You're pretty much correct. Although I would say #8 is debatable. I believe that as a result of physical limitations placed on a zombies nervous system and joints and muscle due to death, a zombie likely would shamble. Maybe it's a matter of age though. A "new" zombie that turned fairly quickly could quite possibly be one of those new fast-moving zombies. A zombie of something buried many years or a zombie that's existed for a long time probably shambles. Maybe, it's the ultimate fate of every zombie to become non-moving? Sorta like 28 Days Later I suppose.
Surely a zombie isn't capable of doing things the original living human couldn't do. Could an olympic sprinter zombie ruin your day from 100 yards away? I think maybe.
And in #10, I am betting that zombies don't feel pain, though they might think they do. Memory makes them fear great heights, water, fire, etc. Maybe a zombie's natural tendency would be to recoil from the sight of you aiming a shotgun at it.
Zombies are real in the Haitian voodoo sense, but we're talking about the classic Romero zombie I assumed, the one upon which most zombie fiction is now based.
It wouldn't be hard to really. Look at the average post-goth teen. They're still in love with death and the macabre. A vampire is just an undead human if you remove the demon aspect. Stephenie Meyer did that *shudder*. I suppose, you could have teen protagonists, one of which dies and comes back, and then they try to make it work. Think about Return of the Living Dead 3 and factor in some of the recent zombie mockumentaries where zombies are vying for civil rights. I think, sadly, a teen zombie romance is a logical eventuality. I'm sorry.
About PH levels. It's not a bad idea generally to make your body less acidic, and doctors recommend you do this through foods: fruits and veggies lower acidity. But there are people out there marketing alkaline water. I looked into it myself, and from what I've read, it's a sham. Alkaline water doesn't seem to lower the acidity of the body, nowhere near as effectively as eating fruits and veggies does. I understand Kurzweil drinks nothing but alkaline water, and he's over 60 now, and has lived longer than his father and grandfather did. Apparently his family is big risk for cancers. Still, there's no science that shows that alkaline water helps, yet at the moment, it's a big miracle product.
I'm dealing with a loss of my mother as well. I tried doing video recordings, but the problem I faced was that they weren't terribly candid. My mother was always a camera whore however, so in one sense it was natural for her to seek and find the camera in the room, then play up to it; in another sense I was never able to capture the candid moments when mom was just being herself.
The OP has likely weighed the worth of capturing the last moments of his wife's life, knowing full well how painful the moments will be (the visual effect of her illness, etc.).
I recommend creating new memories and documenting those with recordings. Go out, take a day trip. These things need not be expensive. Record yourself spending time together be alive and not merely acting. Write letters to each other. Share old memories, remind each other of your life spent together. A written letter, not some blog entry that only exists digitally, will have more value. Create physically tangible pieces of memory, be it toys you buy each other, or polaroids you shot of each other. Things you can hold, things that don't require a computer, will mean a lot to you.
The point of all this is to create new memories that don't anchor you or her to the illness. Make the illness a non-issue.
As for preserving old memories. I recommend that any video or audio you have be archived losslessly to very durable storage medium. I recommend digital tape. Even my old VHS analog tapes have proven more durable that things written to DVD-R. But do keep copies on more easily consumable mediums such as flash cards and DVD-Rs. For photos, I recommend developing your photos, archiving lossless originals as above, and then keeping high quality JPEGs for easy digital access. For personal belongings, I use durable plastic containers that can be sealed. Zip-loc bags are useful too.
The point here is you'll find yourself wanting to archive a lot of diverse materials. Being Slashdot, we immediately think about media, but there's other things too like stuffed animals, christmas ornaments. etc. A wide variety of things. Also, I recommend photographing those things. I would also digitally scan letters and other documents. Save things from your outings. I have movie tickets. They bring back a lot of memories.
It's a lot of heartbreaking work. At the moment, I can't even look at the material I've collected, but I know someday I will want to revisit it.
Classified secrets are nothing like trade secrets. A classified secret is no longer a secret when it's declassified, and only then. It doesn't matter how many people know the secret. That is the law. An enlisted serviceman holding a stack of papers stamped as okay-to-be-classified does not get to be the final person in the chain who formally declassifies something. And surely, what aspects of a secret might be public rarely make up the majority of a secret. The docs held more info than anyone in the public knew or ought to have known. The government reserves its right of denial in the interest of national secrets. A trade secret is very much about keeping the cat in the bag. National secrets are more important. Yes, this calls for the use of nuanced language, and yes it seems silly to imagine generals saying "I don't see a building there in that photograph, congressman" when it's obvious to everyone that there is indeed a building; but that illustrates the nature of national secrets, of espionage and intelligence gathering. It has it's own logic
I think the network censored the episode out of fear of violent Muslim reaction. I am confident that in the current political climate, I can get away with saying something mean-spirited about Muslims. I don't think many non-Muslims will rush to criticize me.
