Re:how about realistic advertisement of graphics?
on
The Great Digital Hype
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· Score: 1
This is why I like Nintendo's ads on the whole. No, they don't show gameplay for the entire spot. Instead they try to capture the essence of the game with live actors (NOT people in Crash Bandicoot suits).
So in one ad we have what looks like a class for new fathers, until the instructor puts helmets on the baby dolls and announces its time to practice some cannon loading. Then we find out, this is an ad for Mario And Luigi: Partners in Time, a game where you treat baby Mario and Luigi pretty irresponsibly - including shooting them out of cannons, throwing them off cliffs, and literally *hitting your enemies with them*. There's the appeal of the game right there. No fancy prerenders needed. The box art is cartooney, so you know that's not exactly what it'll look like, but you can still recognize the characters in the game from it.
Another ad like this was the one a few years back for the wireless enabled Pokemon game. It was done in very serious cinema style, a kid walking through a glare-filled, crowded street, with a child's voice reciting the Team Rocket poem, so deadpan that at first you really didn't realize what it was. Then suddenly the kid meets another kid and its clear what's happening; they're going to have a pokemon battle! If you haven't gotten the words of the ad yet, it suddenly clicks. Again, this is a great representation of the product being advertised; its something that should be familiar (note that they're using text from the show, which has a much broader audience) and playing on that same sense of familiarity to make the point that you could run into another pokemon player virtually anywhere. It was brilliant, and it didn't misrepresent the contents of the game at all. (Of course, the ubiquity of the wireless adapter proved to be another story.)
I think these ads come out of a Japanese style. I've seen a lot of examples of this - most famously this Japanese spot for Katamari Damacy. The spots aren't using live actors to seem "EXTREEM" - they're just funny, dramatic, and suprising, and they get the point across. If anything, these spots are dressed down for effect. Check out the color schemes in the Katamari and Partners in Time spots. Both use desaturated colors to set up an expectation of "normality" that the situation then breaks. The Pokemon ad functions more or less the same way.
Presidents spend most of their 1st term wasted trying to get re-elected instead of actually doing anything of real use.
Not James K. Polk. In four short years he met his every goal. He seized the whole southwest from Mexico, made sure the tariffs fell and made the English sell the Oregon Territory. He built an independent treasury. Having done all this, he sought no second term. But precious few have mourned the passing of Mr. James K Polk, our 11th president.
You know that "I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," goes both ways, right?
I believe it's common decency to afford your fellow man the right to disagree, even vehemently, without being accused of censorship.
I understand that we are all working from First Amendment rights here, but those do not include the right to be agreed with, or the right to be popular. You seem to believe that they do.
I think he's talking about the Adult Swim "cards" that appear between the commercials during that time block and change constantly. Those are fantastic advertising; they keep people watching, waiting to see a new Adult Swim spot. That's *exactly* the effect that Cuban is talking about; intersperse actual content with the advertising and people won't tune out the ads.
Live content is even better because people will go out of their way to be "in the moment." The only problem with this is, live events are terribly expensive. So you can't run a lot of them. People have run promotions in the past where they promote an ad that will run sometime during a given time frame, like, "during this weeks episode of Friends." When you do that, ratings spike during that particular slice of time.
Cuban thinks that doing this more will make ratings go up overall; the truth is, you can only run so many live events before people think of them as normal. At which point, the live television spots will be at a disadvantage to other forms of entertainment that don't require the viewer to be in front of their TV, on a certain channel at a certain time.
In order for advertising to be more effective, all the TV execs have to do is cut down on the number of ads shown - say, removing 2 30-second spots from an average 30-minute show. Don't allow one company to run the same spot every break. Have every network that's going to run an ad from a spot series run the entire series, weigh them somewhat equally, and order them appropriately. Ad agencies should negotiate so that their works don't become "diluted" from overuse; the Bud-Weis-Er frogs were only funny the first fifteen hundred times. Manage the spots more tightly so that they are entertaining themselves. Then we'll want to stick around for them. Duh.
It isn't just his box-in-closet that has this problem with Comcast. They sporadically won't accept any mail from my dreamhost-managed mail server because they think it's a residential IP.
The reason for the unified front is, if you want to be considered to run as a Republican and get Republican money to run for office, you have to agree to abide by every plank of the party platform. This includes support for the far-fetched, the unconstitutional and the irrational. (For example, the Texas GOP included clauses in their platform that called for de-anonymizing the people who report to Child Protective Services.) The GOP has a lot of campaign money, and if you choose to run against them, that money will work against you. So it's not surprising that they're more "unified" as a party. They money is flowing in that direction.
