You'd have to be specific about DRM systems - there's more than one implementation. However, since it's possible to include expiration of content, I'm sure it's possible to include unlocking of content. No one will do this, however, because the likelihood of using today's technologies and encodings in 50 years (Europe) or 95 years (US and subjugated countries) is pretty freaking small. Let's also not forget that, in the US at least, the companies keep pushing for copyright extensions, so that their creative work never has to fall into the public domain. Look at Mickey Mouse for example - he'd be public domain if it weren't for these extensions, and then anyone could make Mickey gear, games, toys, and so on. Disney's hold on one of the most popular cartoon characters of all time would disappear. Corporations refuse to let things like that happen.
Would someone from Jerry Falwell's congregation like to chime in?
This reminds me of some customers I had at work. They were trying to find a game for their son, and somehow had stumbled across Diablo. The two were obviously religious from their reaction to a game featuring demons, the undead, and of course, Diablo himself. After looking at the box for a while, asking my coworker some questions, and saying 'oh my' or what have you, they asked their final question, which it seems no religious advocates seem to consider.
'So... you're supposed to kill Diablo?' 'Yep, that's the whole point of the game.' 'That doesn't sound too bad then. We'll take it.'
These parents seem to realize what most religious groups don't: namely, that games like Diablo, that feature unholy evil, are not necessarily bad. Why? Because you're KILLING THE EVIL. You can be a Paladin, a holy warrior of God. How is this bad?
Can't find anyone who posted it, so I'll point out th eCBC story as well. Doubt it has anything the others don't, but I'm in the middle of making breakfast so I'm not going to check quite yet.
Interesting... I didn't know that Americans (I assume you're American) can call themselves Engineers without going through years of training and practical experience and joining an Engineers' Guild (for lack of a better term). Perhaps this indicates part of the problem in the US, if anyone can call themselves an Engineer? It would certainly explain shoddy technical practices.
The poets have been used to having to be plumbers for thousands of years.
In some respects, you are right, but historically, artisans, especially painters and sculptors, were commissioned - that is, they lived off their art, provided they had the skill to do so. This was back when art wasn't mass-produced, and when people had an appreciation for the work that went into it (and when the economy, such as it was, wasn't nearly so capitalist).
The link you referenced indicates she has a degree in business administration. Chances are her work at Apple Computer indicates her skill in the IT field as her work at Cibibank indicates her skill in screwing people for money.
Chances are she was management, and picked up or posessed relevant skills, but she's got nothing like a degree in IT. Still, an impressive and remarkable woman.
For the last six years neither Microsoft nor Apple have come up with anything really new.
I would think that a stable, fast UNIX microkernel architecture coupled with a usable, simple, and (arguably) beautiful user interface that people can actually use is something 'really new'. While Linux is still struggling with usability for the unix geeks who use it, Apple has made something that real people can actually get work done with. They've created a UNIX OS that is means to an end, not the end itself as Linux appears to be.
That's new. The problem is that people don't seem to realize that - hey - Open Source can do anything, but it'll take forever for anything worthwhile to get accomplished, since someone has to want it, understand it, and be able to write it themselves before that can happen. In the meantime, Apple is years ahead of Linux in the server and the desktop market, unless you count support for antiquated hardware, and it's only getting better. Linux, meanwhile, is still working on getting filesystem code that doesn't corrupt my data.
In the areas where OpenGL and DirectX overlap, DirectX is quite a lot better. The benefit of Microsoft controlling standards, as opposed to the community, is that Microsoft can make decisive changes or updates to DirectX as it chooses. OpenGL, on the other hand, has to go through committee, which takes time.
In OpenGL games, you have to support OpenGL extensions to get anything that isn't directly supported by the OpenGL spec - which, at this point, is quite a lot. In order to do that, you have to go through the entire list of available extensions, check to see which ones you want, check to see which you have, enable the features that require the extensions you have, and disable the features that require extensions you don't. And if two manufacturers (ATI and NVidia) implement the same thing two different ways, you have to support both extensions to get anything depending on that to work.
As far as programming goes, DirectX used to be horrible, but it is now a lot better, easier to use, and faster to develop, in and of itself. Add in the complexity above, and, well, it's pretty obvious who's winning.