I didn't mind the censoring. As you said, it is their network, they decide what's put on it. That's the business of television. But I do mind a more general (even if informal) policy of not offending Muslims because it makes Muslims a protected group and forces everyone to bend to their cultural expectations. The nature of the offense also bothers me. It seems that groups like Revolution Muslim are more offended that non-believers discussed Mohammad in any context, positive or negative. I understand their faith has a rule that Mohammad cannot be depicted visually in any form. But that is their rule, not mine. And I'd rather not be censored from creating a cartoon of Mohammad -- good or bad, because of their own religious rule. I would be similarly angered if I was barred from eating meat on fridays or from eating at all during Rosh Hashanah.
And when Revolution Muslim issues a statement that says I will die or should die or may possibly die as a result of not following one of laws of their religion, that makes me less willing to engage with Muslim culture in a positive way.
Clearly you didn't get what he said. There's a difference between being a gun-toting American and a gun-toting American who's out preaching that the end is fucking nigh, hides his children, and then marches down main street with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other while threatening to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and incidentally anyone else who doesn't agree with him. At some point, those particular gun-toting Americans begin to look awfully like the Taliban
A few year ago, I would have agreed that all but the most far out sects have abandoned those ideals, but I'm not so sure today. I wonder how many hardcore Christians would stone -- or in the modern version, shoot or bomb, a disbeliever or some other sinner if only they could get away with it.
I've met religious zealots before -- none Muslim, and what I learned from being open-minded to their beliefs and killing them with kindness so to speak, is that I often am regarded as one of the "good ones", an exception to an otherwise horrible lot of people that ought to be either put on an island somewhere or converted. To me, religious extremists are unreasonable, and you can only gain so much with them. You can never be one of them in their eyes. At best, you're a pet. Still, it's admirable to try, and it doesn't help to go provoking overly sensitive people.
On the other hand, perhaps OP is a dick, but going through life having to make special exceptions for Muslims is absolutely unreasonable. We are not bound by Muslim law in this part of the world, and we resist attempts to have our freedom of expression taken from us in order to please them. There is nothing special about the Muslim sensitivity that it deserves this treatment. I would say the same of other religious extremists too however, including various Christian groups.
I wouldn't mind 2560x2048 resolution. I'd even love twice as much as that. It would help greatly with my digital photography. My digital negatives are typically 2852x4304, and I pixel peep heavily when developing my shots in post. But, again, my usage is specialized and you can probably lump me in there with graphic artists and drafters.
For document viewing, I've always liked really high resolution. I used to use as 1280x1024 resolution on an old 15" Trinitron. I was never one who enjoyed seeing type at higher than 16pt. I often have PDF ebooks open alongside web pages and an IDE, so higher resolution would make it easier for me to display full page documents side by side, allowing me to work faster (hopefully). I think I would still need something larger than a 24" screen to take advantage of that though.
Is it any wonder that IE's market share only really rose dramatically after IE4 was released [wikipedia.org], when they began bundling it with Windows 98? I don't think the "channels" feature was that impressive.
It certainly helped for the reasons you gave. IE4 came out in Sept '97, and Netscape Communicator came out in June '97. Netscape was well established. As I remember, Netscape 4 wasn't as good as IE4, although previous versions of IE were pretty lackluster. IE4 had an edge for two reasons: bundling and better performance. Of course, Netscape would allege that IE's better performance was due to the bundling in the first place. IE was basically preloaded into memory upon boot.
I didn't like the Channels feature either. I didn't think the marketing value of having real estate on a desktop in the form of an icon was well-proven enough to merit companies like Disney paying to become a channel click. That entire Active Desktop thing always annoyed me.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. Sounds like you're going all the way back to 1790 era copyright law which had an initial term of 14 years plus renewal privileges for an additional 14 years. So, even in the beginning, we gave copyright holders about 30 years of protection. In 1831, we extended that initial protection to 28 years with renewal privileges of 14 years thereafter. In 1909 we extended that renewal term from 14 years to 28 years.
Clearly you have a problem with the Copyright Act of 1976 which came into effect in 1978 and redefined protection as life of author plus 50 years. But you can kinda see from the legal history that even in the early 1800s there were updates to copyright protections, and this was absent the lobbying power of the entertainment industry. Even the first copyright protections basically gave 28 years of protection.