Re:What with the piss-poor grammar on here?
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Code Monkey Like Fritos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not referring to people who speak English as a second language, either.
How do you know? Do you go through their post histories, meticulously reconstructing the details of their sordid past? Because that's just...creepy.
Wow. You are so wrong, it's not even funny. Allow me to speak from experience.
Women like literature that discusses social issues. Whether those are issues of justice, social acceptability, or relationship standards, that's where women gravitate. Women love Judge Judy, they love Jerry Springer, and they love Sex and the City. Okay, maybe those shows are trash. But in the same vein, they also love The Scarlet Letter, which is primarily a critique of puritanical society and its justice system. They also love that terrible musical version of Pygmalion, which was a pioneering play in terms of talking through characters' expectations and beliefs. It's not sex that is drawing them in. It's a discussion of "right" and "wrong," which happens to have a lot to do with sex in some situations. (For example, I've found that female readers are much less interested in Dante's inferno, because its style is too high-handed to allow a great deal of dialogue on each subject. Likewise, they are not so keen on reading about the whiteness of the whale.)
In the realm of games, women love the storyline in Grim Fandango - which puts you at odds with the justice system, explores the society in the Land of the Dead, and places you in the uneasy role of trying to save a woman who may not even want your help. Adventure games on the whole are appealing to the female audience because they have very deep conversation engines. On the other hand, the plot of Oblivion ("your crime does not matter now") is not appealing to female gamers, but the crime and punishment system is! I actually heard a female gamer justifying her arrest, "No, they didn't arrest me because I stole all that stuff. They just hate the Khajit!" A social justification for a logical event.
Sex nothing. If all it took was sex, there would be millions of female Leisure Suit Larry fans.
I understand where you're coming from, but I have to say that I find complete strangers who take it upon themselves to tell me how to channel my creative forces intolerably rude.
The same with people who say, "But you don't want to go into $professionalfield! It's hard!" I am well aware of how hard it is. Thank you.
Actually, I'm 98% sure that the Rev controller WILL use a gyroscope/accelerometer system. The sensor strip will be used to establish the screen location and error-check the absolute position extrapolated from this data.
I'm so sure about this, partly because the media hands-on included a demo (an adaptation of Kurukuru Kururin) where you hold the controller on its side, pointing the IR transmitter parallel to the screen. Internal sensors would be needed for this. Also, when Iwata presented the controller, he mentioned that it would be able to sense when the controller was turned upside down. Need a gyro for that.
Now that I think about it, that would be a great analog to the current "pull out" pauses that happen when your controller gets jarred loose. If you're playing a game where the controller should always be right-side up, knowing when it was upside down would allow you to pause the game if someone dropped their controller.
Supposedly, Albatross 18 is going to be a launch title for the Revolution. I don't know how well this game compares with Mario Golf, but I can say that it's taken its fair share of gaming hours from my roommate. Honestly, I came in once and saw him playing Albatross on one box and Oblivion on another. It's an addiction.
Not unless the line has a particular genetic feature which does not exist outside that line. Which is nearly impossible.
Also, you can't build a virus such that it will only work on individuals with certain DNA. Only gene expressions will determine whether the disease gets access to the body. Which means that, even given that your patrilineal line, which also becomes matrilineal after the first generation, by the way - Fun fact: There is only one expressive gene on the Y chromosome, which activates the production of natal testosterone which triggers all the physical changes needed to produce a male child. All male-dominant genetic expressions, like MPB and color-blindness, are inherited from the mother. - had a completely unique DNA sequence that actually did something, any other person that happened to have different DNA expressing the key trait would be subject to the disease as well.
Also, this disease would affect so few people that it would die off rather quickly. You'd probably have to track down each individual and administer it to them personally, at which point you might as well just shoot them.
Huh? I don't know every detail of Clinton's administration, but I believe there was a good bit of Repub effort thrown into making people believe that he was some sort of underworld figure. They even started a rumor that he had murdered a former employee. So when I hear things like your IRS claim, my bullshit alarm goes off. Got any quotes to back that up?
Of course the people that criticize Bush now will be the first to criticise him if there's another attack. Why do you think they'd do anything different?
Out of curiosity, how do you define the "constitutional minimum"? Do you believe, for example, in state-appointed attorneys for poor criminal defendants? Because that's not in the constitution at all, and we only have it because of a really persistent inmate who spent his unearned jail time appealing his case.
Do you believe in Child Protective Services? Miranda rights? The FCC? The FDA? Which parts get to stay, and which ones get the axe?
Dubious. If they believed that God could create such a world, they wouldn't accuse "science" of besmirching God with their research into evolution.
