It's apparently HUGE in the USN, particularly on submarines. The crewmen are trapped down in little sardine cans for months on end with little to do when not on duty, so a lot play D&D.
Those geeks should get out and get themselves some girlfriends!
The parent should actually be modded up because he makes a good point. What if they have a winning streak and get the taste of "free money?" Teaching them the pain of losing at gambling is one thing... But if they happen to have a lucky streak you could be sending the wrong message.
Dilemnas like this are why I really don't think I want to have kids...
It sucks that it's out there, and this doesn't bode well for things to come... But the talk in this thread makes it sound like Bungee is completely screwed. Really, though... How many modified X-Boxes are there out there? A few hundred thousand? A million? Of those, will everyone download the game (which is in French) and know how to install it? And will they all be happy with a hacked game instead of buying the real thing when it comes out?
Yes this is a problem... But I don't think it will affect sales one bit. In fact I would suspect most who download this will end up buying the real thing... They just want to get a jump on learning to play it first, to get a head start on multiplayer.
On CD's? Nope, typical pricing that I can get online in a dozen places. On electronics? Not really, I can do better at Costco, or Best Buy.
I want to point out that in the electronics department Walmart typically sells a few standard items for a price comparable to Best Buy... But they also always have enormous stacks of one or two dirt-cheap, no-name models for a price that even Best Buy can't beat.
Of course, it's always the $24.99 DVD player that sells, not the full-price Sanyo on the shelf. In fact, they're often "sold out" of the name brand models... And I believe they make no effort to actually have them in inventory.
I've worked in animation for quite a while and I can tell you that acting and doing voiceovers are two different things. Some actors are good at it, but many aren't-- it's a very different set of skills. But I do see why game companies shell out for big names. It gives legitimacy to the product, perhaps not to consumers necessarily but within the entertainment industry. It does help the process of video games being taken as seriously as any other form of entertainment.
As for the money... It just doesn't work that way. We're not going to get a $5 discount because they didn't pay Heather Graham, and that $5 isn't going to hire an extra team of programmers or designers either. There isn't a lump sum to be divided amongst the teams-- a major company is going to budget what it thinks is necessary for each element, and charge whatever it thinks it can get for the end product.
Nerezza writes "A new site, Oscuro Destiny, has put up its first feature! Final Fantasy is a feature article series from an up and coming site." Includes info on the history of Squeenix and a look at the MMOG.
I'm sorry to be so negative, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that the submitter is a bit less than forthcoming about the fact that he is the webmaster of said site. Slashdot at its best feels like a community of like-minded souls sharing links and news, not promoting their own fan sites.
I don't think this would put a dent in Apple's sales one bit-- in fact if it takes off it would probably mean a few extra OS X sales. But those who were going to buy a Mac will still do so, whether they wanted it for serious production work (who would trust this for a complicated Final Cut or DVD Studio Pro project?) or because they wanted the pretty case design. Or both. An emulator will simply never be a subsitute for the real thing.
So a home-brewed "underground" cartoon isn't to your taste. So what? If you don't get the joke, move along.
Shark Tale is in theaters now... Of course the story is horrible and the jokes were flat and tired when I first read them in Cracked magazine twenty years ago-- but that doesn't matter, right? After all they put tons of work into the 3-D animation making those sea creatures move around and talk!
Why is this insightful? Because you aren't interested? So what? It's easy to say "radio sucks", but I can name dozens of radio shows that have followings, and people might want to record them to listen at their convenience (and skip the annoying commercials)... Howard Stern, Leo Laporte, Art Bell, Phil Hendrie, This American Life, Loveline, Matt Drudge, Jim Rome, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Harry Shearer, Al Franken, Don Imus, Tom Leykis, etc... They're not all my tastes but they do have large followings. Plus college channels often have interesting shows playing music you wouldn't otherwise hear.
This product could totally kill the RIAA by flooding the net with legally (or almost) recorded music that the average listener will be happy with.
