Well yes. I know you were being faceteous, but corporations are like that. 'We don't do X' only applies until you're willing to more than cover their costs.
If I called up my phone company and said I wanted 300 gigabits of bandwidth to my house, they'd say 'we don't offer that kind of service'. But if I said I'd pay the entire cost to the company, start to finish, I'd be speaking to the VP of Sales in a matter of minutes.
Because in the corporate world, everyone knows Windows works and everyone is happy with it.
Are there streets of gold and rivers of chocolate too? Ooh, and magical fairies with pixie dust that makes the spring rain taste as sweet as honey?
All I need to do is find a magical portal to this secret corporate world and bring back their purportedly working, happiness-inducing versions of Windows, and I can corner the market. Microsoft will be out of business in days, and I'll be a hero to everyone!
TD Canada Trust is an entirely IBM shop - their mainframes are IBM, their workstations are OS/2, their webservers are Websphere, and their ATMs are manufactured by IBM - with a big grey Big Blue logo on them.
As for the security thing, a lot of customers still use preinstalled Netscape 4 with 'international' (read: shitty) encryption built-in. Stupid, but oh well. Banks need to realize that they, more than anyone, need to force security early and often - and if you can't be secure, well then don't bank online.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
Not particularly. Who here would pay $7 extra per CD-R (I can get them for less than a buck in Canada)? Or an extra $48 on DVD-R media? Americans would be outraged, and would import en-masse from outside of the country, probably from Canada.
Oh, wait, I get it now... Why didn't I think of that?
Ok, then order your CDs from the States. Bringing media that falls under this levy across the border yourself isn't just a handy way around the issue, it's also legal. The levy isn't against consumers, it's against companies that retail. It's Future Shop that's paying the levy, not you - you're just paying them back for it.
Importing your CD-Rs and CD-RWs from outside of the country is entirely legal, as long as you're not reselling them. Another alternative, I suppose, is to make other people bring their own blank CDs, or make them cover the costs of yours (buck each for distribution and so on).
Besides, it's not an assumption of guilt any more than 'health care' is an assumption of injury, or car insurance is an assumption of ineptitude (or bad luck). It's there for when people do. Everyone pays, everyone gets the benefits. Just like health care, or auto insurance, or GST/PST. Whether or not the benefits are worth it is another matter (I feel they are), but it's not an assumption of guilt.
In the end, it doesn't. Technically, they have to front the money, but they get back more than enough from the successful investments to make up for the losses.
That being said, if they didn't screw everyone the way they do, they wouldn't make as much money, and they wouldn't be able to put out as much music.
I recently found out that everything Elton John did before (I think) the early 80's belongs to the record companies. They kept him high on cocaine for two decades and he was happy as a clam, signing his life away to keep the snow coming. That's how they make money. Now, they own all the rights to those songs. Pretty screwy.
As for the music, if they weren't screwing everyone, it would be harder to recoup their losses, so they'd have to spend more time and money finding the quality acts that keep seeling (Eagles, Aerosmith, Alanis Morisette, whether you like them or not), instead of just flooding the market with pop sensation after pop sensation.
This isn't really a reply to your comment, it's just more that I forgot to put in the original.
the only thing keeping them from an RIAA-style attack on the customer base is that current broadband technology doesn't permit easy sharing of movies.
Are they on the same internet that I'm on? Maybe Kazaa just blacklisted all their IPs, because sharing of movies has never been so easy. Heck, it's faster to download a movie rip than it is to go rent it.
Er, oh, wait, I get it now. Nooooo, there's no way to share movies yet. In fact, there never will be. Wink wink.
Er, I'm sorry, have you ever *used* kazaa? Or Direct Connect? Or IRC, before dalnet got morals?I've watched more movies in DivX format in the last year than I have on DVD ever.
On any Canadian broadband I've ever used, you're looking at about 45 minutes to download an entire movie. Not instant like MP3s (twenty seconds), but it takes less time for me to go to Blockbuster and find something I want (to pay that much for). But wait, if I get two, I save a buck! But if I get three.... But if I go to Rogers Video and get eight, I save fifteen bucks! Wow, I may as well get eight then, for just four times the price.
DivX and XVid have saved me from a life of impulse renting and 'movie weeks'.
Yes. Part of it is the investment made in producing the product. For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
Well, here's how it goes.