The problem is that the particular strains of Christianity to which Intelligent Design appeal are a mix of mainline Christian philosophy and narrative orthodoxy. The former being the belief in God as a supreme being, omniscient and omnipotent, which is a fairly new feature of philosophy, and the latter being the belief that God literally created the world in six days, literally flooded the entire world, etc. These two live together in an uneasy ideological truce, and anything that requires one to take precedence over the other is a problem.
Of course, the other problem is that ID as a movement is politically valuable - just like video game bans, ID proposals allow politicians to claim allegiance with a certain demographic without actually doing anything for them.
I disagree. I think that disagreeing with someone is a perfectly good reason to mod someone down. In fact, when it comes down to it, that's the only criterion you can really have. Complaining that you were modded down "just because they didn't like what I said" is like complaining the party going against an incumbent candidate at election time is "just trying to get him out of office."
Note to Slashdotters: Being modded up is a privilege, not a right. Being modded down is criticism, not censorship.
I actually think that Fox may be onto something with their "cancelling great shows" habit. I know you and I think of television as an ongoing thing; success in the American market usually means a long pre-syndication primetime run. But other areas of the world are perfectly willing to run single-season shows. The perfect example of this is Anime - many popular shows, such as FLCL, Evangelion, Trigun, and Cowboy Bebop were written with a single story arc, 26 episodes or less, intended to be taken together as a single work. This seems to be what Fox is stabbing at, especially with shows like Arrested Development and Family Guy which had definitive "endings."
Why would Fox do this? There are plenty of advantages to creating (essentially) long form movies like these. For one, they can sell single-unit hard copies of the show long after it has gone off the air; and if they could sell television shows like DVD movies, that would be a great source of revenue. But the real sauce is in merchandising. Family Guy became a merchandising cash cow after it was cancelled, and the DVDs of the series became an entertainment staple. Futurama has seen similar retail success, and anyone else notice the amazing upsurge in Firefly merch as Serenity approached?
Making one season of a good show is also a lot cheaper and a lot faster. Firefly has basically leapt from "new show" to "movie franchise" in the time it took to make the entire Star Trek original series, and its success was far cheaper. And dare I point out that the format doesn't burn out the writers, and keeps them happy coming up with new ideas for yet more shows?
Of course, I don't know Fox's financials, but I'm willing to bet that they've made more from merchandising and syndicating Family Guy, Futurama, Firefly, or Arrested Development than they get from selling advertising on most of their other shows. (And I bet reruns of those have a better ad index than most of their "fresh" shows, too - the shows were cancelled before they could make any bad episodes!)
Then maybe this move on Nintendo's part is a good thing. Sony and Microsoft are drowning each other out in similar rhetoric, a shared library of ports, and a general dissociation from the game content that their machines run; that can't be helping that hurdle get any lower.
This is why I call their strategy "intra-genre." If Nintendo gets the word out that their console is significantly different, Nintendo effectively separates itself from the other two consoles. Effectively this puts their product in a different "genre" than the XBox or the PS3, allowing it to flourish in it's own space. This effect can be seen in the PC section of Frys, where games are categorized by genre. You can pick a "best in category" for each genre (FPS, Adventure, Strategy, Puzzle) without comparing, say, SWAT 4 and Civ 4 - you shouldn't compare them, because they're in different genres. What's more, you have reason to buy BOTH of them, because they're both the "best" in their respective genres.
Now I know you're thinking, "Yeah, but it just won't work." There are several reasons to think that it will.
For one, there's the pricing. A two hundred dollar price difference is enough to make someone think that the two products are fundamentally different - a marketing strategy commonly used to sell indistinguishable products for vastly inflated prices. Why on earth then would this strategy work in favor of the cheaper product? Parents. When you're selling directly to the consumer, a higher price tag means a precision experience and a level of prestige, but when you're getting at the consumer through a second party - to wit, their children - the higher priced item is likely to come across as inaccessible and arcane, which is exactly how most non-gamer parents feel about the current generation of consoles. If Nintendo can get more parents to see their system as simple, cheap and fun - more toy than tool - then they have a much better chance of getting to their pocketbooks.
The pricing also means that anyone who can afford either of the other consoles can afford a Revolution, too. And the people who can't afford the other consoles...can probably afford the Revolution. It's a good market position to settle yourself in.
