Sorry for not being clearer. So far, Do Androids Dream... and Scanner Darly are the only novels I am aware of that have movie adaptations.
Thinking of "not much SF in it," one of my favorite parts of Man in the High Castle (which would be my #1 choice for movie adaptation) was when they debated if Grasshopper Lies Heavy was indeed SF.
Keanu's spaced out like acting will be perfect for the last half of the novel. I just hope he can do a decent job of the first half where Arctor is still somewhat sane. I always pictured either Peter Weller as Bob Arctor though.
I was picturing the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons as Barris.
I had no specific person in my head as Donna, but I agree that Winona Rider just isn't what I had in mind. However, I think that Courtney Love would be an equally bad choice.
I agree. Also, Ubik had to be a lot more action-oriented to be made into the Matrix (especially so that the filemakers would have plenty of opportunity to use their new camera tricks) and Time Out of Joint had to come off the Cold War undertones to make a viable Truman Show.
If this movie IS faithful to the novel and you're expecting something like Dazed and Confused, then you'll be very disappointed. A Scanner Darkly is really more of a descent into insanity novel. The drugs are merely the means of descent. It's a very good book. I'd like to see more of Dick's novels get made into movies. I am much more familiar with them than his short stories which typically get made into movies.
I remember back when Blockbuster had just about any title you were looking for new or old. The vast increase in the number of new releases they stocked forced them to cut the number of older releases each store carried. In fact I remember the day I noticed that they didn't have their Evil Dead or Doctor Who titles anymore at the Blockbuster in my hometown so they could make room for new releases of such crap as Tin Cup.
I don't think it would bother them terribly to ditch the rest of their older release library so they can stock the thousands of copies they would need of each title, but I do think it would put a crimp in their late fees that they make so much money off of.
If I'm not mistaken, movie studios cannot bar movie rental companies from buying a copy of a video in a format that Joe Public can get. I'm not sure how it works with DVDs, but back in the VHS days the copyright restrictions were no different on the rental tapes than the store bought tapes. Rental companies did have to pay more per copy of VHS tapes, but only because they bought them while they were still $70 per tape. Anyone could buy them at that point, but it was not popular since they typically dropped to $15 - $20 within two months. I used to get a catalog selling the $70 tapes that were still new releases in video stores but not available to buy in stores yet. Stores that sold VHS movies wouldn't stock VHS titles until the drop to $15 - $20 was made. FOX's distributors might not sell directly to a video rental store, but the store can simply buy the videos elsewhere. I'm sure some store would be more than happy to sell Blockbuster the thousands of each video they want and there's not much FOX or its distributors can do about it.
It says that you don't know too many people who own an X-Box, but that's about all. Sales numbers are sales numbers. Microsoft doesn't have to check to see if you know someone before they sell a console to them.
As long as X-Box and Gamecube are still actively pushing their consoles, the PS2 is taking some form of heat from them. X-Box's monthly sales are dangerously close to PS2, but PS2 has a sizeable lead in overall sales. If PS2 throttles their console sales by making their console significantly more expensive, X-Box will have a legitimate opportunity to overtake them in monthly sales and maybe become the dominant market force.
The reason that it is coming to us yanks last is that Sony is still in a pretty tight race with X-Box here in the states. That is not true in Japan and I'm pretty sure that is also not true in Europe. I can the the fancy system coming out here, but I can't see it replacing the original system since Sony needs to have a (recently reduced) $150 model to remain competitive.
If you look at movie-based (or movie-inspired) games as a genre, the crap to good ratio is about the same as any other mature genre. Most of it is crap (ET, Rocketeer, Untouchables) but there are quite a few good games in the genre (Super Star Wars, Tron, Blade Runner). That's true for all genres.
What makes the movie-based genre different? The movies still get seen from time to time, especially the good ones. That makes us remember the games even if they were terrible. I can't remember most of the slew of crappy 1-on-1 fighter games from the mid-90's that were SF2/MK clones, but I can remember most of the NES movie conversions that were terrible (Total Recall, Three Stooges, Karate Kid, Rambo).
Movie-based games only seem worse because we actually remember the bad ones from this genre.
The ads I've seen lately have changed their wording to "Stealing Satellite SERVICE".
I've been wanting to build my own Dalek PC, but I can't find a mutated Kaled to use as a CPU.
About 5 years ago, I built a 233 Mhz Pentium II machine for about $500. Each year, I put $100 - $200 into hardware upgrades and I have a machine that will very comfortably play today's games (ex. Tron 2.0, Vice City, UT2K4) and I still haven't spent more than $1500. On top of that, I was able to Frankenstein some parts from the old computer and buy a $30 case/power supply and I now have a spare computer that can read e-mail, surf the net, and play games along the age of RA2, Quake 3, and UT.
I agree that caching is a good thing in almost all circumstances. Generally, you would have to go out of your way to design a progam that makes caching inefficient.
I guess my point is that I was expecting ten really cool OS tricks that make their operating system run faster and after reading the article I feel somewhat let down that six of them invovled caching. Not to knock caching, but that's kind of a cureall for performance woes. From my training we've always looked at it like, "Well, we can't get it to run any faster so just throw a bigger cache on it."
Defrag is most certainly a form of caching. Placing data in a place where it is faster to access based on when the OS predicts it will be used is caching. The OS assumes (and with good reason) that a program accessing a sector off the disk will likely access other sectors belonging to the same file. Therefore the OS places all of these sectors in the same locality in order to access them faster when needed since sectors read insequentially off of the hard disk incurs a performance hit.
The only difference between this and memory caching is that the memory cache is a copy while the file system does not bother to keep a copy of the disk sector in two places since the medium has not changed (i.e. RAM to CPU cache) and the data storage is persistant.
Is it just me or are the first six items all caching schemes?
...AdvanceMAME would support medium resolution monitors as easily as standard resoution so I can use it in my broken BOTSS cockpit (I think BOTSS machines all came from the factory already broken). That's too sweet a monitor to leave sitting there and I haven't made much progress on my Blitz 2000 cab lately.
Stratego is by and large my favortie board game. It's not got a lot of social interation as it's only a two person game, unless you count people watching the game. One thing I like about Stratego is that it is really fun to watch two people play who are good at it. It's like watching a really good game of poker because it's very easy to bluff both on offense and defense. I especially like the now-defunct Electronic Stratego just because you don't know the rank of a piece until that piece dies and the electronic bomb system is more challenging.
The other board games I love are Risk, Trivial Pursuit 80's Edition, and Clue.
And don't forget about the Ford PowerStroke Diesel.
I agree that the game stood on its own, but there is always room for improvement. The best part of the game was when you're chainsawing the boy scout kiddies and Ash says, "Kumbaya, baby."