You want to save graphic adventures? Simple, have whoever owns the Leisure Suit Larry trademark hire Al Lowe and have him get cracking on a new, *GOOD* Larry, that actually stars Larry and not his nephew or whatever shit was in the past few games.
Homer: What if instead of donating one of my old worn out kidneys, I gave grandpa that artificial kidney I invented...
Marge: Oh Homer, that was just a beer can with a whistle glued to it...
Insider but Mac minis and Mac pros are not replacement for Xserves period. In my opinion Apple wasted an absolutely golden opportunity but not pairing up with Oracle to offer OS x server capable sunfires. Apple would have been able to divest itself of having to design and support server level hardware, oracle would not only gain sales but also tons of free publicity, and OS x server customers would be able to stick with their rack mounted hardware. Everyone wins, but since jobs is so obsssed about not doing the whole clone thing I bet he never even considered it. That one is going to come back and burn him.
Apple handed Microsoft a huge weapon to which fight this battle, the sudden cancellation of the Xserve with no real replacement. Now whenever Apple goes after the enterprise market Microsoft can point to this and say, "Do you really want to risk introducing a device into your enterprise that Apple can discontinue on a whim leaving you with no easy upgrade/replacement options? Apple has done this in the past and will do it again"
Especially if you consider the fact that conquerers like that mainly killed men and the elderly. The fertile women were usually raped, married off, and/or sold as slaves for above purposes. So the overall effect on the population would be limited, he was just replacing one set of sperm with another.
The reason why Big TV Sci-Fi is in trouble more than other genres is that the audience of Big TV Sci-Fi is the most likely to seek a method of viewing the product that can't be monetized. The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
You are also neglecting cost, even if the ratings for wrestling and an original sci-fi series are the same, 99% of the time the wrestling is going to be cheaper to produce and thus be more profitable.
You are sort of right, but you are really not looking at this from the right angle. While doing what Hollywood does takes money, but now thanks to the proliferation of technology, we are not limited to just consuming what Hollywood produces. Most people have a set amount of time they can devote to entertainment, now back in the day video entertainment consisted of TV and movies, all products of the entertainment industries. Now there are literally tons of different types of videos I can watch, things like video game reviews or comedy sketches or political commentary. And while the Hollywood stuff I do watch cannot be easily replicated by people on the internet, overall I still end up watching less of what the major studios produce.
Yeah, a lot of those kids say they want to become scientists or engineers but very few actually have a passion for it, they only get into it because it's what their parents tell them to get into. It's been my experience that people without a passion for science/engineering and are only going through the motions because they were forced into make really shitty engineers. It's Friedman-esque reporting at its finest(ie taking PR points from companies as the honest truth and not scrutinizing a single thing they are fed provided it matches their preset narrative).
Special report coming to us from hell this evening, it seems that satan, lord of darkness, has been seen getting out his winter clothes and polishing the blades on his ice skates. We are still unaware of the cause of this behavior.
The other thing that motivates particularly Japanese developers to push a lot of portable games is the price system the Japanese are used to. For the most part the big name portable games get prices that are really close, if not the same as, the big console releases. The idea of portable games being significantly cheaper than console games doesn't seem to exist in Japan. As a result, as long as they can get sales publishers are rewarded more for portable titles than they are console titles.
Um, first and foremost Tokyo != Japan. Secondly, yes Japanese apartments are small, but they are still shockingly 3d and a games console doesn't take up a lot of room. My personal opinion for why the PSP did better in Japan are twofold:
1) Monster hunter, that game is so popular that there are tons of people who went out and bought a PSP for that game and ONLY for that game.
2) RPGs in general. There are some RPGs for the DS, but in general they suck pretty bad. The PSP has a ton more good JRPGs available.
All you would need is one rogue engineer, not all that improbable.
Also, even in "moderate" groups, I don't think there are many who hate an Iranian A-Bomb. Probably many would be willing to not get it in exchange for better relations/foreign support/avoiding the expenses, but I don't think it is the biggest concern about their government.
Thats the brilliance of it, they may be trying to publicly humiliate the regime. They want to show the people that the regime is so incompetent it cannot possibly be trusted with building the bomb.
It could very well have even been a group inside Iran. The recent elections have shown that there are a large group of people opposed to the current regime, most of them youth. Ahmadinejad's main claim to power is that he is protecting Iran from a US invasion(which yet another reason why W's war to avenge daddy was a huge mistake), if he can be shown to be inept at protecting Iran's military interests then he can conceivably be thrown out.