Another (small) contributing factor is the fact that the Revolution won't have hi-def support. This means that Nintendo isn't expecting people to plug the Rev into their expensive main TV; they want it plugged into a different TV, say, in a kid's room. This is a great way of illustrating how non-competition can give you an advantage; the 360 seems to demand to be plugged into the most expensive, biggest TV possible (and some people have postulated that the 360 is actually trying to sell these expensive TVs). The Revolution isn't as demanding, therefore it will get bought and plugged into smaller, more common TV sets.
Of course, there's the elephant-in-the-room controller. It doesn't look like a current game system or control like a current game system, so people aren't likely to associate it with the NESes and PlayStations of former decades. People, especially parents, really do think that console gaming is pressing little buttons in order - something that further enforces the idea of gaming as something arcane and distant to them. Of course, Nintendo is partly to blame for this image, as they were the ones that pumped up the "master the game" consumerism in the 1980s. (But they've noticed that point and click games like Bejeweled have become ubiquitous in the vaccum created by gaming elitism.)
On a similar note, how easy will it be, do you think, to port to and from the Revolution? Code will likely be technically portable, but the interface will be very different. The likely result will be an entirely different library of games, which is going to differentiate the product even further. (So far, this has worked very well in favor of the DS, even with games that were essentially tech demos.)
Wow...what a great troll! You even managed to fit some ancient Greek philosophy in there - good for you!
Competition is good for everyone, as long as the competition exists in the media and not in business practices. The console flame wars are ensuring that more people will buy all three. (Just like boy band rivalries ensure higher record sales on both sides.)
That said, Nintendo's marketing has tried to convert to a sort of "intra-genre" format. They're framing the current media storm so that they are on one "side" and Sony and Microsoft are allied together on the other. The Nintendo side being affordability and innovation, and the "other" side being expensive and conventional (again, according to Nintendo's marketing.) This is taking the steam out of Sony and Microsofts mutual rivalry by making them seem homogenous - removing the level of difference between them. (And I can't say Sony and Microsoft are doing anything to truly differentiate their consoles - but then again, this is part of the boy band rivalry formula: the two products are the same except for how you *feel* about them.)
So when Nintendo says they aren't competing with Sony or Microsoft, that their product is totally different and will occupy its own niche, their real message is really that: A) their product will be so valuable for its cost that it won't matter if you have another console already, and B) it doesn't really matter whether you buy a 360 or a PS3, and there's certainly no point in buying both. Their message seems to be getting into the mainstream, because even their critics are using their competitors' products mashed together with a slash between them.
Just to set the record straight, there was a game based on A.I. It was called TheBeast, and it was the first commercial alternate reality game. It was set between the first and second endings of A.I. and really fleshed out the world about 20 years after David left his family. If you noticed a certain weird job title in the film's end credits - that was part of this game.
Apparently the early development was done at Microsoft, so maybe this is where the ideas for the XBox games ended up?
Look, Firefox does NOT have the capability to determine how many "real" Firefox users there are. Period. Those numbers are impossible to get. Just like it's impossible to know how many people watched a specific television program on a specific night, how many dentists recommend Crest or how many Americans approve of the President. It's just not possible. The technology to make that knowledge possible is NOT something that you want installed in your home. Trust me.
Firefox download numbers are NOT a bad way to count individual users. They're a much better way, statistically, than the method used to determine the Presidents approval rating or the Nielsen numbers. (They take a small sample and scale it up to get a picture of the entire population.) If Firefox were a commercial product, we would use sales figures, but it isn't being offered for sale. So we count every download as a "sale." If you have a better method for counting users, please, please enlighten us. Otherwise you're equating use of the best data available to outright lying, and that's just not cool.
God...would you call someone a liar if he used "car" instead of "1997 Honda Civic"? Get a grip.
The Romans had a similar view when they carved their tombstones and road signs. The result was a separate "mini-language" that takes extra study to decipher. For example, there are abbreviations for all of the common Roman names and certain positions in the government and military. Certain popular phrases were merely acronymed out a la SPQR. 4 years of Latin really won't help deciphering a Roman tombstone. You have to either be fluent in the language and extremely knowledgable about history, or have a codex created for you by someone who is. They honestly assumed that their audience would be Roman, and would simply "know what they meant anyway."
Can you imagine a future scholar trying to decipher AIMspeak? I imagine the Roman inscription rules, but made up on the fly, relying on puns and phonetic mutations, and I shudder. The future had better breed some damn fine linguists if we want 20th century culture to be recorded accurately.
My parents' generation and a few of their children that never moved out of west Texas still tack the word "located" onto sentences with "where" in them.
"Where is it located?"
"Hell, I don't know where it's located!"