I'm a musician myself, for a brief while, professionally. For me, the bigger sin is in copyright holders not necessarily being the actual author of the work. This is the case where your music is owned by the label. I still like the idea of extended copyright protection particularly because an author lives longer and can work longer than before, and technology naturally extends the usefulness and availability of a protected work, especially music. That said, I'm all for fair use rules that empower you to enjoy my music or my writings in ways that I hadn't intended.
Have to nitpick just a little. Yes, Windows was big, but back when Windows was just a shell, you could buy multiple brands of DOS as well as other GUIs easily. The retail stores looked a lot differently back then. So much of my software was purchased in square cardboard paper envelopes on little hangers, like for greeting cards. A far cry from the long row of glossy Windows boxes today.:D After Windows 95, you could also choose OS/2, and later, BeOS. I was fortunate to also have access to Amiga still.
Also, Apple long had problems in retail space. Apple never could figure out how to sell premium hardware systems next to lower priced IBM compatibles. Apple routinely pulled out of Sears for instance. Apple also dropped out on other retailers such as Computer City in favor of partnerships with Circuit City and CompUSA which ultimately didn't work either. So, Microsoft's monopoly power actually wasn't a reason that consumers had a hard time finding Macs in stores.
Microsoft's monopoly power came mostly from Microsoft's treatment of OEMs who attempted to offer computers preloaded with other operating systems and office suites. I think most people were unaware of the code that Microsoft had in Windows which caused the software to cough up an error if it detected anything other than MS-DOS. But Microsoft did heavily market the idea that one needed MS-DOS in order to run MS-Windows, although that wasn't true. One of my old colleagues, a marketing professor, was adamant that Microsoft's monopoly was not in the operating system, but MS Office. A lot of us Ami Pro and Word Perfect lovers agreed. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was justified in those feelings. I found a way to continue using WP professionally all the way up through 1999.
Looking back, I think the IE vs Netscape thing was mostly Netscape's fault. They made a calculated business decision which backfired and left an opportunity for Microsoft to create IE. I never bought the idea that consumers wouldn't download alternative software just because Windows provided that functionality out of the box. Otherwise, software like WinZip and ACDSee would not have continued to thrive, no?
Clearly. I think he's a fanatic as well, but I never thought to call him a manic depressive or just clinically depressed. I figure, there are countless people who will continue to benefit directly or indirectly from GNU and the free software movement whilst still saying this guy is a complete paranoid nut job who wgets his google searches. He doesn't get to be a patron saint to anyone but software developers and activists who believe in free software but who probably mostly want little to do with Stallman's other philosophies. He's a punchline to a joke about taking things too far. He's a religious zealot, and supposedly, he's been likened to the Unabomber. He certainly has made personal sacrifices for his beliefs. Of course, I can't help but wonder if he would have been just another lunatic living off the grid in a bunker had he not offered an honestly brilliant humanitarian philosophy.
You lost me. How is a song not property? Were you strictly using "song" to mean a portable digital representation of a song, such as a MP3?
What do you mean when you say songs that "properly belong in the public domain... songs released prior to about 1980 or possible even 1990?" Under what copyright code are songs released that recently rightful in the public domain?
Granted, Ebert now says there are some films he doesn't feel qualify as art, but when you take it with all that he has said on the subject of videogames, it reads like an attempt to backpedal from a previously absolutist position. It's obvious he disagrees with me and many other people, but again, based on a history of his comments on videogames, he comes off having an actual disrespect for the medium.
I don't think you can argue any aspersions in what I've written anymore than Ebert can argue that no video game can EVER be art, and even more, comparable to great works of poetry.
I said he "probably" dislikes the respectability video games have today. I stand by that. I don't think my inference was unfair. I'll go one step further. I be he probably doesn't like the effect that video games and video game production have on filmmaking. I've been watching and reading Ebert since the early '80s. He isn't a total stranger.
Yeah, you're right about that. I take that back. I always enjoyed reading Ebert, but there's been a lot of movies over the years that ended up being highly regarded in retrospect, but panned by Ebert, but that was an honest critique.
And Heavy Rain is just the most recent in a long history of games that are expressive and more experienced-focused than victory-focused. I still enjoy Flow (PS3) for example. It doesn't fill me with emotions such as Heavy Rain did when I made practically every bad decision I could in that game, but it soothed me the way a soft jazz piano melody does.