Historically this has been true, but times they are a changing. Namely the vast majority of people coming in from Mexico and South America, which represent the fastest growing demographic in the US, are predominately catholic. About 1/3 of the country is now catholic and that number is expected to grow.....(unfortunately IMO, ex-catholic ex-everything now:P)
Wow, the dividend doesn't even come close to making up for the fall in share price, again you would have been better off with almost ANY other tech stock. Lets not even get into the fact that Windows is slowly wasting away, Office is going the way of the dodo and almost EVERY other venture they have gone into has pretty much failed.... But if you want to keep pissing your money away on a dying company with a moron at the helm, I obviously cannot stop you.
Um how exactly is he delivering value to the shareholders. Maybe you own a different MSFT from everyone else, but in the past 3 years MSFT has lagged behind pretty much EVERYONE else in the tech sector, fuck they barely edge out Novell, Novell for fucks sake. Balmer's ineptitude is flushing Microsoft down the shitter, if you want to join the ride thats your problem, but if I were an MSFT shareholder I would be royally pissed.
Just because I think that 99.999% of Republican policy is absolute bullshit DOESNT mean I support the democrats on most economic issues. Almost all Republican and most Democratic economic policies have little to no empirical backing. I try to be as empirical as possible, for example I'm one of those people thats for public health care but against extending unemployment benefits. Why? Because public healthcare has been unequivocally proven to be much cheaper for both the individual and society as a whole than private health care. The numbers are there for all to see. However on the flip side extended unemployment does act as a disincentive to return to work, even jobs that people feel are beneath them(for the record, I am pro-unemployment benefits up to 1 year, after that you had better figure something out).
Yeah, they paid us back largely with our own money. One of the biggest scams ever in the history of the united states seems to go largely unnoticed by the average man. While most of us are, legitimately might I add, up in arms about the bailout loans the much more sinister part of the baillout was the preferential interest rates banks got selling us our own debt. Essentially in order to spur lending the Fed was loaning money, with no strings attached of course, to banks at something like less than.25% APY. The banks, instead of lending the money opted instead to buy the very bonds that were issued to fund the loans and were getting about 2% APY on them. So essentially the bank was borrowing money from the Federal government at -1.75% interest, and the more they borrowed the more bonds were issued the more they could make. This was theft on almost unimaginable scales and yet it was completely legal! Its just fucking disgusting that they can pull this kind of shit, and hardly anyone complained. And yet you or I cannot get a -1.75% interest loan from the Fed. Only the uber rich are allowed to get them....fucking sick....
I've read similar hypothesis, the one I read went something along the lines of the fact that in China the emperor was also the head of the church, however in Europe the church and the state often went head to head and constantly competed with eachother. Of course England who did a large amount of the exploring also had a king who was the head of the church....but anyway.
While internal competition can be a good idea, ultimately you have to have a strong autocrat who can pick losers and winners. Microsoft doesn't pick losers and winners, Ballmer seems either unable or uninterested in being able to judge the merits of various technologies so what you wind up with is a company constantly re-inventing the wheel and spamming the market with products that essentially do the same thing but do it in ways that are incompatible with each other, ie a huge mess. Before Jobs came back Apple was in pretty much the same situation, they had ineffectual leadership who were constantly developing and releasing products in the same market that lacked any sort of direction and it almost killed them. Microsoft is going down the exact same road unless they find someone who is bold and preferably comes from outside Microsoft. Microsoft shot up so fast that a lot of the guys who got in on the ground floor still seem to think that they can do no wrong, they really need to be disabused of that notion.
Bad analogy time: imagine that you have two kids and they are trying to decide what to have for dinner, one wants pizza the other Chinese food. Now there are a lot of really good Chinese-style pizzas that combine the two styles very nicely and you end up with something that nicely combines the "features" of the two types of food. However Microsoft management doesn't work like that, what they would wind up doing is ordering delivery for both and just taking the Chinese food and dumping it on top of the pizza. It contains the "features" of both, but the end result would be such a mismash of flavors that it would wind up pleasing nobody.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to save graphic adventures? Simple, have whoever owns the Leisure Suit Larry trademark hire Al Lowe and have him get cracking on a new, *GOOD* Larry, that actually stars Larry and not his nephew or whatever shit was in the past few games.