Don't get me wrong, I wish OpenGL would come out on top, but at the moment, DirectX just rocks my boxers, and that's all there is to it.
2) InterTrust loses, and loses hard enough to set a precedent against questionable patents. Although this would be good for Microsoft in the short term, it might be good for everyone in the long term by establishing the precedent that ideas aren't patentable, only implementations, which is the way it should be all along. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into enough detail to judge whether that's a possible outcome, but if it did happen, it would be a Good Thing.
While I agree with your point, I quote the article:
InterTrust does not believe that all DRM products necessarily infringe its patents. "There are lots of noninfringing security capabilities out there," Maher says--including DRM techniques. "There's a difference between how we do things and how IBM did, or how Xerox did," he adds. "Microsoft picked the way we did it. How and why, I'm not going to conjecture." So in April 2001, InterTrust sued Microsoft.
The issue is not the idea of DRM, but rather the implementation MS used for their DRM-related products. Chances are, MS picked InterTrust's because they knew that IBM is too big to be bullied, as is Xerox, but Intertrust might be too small to put up a fight. That definitely needs stopping.
Judging from the article, InterTrust looks to be in the right on this one. We'll see how it turns out.
The Sorenson CODEC is not open because Sorenson doesn't want it to be. Once MPEG-4 is more established, I think we can expect to see a shift away from Sorenson in QT files.
As for full-screen, you can get it if you pay (I know, I know, paying for software is worse than eating babies, but suck it up).
Apple's 'proprietary crap' game is horrible, I agree. Everything they do, from opening the QT file specs up to releasing their streaming server as open-source has been totally anti-consumer. Even their support of MP3 (a very established file format, though not 'open') in the iPod has to be evil somehow, because, well, it just is, right? That ties in somehow with their anticompetetive use of MP3 in iTunes too. They've got to be up to SOMETHING!
Let's face it, Apple is a corporation trying to make money, but as corporations go, I think it's a pretty good one. They're not anti-competetive or anti-consumer. Of COURSE they want people to use their stuff instead of MS's, but that doesn't mean they're evil. If we have to have a dictator, let's have one that likes us, not one that regards us with contempt like Microsoft does.
Note: The following is not US-bashing, nor Canadian patriotism (many examples are non-Canadian, I just can't think of many:P). Think of it more like devil's advocate plus Canadian pride plus it's two thirty in the morning and I'm listening to Arrogant Worms music. With that said...
1) Fun: We still produce more films than anyone but India, and not many people outside of the subcontinent watch those anyway. A substantial amount of the television shows (Emeril!) music, video games, theme parks, etc. still come from the good ol' US of A.
I hate to rag on someone's pride, but outside of the US, you're famed for producing schlock, and lots of it. You've produced The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and CSI, sure, but for every one good TV series that HBO (or, amazingly, CBS) airs, there are twenty or thirty shitty shows that have no substance whatsoever, and are just one-season runs to get people hooked until they can come out with the next round of crap (fortunately, in Canada, CTV and Global get all the HBO shows anyway, so we don't have to wait for syndication to get them on broadcast).
Now ask yourself how many modern games have really good staying power? How many are really, really that awesome? I think NWN is, but that's Canadian (Bioware). Rainbow Six 3, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Myst? Published by Ubisoft, from Montreal. Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate are/were Bioware too, but we all knew that. It also occurs to me that EA publishes and develops a lot of games, which is pretty cool. It's cooler that they're based in Vancouver though. I didn't care much for Black and White though, I guess the UK isn't my ball of wax.
As for music, turn on the radio. Enough said there.
2) Pharmaceuticals -- now careful, I'm not lumping these with Entertainment. Prescription drugs are mostly innovated here.
I'll easily give you that they're largely innovated there, but even Canada's pharmaceutical industry is, as I recall, huge, and our genetic/biotech firms are on their way to being light-years ahead of the US's, by virtue of less paranoia and so on - and I don't mean genetically enhancing crops then cross-pollinating and suing someone, I mean designing soy plants to produce enzymes, antibodies, protiens, etc. for use in medicines.
