"Its days like this I'm so happy I live in Canada. Anyone want to move up here? I have a spare bedroom."
Given Canada's history of taxing media and giving the proceeds to the music and movie companies, it's quite foolish for Canadians to assume that their government won't institute this law as well.
"The people who are rabidly against the concept of intelligent design are nothing more than arrogant freaks who declare that man may be able to build evolving life in the lab but nobody else in the universe has ever been able to do so, nor ever will"
Opponents of intelligent design oppose it because intelligent design is nothing but a bunch of Christian extremists posing as scientists trying to slowly bring the book of Genesis into science classrooms, and throw out the entire idea of evolution in the process. Right now there's not a single shred of evidence that the world was designed, only fairy tales about invisible men who live in the sky and speak things into existence. A true science class about the possibilities of world building would probably welcomed on many college campuses - but it's definately too advanced for middle or high school students.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's a shame that movie was so dull and preachy, or they might have actually educated the general public about this stuff.
This is a book that inspired a revolution that lead to the murders of somewhere between sixty and eighty million people - China has been so good at covering things up nobody is even sure about the real numbers. I'm not saying that Homeland Security should be allowed to put books on a watch list, but hey, Mao's Little Red Book is not just a book.
"Why did he have to provide his "name, address, phone number and Social Security number"... to read a book?"
Probably so that the school (most of which use social security numbers as student id numbers) could make sure that he was actually a student and not just someone trying to steal a book.
"As near as I know, the only reason to take a company public is for the owners of that company to make money by selling part or all of their stake in that company."
I think that you just summed up the important benefit of going public. Porsches don't grow on trees.
The grass is blurry because Sony's designers only put four megabytes of video RAM into the PS2, so in PS2 games there is no such thing as a hi-res texture. Thank god that after five years of hideous PS2 graphics Sony had the sense to outsource the hardware of the PS3!
"BuildForge provides development automation solutions for Real-World Application Lifecycle Management.
"BuildForge FullControl is a powerful, adaptive framework that allows development teams to automate, integrate, and analyze their development lifecycle using the tools they have in place today."
I copied/pasted that from the BuildForge website. Raise your hand if hearing the above slogans parroted by some annoying MBA in charge of your department would cause you to immediately post your resume on the internet.
What I really don't understand is why SOE/Lucasarts didn't just make this update a sequel. SWG is far too long in the tooth for a major update to bring in new players - those of us who never picked up the game because it takes five minutes to kill a wamp rat with a blaster pistol have already played newer, better games and are probably not too inclined to start playing a game in which the designers only made changes based on player feedback over two years after release!
Sony's execs have a hard-on for 3D games with trendy themes, especially when it comes to US releases. Anything else pretty much has to be released as either a value title that either has a low price or combines multiple games on one disc. This is especially bad for companies that want to do sprite-based games or port obscure Japanese games to the US like Working Designs did.
The really annoying thing is, Sony doesn't seem to mind at all when it is the one publishing the game (Ico and Shadow of the Colossus), or if a cult-hit like Katmari Damacy is an exclusive port.
This kind of crap is why I'm not buying Sony stuff anymore. Microsoft is more than happy to help publishers get their obscure Japanese stuff onto the Xbox. Hell, Microsoft even funded a port of Guilty Gear #Reload to the Japanese Xbox just to win over Japanese gamers, and it was then ported to the USA! That beats the hell out of Sony and Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card.
The Square Enix of 2005 is not the Squaresoft that produced all those great games you remember. After the company invested over $250 million (US) in a poorly-planned CGI movie production facility that was quickly obsoleted by competitors running on commodity hardware and Linux, the "Final Fantasy" movie they planned to recoup the loss with bombed in nearly every nation it was released. Hironobu Sakaguchi, long the creative heart of Squaresoft, was the director of the movie, and was ostracized by the rest of the employees afterward finally gave in to Japanese tradition and quit. It's a pretty safe bet that similar fates befell most of the other Squaresoft old timers, and some less than stellar management after the failure of the FF movie lead the company into massive debt, which opened it up for a takeover by Enix.
Now Squaresoft is just a brand name Enix markets to bring in easy cash to gamers looking to feed their hunger for nostalgia. Smart gamers would do well to stay far away from future FF games...
"We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players."