Homer: What if instead of donating one of my old worn out kidneys, I gave grandpa that artificial kidney I invented...
Marge: Oh Homer, that was just a beer can with a whistle glued to it...
Insider but Mac minis and Mac pros are not replacement for Xserves period. In my opinion Apple wasted an absolutely golden opportunity but not pairing up with Oracle to offer OS x server capable sunfires. Apple would have been able to divest itself of having to design and support server level hardware, oracle would not only gain sales but also tons of free publicity, and OS x server customers would be able to stick with their rack mounted hardware. Everyone wins, but since jobs is so obsssed about not doing the whole clone thing I bet he never even considered it. That one is going to come back and burn him.
(^o^)
Apple handed Microsoft a huge weapon to which fight this battle, the sudden cancellation of the Xserve with no real replacement. Now whenever Apple goes after the enterprise market Microsoft can point to this and say, "Do you really want to risk introducing a device into your enterprise that Apple can discontinue on a whim leaving you with no easy upgrade/replacement options? Apple has done this in the past and will do it again"
Hard work such as selling war materials to the Nazis(the Bushes) or bootlegging liquor(Kennedys)?
Especially if you consider the fact that conquerers like that mainly killed men and the elderly. The fertile women were usually raped, married off, and/or sold as slaves for above purposes. So the overall effect on the population would be limited, he was just replacing one set of sperm with another.
The reason why Big TV Sci-Fi is in trouble more than other genres is that the audience of Big TV Sci-Fi is the most likely to seek a method of viewing the product that can't be monetized. The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
You are also neglecting cost, even if the ratings for wrestling and an original sci-fi series are the same, 99% of the time the wrestling is going to be cheaper to produce and thus be more profitable.
You are sort of right, but you are really not looking at this from the right angle. While doing what Hollywood does takes money, but now thanks to the proliferation of technology, we are not limited to just consuming what Hollywood produces. Most people have a set amount of time they can devote to entertainment, now back in the day video entertainment consisted of TV and movies, all products of the entertainment industries. Now there are literally tons of different types of videos I can watch, things like video game reviews or comedy sketches or political commentary. And while the Hollywood stuff I do watch cannot be easily replicated by people on the internet, overall I still end up watching less of what the major studios produce.
Yeah, a lot of those kids say they want to become scientists or engineers but very few actually have a passion for it, they only get into it because it's what their parents tell them to get into. It's been my experience that people without a passion for science/engineering and are only going through the motions because they were forced into make really shitty engineers. It's Friedman-esque reporting at its finest(ie taking PR points from companies as the honest truth and not scrutinizing a single thing they are fed provided it matches their preset narrative).
Special report coming to us from hell this evening, it seems that satan, lord of darkness, has been seen getting out his winter clothes and polishing the blades on his ice skates. We are still unaware of the cause of this behavior.
Who gives a shit about cell phones on an airplane, I want to know when I'll be able to use my remote control car during flight.
The other thing that motivates particularly Japanese developers to push a lot of portable games is the price system the Japanese are used to. For the most part the big name portable games get prices that are really close, if not the same as, the big console releases. The idea of portable games being significantly cheaper than console games doesn't seem to exist in Japan. As a result, as long as they can get sales publishers are rewarded more for portable titles than they are console titles.
Um, first and foremost Tokyo != Japan. Secondly, yes Japanese apartments are small, but they are still shockingly 3d and a games console doesn't take up a lot of room. My personal opinion for why the PSP did better in Japan are twofold:
1) Monster hunter, that game is so popular that there are tons of people who went out and bought a PSP for that game and ONLY for that game.
2) RPGs in general. There are some RPGs for the DS, but in general they suck pretty bad. The PSP has a ton more good JRPGs available.
The Japanese will be getting the 3ds in a couple of weeks but it's going to cost a little north of $300.
All you would need is one rogue engineer, not all that improbable.
Also, even in "moderate" groups, I don't think there are many who hate an Iranian A-Bomb. Probably many would be willing to not get it in exchange for better relations/foreign support/avoiding the expenses, but I don't think it is the biggest concern about their government.
Thats the brilliance of it, they may be trying to publicly humiliate the regime. They want to show the people that the regime is so incompetent it cannot possibly be trusted with building the bomb.