When you (the artist) sign a contract with a record company (satan), they give you a signing bonus - let's say, $100,000 in cold hard cash. Sweet deal, eh? But unless you're Sheryl Crow or Aerosmith, you won't see a penny more, so make it last.
Now that you've signed your contract, you have to make some music, which means you need time in a recording studio, which is going to cost you a lot. Fortunately, the record companies will pick a recording studio for you, set you up with time, and even front the bill for you. Aren't they sweet? Funny thing is, since the record companies OWN the recording studios, they don't actually have to pay for the time.
Of course, you still have to pay them back. At the fair market price (which is decided by them, fair or not).
Also, there's your manager. You have to pay the guy that acts as the go-between with the record company. The guy has to eat, right? The record company also pays him, for the same reason. Double your income, double your fun.
That money, of course, is ALSO handled by the record company, gentlemen that they are. They're so nice to take care of you like that.
Of course, you'll have to pay them back.
So your CD is produced and selling for $15, and it's flying off the shelf! Awesome! You're gonna be rich! But of that $15, the distribution needs to be paid, and the stores need to take their cut, and so on, and the artist only gets about a dollar a CD. Still, if you sell fifty thousand CDs, that's fifty thousand bucks!
Oh, wait, how much did you owe the studios again? Well, I guess you're almost paid off. That's a good start. But the original hundred grand has run out, and you haven't gotten enough of the rock star lifestyle. The record companies, however, will be happy to help you out. A loan here, a cheque there, and all the hookers, beer, and cocaine (or heroin! awesome!) that you could ever want. What a nice bunch of guys.
Of course, you have to pay them back.
So now that you've trashed some hotel rooms, sniffed, snorted, smoked, and injected a hundred thousand dollars worth of illicit drugs, and bought all the houses, cars, and women you could want, you're getting pretty badly in debt. Well, good thing the record companies are there to soften the blow. And they're paying for your next album, how awesome is that?
The music industry can follow suit. Embrace file sharing, don't try to stop casual non-commercial copying, and sell CD's for $3.99 each. They'd make a fortune.
They're already making a fortune by screwing their customers and their artists at every turn. That's the entire reason they're against file-swapping and so on. If they lowered their CDs to four bucks, people would still complain about having to pay four bucks for a CD with 'only two or three good songs on it', people would still download music off the internet because free is still cheaper, and they wouldn't be making as much off gouging the consumer.
In the short term, it makes a lot more sense to just screw everyone you can. In the long term... well, American corporate policy seems to be oblivious to the long term (oil industry, environmental damage, etc). Why should the RIAA be any different?
Me, I just listen to Canadian content (which a lot of the 'alternative' content out there is, I find), and try to import foreign stuff whenever I can.
No, it's scarred for life because it's a horrible product that costs more than it should, doesn't do anything well, and will be a gigantic flop. Even if they release a fixed version, people are going to say 'Oh, they tried that before, and it didn't work.'
is ATI really rich enough to buy off all of these companies and also manage to sabotage Nvidias drivers and PR team?:P
Nope, but when Microsoft was developing the DX specs for pixel shading and whatever the hell all else has been new lately, they asked both companies for the designs of the chips. NVidia told them where to go, and ATi handed them over. Thus, the DX vertex and pixel shading specs are designed with the ATI cards in mind.
The way I look at it, NVidia got cocky and then got fucked. ATI knows what the score is, and they played along, and now it's paying off.
On the contrary, a lot of companies nowadays, especially those with branch offices and the like, are moving to VOIP. In Canada, for example, many Ontario (or Vancouver) call-centres are realizing that all they need is an internet connection to be able to route all 'Poussez 2 pour service en Francais' to a smaller French-only call centre in Montreal. Other companies are finding that they can (relatively) seamlessly integrate branch offices into their extension system ('324 for Joan in accounting in Toronto, 524 for Jacob in legal in Vancouver'), making things easier for everyone.
It's not going to happen for 'all' such companies, but for a lot of them, it makes sense, it's good enough, it's fast enough, and it'll only get better. Especially in Canada's broadband-equipped long-distance cross-country environment, it's easy and getting easier. Whether or not that will happen in the US (where bandwidth is apparantly expensive) or not remains to be seen.
As for a publicly traded company getting on the bandwagon, is Sprint not publicly traded? (hint: yes, it is). Or Telus? AT&T is just another large phone company to start, but it's hardly the first of the big guys to start.