3) Microprocessors -- sure they're manufactured where the labor is cheap, but Intel, Moto, IBM... they're developing the stuff here.
This, again, is true, but don't forget about a lot of other companies. Cisco's R&D department is right near the waterfront in a beautiful Israeli resort town on the sea. ATI, which is in the process of stomping NVidia (or, at the very least, giving them a run for their money) is based in Markham, Ontario. Yeah, Intel and AMD are American, but without a good ASUS or ABit board to put them in, they're useless, and both companies are Taiwanese. If you get one though, and put Windows on, and have a Solaris machine and want to run code on both, but don't feel like using Canadian James Gosling's Java idea, you could use Activeperl and Activepython on Windows. Activestate, we all know, is in Victoria, but that's irrelevant, really.
4) Industrial Design -- The shiny new cars that are manufactured by foreign companies use US design teams. Why do you think Daimler bought Chrysler?
Installed base? It was profitable? The phrase 'European styling' exists for a reason. Look at the Ford (I think) Asstek, or the Plymouth Prowler, or any number of other ass-ugly vehicles. Yes, Americans make nice cars, but they also make shitty cars. Europeans make less cars, but they're all so much nicer.
The US has a lot going for it, don't get me wrong, but I just can't let blanket 'we're better than everyone at this' statements go unattacked, even if only as devil's advocate.
Make grade school HARD. If it takes little Johnny an extra 3 years to graduate, so be it. Holding back brighter kids so the less able ones don't feel bad has to stop. I honestly want my second grader learning Intro Chinese, Solar System basics, Ecology (where litter goes), math that isn't memorization, etc. etc. No more whole days spent on Red+Blue=Purple.
This I agree wholeheartedly about. I loved school until about grade 4, when my burst of learning hit a brick wall because the reservoir ran dry. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder where I could be or what I could do if I'd learned at my own rate, instead of getting a day's learning done every week or so. When I was reading 400 page novels in a week and the rest of the class was bitching about having to read a 10-page story (or rather, having the teacher read it to them), I knew that the education system needed work.
And you know what? I don't think that reading that much is unrealistic. I'll admit that not everyone can do it, but I think that it could be the rule, not the exception. We need to start seeing education and knowledge as a reward in and of itself, not just a route to better jobs, more money, or whatever, and we need to stop emphasizing sports. Large schools have more 'intellectual' after-hours clubs, sure, but the smaller schools can 'only' afford sports teams. How is this right?
Sidenote: I'm Canadian, incidentally. I've been educated (grades 8-12) in three provinces. Saskatchewan didn't have the money to keep up to date (Social Studies textbooks from 1978), BC had too much beaureaucracy (sp?)(they spent entire school board meetings arguing over what title our school's 'principal'/'director' should be given) and too much union crap. If I had children to put through high school right now, I'd move to Lethbridge, Alberta, and put them through WCHS. It's the best highschool I've attended/visited/heard of. Language programs, trips, and the atmosphere is intellectually-inclusive. It's sad when these features are so rare.
Chances are, if the government wanted to track you down, they'd just pay someone to follow you. If they wanted to know what you were buying, they'd subpoena the companies that your tail said you went to.
I don't know why all Americans I meet are so certain that the government is out to get each and every one of them. Get real guys, even if all government was as citizen-hostile as you seem to think, your lives are far more pathetically uninteresting than they would ever care to waste their time on. Get over yourselves.
It was reported by (I think) Gamespy that Electronics Boutique sold/rung up (including pre-orders) I think 300,000 copies of Vice City on the day of release. Where I work, it's flying off the shelves almost as fast as it's coming in, and it's coming in in droves. Console games are crazy popular, especially around Christmas; I sell easily four dozen console games for every PC game I sell, no question. It just doesn't compare.
on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002 plus use emulator of almost every platform
You forgot that on GBA, you can play games that have been out since the late 1980s flawlessly, and with improved (i.e. added) colour as well, no software virtualization required. Compare this with trying to run Scorched Earth on W2K, or even W95? No contest.
on PC you can buy very cheap games from "classic packs" or cover CDs, classic games are for example Fallout, Unreal, Thief or Railroad Tycoon 2 - are these games really worse than current "hits" ?