It may be "legally recorded", but the RIAA would still consider it actionable. It doesn't matter where the song came from-- CD, radio, tape, vinyl, whatever-- you're still sharing a copyrighted work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this product flew under the RIAA's radar, though. It's the perfect product for a very small group of people who want it but it's not something the masses are clamoring for. And I wouldn't worry about Net being flooded... Extracting music from a longer broadcast-- which would often have the DJ talking over the beginning-- would be a pain, and then each song would have to be tagged... And outside of college stations, what song are you going to hear on the radio that can't already be found on P2P?
Yes, actually, we do. Harping on their security "oversights" isn't picking on the little guy when he's down... As long as Microsoft holds a virtual monopoly their sloppiness and failures affect all of us.
Apple created a very good operating system, which would actually probably be more to the liking of the average PC user - who just checks their email and surfs the web.
I think the average PC user would love to do more than surf the web and check their e-mail. Apple's campaign should never be, "Our computers are just as good at surfing the web as cheap windows boxes." It should be-- and I think it pretty much is-- that it's pretty easy to do things with our computers that you never knew you could do. Like manipulate photos, edit video and burn DVDs (complete with menus)... And so on.
Of course there are myriad ways to do these things in Windows-- but they'e more often than not intimidating and hard to learn. iLife apps, included with the system, really hold the novice's hand through the process.
Your "friend" should be angry with the Australian government. They're the ones who placed a completely arbitrary ban on the basically harmless game, they're the ones who are making potential customers "pirate" the game.
Your "friend" can be mad at cheapskate Americans who opt for the torrent, but Australians should be granted a pass. I realize we're just talking about Leisure Suit Larry here, but one of the most socially redeeming aspects of torrent sites, P2P sharing and the web in general is the ability to access materials your country's government has decided you aren't mature or enlightened enough to handle (snuff film arguments aside.)
£200-£300 UKP will get you a crap G3 from a second hand shop, and will be much faster.
Maybe they're scarcer in the U.K... But you should be able to get decent beige G3 tower for under $50 in the states. Since they don't support Panther without a hack-- and they don't have USB or Firewire (both easily added with $10 PCI cards)-- they're practically worthless.
I counted at least three "Eat Up Martha" jokes in this thread, and I didn't try very hard. It's kind of sad that had to be the Newton's legacy. Just as it's kind of sad Al Gore must go down in history as the man who claimed he invented the internet (though in reality he said no such thing.)
The Newton was a great little machine with possibly the best OS of any PDA-- and it did have great handwriting recognition. I'd love for it to have a new life, though it's obviously not coming from Apple...
It is hardly reasonable for professors to demand copies of assignments in a format that requires students to spend a great deal of money to generate.
I doubt this practice is widespread -- is this a small, private college or something?
Did you not go to college? You never had to buy a slew of $125 text books? Requiring students to shell out cash is par for the course.
I do understand requiring all documents to be in the same format, by the way-- when you have potentially hundreds of students turning in papers you don't want to deal with a dozen file formats. Plain text and even RTF aren't options because they have to be formatted (including footnotes, etc.), and PDFs aren't "soft" (easily edited.) From my experience professors aren't always the most tech-savvy people, anyway-- they know what works, but don't try to explain another alternative.
I mean, it makes it virtually a requirement for students to own computers.
I'd say it is pretty much a requirement to have a computer if you're going to college. What's wrong with that?
LinuxPPC is a great option for older Macs with pre-OSX or pre-Panther. With one of many WM themes, you can approximate the latest Mac experience without shelling out $150.
Even relatively young Macs can be horribly slow running OSX... Like the last of the CRT iMacs (2001) and the first few dual-usb iBooks (2001-2002) and maybe the Pismo (haven't tried that one.) Pather is really barely acceptable on most G3's, even with a lot of RAM it's horribly sluggish. My 500mhz iBook spends most of its time in OS9, because Pather just can't give acceptable performance with higher-end apps like Flash, Photoshop and Virtual PC (all of which run fine in 9.)
I'm not bashing OSX, I would never consider anything but Panther on my G5, but it really has left some relatively recent machines behind. I just might install Yellow Dog on the iBook to breathe some more life into it...
However, the profit margins on a reality TV show are MUCH higher. They don't have to pay expensive actors, they don't have to build or maintain sets, they don't need to hire extras from the screen actors guild, etc. They can even usually do product placements *on* the shows to make more money.