You might want to consider a web hosting plan that will roll in a license for Miva Merchant for a low price. Apparently Apollo Hosting sells them for around $65. (Disclaimer: I got this info from someone who works their tech support. So if you do sign up with them, be nice to the support guys.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I like Nintendo's ads on the whole. No, they don't show gameplay for the entire spot. Instead they try to capture the essence of the game with live actors (NOT people in Crash Bandicoot suits).
So in one ad we have what looks like a class for new fathers, until the instructor puts helmets on the baby dolls and announces its time to practice some cannon loading. Then we find out, this is an ad for Mario And Luigi: Partners in Time, a game where you treat baby Mario and Luigi pretty irresponsibly - including shooting them out of cannons, throwing them off cliffs, and literally *hitting your enemies with them*. There's the appeal of the game right there. No fancy prerenders needed. The box art is cartooney, so you know that's not exactly what it'll look like, but you can still recognize the characters in the game from it.
Another ad like this was the one a few years back for the wireless enabled Pokemon game. It was done in very serious cinema style, a kid walking through a glare-filled, crowded street, with a child's voice reciting the Team Rocket poem, so deadpan that at first you really didn't realize what it was. Then suddenly the kid meets another kid and its clear what's happening; they're going to have a pokemon battle! If you haven't gotten the words of the ad yet, it suddenly clicks. Again, this is a great representation of the product being advertised; its something that should be familiar (note that they're using text from the show, which has a much broader audience) and playing on that same sense of familiarity to make the point that you could run into another pokemon player virtually anywhere. It was brilliant, and it didn't misrepresent the contents of the game at all. (Of course, the ubiquity of the wireless adapter proved to be another story.)
I think these ads come out of a Japanese style. I've seen a lot of examples of this - most famously this Japanese spot for Katamari Damacy. The spots aren't using live actors to seem "EXTREEM" - they're just funny, dramatic, and suprising, and they get the point across. If anything, these spots are dressed down for effect. Check out the color schemes in the Katamari and Partners in Time spots. Both use desaturated colors to set up an expectation of "normality" that the situation then breaks. The Pokemon ad functions more or less the same way.
Presidents spend most of their 1st term wasted trying to get re-elected instead of actually doing anything of real use.
Not James K. Polk. In four short years he met his every goal. He seized the whole southwest from Mexico, made sure the tariffs fell and made the English sell the Oregon Territory. He built an independent treasury. Having done all this, he sought no second term. But precious few have mourned the passing of Mr. James K Polk, our 11th president.
You know that "I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," goes both ways, right?
I believe it's common decency to afford your fellow man the right to disagree, even vehemently, without being accused of censorship.
I understand that we are all working from First Amendment rights here, but those do not include the right to be agreed with, or the right to be popular. You seem to believe that they do.
I think he's talking about the Adult Swim "cards" that appear between the commercials during that time block and change constantly. Those are fantastic advertising; they keep people watching, waiting to see a new Adult Swim spot. That's *exactly* the effect that Cuban is talking about; intersperse actual content with the advertising and people won't tune out the ads.
Live content is even better because people will go out of their way to be "in the moment." The only problem with this is, live events are terribly expensive. So you can't run a lot of them. People have run promotions in the past where they promote an ad that will run sometime during a given time frame, like, "during this weeks episode of Friends." When you do that, ratings spike during that particular slice of time.
Cuban thinks that doing this more will make ratings go up overall; the truth is, you can only run so many live events before people think of them as normal. At which point, the live television spots will be at a disadvantage to other forms of entertainment that don't require the viewer to be in front of their TV, on a certain channel at a certain time.
In order for advertising to be more effective, all the TV execs have to do is cut down on the number of ads shown - say, removing 2 30-second spots from an average 30-minute show. Don't allow one company to run the same spot every break. Have every network that's going to run an ad from a spot series run the entire series, weigh them somewhat equally, and order them appropriately. Ad agencies should negotiate so that their works don't become "diluted" from overuse; the Bud-Weis-Er frogs were only funny the first fifteen hundred times. Manage the spots more tightly so that they are entertaining themselves. Then we'll want to stick around for them. Duh.
It isn't just his box-in-closet that has this problem with Comcast. They sporadically won't accept any mail from my dreamhost-managed mail server because they think it's a residential IP.
The reason for the unified front is, if you want to be considered to run as a Republican and get Republican money to run for office, you have to agree to abide by every plank of the party platform. This includes support for the far-fetched, the unconstitutional and the irrational. (For example, the Texas GOP included clauses in their platform that called for de-anonymizing the people who report to Child Protective Services.) The GOP has a lot of campaign money, and if you choose to run against them, that money will work against you. So it's not surprising that they're more "unified" as a party. They money is flowing in that direction.