No, but after owning Fallout for like 5 years, it kind of gets a little old. It's nice to have something new every now and then, and as fun as retrogaming is, it only lasts so long.
But which console give you so much possibilites (just in games!) as PC?
That work properly, without bugs? PS2, hands-down. The amount of games we have in stock at work for PS2 plus PS1 is staggering, and the amount of games we have for PC is insignificant in comparison, not to mention the PC games that will work on the average computer nowadays is a lower number yet.
When a customer comes to me and says 'will this work in my computer?' and I say 'it may well, but I honestly can't tell you either way', and then they look over and see people grab something off the PS2 or GC wall, pay, and leave... Well, it's easy to see.
Thing I notice at our major (inter)national chain store (we just opened up four in Sweden, maybe we're the same one;) is that people don't feel like upgrading. If they want the latest, greatest in graphics and sound, they can get (in Canadian dollars) a $500 monitor (big, so you don't have to sit four inches away), $600 video card (latest greatest), $200 sound card (Dolby 5.1), $200 hard drive (for installing your game collection so you can play whenever you want), $100 DVD drive (installing/playing/movies), $70 gamepad, $150 speaker set...
Or you could use the TV most people already have, the sound system most people already have hooked up to it, and buy an XBox for $300, get two games with it (Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT, but they're still games), get a DVD remote, and then have almost $1500 left over. New TV? Kickass minisystem? You can do a lot with that. Or you could get like 25 games (average of $60 each), or you could have a hobby outside of gaming.
Computers are nice, but consoles are easy, cheap, and fun. BMX XXX, Tony Hawk 4, and Outlaw Golf kept us busy all night tonight at the staff party. As much as I hate some of what Microsoft does, I have to say, it's a better deal than PC, and it sure does work better than Windows. Gamecube is cheaper still, but the online play doesn't rock as much. Still, you can get the major games, the fun games, the kid games, and so on, and that's a hundred bucks cheaper.
Yeha, but try finding games for it. In the larger cities, it's possible, but even in a university town at our gaming franchise, where we have walls of PC games, and walls of PS2 games, and walls of PS1 games, we only have the N64 games that no one wants. And try getting the expansion pack? Good luck.
I was using a P120 (well, the system varied between 166 and 120 depending on what hardware was working that day) until the end of August, and you know what? It worked fine. I couldn't play the latest, greatest games, but you can't play them on your N64 either. If you want the latest anything, you need to buy a new system, same deal with games.
The difference in longevity is thus: When you buy a console, it'll last maybe five years, which means you have five years from the date of purchase to play the games. If you buy a PC, the games and the hardware is incremental, so if you buy new hardware every five years, you can play the games released over the last five years (let's say two years in this case).
With consoles it's stagnation, with PCs it's catch-up.
The thing you should note is that, according to the current legislation, you can make a (legal) 'private copy' of someone else's music (i.e. a friend's Sneaker Pimps CD) for your own use. The distinction is that they cannot legally make one for your use, you have to make it yourself. Thus, you can borrow and burn all you want, but do it from the originals.
Your point, therefore, is moot, however I do not entirely disagree with you. CD-Rs today are classified as 'Audio' or 'Data', and both are tariffed, albeit not as much. I suggest that data CDs be not tariffed at all, and then people who wish to borrow 'n' burn can do so by buying Audio CD-R discs, knowing that artists are being compensated to some extent (moreso than if there was no tariff).
Not quite. You can record any songs owned by the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA (forget their acroname now, but they have one...). This means, to me, that I can copy anything, but there's likely to be trash that you can't copy that I could, and trash that you could copy that I can't.
Any money not claimed within like 12 months goes to some worthy cause.
And all we'd have to do to get that money back to people is send them an e-mail. We could probably phrase it something like this:
To: <undisclosed-recipients> From: Free Money! Re: Make Money from Class-Action Settlements!
Friend! Would you like to make money from class-action lawsuits? You have been selected to recieve a settlement of $10 dollars! It can ALL BE YOURS! All you have to do to claim this GREAT PRIZE is reply to this e-mail within 12 months to get your FREE MONEY NOW! This offer CAN'T BE BEAT!