I never though of Ebert as a cultural elitist. He isn't like some haut cinema snobs I've read who dislike any film that isn't shot on old film stock and in a foreign language. But he is a professional critic, and he probably dislikes the respectability video games are getting in mainstream culture today. The thought of a room full of students critiquing Norman Jayden in Heavy Rain likely scares Ebert. He doesn't want video games to have legitimacy. If so, that is either very selfish or very naive, depending on whether Ebert has looked past the one-dimensional action protagonists in many popular games today. And he can't give a single valid argument for why video games are not art without being absolutist about cinema, and that's the hilarious bit in all this. There are countless films that appeal only to our base desires for a laugh or a cringe, and they remain artistic for being cinema. If movies like "The Rock", "Red Sonja", "Ichi The Killer", or the collective films of Andy Sidaris (which I love) are still art for being cinema, then surely Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Heavenly Sword are art as well.
I would argue strongly that, yes, video game is art, and for the reasons you have given. But also, a film is a combination of various arts all pulled together and carefully choreographed to create a singular artistic expression. At least in modern, big budget game production, there is a 1:1 correlation with these elements that comprise a film project: make-up, set design, acting, special effects, music, etc..
I have to say though that while Ebert is entitled to his opinion as a film critic who has often been on the wrong side of cinematic masterpieces over the decades, he is completely unqualified to give a meaningful critique of video games that is worth regarding as an opinion. I feel his opinion is in essence a non-opinion. It's like asking a person who hates seafood to tell you whether it's better to grilled a salmon filet skin-side down first or second.
I develop primarily on a Mac. I don't run Linux anymore, and I don't consciously think about that platform. Windows, OTH, is always in the back of my mind. The game demo I am currently working on is (rather sloppily) written in C++ using GCC and is 100% SDL at the moment with some help from SDL_ttf and SDL_gfx. This demo will run any platform that SDL can be built for. For 3D, I use OpenGL.
Not every Mac game uses SDL or OpenGL however. There are a number of popular kits out there including PopCap Games and Torque 3D. They are platform specific. There is a GNU port of PopCap called TuxCap. I don't know how whether something I've written with PopCap will just magically run on Linux using TuxCap.
Congress would be perfectly find with a company locking in consumers. Had GM disabled consumers' ability to drive their cars unless getting a favored audio system, that would be something. Similarly, if Apple retroactively decided that no DRM-ladened audio files could be played on an iPod, that might also be something. In both case, the primary basic functionality of the product is being denied to paying consumers by the maker. The "Other OS" feature is ancillary. The PS3 is primarily a videogame console. It is marketed as one, and it is sold as one. It is also marketed as a complete home entertainment system, and even without the "Other OS" option, the PS3 still is. Sony did advertise Linux, but that wasn't a promise, it was a sell -- a way to grab the attention of techies. If you bought the PS3 mostly for Cell programming and Linux, and relied on that feature to your detriment, you will get no sympathy from a court because the PS3 is universally understood to be a game system. Using a game console as a general purpose computer was a cool idea, but it was just a crazy idea.
If a lawsuit must be had, it might be better to focus on the mandate that one be able to sign into PSN in order to play the games they bought. The last firmware update I downloaded killed my access to PSN and prevented me and others from being able to play Heavy Rain. That was a denial of service.
Exactly. I don't play Guitar Hero or Rock Band because I am a guitar hero in real life and I've done the rock band thing. I do play mystery games whenever I can because I don't get to go solving murders on my own. I fantasize about owning a restaurant, but I haven't the time or money to commit to opening my own diner. I have had virtual pets. I would love to have a real pet, but my lifestyle doesn't support it. I have a virtual house with nice furniture that rivals my own, and that's because I find it cathartic creating a virtual ideal home - one that I can't seem to obtain in real life because of work, family, and other obligations. I have spent money on these web games, but doing so has always been a careful calculation. I see these as games. Spending $40 on SmallWorlds in order to get higher privileges and the ability to access more in-game items is no different from me spending $60 on a 6-hour long PS3 game. It's a fun distraction that interests me. Lest we forget that World of Warcraft, Magic: The Gathering, and the slew of MMORPGs out there are very much the same.
Frankly, I am mystified that Dan Lyons is mystified. The value proposition in web-based virtual life games is dirt-simple: these games entertain. Looks like Lyons is getting distracted by the HTTP protocol, or maybe he has experience with the old BBS door games we used to play, and that experience is telling him that web games ought not be money makers.
Slashdot Mirror
ssssssshhhhh zombie Edward isn't rotting, he's dazzling us with his sparkling.