I'm not referring to people who speak English as a second language, either.
How do you know? Do you go through their post histories, meticulously reconstructing the details of their sordid past? Because that's just...creepy.
They were probably collecting data for the companies in the list. Nielsen makes its money selling consumer data, not doing unbiased research.
Wow. You are so wrong, it's not even funny. Allow me to speak from experience.
Women like literature that discusses social issues. Whether those are issues of justice, social acceptability, or relationship standards, that's where women gravitate. Women love Judge Judy, they love Jerry Springer, and they love Sex and the City. Okay, maybe those shows are trash. But in the same vein, they also love The Scarlet Letter, which is primarily a critique of puritanical society and its justice system. They also love that terrible musical version of Pygmalion, which was a pioneering play in terms of talking through characters' expectations and beliefs. It's not sex that is drawing them in. It's a discussion of "right" and "wrong," which happens to have a lot to do with sex in some situations. (For example, I've found that female readers are much less interested in Dante's inferno, because its style is too high-handed to allow a great deal of dialogue on each subject. Likewise, they are not so keen on reading about the whiteness of the whale.)
In the realm of games, women love the storyline in Grim Fandango - which puts you at odds with the justice system, explores the society in the Land of the Dead, and places you in the uneasy role of trying to save a woman who may not even want your help. Adventure games on the whole are appealing to the female audience because they have very deep conversation engines. On the other hand, the plot of Oblivion ("your crime does not matter now") is not appealing to female gamers, but the crime and punishment system is! I actually heard a female gamer justifying her arrest, "No, they didn't arrest me because I stole all that stuff. They just hate the Khajit!" A social justification for a logical event.
Sex nothing. If all it took was sex, there would be millions of female Leisure Suit Larry fans.
I understand where you're coming from, but I have to say that I find complete strangers who take it upon themselves to tell me how to channel my creative forces intolerably rude.
The same with people who say, "But you don't want to go into $professionalfield! It's hard!" I am well aware of how hard it is. Thank you.
Actually, I'm 98% sure that the Rev controller WILL use a gyroscope/accelerometer system. The sensor strip will be used to establish the screen location and error-check the absolute position extrapolated from this data.
I'm so sure about this, partly because the media hands-on included a demo (an adaptation of Kurukuru Kururin) where you hold the controller on its side, pointing the IR transmitter parallel to the screen. Internal sensors would be needed for this. Also, when Iwata presented the controller, he mentioned that it would be able to sense when the controller was turned upside down. Need a gyro for that.
Now that I think about it, that would be a great analog to the current "pull out" pauses that happen when your controller gets jarred loose. If you're playing a game where the controller should always be right-side up, knowing when it was upside down would allow you to pause the game if someone dropped their controller.
Supposedly, Albatross 18 is going to be a launch title for the Revolution. I don't know how well this game compares with Mario Golf, but I can say that it's taken its fair share of gaming hours from my roommate. Honestly, I came in once and saw him playing Albatross on one box and Oblivion on another. It's an addiction.
Not unless the line has a particular genetic feature which does not exist outside that line. Which is nearly impossible.
Also, you can't build a virus such that it will only work on individuals with certain DNA. Only gene expressions will determine whether the disease gets access to the body. Which means that, even given that your patrilineal line, which also becomes matrilineal after the first generation, by the way - Fun fact: There is only one expressive gene on the Y chromosome, which activates the production of natal testosterone which triggers all the physical changes needed to produce a male child. All male-dominant genetic expressions, like MPB and color-blindness, are inherited from the mother. - had a completely unique DNA sequence that actually did something, any other person that happened to have different DNA expressing the key trait would be subject to the disease as well.
Also, this disease would affect so few people that it would die off rather quickly. You'd probably have to track down each individual and administer it to them personally, at which point you might as well just shoot them.
Sounds like a great plot device, though.
Huh? I don't know every detail of Clinton's administration, but I believe there was a good bit of Repub effort thrown into making people believe that he was some sort of underworld figure. They even started a rumor that he had murdered a former employee. So when I hear things like your IRS claim, my bullshit alarm goes off. Got any quotes to back that up?
Of course the people that criticize Bush now will be the first to criticise him if there's another attack. Why do you think they'd do anything different?
Out of curiosity, how do you define the "constitutional minimum"? Do you believe, for example, in state-appointed attorneys for poor criminal defendants? Because that's not in the constitution at all, and we only have it because of a really persistent inmate who spent his unearned jail time appealing his case.
Do you believe in Child Protective Services? Miranda rights? The FCC? The FDA? Which parts get to stay, and which ones get the axe?