Then we'd just have to wait for everyone to reply to the e-mail. Simple!
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You'd have to be specific about DRM systems - there's more than one implementation. However, since it's possible to include expiration of content, I'm sure it's possible to include unlocking of content. No one will do this, however, because the likelihood of using today's technologies and encodings in 50 years (Europe) or 95 years (US and subjugated countries) is pretty freaking small. Let's also not forget that, in the US at least, the companies keep pushing for copyright extensions, so that their creative work never has to fall into the public domain. Look at Mickey Mouse for example - he'd be public domain if it weren't for these extensions, and then anyone could make Mickey gear, games, toys, and so on. Disney's hold on one of the most popular cartoon characters of all time would disappear. Corporations refuse to let things like that happen.
--Dan
Why not just be a vegetarian?
In the words of Quentin Tarantino (via Vincent Vega), 'Bacon tastes goooood, pork chops taste goooood.'
--Dan
Would someone from Jerry Falwell's congregation like to chime in?
This reminds me of some customers I had at work. They were trying to find a game for their son, and somehow had stumbled across Diablo. The two were obviously religious from their reaction to a game featuring demons, the undead, and of course, Diablo himself. After looking at the box for a while, asking my coworker some questions, and saying 'oh my' or what have you, they asked their final question, which it seems no religious advocates seem to consider.
'So... you're supposed to kill Diablo?'
'Yep, that's the whole point of the game.'
'That doesn't sound too bad then. We'll take it.'
These parents seem to realize what most religious groups don't: namely, that games like Diablo, that feature unholy evil, are not necessarily bad. Why? Because you're KILLING THE EVIL. You can be a Paladin, a holy warrior of God. How is this bad?
--Dan
Maybe as part of this next-gen shell they'll introduce a good command line text editor.
What do you mean 'maybe'? Windows XP Pro already has edlin.exe, what more do you really need?
(Sometimes, backwards compatibility goes too far.)
--Dan
Er, I was actually referring to Classical Greece and Rome though...
--Dan
Can't find anyone who posted it, so I'll point out th eCBC story as well. Doubt it has anything the others don't, but I'm in the middle of making breakfast so I'm not going to check quite yet.
--Dan
Interesting... I didn't know that Americans (I assume you're American) can call themselves Engineers without going through years of training and practical experience and joining an Engineers' Guild (for lack of a better term). Perhaps this indicates part of the problem in the US, if anyone can call themselves an Engineer? It would certainly explain shoddy technical practices.
--Dan
The poets have been used to having to be plumbers for thousands of years.
In some respects, you are right, but historically, artisans, especially painters and sculptors, were commissioned - that is, they lived off their art, provided they had the skill to do so. This was back when art wasn't mass-produced, and when people had an appreciation for the work that went into it (and when the economy, such as it was, wasn't nearly so capitalist).
--Dan
The link you referenced indicates she has a degree in business administration. Chances are her work at Apple Computer indicates her skill in the IT field as her work at Cibibank indicates her skill in screwing people for money.
Chances are she was management, and picked up or posessed relevant skills, but she's got nothing like a degree in IT. Still, an impressive and remarkable woman.
--Dan
For the last six years neither Microsoft nor Apple have come up with anything really new.
I would think that a stable, fast UNIX microkernel architecture coupled with a usable, simple, and (arguably) beautiful user interface that people can actually use is something 'really new'. While Linux is still struggling with usability for the unix geeks who use it, Apple has made something that real people can actually get work done with. They've created a UNIX OS that is means to an end, not the end itself as Linux appears to be.
That's new. The problem is that people don't seem to realize that - hey - Open Source can do anything, but it'll take forever for anything worthwhile to get accomplished, since someone has to want it, understand it, and be able to write it themselves before that can happen. In the meantime, Apple is years ahead of Linux in the server and the desktop market, unless you count support for antiquated hardware, and it's only getting better. Linux, meanwhile, is still working on getting filesystem code that doesn't corrupt my data.
--Dan
About $10/month, plus any downloadable content your kids downloaded.