You are right, but one thing I would add is that the networks are really sealing their own doom by moving to reality TV. They're going after the ratings and profit right now without creating new shows that could potentially live forever in syndication-- and that, along with DVDs, merchandising and whatever on-demand system may evolve in the future, is where the real profit is... As well as the love of the viewers.
Because the songwriters don't own the music, the labels do. When you're one of their artists, they own everything you do. The musicians are entitled to profits, but the contracts are so skewed against them that only the biggest of names will see a dime. A band can't even break up to get out of the contract-- the principals are locked in for the full term, which is usually long enough to ensure they won't be free until they're no longer young and cute enough to be viable in the MTV market. Labels sign lots and lots and lots of bands, and most of them will never see the stardom they're promised... On the contrary, the labels sign them up more often than not to keep a rival label from having them.
They probably won't go for it, because musicians tend to be young and short-sighted, but the only way to really bring down the RIAA and major labels is to get the bands to stop signing their contracts. The only real hope as I see it, is to educate up-and-coming bands that they have a choice... They don't have to sign the contract. They need to be told that the stardom the A&R guy is promising them probably won't happen if they sign their lives away. They need to be told that even with the backing of a major, they're still pretty much on their own to book tours and generate "buzz." They may not open for the Rolling Stones, but they can succeed by touring and distribution through independant channels, including letting the songs go out for free via P2P. Most of all it needs to be explained to them that an "Indie" act with a respectable but not necessarily mainstream following has a longer career and makes more money than all but the highest tier of bands on the major labels.
Slashdot Mirror
It's apparently HUGE in the USN, particularly on submarines. The crewmen are trapped down in little sardine cans for months on end with little to do when not on duty, so a lot play D&D.
Those geeks should get out and get themselves some girlfriends!
The parent should actually be modded up because he makes a good point. What if they have a winning streak and get the taste of "free money?" Teaching them the pain of losing at gambling is one thing... But if they happen to have a lucky streak you could be sending the wrong message.
Dilemnas like this are why I really don't think I want to have kids...
It sucks that it's out there, and this doesn't bode well for things to come... But the talk in this thread makes it sound like Bungee is completely screwed. Really, though... How many modified X-Boxes are there out there? A few hundred thousand? A million? Of those, will everyone download the game (which is in French) and know how to install it? And will they all be happy with a hacked game instead of buying the real thing when it comes out?
Yes this is a problem... But I don't think it will affect sales one bit. In fact I would suspect most who download this will end up buying the real thing... They just want to get a jump on learning to play it first, to get a head start on multiplayer.
On CD's? Nope, typical pricing that I can get online in a dozen places. On electronics? Not really, I can do better at Costco, or Best Buy.
I want to point out that in the electronics department Walmart typically sells a few standard items for a price comparable to Best Buy... But they also always have enormous stacks of one or two dirt-cheap, no-name models for a price that even Best Buy can't beat.
Of course, it's always the $24.99 DVD player that sells, not the full-price Sanyo on the shelf. In fact, they're often "sold out" of the name brand models... And I believe they make no effort to actually have them in inventory.
I remember when you were [BUFFERING... BUFFERING...] Oh, wait. That's Real. Sorry, wrong joke.
I've worked in animation for quite a while and I can tell you that acting and doing voiceovers are two different things. Some actors are good at it, but many aren't-- it's a very different set of skills. But I do see why game companies shell out for big names. It gives legitimacy to the product, perhaps not to consumers necessarily but within the entertainment industry. It does help the process of video games being taken as seriously as any other form of entertainment.
As for the money... It just doesn't work that way. We're not going to get a $5 discount because they didn't pay Heather Graham, and that $5 isn't going to hire an extra team of programmers or designers either. There isn't a lump sum to be divided amongst the teams-- a major company is going to budget what it thinks is necessary for each element, and charge whatever it thinks it can get for the end product.
Nerezza writes "A new site, Oscuro Destiny, has put up its first feature! Final Fantasy is a feature article series from an up and coming site." Includes info on the history of Squeenix and a look at the MMOG.