Dubious. If they believed that God could create such a world, they wouldn't accuse "science" of besmirching God with their research into evolution.
The problem is that the particular strains of Christianity to which Intelligent Design appeal are a mix of mainline Christian philosophy and narrative orthodoxy. The former being the belief in God as a supreme being, omniscient and omnipotent, which is a fairly new feature of philosophy, and the latter being the belief that God literally created the world in six days, literally flooded the entire world, etc. These two live together in an uneasy ideological truce, and anything that requires one to take precedence over the other is a problem.
Of course, the other problem is that ID as a movement is politically valuable - just like video game bans, ID proposals allow politicians to claim allegiance with a certain demographic without actually doing anything for them.
I disagree. I think that disagreeing with someone is a perfectly good reason to mod someone down. In fact, when it comes down to it, that's the only criterion you can really have. Complaining that you were modded down "just because they didn't like what I said" is like complaining the party going against an incumbent candidate at election time is "just trying to get him out of office."
Note to Slashdotters: Being modded up is a privilege, not a right. Being modded down is criticism, not censorship.
I actually think that Fox may be onto something with their "cancelling great shows" habit. I know you and I think of television as an ongoing thing; success in the American market usually means a long pre-syndication primetime run. But other areas of the world are perfectly willing to run single-season shows. The perfect example of this is Anime - many popular shows, such as FLCL, Evangelion, Trigun, and Cowboy Bebop were written with a single story arc, 26 episodes or less, intended to be taken together as a single work. This seems to be what Fox is stabbing at, especially with shows like Arrested Development and Family Guy which had definitive "endings."
Why would Fox do this? There are plenty of advantages to creating (essentially) long form movies like these. For one, they can sell single-unit hard copies of the show long after it has gone off the air; and if they could sell television shows like DVD movies, that would be a great source of revenue. But the real sauce is in merchandising. Family Guy became a merchandising cash cow after it was cancelled, and the DVDs of the series became an entertainment staple. Futurama has seen similar retail success, and anyone else notice the amazing upsurge in Firefly merch as Serenity approached?
Making one season of a good show is also a lot cheaper and a lot faster. Firefly has basically leapt from "new show" to "movie franchise" in the time it took to make the entire Star Trek original series, and its success was far cheaper. And dare I point out that the format doesn't burn out the writers, and keeps them happy coming up with new ideas for yet more shows?
Of course, I don't know Fox's financials, but I'm willing to bet that they've made more from merchandising and syndicating Family Guy, Futurama, Firefly, or Arrested Development than they get from selling advertising on most of their other shows. (And I bet reruns of those have a better ad index than most of their "fresh" shows, too - the shows were cancelled before they could make any bad episodes!)
Then maybe this move on Nintendo's part is a good thing. Sony and Microsoft are drowning each other out in similar rhetoric, a shared library of ports, and a general dissociation from the game content that their machines run; that can't be helping that hurdle get any lower.
This is why I call their strategy "intra-genre." If Nintendo gets the word out that their console is significantly different, Nintendo effectively separates itself from the other two consoles. Effectively this puts their product in a different "genre" than the XBox or the PS3, allowing it to flourish in it's own space. This effect can be seen in the PC section of Frys, where games are categorized by genre. You can pick a "best in category" for each genre (FPS, Adventure, Strategy, Puzzle) without comparing, say, SWAT 4 and Civ 4 - you shouldn't compare them, because they're in different genres. What's more, you have reason to buy BOTH of them, because they're both the "best" in their respective genres.
Now I know you're thinking, "Yeah, but it just won't work." There are several reasons to think that it will.
For one, there's the pricing. A two hundred dollar price difference is enough to make someone think that the two products are fundamentally different - a marketing strategy commonly used to sell indistinguishable products for vastly inflated prices. Why on earth then would this strategy work in favor of the cheaper product? Parents. When you're selling directly to the consumer, a higher price tag means a precision experience and a level of prestige, but when you're getting at the consumer through a second party - to wit, their children - the higher priced item is likely to come across as inaccessible and arcane, which is exactly how most non-gamer parents feel about the current generation of consoles. If Nintendo can get more parents to see their system as simple, cheap and fun - more toy than tool - then they have a much better chance of getting to their pocketbooks.
The pricing also means that anyone who can afford either of the other consoles can afford a Revolution, too. And the people who can't afford the other consoles...can probably afford the Revolution. It's a good market position to settle yourself in.