--Dan
In the areas where OpenGL and DirectX overlap, DirectX is quite a lot better. The benefit of Microsoft controlling standards, as opposed to the community, is that Microsoft can make decisive changes or updates to DirectX as it chooses. OpenGL, on the other hand, has to go through committee, which takes time.
In OpenGL games, you have to support OpenGL extensions to get anything that isn't directly supported by the OpenGL spec - which, at this point, is quite a lot. In order to do that, you have to go through the entire list of available extensions, check to see which ones you want, check to see which you have, enable the features that require the extensions you have, and disable the features that require extensions you don't. And if two manufacturers (ATI and NVidia) implement the same thing two different ways, you have to support both extensions to get anything depending on that to work.
As far as programming goes, DirectX used to be horrible, but it is now a lot better, easier to use, and faster to develop, in and of itself. Add in the complexity above, and, well, it's pretty obvious who's winning.
Don't get me wrong, I wish OpenGL would come out on top, but at the moment, DirectX just rocks my boxers, and that's all there is to it.
--Dan
While I agree with your point, I quote the article:
The issue is not the idea of DRM, but rather the implementation MS used for their DRM-related products. Chances are, MS picked InterTrust's because they knew that IBM is too big to be bullied, as is Xerox, but Intertrust might be too small to put up a fight. That definitely needs stopping.
Judging from the article, InterTrust looks to be in the right on this one. We'll see how it turns out.
--Dan
The Sorenson CODEC is not open because Sorenson doesn't want it to be. Once MPEG-4 is more established, I think we can expect to see a shift away from Sorenson in QT files.
As for full-screen, you can get it if you pay (I know, I know, paying for software is worse than eating babies, but suck it up).
Apple's 'proprietary crap' game is horrible, I agree. Everything they do, from opening the QT file specs up to releasing their streaming server as open-source has been totally anti-consumer. Even their support of MP3 (a very established file format, though not 'open') in the iPod has to be evil somehow, because, well, it just is, right? That ties in somehow with their anticompetetive use of MP3 in iTunes too. They've got to be up to SOMETHING!
Let's face it, Apple is a corporation trying to make money, but as corporations go, I think it's a pretty good one. They're not anti-competetive or anti-consumer. Of COURSE they want people to use their stuff instead of MS's, but that doesn't mean they're evil. If we have to have a dictator, let's have one that likes us, not one that regards us with contempt like Microsoft does.
--Dan
Note: The following is not US-bashing, nor Canadian patriotism (many examples are non-Canadian, I just can't think of many :P). Think of it more like devil's advocate plus Canadian pride plus it's two thirty in the morning and I'm listening to Arrogant Worms music. With that said...
1) Fun: We still produce more films than anyone but India, and not many people outside of the subcontinent watch those anyway. A substantial amount of the television shows (Emeril!) music, video games, theme parks, etc. still come from the good ol' US of A.
I hate to rag on someone's pride, but outside of the US, you're famed for producing schlock, and lots of it. You've produced The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and CSI, sure, but for every one good TV series that HBO (or, amazingly, CBS) airs, there are twenty or thirty shitty shows that have no substance whatsoever, and are just one-season runs to get people hooked until they can come out with the next round of crap (fortunately, in Canada, CTV and Global get all the HBO shows anyway, so we don't have to wait for syndication to get them on broadcast).
Now ask yourself how many modern games have really good staying power? How many are really, really that awesome? I think NWN is, but that's Canadian (Bioware). Rainbow Six 3, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Myst? Published by Ubisoft, from Montreal. Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate are/were Bioware too, but we all knew that. It also occurs to me that EA publishes and develops a lot of games, which is pretty cool. It's cooler that they're based in Vancouver though. I didn't care much for Black and White though, I guess the UK isn't my ball of wax.
As for music, turn on the radio. Enough said there.
2) Pharmaceuticals -- now careful, I'm not lumping these with Entertainment. Prescription drugs are mostly innovated here.
I'll easily give you that they're largely innovated there, but even Canada's pharmaceutical industry is, as I recall, huge, and our genetic/biotech firms are on their way to being light-years ahead of the US's, by virtue of less paranoia and so on - and I don't mean genetically enhancing crops then cross-pollinating and suing someone, I mean designing soy plants to produce enzymes, antibodies, protiens, etc. for use in medicines.