You're pretty much correct. Although I would say #8 is debatable. I believe that as a result of physical limitations placed on a zombies nervous system and joints and muscle due to death, a zombie likely would shamble. Maybe it's a matter of age though. A "new" zombie that turned fairly quickly could quite possibly be one of those new fast-moving zombies. A zombie of something buried many years or a zombie that's existed for a long time probably shambles. Maybe, it's the ultimate fate of every zombie to become non-moving? Sorta like 28 Days Later I suppose.
Surely a zombie isn't capable of doing things the original living human couldn't do. Could an olympic sprinter zombie ruin your day from 100 yards away? I think maybe.
And in #10, I am betting that zombies don't feel pain, though they might think they do. Memory makes them fear great heights, water, fire, etc. Maybe a zombie's natural tendency would be to recoil from the sight of you aiming a shotgun at it.
Zombies are real in the Haitian voodoo sense, but we're talking about the classic Romero zombie I assumed, the one upon which most zombie fiction is now based.
It wouldn't be hard to really. Look at the average post-goth teen. They're still in love with death and the macabre. A vampire is just an undead human if you remove the demon aspect. Stephenie Meyer did that *shudder*. I suppose, you could have teen protagonists, one of which dies and comes back, and then they try to make it work. Think about Return of the Living Dead 3 and factor in some of the recent zombie mockumentaries where zombies are vying for civil rights. I think, sadly, a teen zombie romance is a logical eventuality. I'm sorry.
Wait, didn't we visit this subject years ago with a story about dead frozen dogs in Australia being reanimated by having fresh blood pumped into them?
About PH levels. It's not a bad idea generally to make your body less acidic, and doctors recommend you do this through foods: fruits and veggies lower acidity. But there are people out there marketing alkaline water. I looked into it myself, and from what I've read, it's a sham. Alkaline water doesn't seem to lower the acidity of the body, nowhere near as effectively as eating fruits and veggies does. I understand Kurzweil drinks nothing but alkaline water, and he's over 60 now, and has lived longer than his father and grandfather did. Apparently his family is big risk for cancers. Still, there's no science that shows that alkaline water helps, yet at the moment, it's a big miracle product.
I'm dealing with a loss of my mother as well. I tried doing video recordings, but the problem I faced was that they weren't terribly candid. My mother was always a camera whore however, so in one sense it was natural for her to seek and find the camera in the room, then play up to it; in another sense I was never able to capture the candid moments when mom was just being herself.
The OP has likely weighed the worth of capturing the last moments of his wife's life, knowing full well how painful the moments will be (the visual effect of her illness, etc.).
I recommend creating new memories and documenting those with recordings. Go out, take a day trip. These things need not be expensive. Record yourself spending time together be alive and not merely acting. Write letters to each other. Share old memories, remind each other of your life spent together. A written letter, not some blog entry that only exists digitally, will have more value. Create physically tangible pieces of memory, be it toys you buy each other, or polaroids you shot of each other. Things you can hold, things that don't require a computer, will mean a lot to you.
The point of all this is to create new memories that don't anchor you or her to the illness. Make the illness a non-issue.
As for preserving old memories. I recommend that any video or audio you have be archived losslessly to very durable storage medium. I recommend digital tape. Even my old VHS analog tapes have proven more durable that things written to DVD-R. But do keep copies on more easily consumable mediums such as flash cards and DVD-Rs. For photos, I recommend developing your photos, archiving lossless originals as above, and then keeping high quality JPEGs for easy digital access. For personal belongings, I use durable plastic containers that can be sealed. Zip-loc bags are useful too.
The point here is you'll find yourself wanting to archive a lot of diverse materials. Being Slashdot, we immediately think about media, but there's other things too like stuffed animals, christmas ornaments. etc. A wide variety of things. Also, I recommend photographing those things. I would also digitally scan letters and other documents. Save things from your outings. I have movie tickets. They bring back a lot of memories.
It's a lot of heartbreaking work. At the moment, I can't even look at the material I've collected, but I know someday I will want to revisit it.
Classified secrets are nothing like trade secrets. A classified secret is no longer a secret when it's declassified, and only then. It doesn't matter how many people know the secret. That is the law. An enlisted serviceman holding a stack of papers stamped as okay-to-be-classified does not get to be the final person in the chain who formally declassifies something. And surely, what aspects of a secret might be public rarely make up the majority of a secret. The docs held more info than anyone in the public knew or ought to have known. The government reserves its right of denial in the interest of national secrets. A trade secret is very much about keeping the cat in the bag. National secrets are more important. Yes, this calls for the use of nuanced language, and yes it seems silly to imagine generals saying "I don't see a building there in that photograph, congressman" when it's obvious to everyone that there is indeed a building; but that illustrates the nature of national secrets, of espionage and intelligence gathering. It has it's own logic
I think the network censored the episode out of fear of violent Muslim reaction. I am confident that in the current political climate, I can get away with saying something mean-spirited about Muslims. I don't think many non-Muslims will rush to criticize me.