Another (small) contributing factor is the fact that the Revolution won't have hi-def support. This means that Nintendo isn't expecting people to plug the Rev into their expensive main TV; they want it plugged into a different TV, say, in a kid's room. This is a great way of illustrating how non-competition can give you an advantage; the 360 seems to demand to be plugged into the most expensive, biggest TV possible (and some people have postulated that the 360 is actually trying to sell these expensive TVs). The Revolution isn't as demanding, therefore it will get bought and plugged into smaller, more common TV sets.
Of course, there's the elephant-in-the-room controller. It doesn't look like a current game system or control like a current game system, so people aren't likely to associate it with the NESes and PlayStations of former decades. People, especially parents, really do think that console gaming is pressing little buttons in order - something that further enforces the idea of gaming as something arcane and distant to them. Of course, Nintendo is partly to blame for this image, as they were the ones that pumped up the "master the game" consumerism in the 1980s. (But they've noticed that point and click games like Bejeweled have become ubiquitous in the vaccum created by gaming elitism.)
On a similar note, how easy will it be, do you think, to port to and from the Revolution? Code will likely be technically portable, but the interface will be very different. The likely result will be an entirely different library of games, which is going to differentiate the product even further. (So far, this has worked very well in favor of the DS, even with games that were essentially tech demos.)
The only thing Nintendo really has to w
Wow...what a great troll! You even managed to fit some ancient Greek philosophy in there - good for you!
Competition is good for everyone, as long as the competition exists in the media and not in business practices. The console flame wars are ensuring that more people will buy all three. (Just like boy band rivalries ensure higher record sales on both sides.)
That said, Nintendo's marketing has tried to convert to a sort of "intra-genre" format. They're framing the current media storm so that they are on one "side" and Sony and Microsoft are allied together on the other. The Nintendo side being affordability and innovation, and the "other" side being expensive and conventional (again, according to Nintendo's marketing.) This is taking the steam out of Sony and Microsofts mutual rivalry by making them seem homogenous - removing the level of difference between them. (And I can't say Sony and Microsoft are doing anything to truly differentiate their consoles - but then again, this is part of the boy band rivalry formula: the two products are the same except for how you *feel* about them.)
So when Nintendo says they aren't competing with Sony or Microsoft, that their product is totally different and will occupy its own niche, their real message is really that: A) their product will be so valuable for its cost that it won't matter if you have another console already, and B) it doesn't really matter whether you buy a 360 or a PS3, and there's certainly no point in buying both. Their message seems to be getting into the mainstream, because even their critics are using their competitors' products mashed together with a slash between them.
Just to set the record straight, there was a game based on A.I. It was called The Beast, and it was the first commercial alternate reality game. It was set between the first and second endings of A.I. and really fleshed out the world about 20 years after David left his family. If you noticed a certain weird job title in the film's end credits - that was part of this game.
Apparently the early development was done at Microsoft, so maybe this is where the ideas for the XBox games ended up?
For the love of Bob...
Look, Firefox does NOT have the capability to determine how many "real" Firefox users there are. Period. Those numbers are impossible to get. Just like it's impossible to know how many people watched a specific television program on a specific night, how many dentists recommend Crest or how many Americans approve of the President. It's just not possible. The technology to make that knowledge possible is NOT something that you want installed in your home. Trust me.
Firefox download numbers are NOT a bad way to count individual users. They're a much better way, statistically, than the method used to determine the Presidents approval rating or the Nielsen numbers. (They take a small sample and scale it up to get a picture of the entire population.) If Firefox were a commercial product, we would use sales figures, but it isn't being offered for sale. So we count every download as a "sale." If you have a better method for counting users, please, please enlighten us. Otherwise you're equating use of the best data available to outright lying, and that's just not cool.
God...would you call someone a liar if he used "car" instead of "1997 Honda Civic"? Get a grip.
The Romans had a similar view when they carved their tombstones and road signs. The result was a separate "mini-language" that takes extra study to decipher. For example, there are abbreviations for all of the common Roman names and certain positions in the government and military. Certain popular phrases were merely acronymed out a la SPQR. 4 years of Latin really won't help deciphering a Roman tombstone. You have to either be fluent in the language and extremely knowledgable about history, or have a codex created for you by someone who is. They honestly assumed that their audience would be Roman, and would simply "know what they meant anyway."
Can you imagine a future scholar trying to decipher AIMspeak? I imagine the Roman inscription rules, but made up on the fly, relying on puns and phonetic mutations, and I shudder. The future had better breed some damn fine linguists if we want 20th century culture to be recorded accurately.
My parents' generation and a few of their children that never moved out of west Texas still tack the word "located" onto sentences with "where" in them.
"Where is it located?"
"Hell, I don't know where it's located!"
Drives me up the wall!
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