Re:The real History of Apple Corps. Ltd
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Beatles Bite Apple
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Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson used to be great friends, actually. What happened, though, was Jackson outbid McCartney on the Beatles catalogue, and the two haven't spoken since (as of a few years ago). What a jerk.
The people who buy ncage will be doing so purley to play games, I don't see the gamer market being crazed about cellphones.
Well, here's how I look at it (excerpted from my Weblog Rant, based off street prices for everything listed:
It's Nokia's latest offering, full of innovation that would be best-placed in something that is either one or the other. It's a GSM cellular device, so it only works with two cellular providers in Canada, one of which isn't really available anywhere except the major cities, and it's a game console that doesn't play any games you'll want to play for more than ten minutes.
Interested? Well now you too can enjoy this medocrity for only twice the price of a PS2 or XBox, 2.5 times the price of a Gamecube, a little over three times the price of a Game Boy Advance SP, or five times the price of a regular Game Boy Advance.
Sound too good to be true? Well, let's look at it from another angle, and you'll see that this advanced technology can be yours for a mere ten times the price of an ordinary cellphone or only twice the price of a premium cellular phone at street market prices.
A lot of people gawk at me when I quote these kinds of prices, but it's true - the N-Gage is retailing at EB for $499 (barring any last-minute price changes). At the same store, you can get a brand-new XBox or PS2 for $249 (or bundles for $279), a GameCube for $199, a Game Boy Advance for $99, or a GBA SP for $150.
Similarly, I can go to the Telus booth and get a wide selection of nice phones for much cheaper. Do they do all this fancy stuff? Not all of them, not the cheap ones, but so what?
I could get a GBA SP for $150, a Motorola V120x for $130, and a Sony Cli PEG-SJ20 for $200, and still have $20 left over to buy the girlfriend roses so she won't get pissed that I blew $500 on stuff I don't really need (an important factor for many of the 18-25 crowd).
Couple that with the fact that it doesn't do anything well, looks stupid when affixed to the side of your head, has a proprietary headphone jack (Nokia, you don't have to copy everything Nintendo does, but try to at least copy the good stuff), it's a pain in the ass to switch games, and on and on and on.
Incidentally, why in god's name would I ever switch off my phone? These guys have got to be fucking kidding me.
Sorry Nokia, your new brand is now scarred for life.
It's not that they can't enter into legally binding contracts, it's that when they do, they're not bound by them. Unfortunately, the same thing can't be said for the corporations. Thus, the contract would be enforced, basically, at the minor's discretion.
IANAL, but this was the first thing I learned in my first law course.
I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for a while. What a great game, it kept going, it was fun, innovative, imaginative, and, well, more fun. The wandering around in the ocean thing got old fast, but then I got the Melody of Control or whatever, and that solved that.
And then that goddamn Triforce quest.
The whole game proceeds with action until this quest, when it suddenly turns into Errands Online. You have to find eight Triforce Charts that are scattered around the world. Then you have to get them decoded, which means getting a crapload of money. Then you have to go actually GET the triforce shards. Ugh.
Yes, I could have done it. I could have finished it in a day. But god, what a fucking boring way to spend a day off. No thanks. I traded it in and got Skies of Arcadia instead. Way to drop the fucking ball, Nintendo.
Metroid was the same way. For the first half of the game, you're getting powerups left and right. Morph ball, bombs, varia suit, everything. Then it just fucking stops. You have to wander around and get a bunch of artifacts. It's easy enough to do, except you have to cross the fucking planet like four times. Ugh. No thanks. The map system didn't make life much easier either. Boooring.
Both of these games were paced very well until those spots, at which point the developers dropped tbe ball and fucked it up. If you're going to develop a game (or a movie or TV show), then there's one thing people have to do, and that's pick a pace and stick with it. SWAT did this well, Jedi Academy did this well too (er, not that I'd know of course, wink wink nudge nudge), but very few other games do.
Of course, there are notable exceptions (Final Fantasy 6 had a nice blend of action, relaxation, panic, and butterflies-in-the-breeze), but that's hard to do right.
In Jedi Academy, you can hit your 'use' key to skip the in-game (non-movie) cutscenes. Very handy when I found that out, it made my life way easier. Well... made the game easier anyway.
Problem with that scenerio is those two product lines keep the company going and allows them to take risks in other markets.
Problem with that scenario is that they have something like $40b in the bank. They could close down their operations and just pay people to sit at home and everyone would die before the money ran out.