I'm sorry to be so negative, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that the submitter is a bit less than forthcoming about the fact that he is the webmaster of said site. Slashdot at its best feels like a community of like-minded souls sharing links and news, not promoting their own fan sites.
I don't think this would put a dent in Apple's sales one bit-- in fact if it takes off it would probably mean a few extra OS X sales. But those who were going to buy a Mac will still do so, whether they wanted it for serious production work (who would trust this for a complicated Final Cut or DVD Studio Pro project?) or because they wanted the pretty case design. Or both. An emulator will simply never be a subsitute for the real thing.
Not on eBay. Panther can be had for about $50, Jaguar for as low as $10. Of course it takes a few days to find a deal...
So a home-brewed "underground" cartoon isn't to your taste. So what? If you don't get the joke, move along.
Shark Tale is in theaters now... Of course the story is horrible and the jokes were flat and tired when I first read them in Cracked magazine twenty years ago-- but that doesn't matter, right? After all they put tons of work into the 3-D animation making those sea creatures move around and talk!
Why is this insightful? Because you aren't interested? So what? It's easy to say "radio sucks", but I can name dozens of radio shows that have followings, and people might want to record them to listen at their convenience (and skip the annoying commercials)... Howard Stern, Leo Laporte, Art Bell, Phil Hendrie, This American Life, Loveline, Matt Drudge, Jim Rome, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Harry Shearer, Al Franken, Don Imus, Tom Leykis, etc... They're not all my tastes but they do have large followings. Plus college channels often have interesting shows playing music you wouldn't otherwise hear.
This product could totally kill the RIAA by flooding the net with legally (or almost) recorded music that the average listener will be happy with.
It may be "legally recorded", but the RIAA would still consider it actionable. It doesn't matter where the song came from-- CD, radio, tape, vinyl, whatever-- you're still sharing a copyrighted work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this product flew under the RIAA's radar, though. It's the perfect product for a very small group of people who want it but it's not something the masses are clamoring for. And I wouldn't worry about Net being flooded... Extracting music from a longer broadcast-- which would often have the DJ talking over the beginning-- would be a pain, and then each song would have to be tagged... And outside of college stations, what song are you going to hear on the radio that can't already be found on P2P?
Yes, actually, we do. Harping on their security "oversights" isn't picking on the little guy when he's down... As long as Microsoft holds a virtual monopoly their sloppiness and failures affect all of us.
Apple created a very good operating system, which would actually probably be more to the liking of the average PC user - who just checks their email and surfs the web.
I think the average PC user would love to do more than surf the web and check their e-mail. Apple's campaign should never be, "Our computers are just as good at surfing the web as cheap windows boxes." It should be-- and I think it pretty much is-- that it's pretty easy to do things with our computers that you never knew you could do. Like manipulate photos, edit video and burn DVDs (complete with menus)... And so on.
Of course there are myriad ways to do these things in Windows-- but they'e more often than not intimidating and hard to learn. iLife apps, included with the system, really hold the novice's hand through the process.
Your "friend" should be angry with the Australian government. They're the ones who placed a completely arbitrary ban on the basically harmless game, they're the ones who are making potential customers "pirate" the game.
Your "friend" can be mad at cheapskate Americans who opt for the torrent, but Australians should be granted a pass. I realize we're just talking about Leisure Suit Larry here, but one of the most socially redeeming aspects of torrent sites, P2P sharing and the web in general is the ability to access materials your country's government has decided you aren't mature or enlightened enough to handle (snuff film arguments aside.)
£200-£300 UKP will get you a crap G3 from a second hand shop, and will be much faster.
Maybe they're scarcer in the U.K... But you should be able to get decent beige G3 tower for under $50 in the states. Since they don't support Panther without a hack-- and they don't have USB or Firewire (both easily added with $10 PCI cards)-- they're practically worthless.
I counted at least three "Eat Up Martha" jokes in this thread, and I didn't try very hard. It's kind of sad that had to be the Newton's legacy. Just as it's kind of sad Al Gore must go down in history as the man who claimed he invented the internet (though in reality he said no such thing.)