I didn't mind the censoring. As you said, it is their network, they decide what's put on it. That's the business of television. But I do mind a more general (even if informal) policy of not offending Muslims because it makes Muslims a protected group and forces everyone to bend to their cultural expectations. The nature of the offense also bothers me. It seems that groups like Revolution Muslim are more offended that non-believers discussed Mohammad in any context, positive or negative. I understand their faith has a rule that Mohammad cannot be depicted visually in any form. But that is their rule, not mine. And I'd rather not be censored from creating a cartoon of Mohammad -- good or bad, because of their own religious rule. I would be similarly angered if I was barred from eating meat on fridays or from eating at all during Rosh Hashanah.
And when Revolution Muslim issues a statement that says I will die or should die or may possibly die as a result of not following one of laws of their religion, that makes me less willing to engage with Muslim culture in a positive way.
Clearly you didn't get what he said. There's a difference between being a gun-toting American and a gun-toting American who's out preaching that the end is fucking nigh, hides his children, and then marches down main street with a gun in one hand and a bible in the other while threatening to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and incidentally anyone else who doesn't agree with him. At some point, those particular gun-toting Americans begin to look awfully like the Taliban
A few year ago, I would have agreed that all but the most far out sects have abandoned those ideals, but I'm not so sure today. I wonder how many hardcore Christians would stone -- or in the modern version, shoot or bomb, a disbeliever or some other sinner if only they could get away with it.
I've met religious zealots before -- none Muslim, and what I learned from being open-minded to their beliefs and killing them with kindness so to speak, is that I often am regarded as one of the "good ones", an exception to an otherwise horrible lot of people that ought to be either put on an island somewhere or converted. To me, religious extremists are unreasonable, and you can only gain so much with them. You can never be one of them in their eyes. At best, you're a pet. Still, it's admirable to try, and it doesn't help to go provoking overly sensitive people.
On the other hand, perhaps OP is a dick, but going through life having to make special exceptions for Muslims is absolutely unreasonable. We are not bound by Muslim law in this part of the world, and we resist attempts to have our freedom of expression taken from us in order to please them. There is nothing special about the Muslim sensitivity that it deserves this treatment. I would say the same of other religious extremists too however, including various Christian groups.
I wouldn't mind 2560x2048 resolution. I'd even love twice as much as that. It would help greatly with my digital photography. My digital negatives are typically 2852x4304, and I pixel peep heavily when developing my shots in post. But, again, my usage is specialized and you can probably lump me in there with graphic artists and drafters.
For document viewing, I've always liked really high resolution. I used to use as 1280x1024 resolution on an old 15" Trinitron. I was never one who enjoyed seeing type at higher than 16pt. I often have PDF ebooks open alongside web pages and an IDE, so higher resolution would make it easier for me to display full page documents side by side, allowing me to work faster (hopefully). I think I would still need something larger than a 24" screen to take advantage of that though.
Is it any wonder that IE's market share only really rose dramatically after IE4 was released [wikipedia.org], when they began bundling it with Windows 98? I don't think the "channels" feature was that impressive.
It certainly helped for the reasons you gave. IE4 came out in Sept '97, and Netscape Communicator came out in June '97. Netscape was well established. As I remember, Netscape 4 wasn't as good as IE4, although previous versions of IE were pretty lackluster. IE4 had an edge for two reasons: bundling and better performance. Of course, Netscape would allege that IE's better performance was due to the bundling in the first place. IE was basically preloaded into memory upon boot.
I didn't like the Channels feature either. I didn't think the marketing value of having real estate on a desktop in the form of an icon was well-proven enough to merit companies like Disney paying to become a channel click. That entire Active Desktop thing always annoyed me.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. Sounds like you're going all the way back to 1790 era copyright law which had an initial term of 14 years plus renewal privileges for an additional 14 years. So, even in the beginning, we gave copyright holders about 30 years of protection. In 1831, we extended that initial protection to 28 years with renewal privileges of 14 years thereafter. In 1909 we extended that renewal term from 14 years to 28 years.