It's psychology. You see the world as you are. People who are very negative also see the world as very negative, where everyone is either stupid or out to screw you. Those who are positive, like myself, see the world as a wonderful place of potential, where you can still trust, and your word is worth something.
Antitrust corporations believe that others will act as they do, so they have to do it first. Nice guys, however, believe that fair play will save them. Unfortunately, the large corporations get paranoid, which turns them evil, and then they crush, kill, and destroy. Suck.
Then again, Microsoft's been a lying, stealing, bullying outfit from the beginning, so...
Nintendo is making (and contracting/funding) high-quality, innovative games - Eternal Darkness, Metroid, Animal Crossing, Zelda, and so on. These games are awesome, and are worth the price paid for them. The problem is that there are so few good games being released today, and they have to spread themselves over three consoles.
Back in the SNES days, all the good games were SNES games, because that's all there was - unless you liked sports games. The Genesis wasn't a competitor, ever. Then came the Playstation - now, I love Nintendo, but the N64's lineup was pathetic from start to dismal dying finish.
Now, we have three great consoles - except that the PS2 stops reading blue discs, and XBox games tend often to have bugs in them, it seems, but they still work more often than not.
So what good games are there? Final Fantasy X/X2 (PS2); SW:KOTOR (XBox); Resident Evil 4 (GC); Mario Golf (GC); F-Zero (GC); Halo 2 (XBox); Arc the Lad (PS2); Tales of Symphonia (GC). That's just to name a few.
Notice something? To play this fall's (impressive) lineup, you need to spend $700 just on consoles to be able to play the games. There are three systems to choose from, each with a selection of games... But there's no pattern.
F-Zero and Mario Golf for Gamecube, so kiddie games, right? Er, and Resident Evil? Splinter Cell? Ok, well the PS2 is good for RPGs... unless you want Skies of Arcadia Legends, KOTOR, or Tales of Symphonia. And the XBox, of course, is good for the darker games (except RE4), and the sports games (unless you want to play EA's offerings online).
The reason that there aren't 'any good games' for platform X is because the developers have to spread their developing oevr multiple platforms. Me, I'll just wait until (like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell) they bring it to the GC with perks, features, or upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes. I know you were being faceteous, but corporations are like that. 'We don't do X' only applies until you're willing to more than cover their costs.
If I called up my phone company and said I wanted 300 gigabits of bandwidth to my house, they'd say 'we don't offer that kind of service'. But if I said I'd pay the entire cost to the company, start to finish, I'd be speaking to the VP of Sales in a matter of minutes.
Hmm... I wonder if they'd take a cheque...
--Dan
http://www.oclc.org/dewey/versions/ddc22print/intr o.pdf
(Why is there a space between the 'r' and 'o'?)
So that it will wrap on non-wide screens instead of people having to scroll over.
--Dan
Because in the corporate world, everyone knows Windows works and everyone is happy with it.
Are there streets of gold and rivers of chocolate too? Ooh, and magical fairies with pixie dust that makes the spring rain taste as sweet as honey?
All I need to do is find a magical portal to this secret corporate world and bring back their purportedly working, happiness-inducing versions of Windows, and I can corner the market. Microsoft will be out of business in days, and I'll be a hero to everyone!
--Dan
TD Canada Trust is an entirely IBM shop - their mainframes are IBM, their workstations are OS/2, their webservers are Websphere, and their ATMs are manufactured by IBM - with a big grey Big Blue logo on them.
As for the security thing, a lot of customers still use preinstalled Netscape 4 with 'international' (read: shitty) encryption built-in. Stupid, but oh well. Banks need to realize that they, more than anyone, need to force security early and often - and if you can't be secure, well then don't bank online.
--Dan
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
Not particularly. Who here would pay $7 extra per CD-R (I can get them for less than a buck in Canada)? Or an extra $48 on DVD-R media? Americans would be outraged, and would import en-masse from outside of the country, probably from Canada.
Oh, wait, I get it now... Why didn't I think of that?
--Dan
Ok, then order your CDs from the States. Bringing media that falls under this levy across the border yourself isn't just a handy way around the issue, it's also legal. The levy isn't against consumers, it's against companies that retail. It's Future Shop that's paying the levy, not you - you're just paying them back for it.
Importing your CD-Rs and CD-RWs from outside of the country is entirely legal, as long as you're not reselling them. Another alternative, I suppose, is to make other people bring their own blank CDs, or make them cover the costs of yours (buck each for distribution and so on).