3) Microprocessors -- sure they're manufactured where the labor is cheap, but Intel, Moto, IBM... they're developing the stuff here.
This, again, is true, but don't forget about a lot of other companies. Cisco's R&D department is right near the waterfront in a beautiful Israeli resort town on the sea. ATI, which is in the process of stomping NVidia (or, at the very least, giving them a run for their money) is based in Markham, Ontario. Yeah, Intel and AMD are American, but without a good ASUS or ABit board to put them in, they're useless, and both companies are Taiwanese. If you get one though, and put Windows on, and have a Solaris machine and want to run code on both, but don't feel like using Canadian James Gosling's Java idea, you could use Activeperl and Activepython on Windows. Activestate, we all know, is in Victoria, but that's irrelevant, really.
4) Industrial Design -- The shiny new cars that are manufactured by foreign companies use US design teams. Why do you think Daimler bought Chrysler?
Installed base? It was profitable? The phrase 'European styling' exists for a reason. Look at the Ford (I think) Asstek, or the Plymouth Prowler, or any number of other ass-ugly vehicles. Yes, Americans make nice cars, but they also make shitty cars. Europeans make less cars, but they're all so much nicer.
The US has a lot going for it, don't get me wrong, but I just can't let blanket 'we're better than everyone at this' statements go unattacked, even if only as devil's advocate.
--Dan
Make grade school HARD. If it takes little Johnny an extra 3 years to graduate, so be it. Holding back brighter kids so the less able ones don't feel bad has to stop. I honestly want my second grader learning Intro Chinese, Solar System basics, Ecology (where litter goes), math that isn't memorization, etc. etc. No more whole days spent on Red+Blue=Purple.
This I agree wholeheartedly about. I loved school until about grade 4, when my burst of learning hit a brick wall because the reservoir ran dry. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder where I could be or what I could do if I'd learned at my own rate, instead of getting a day's learning done every week or so. When I was reading 400 page novels in a week and the rest of the class was bitching about having to read a 10-page story (or rather, having the teacher read it to them), I knew that the education system needed work.
And you know what? I don't think that reading that much is unrealistic. I'll admit that not everyone can do it, but I think that it could be the rule, not the exception. We need to start seeing education and knowledge as a reward in and of itself, not just a route to better jobs, more money, or whatever, and we need to stop emphasizing sports. Large schools have more 'intellectual' after-hours clubs, sure, but the smaller schools can 'only' afford sports teams. How is this right?
Sidenote: I'm Canadian, incidentally. I've been educated (grades 8-12) in three provinces. Saskatchewan didn't have the money to keep up to date (Social Studies textbooks from 1978), BC had too much beaureaucracy (sp?)(they spent entire school board meetings arguing over what title our school's 'principal'/'director' should be given) and too much union crap. If I had children to put through high school right now, I'd move to Lethbridge, Alberta, and put them through WCHS. It's the best highschool I've attended/visited/heard of. Language programs, trips, and the atmosphere is intellectually-inclusive. It's sad when these features are so rare.
--Dan
Chances are, if the government wanted to track you down, they'd just pay someone to follow you. If they wanted to know what you were buying, they'd subpoena the companies that your tail said you went to.
I don't know why all Americans I meet are so certain that the government is out to get each and every one of them. Get real guys, even if all government was as citizen-hostile as you seem to think, your lives are far more pathetically uninteresting than they would ever care to waste their time on. Get over yourselves.
--Dan
It was reported by (I think) Gamespy that Electronics Boutique sold/rung up (including pre-orders) I think 300,000 copies of Vice City on the day of release. Where I work, it's flying off the shelves almost as fast as it's coming in, and it's coming in in droves. Console games are crazy popular, especially around Christmas; I sell easily four dozen console games for every PC game I sell, no question. It just doesn't compare.
--Dan
on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002 plus use emulator of almost every platform
You forgot that on GBA, you can play games that have been out since the late 1980s flawlessly, and with improved (i.e. added) colour as well, no software virtualization required. Compare this with trying to run Scorched Earth on W2K, or even W95? No contest.
on PC you can buy very cheap games from "classic packs" or cover CDs, classic games are for example Fallout, Unreal, Thief or Railroad Tycoon 2 - are these games really worse than current "hits" ?