Clearly you have a problem with the Copyright Act of 1976 which came into effect in 1978 and redefined protection as life of author plus 50 years. But you can kinda see from the legal history that even in the early 1800s there were updates to copyright protections, and this was absent the lobbying power of the entertainment industry. Even the first copyright protections basically gave 28 years of protection.
I'm a musician myself, for a brief while, professionally. For me, the bigger sin is in copyright holders not necessarily being the actual author of the work. This is the case where your music is owned by the label. I still like the idea of extended copyright protection particularly because an author lives longer and can work longer than before, and technology naturally extends the usefulness and availability of a protected work, especially music. That said, I'm all for fair use rules that empower you to enjoy my music or my writings in ways that I hadn't intended.
Have to nitpick just a little. Yes, Windows was big, but back when Windows was just a shell, you could buy multiple brands of DOS as well as other GUIs easily. The retail stores looked a lot differently back then. So much of my software was purchased in square cardboard paper envelopes on little hangers, like for greeting cards. A far cry from the long row of glossy Windows boxes today. :D After Windows 95, you could also choose OS/2, and later, BeOS. I was fortunate to also have access to Amiga still.
Also, Apple long had problems in retail space. Apple never could figure out how to sell premium hardware systems next to lower priced IBM compatibles. Apple routinely pulled out of Sears for instance. Apple also dropped out on other retailers such as Computer City in favor of partnerships with Circuit City and CompUSA which ultimately didn't work either. So, Microsoft's monopoly power actually wasn't a reason that consumers had a hard time finding Macs in stores.
Microsoft's monopoly power came mostly from Microsoft's treatment of OEMs who attempted to offer computers preloaded with other operating systems and office suites. I think most people were unaware of the code that Microsoft had in Windows which caused the software to cough up an error if it detected anything other than MS-DOS. But Microsoft did heavily market the idea that one needed MS-DOS in order to run MS-Windows, although that wasn't true. One of my old colleagues, a marketing professor, was adamant that Microsoft's monopoly was not in the operating system, but MS Office. A lot of us Ami Pro and Word Perfect lovers agreed. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was justified in those feelings. I found a way to continue using WP professionally all the way up through 1999.
Looking back, I think the IE vs Netscape thing was mostly Netscape's fault. They made a calculated business decision which backfired and left an opportunity for Microsoft to create IE. I never bought the idea that consumers wouldn't download alternative software just because Windows provided that functionality out of the box. Otherwise, software like WinZip and ACDSee would not have continued to thrive, no?
Clearly. I think he's a fanatic as well, but I never thought to call him a manic depressive or just clinically depressed. I figure, there are countless people who will continue to benefit directly or indirectly from GNU and the free software movement whilst still saying this guy is a complete paranoid nut job who wgets his google searches. He doesn't get to be a patron saint to anyone but software developers and activists who believe in free software but who probably mostly want little to do with Stallman's other philosophies. He's a punchline to a joke about taking things too far. He's a religious zealot, and supposedly, he's been likened to the Unabomber. He certainly has made personal sacrifices for his beliefs. Of course, I can't help but wonder if he would have been just another lunatic living off the grid in a bunker had he not offered an honestly brilliant humanitarian philosophy.
You lost me. How is a song not property? Were you strictly using "song" to mean a portable digital representation of a song, such as a MP3?
What do you mean when you say songs that "properly belong in the public domain... songs released prior to about 1980 or possible even 1990?" Under what copyright code are songs released that recently rightful in the public domain?
Granted, Ebert now says there are some films he doesn't feel qualify as art, but when you take it with all that he has said on the subject of videogames, it reads like an attempt to backpedal from a previously absolutist position. It's obvious he disagrees with me and many other people, but again, based on a history of his comments on videogames, he comes off having an actual disrespect for the medium.
I don't think you can argue any aspersions in what I've written anymore than Ebert can argue that no video game can EVER be art, and even more, comparable to great works of poetry.
I said he "probably" dislikes the respectability video games have today. I stand by that. I don't think my inference was unfair. I'll go one step further. I be he probably doesn't like the effect that video games and video game production have on filmmaking. I've been watching and reading Ebert since the early '80s. He isn't a total stranger.
Yeah, you're right about that. I take that back. I always enjoyed reading Ebert, but there's been a lot of movies over the years that ended up being highly regarded in retrospect, but panned by Ebert, but that was an honest critique.
And Heavy Rain is just the most recent in a long history of games that are expressive and more experienced-focused than victory-focused. I still enjoy Flow (PS3) for example. It doesn't fill me with emotions such as Heavy Rain did when I made practically every bad decision I could in that game, but it soothed me the way a soft jazz piano melody does.