Besides, it's not an assumption of guilt any more than 'health care' is an assumption of injury, or car insurance is an assumption of ineptitude (or bad luck). It's there for when people do. Everyone pays, everyone gets the benefits. Just like health care, or auto insurance, or GST/PST. Whether or not the benefits are worth it is another matter (I feel they are), but it's not an assumption of guilt.
--Dan
In the end, it doesn't. Technically, they have to front the money, but they get back more than enough from the successful investments to make up for the losses.
That being said, if they didn't screw everyone the way they do, they wouldn't make as much money, and they wouldn't be able to put out as much music.
I recently found out that everything Elton John did before (I think) the early 80's belongs to the record companies. They kept him high on cocaine for two decades and he was happy as a clam, signing his life away to keep the snow coming. That's how they make money. Now, they own all the rights to those songs. Pretty screwy.
As for the music, if they weren't screwing everyone, it would be harder to recoup their losses, so they'd have to spend more time and money finding the quality acts that keep seeling (Eagles, Aerosmith, Alanis Morisette, whether you like them or not), instead of just flooding the market with pop sensation after pop sensation.
This isn't really a reply to your comment, it's just more that I forgot to put in the original.
--Dan
the only thing keeping them from an RIAA-style attack on the customer base is that current broadband technology doesn't permit easy sharing of movies.
Are they on the same internet that I'm on? Maybe Kazaa just blacklisted all their IPs, because sharing of movies has never been so easy. Heck, it's faster to download a movie rip than it is to go rent it.
Er, oh, wait, I get it now. Nooooo, there's no way to share movies yet. In fact, there never will be. Wink wink.
--Dan
Er, I'm sorry, have you ever *used* kazaa? Or Direct Connect? Or IRC, before dalnet got morals?I've watched more movies in DivX format in the last year than I have on DVD ever.
On any Canadian broadband I've ever used, you're looking at about 45 minutes to download an entire movie. Not instant like MP3s (twenty seconds), but it takes less time for me to go to Blockbuster and find something I want (to pay that much for). But wait, if I get two, I save a buck! But if I get three.... But if I go to Rogers Video and get eight, I save fifteen bucks! Wow, I may as well get eight then, for just four times the price.
DivX and XVid have saved me from a life of impulse renting and 'movie weeks'.
--Dan
Yes. Part of it is the investment made in producing the product. For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
Well, here's how it goes.
When you (the artist) sign a contract with a record company (satan), they give you a signing bonus - let's say, $100,000 in cold hard cash. Sweet deal, eh? But unless you're Sheryl Crow or Aerosmith, you won't see a penny more, so make it last.
Now that you've signed your contract, you have to make some music, which means you need time in a recording studio, which is going to cost you a lot. Fortunately, the record companies will pick a recording studio for you, set you up with time, and even front the bill for you. Aren't they sweet? Funny thing is, since the record companies OWN the recording studios, they don't actually have to pay for the time.
Of course, you still have to pay them back. At the fair market price (which is decided by them, fair or not).
Also, there's your manager. You have to pay the guy that acts as the go-between with the record company. The guy has to eat, right? The record company also pays him, for the same reason. Double your income, double your fun.
That money, of course, is ALSO handled by the record company, gentlemen that they are. They're so nice to take care of you like that.
Of course, you'll have to pay them back.
So your CD is produced and selling for $15, and it's flying off the shelf! Awesome! You're gonna be rich! But of that $15, the distribution needs to be paid, and the stores need to take their cut, and so on, and the artist only gets about a dollar a CD. Still, if you sell fifty thousand CDs, that's fifty thousand bucks!
Oh, wait, how much did you owe the studios again? Well, I guess you're almost paid off. That's a good start. But the original hundred grand has run out, and you haven't gotten enough of the rock star lifestyle. The record companies, however, will be happy to help you out. A loan here, a cheque there, and all the hookers, beer, and cocaine (or heroin! awesome!) that you could ever want. What a nice bunch of guys.
Of course, you have to pay them back.
So now that you've trashed some hotel rooms, sniffed, snorted, smoked, and injected a hundred thousand dollars worth of illicit drugs, and bought all the houses, cars, and women you could want, you're getting pretty badly in debt. Well, good thing the record companies are there to soften the blow. And they're paying for your next album, how awesome is that?
Of course, you have to pay them back.