It could very well have even been a group inside Iran. The recent elections have shown that there are a large group of people opposed to the current regime, most of them youth. Ahmadinejad's main claim to power is that he is protecting Iran from a US invasion(which yet another reason why W's war to avenge daddy was a huge mistake), if he can be shown to be inept at protecting Iran's military interests then he can conceivably be thrown out.
Historically this has been true, but times they are a changing. Namely the vast majority of people coming in from Mexico and South America, which represent the fastest growing demographic in the US, are predominately catholic. About 1/3 of the country is now catholic and that number is expected to grow.....(unfortunately IMO, ex-catholic ex-everything now :P)
Wow, the dividend doesn't even come close to making up for the fall in share price, again you would have been better off with almost ANY other tech stock. Lets not even get into the fact that Windows is slowly wasting away, Office is going the way of the dodo and almost EVERY other venture they have gone into has pretty much failed.... But if you want to keep pissing your money away on a dying company with a moron at the helm, I obviously cannot stop you.
Um how exactly is he delivering value to the shareholders. Maybe you own a different MSFT from everyone else, but in the past 3 years MSFT has lagged behind pretty much EVERYONE else in the tech sector, fuck they barely edge out Novell, Novell for fucks sake. Balmer's ineptitude is flushing Microsoft down the shitter, if you want to join the ride thats your problem, but if I were an MSFT shareholder I would be royally pissed.
Just because I think that 99.999% of Republican policy is absolute bullshit DOESNT mean I support the democrats on most economic issues. Almost all Republican and most Democratic economic policies have little to no empirical backing. I try to be as empirical as possible, for example I'm one of those people thats for public health care but against extending unemployment benefits. Why? Because public healthcare has been unequivocally proven to be much cheaper for both the individual and society as a whole than private health care. The numbers are there for all to see. However on the flip side extended unemployment does act as a disincentive to return to work, even jobs that people feel are beneath them(for the record, I am pro-unemployment benefits up to 1 year, after that you had better figure something out).
Yeah, they paid us back largely with our own money. One of the biggest scams ever in the history of the united states seems to go largely unnoticed by the average man. While most of us are, legitimately might I add, up in arms about the bailout loans the much more sinister part of the baillout was the preferential interest rates banks got selling us our own debt. Essentially in order to spur lending the Fed was loaning money, with no strings attached of course, to banks at something like less than .25% APY. The banks, instead of lending the money opted instead to buy the very bonds that were issued to fund the loans and were getting about 2% APY on them. So essentially the bank was borrowing money from the Federal government at -1.75% interest, and the more they borrowed the more bonds were issued the more they could make. This was theft on almost unimaginable scales and yet it was completely legal! Its just fucking disgusting that they can pull this kind of shit, and hardly anyone complained. And yet you or I cannot get a -1.75% interest loan from the Fed. Only the uber rich are allowed to get them....fucking sick....
I've read similar hypothesis, the one I read went something along the lines of the fact that in China the emperor was also the head of the church, however in Europe the church and the state often went head to head and constantly competed with eachother. Of course England who did a large amount of the exploring also had a king who was the head of the church....but anyway.
While internal competition can be a good idea, ultimately you have to have a strong autocrat who can pick losers and winners. Microsoft doesn't pick losers and winners, Ballmer seems either unable or uninterested in being able to judge the merits of various technologies so what you wind up with is a company constantly re-inventing the wheel and spamming the market with products that essentially do the same thing but do it in ways that are incompatible with each other, ie a huge mess. Before Jobs came back Apple was in pretty much the same situation, they had ineffectual leadership who were constantly developing and releasing products in the same market that lacked any sort of direction and it almost killed them. Microsoft is going down the exact same road unless they find someone who is bold and preferably comes from outside Microsoft. Microsoft shot up so fast that a lot of the guys who got in on the ground floor still seem to think that they can do no wrong, they really need to be disabused of that notion.
Bad analogy time: imagine that you have two kids and they are trying to decide what to have for dinner, one wants pizza the other Chinese food. Now there are a lot of really good Chinese-style pizzas that combine the two styles very nicely and you end up with something that nicely combines the "features" of the two types of food. However Microsoft management doesn't work like that, what they would wind up doing is ordering delivery for both and just taking the Chinese food and dumping it on top of the pizza. It contains the "features" of both, but the end result would be such a mismash of flavors that it would wind up pleasing nobody.
Giant escalator! there, problem solved.
Let me guess, your heart belongs to Bruce Wayne and only Bruce Wayne?