I never though of Ebert as a cultural elitist. He isn't like some haut cinema snobs I've read who dislike any film that isn't shot on old film stock and in a foreign language. But he is a professional critic, and he probably dislikes the respectability video games are getting in mainstream culture today. The thought of a room full of students critiquing Norman Jayden in Heavy Rain likely scares Ebert. He doesn't want video games to have legitimacy. If so, that is either very selfish or very naive, depending on whether Ebert has looked past the one-dimensional action protagonists in many popular games today. And he can't give a single valid argument for why video games are not art without being absolutist about cinema, and that's the hilarious bit in all this. There are countless films that appeal only to our base desires for a laugh or a cringe, and they remain artistic for being cinema. If movies like "The Rock", "Red Sonja", "Ichi The Killer", or the collective films of Andy Sidaris (which I love) are still art for being cinema, then surely Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Heavenly Sword are art as well.
I would argue strongly that, yes, video game is art, and for the reasons you have given. But also, a film is a combination of various arts all pulled together and carefully choreographed to create a singular artistic expression. At least in modern, big budget game production, there is a 1:1 correlation with these elements that comprise a film project: make-up, set design, acting, special effects, music, etc..
I have to say though that while Ebert is entitled to his opinion as a film critic who has often been on the wrong side of cinematic masterpieces over the decades, he is completely unqualified to give a meaningful critique of video games that is worth regarding as an opinion. I feel his opinion is in essence a non-opinion. It's like asking a person who hates seafood to tell you whether it's better to grilled a salmon filet skin-side down first or second.
I develop primarily on a Mac. I don't run Linux anymore, and I don't consciously think about that platform. Windows, OTH, is always in the back of my mind. The game demo I am currently working on is (rather sloppily) written in C++ using GCC and is 100% SDL at the moment with some help from SDL_ttf and SDL_gfx. This demo will run any platform that SDL can be built for. For 3D, I use OpenGL.
Not every Mac game uses SDL or OpenGL however. There are a number of popular kits out there including PopCap Games and Torque 3D. They are platform specific. There is a GNU port of PopCap called TuxCap. I don't know how whether something I've written with PopCap will just magically run on Linux using TuxCap.
Congress would be perfectly find with a company locking in consumers. Had GM disabled consumers' ability to drive their cars unless getting a favored audio system, that would be something. Similarly, if Apple retroactively decided that no DRM-ladened audio files could be played on an iPod, that might also be something. In both case, the primary basic functionality of the product is being denied to paying consumers by the maker. The "Other OS" feature is ancillary. The PS3 is primarily a videogame console. It is marketed as one, and it is sold as one. It is also marketed as a complete home entertainment system, and even without the "Other OS" option, the PS3 still is. Sony did advertise Linux, but that wasn't a promise, it was a sell -- a way to grab the attention of techies. If you bought the PS3 mostly for Cell programming and Linux, and relied on that feature to your detriment, you will get no sympathy from a court because the PS3 is universally understood to be a game system. Using a game console as a general purpose computer was a cool idea, but it was just a crazy idea.
If a lawsuit must be had, it might be better to focus on the mandate that one be able to sign into PSN in order to play the games they bought. The last firmware update I downloaded killed my access to PSN and prevented me and others from being able to play Heavy Rain. That was a denial of service.
Exactly. I don't play Guitar Hero or Rock Band because I am a guitar hero in real life and I've done the rock band thing. I do play mystery games whenever I can because I don't get to go solving murders on my own. I fantasize about owning a restaurant, but I haven't the time or money to commit to opening my own diner. I have had virtual pets. I would love to have a real pet, but my lifestyle doesn't support it. I have a virtual house with nice furniture that rivals my own, and that's because I find it cathartic creating a virtual ideal home - one that I can't seem to obtain in real life because of work, family, and other obligations. I have spent money on these web games, but doing so has always been a careful calculation. I see these as games. Spending $40 on SmallWorlds in order to get higher privileges and the ability to access more in-game items is no different from me spending $60 on a 6-hour long PS3 game. It's a fun distraction that interests me. Lest we forget that World of Warcraft, Magic: The Gathering, and the slew of MMORPGs out there are very much the same.
Frankly, I am mystified that Dan Lyons is mystified. The value proposition in web-based virtual life games is dirt-simple: these games entertain. Looks like Lyons is getting distracted by the HTTP protocol, or maybe he has experience with the old BBS door games we used to play, and that experience is telling him that web games ought not be money makers.