--Dan
The music industry can follow suit. Embrace file sharing, don't try to stop casual non-commercial copying, and sell CD's for $3.99 each. They'd make a fortune.
They're already making a fortune by screwing their customers and their artists at every turn. That's the entire reason they're against file-swapping and so on. If they lowered their CDs to four bucks, people would still complain about having to pay four bucks for a CD with 'only two or three good songs on it', people would still download music off the internet because free is still cheaper, and they wouldn't be making as much off gouging the consumer.
In the short term, it makes a lot more sense to just screw everyone you can. In the long term... well, American corporate policy seems to be oblivious to the long term (oil industry, environmental damage, etc). Why should the RIAA be any different?
Me, I just listen to Canadian content (which a lot of the 'alternative' content out there is, I find), and try to import foreign stuff whenever I can.
--Dan
No, it's scarred for life because it's a horrible product that costs more than it should, doesn't do anything well, and will be a gigantic flop. Even if they release a fixed version, people are going to say 'Oh, they tried that before, and it didn't work.'
--Dan
As long as they don't play The Girl from Ipanema in the damn thing, I don't mind.
--Dan
is ATI really rich enough to buy off all of these companies and also manage to sabotage Nvidias drivers and PR team? :P
Nope, but when Microsoft was developing the DX specs for pixel shading and whatever the hell all else has been new lately, they asked both companies for the designs of the chips. NVidia told them where to go, and ATi handed them over. Thus, the DX vertex and pixel shading specs are designed with the ATI cards in mind.
The way I look at it, NVidia got cocky and then got fucked. ATI knows what the score is, and they played along, and now it's paying off.
--Dan
On the contrary, a lot of companies nowadays, especially those with branch offices and the like, are moving to VOIP. In Canada, for example, many Ontario (or Vancouver) call-centres are realizing that all they need is an internet connection to be able to route all 'Poussez 2 pour service en Francais' to a smaller French-only call centre in Montreal. Other companies are finding that they can (relatively) seamlessly integrate branch offices into their extension system ('324 for Joan in accounting in Toronto, 524 for Jacob in legal in Vancouver'), making things easier for everyone.
It's not going to happen for 'all' such companies, but for a lot of them, it makes sense, it's good enough, it's fast enough, and it'll only get better. Especially in Canada's broadband-equipped long-distance cross-country environment, it's easy and getting easier. Whether or not that will happen in the US (where bandwidth is apparantly expensive) or not remains to be seen.
As for a publicly traded company getting on the bandwagon, is Sprint not publicly traded? (hint: yes, it is). Or Telus? AT&T is just another large phone company to start, but it's hardly the first of the big guys to start.
Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson used to be great friends, actually. What happened, though, was Jackson outbid McCartney on the Beatles catalogue, and the two haven't spoken since (as of a few years ago). What a jerk.
--Dan
THe Carl Sagan codename was then changed to 'BHA', "random initials", and the lawyers were happy again.
'Coincidentally', BHA could also stand for 'Butt-head astronomer'.
--Dan
Well, here's how I look at it (excerpted from my Weblog Rant, based off street prices for everything listed:
A lot of people gawk at me when I quote these kinds of prices, but it's true - the N-Gage is retailing at EB for $499 (barring any last-minute price changes). At the same store, you can get a brand-new XBox or PS2 for $249 (or bundles for $279), a GameCube for $199, a Game Boy Advance for $99, or a GBA SP for $150.
Similarly, I can go to the Telus booth and get a wide selection of nice phones for much cheaper. Do they do all this fancy stuff? Not all of them, not the cheap ones, but so what?
I could get a GBA SP for $150, a Motorola V120x for $130, and a Sony Cli PEG-SJ20 for $200, and still have $20 left over to buy the girlfriend roses so she won't get pissed that I blew $500 on stuff I don't really need (an important factor for many of the 18-25 crowd).
Couple that with the fact that it doesn't do anything well, looks stupid when affixed to the side of your head, has a proprietary headphone jack (Nokia, you don't have to copy everything Nintendo does, but try to at least copy the good stuff), it's a pain in the ass to switch games, and on and on and on.
Incidentally, why in god's name would I ever switch off my phone? These guys have got to be fucking kidding me.
Sorry Nokia, your new brand is now scarred for life.
--Dan
Hey, maybe it'll be as well-concieved and value-priced as the N-Gage. Wouldn't that be nice.