The Newton was a great little machine with possibly the best OS of any PDA-- and it did have great handwriting recognition. I'd love for it to have a new life, though it's obviously not coming from Apple...
It is hardly reasonable for professors to demand copies of assignments in a format that requires students to spend a great deal of money to generate.
I doubt this practice is widespread -- is this a small, private college or something?
Did you not go to college? You never had to buy a slew of $125 text books? Requiring students to shell out cash is par for the course.
I do understand requiring all documents to be in the same format, by the way-- when you have potentially hundreds of students turning in papers you don't want to deal with a dozen file formats. Plain text and even RTF aren't options because they have to be formatted (including footnotes, etc.), and PDFs aren't "soft" (easily edited.) From my experience professors aren't always the most tech-savvy people, anyway-- they know what works, but don't try to explain another alternative.
I mean, it makes it virtually a requirement for students to own computers.
I'd say it is pretty much a requirement to have a computer if you're going to college. What's wrong with that?
How many of us acquired enormous music collections from Napster, etc. before the iPod, online music stores or DRM-based songs even existed?
LinuxPPC is a great option for older Macs with pre-OSX or pre-Panther. With one of many WM themes, you can approximate the latest Mac experience without shelling out $150.
Even relatively young Macs can be horribly slow running OSX... Like the last of the CRT iMacs (2001) and the first few dual-usb iBooks (2001-2002) and maybe the Pismo (haven't tried that one.) Pather is really barely acceptable on most G3's, even with a lot of RAM it's horribly sluggish. My 500mhz iBook spends most of its time in OS9, because Pather just can't give acceptable performance with higher-end apps like Flash, Photoshop and Virtual PC (all of which run fine in 9.)
I'm not bashing OSX, I would never consider anything but Panther on my G5, but it really has left some relatively recent machines behind. I just might install Yellow Dog on the iBook to breathe some more life into it...
However, the profit margins on a reality TV show are MUCH higher. They don't have to pay expensive actors, they don't have to build or maintain sets, they don't need to hire extras from the screen actors guild, etc. They can even usually do product placements *on* the shows to make more money.
You are right, but one thing I would add is that the networks are really sealing their own doom by moving to reality TV. They're going after the ratings and profit right now without creating new shows that could potentially live forever in syndication-- and that, along with DVDs, merchandising and whatever on-demand system may evolve in the future, is where the real profit is... As well as the love of the viewers.
Because the songwriters don't own the music, the labels do. When you're one of their artists, they own everything you do. The musicians are entitled to profits, but the contracts are so skewed against them that only the biggest of names will see a dime. A band can't even break up to get out of the contract-- the principals are locked in for the full term, which is usually long enough to ensure they won't be free until they're no longer young and cute enough to be viable in the MTV market. Labels sign lots and lots and lots of bands, and most of them will never see the stardom they're promised... On the contrary, the labels sign them up more often than not to keep a rival label from having them.
They probably won't go for it, because musicians tend to be young and short-sighted, but the only way to really bring down the RIAA and major labels is to get the bands to stop signing their contracts. The only real hope as I see it, is to educate up-and-coming bands that they have a choice... They don't have to sign the contract. They need to be told that the stardom the A&R guy is promising them probably won't happen if they sign their lives away. They need to be told that even with the backing of a major, they're still pretty much on their own to book tours and generate "buzz." They may not open for the Rolling Stones, but they can succeed by touring and distribution through independant channels, including letting the songs go out for free via P2P. Most of all it needs to be explained to them that an "Indie" act with a respectable but not necessarily mainstream following has a longer career and makes more money than all but the highest tier of bands on the major labels.
"..You'll have to figure it out on your own for Linux but there is plenty of help available (i.e., "apt-cache search infocom" for Debian)."
I tried to do that. Unfortuately on the way I got lost in the maze, dropped my lantern in the chasm and missed when I threw the knife at the gnome.
They missed the original video game comic books--
"Atari Force", as well as the comics that came with the misguided and impossible to solve "Swordquest" series...
Must I be the geek who points out that the Transformers were a line of toys long before they were a video game? Or even a cartoon, for that matter?