No, but after owning Fallout for like 5 years, it kind of gets a little old. It's nice to have something new every now and then, and as fun as retrogaming is, it only lasts so long.
But which console give you so much possibilites (just in games!) as PC?
That work properly, without bugs? PS2, hands-down. The amount of games we have in stock at work for PS2 plus PS1 is staggering, and the amount of games we have for PC is insignificant in comparison, not to mention the PC games that will work on the average computer nowadays is a lower number yet.
When a customer comes to me and says 'will this work in my computer?' and I say 'it may well, but I honestly can't tell you either way', and then they look over and see people grab something off the PS2 or GC wall, pay, and leave... Well, it's easy to see.
--Dan
Thing I notice at our major (inter)national chain store (we just opened up four in Sweden, maybe we're the same one ;) is that people don't feel like upgrading. If they want the latest, greatest in graphics and sound, they can get (in Canadian dollars) a $500 monitor (big, so you don't have to sit four inches away), $600 video card (latest greatest), $200 sound card (Dolby 5.1), $200 hard drive (for installing your game collection so you can play whenever you want), $100 DVD drive (installing/playing/movies), $70 gamepad, $150 speaker set...
Or you could use the TV most people already have, the sound system most people already have hooked up to it, and buy an XBox for $300, get two games with it (Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT, but they're still games), get a DVD remote, and then have almost $1500 left over. New TV? Kickass minisystem? You can do a lot with that. Or you could get like 25 games (average of $60 each), or you could have a hobby outside of gaming.
Computers are nice, but consoles are easy, cheap, and fun. BMX XXX, Tony Hawk 4, and Outlaw Golf kept us busy all night tonight at the staff party. As much as I hate some of what Microsoft does, I have to say, it's a better deal than PC, and it sure does work better than Windows. Gamecube is cheaper still, but the online play doesn't rock as much. Still, you can get the major games, the fun games, the kid games, and so on, and that's a hundred bucks cheaper.
--Dan
--Dan
Yeha, but try finding games for it. In the larger cities, it's possible, but even in a university town at our gaming franchise, where we have walls of PC games, and walls of PS2 games, and walls of PS1 games, we only have the N64 games that no one wants. And try getting the expansion pack? Good luck.
I was using a P120 (well, the system varied between 166 and 120 depending on what hardware was working that day) until the end of August, and you know what? It worked fine. I couldn't play the latest, greatest games, but you can't play them on your N64 either. If you want the latest anything, you need to buy a new system, same deal with games.
The difference in longevity is thus: When you buy a console, it'll last maybe five years, which means you have five years from the date of purchase to play the games. If you buy a PC, the games and the hardware is incremental, so if you buy new hardware every five years, you can play the games released over the last five years (let's say two years in this case).
With consoles it's stagnation, with PCs it's catch-up.
--Dan
Did anyone else read that as 'A Few Hardware Blts'? Maybe I've been coding too long...
--Dan
The thing you should note is that, according to the current legislation, you can make a (legal) 'private copy' of someone else's music (i.e. a friend's Sneaker Pimps CD) for your own use. The distinction is that they cannot legally make one for your use, you have to make it yourself. Thus, you can borrow and burn all you want, but do it from the originals.
Your point, therefore, is moot, however I do not entirely disagree with you. CD-Rs today are classified as 'Audio' or 'Data', and both are tariffed, albeit not as much. I suggest that data CDs be not tariffed at all, and then people who wish to borrow 'n' burn can do so by buying Audio CD-R discs, knowing that artists are being compensated to some extent (moreso than if there was no tariff).
Just a thought.
--Dan
Not quite. You can record any songs owned by the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA (forget their acroname now, but they have one...). This means, to me, that I can copy anything, but there's likely to be trash that you can't copy that I could, and trash that you could copy that I can't.
--Dan
And all we'd have to do to get that money back to people is send them an e-mail. We could probably phrase it something like this:
Then we'd just have to wait for everyone to reply to the e-mail. Simple!
--Dan