--Dan
It's not that they can't enter into legally binding contracts, it's that when they do, they're not bound by them. Unfortunately, the same thing can't be said for the corporations. Thus, the contract would be enforced, basically, at the minor's discretion.
IANAL, but this was the first thing I learned in my first law course.
--Dan
I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for a while. What a great game, it kept going, it was fun, innovative, imaginative, and, well, more fun. The wandering around in the ocean thing got old fast, but then I got the Melody of Control or whatever, and that solved that.
And then that goddamn Triforce quest.
The whole game proceeds with action until this quest, when it suddenly turns into Errands Online. You have to find eight Triforce Charts that are scattered around the world. Then you have to get them decoded, which means getting a crapload of money. Then you have to go actually GET the triforce shards. Ugh.
Yes, I could have done it. I could have finished it in a day. But god, what a fucking boring way to spend a day off. No thanks. I traded it in and got Skies of Arcadia instead. Way to drop the fucking ball, Nintendo.
Metroid was the same way. For the first half of the game, you're getting powerups left and right. Morph ball, bombs, varia suit, everything. Then it just fucking stops. You have to wander around and get a bunch of artifacts. It's easy enough to do, except you have to cross the fucking planet like four times. Ugh. No thanks. The map system didn't make life much easier either. Boooring.
Both of these games were paced very well until those spots, at which point the developers dropped tbe ball and fucked it up. If you're going to develop a game (or a movie or TV show), then there's one thing people have to do, and that's pick a pace and stick with it. SWAT did this well, Jedi Academy did this well too (er, not that I'd know of course, wink wink nudge nudge), but very few other games do.
Of course, there are notable exceptions (Final Fantasy 6 had a nice blend of action, relaxation, panic, and butterflies-in-the-breeze), but that's hard to do right.
--Dan
In Jedi Academy, you can hit your 'use' key to skip the in-game (non-movie) cutscenes. Very handy when I found that out, it made my life way easier. Well... made the game easier anyway.
--Dan
Problem with that scenerio is those two product lines keep the company going and allows them to take risks in other markets.
Problem with that scenario is that they have something like $40b in the bank. They could close down their operations and just pay people to sit at home and everyone would die before the money ran out.
--Dan
It's psychology. You see the world as you are. People who are very negative also see the world as very negative, where everyone is either stupid or out to screw you. Those who are positive, like myself, see the world as a wonderful place of potential, where you can still trust, and your word is worth something.
Antitrust corporations believe that others will act as they do, so they have to do it first. Nice guys, however, believe that fair play will save them. Unfortunately, the large corporations get paranoid, which turns them evil, and then they crush, kill, and destroy. Suck.
Then again, Microsoft's been a lying, stealing, bullying outfit from the beginning, so...
--Dan
No, it's just that all the other games suck.
Nintendo is making (and contracting/funding) high-quality, innovative games - Eternal Darkness, Metroid, Animal Crossing, Zelda, and so on. These games are awesome, and are worth the price paid for them. The problem is that there are so few good games being released today, and they have to spread themselves over three consoles.
Back in the SNES days, all the good games were SNES games, because that's all there was - unless you liked sports games. The Genesis wasn't a competitor, ever. Then came the Playstation - now, I love Nintendo, but the N64's lineup was pathetic from start to dismal dying finish.
Now, we have three great consoles - except that the PS2 stops reading blue discs, and XBox games tend often to have bugs in them, it seems, but they still work more often than not.
So what good games are there? Final Fantasy X/X2 (PS2); SW:KOTOR (XBox); Resident Evil 4 (GC); Mario Golf (GC); F-Zero (GC); Halo 2 (XBox); Arc the Lad (PS2); Tales of Symphonia (GC). That's just to name a few.
Notice something? To play this fall's (impressive) lineup, you need to spend $700 just on consoles to be able to play the games. There are three systems to choose from, each with a selection of games... But there's no pattern.
F-Zero and Mario Golf for Gamecube, so kiddie games, right? Er, and Resident Evil? Splinter Cell? Ok, well the PS2 is good for RPGs... unless you want Skies of Arcadia Legends, KOTOR, or Tales of Symphonia. And the XBox, of course, is good for the darker games (except RE4), and the sports games (unless you want to play EA's offerings online).
The reason that there aren't 'any good games' for platform X is because the developers have to spread their developing oevr multiple platforms. Me, I'll just wait until (like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell) they bring it to the GC with perks, features, or upgrades.
--Dan