Hmmm... sales suck on CD, sales suck online... maybe it's time for the record industry to reconsider its current business model of pushing albums where the musicians lose almost all control to producers who churn out an album with three good songs and ten filler tracks.
"I have a cable modem, my friend across the country has one. A little free VoIP software and we've forgotten about the telco."
The telco is still there. Comcast doesn't have its own huge backbone running connections out to all of its own users around the USA, it uses the backbones provided by the big telco monopolies to do that. So if they decide to create special high-priority networks accessible only at a premium charge, and degrade the quality of the existing networks to make VOIP unusable, you'll have to pay extra for a premium Comcast account that can send data over the premium networks.
Unfortunately its next to impossible for anyone else to move in an build new networks that can challenge the big telcos, because years of overregulation kept everyone else out of the business for so long. So if the telcos manage to pull this one off, everyone who wants low-latency access will be paying extra to the big telcos unless a huge number of people pool their resources to build new backbones, which would most likely require government involvement that will make such actions illegal under the anti-municipal internet laws that the telcos will doublessly get pushed through at the federal level at the same time they get Congress to allow them to build the premium backbones.
Why are people still whining about KDE vs. Gnome? I found the ultimate solution to all my Linux interface issues a long time ago and I haven't had to worry about all this KDE vs. Gnome nonsense since.
I'm not going to dispute a single point Brown made in that article because I have all of the same gripes about OpenOffice, which I started using way back when it was still being produced by Stardivision. I will, however, point out that Brown's remarks do NOT apply to the majority of open source software I have used - the exception being almost every Linux distro I ever used. Most open source apps are tiny and slick, don't need more than a few people (often one will do the job just fine) to document or fix them. OpenOffice is a rarity in the Open Source world - a bloated pile of cruft that just keeps growing. But most Open Source software was not created by a company with a bloat fetish before being bought out by another company with a bloat fetish, and then released as Open Source software to a crowd of bloat fetishists all looking to take down another bloat fetishist.
What the Open Source community needs to take from Brown's article, and plenty of other critiques of Open Office, is that it's time to stop holding up Open Office as a shining success story. Pick something better, like Firefox, or the ability of BSD to adapt to everything from DVD players to cars to OS X.
"Doing an emulator for something like the SNES is hard"
They aren't using emulation - XBox 360 owners get to download new game binaries coded for the 360 because Microsoft knew emulation would be a bad way to go.
"...they are also responsible for conducting research to let the designers know what their target audience wants..."
So what happens when the target audience doesn't have a clue what he wants? Most consumers -and most people in the game industry- had no idea that computers were capable of generating games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Quake until after John Carmack found ways to make playable 3D games on consumer hardware, so they couldn't even express those desires. The same can be said for the two-player fighting genre that never existed until Capcom created Street Fighter II, or for the entire concept that turned into Katmari Damacy.
All marketing can find out from consumers is what they want to see more of the same of. This is useful for companies like EA that just want to keep making the same game over-and-over with yearly visual tweaks, or for letting Eidos know that nobody wants to see Lara Croft in another game, but market surveys are all but worthless when it comes to bringing new ideas to market.
One would think that before Microsoft decided to run with the PPC chips they would have looked at the problems Apple had. Apple ran into similar supply issues with the G5, not to mention IBM's inability to live up to promises it made about speed increases. Those problems were affecting Apple a long time ago, and the stories were all over the tech gossip sites. Perhaps if Microsoft had kept stealing ideas from Apple and dumped the PPC chips for Intel this wouldn't be a problem.
"...but people have to respect intellectual property."
If respect for intellectual property is something Creative holds so highly, why are they trying to enforce a patent for something that they didn't invent?
On what planet is Wikipedia a reliable source for things like sales numbers? Those could have been pulled from any worthless Sony press release that was never vetted by anyone outside the company - hell they could have even been posted BY Sony. If you're going to quote sales numbers, at least use a website that has some credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
"Its days like this I'm so happy I live in Canada. Anyone want to move up here? I have a spare bedroom."
Given Canada's history of taxing media and giving the proceeds to the music and movie companies, it's quite foolish for Canadians to assume that their government won't institute this law as well.
Because they sure as hell aren't reading the articles before they slap them on the front page...
"Since this is a federal court ruling, does it affect the ID stuff going on in Kansas?"
Not directly, however, it will probably make other judges more comfortable with handing down similar rulings in the future.
"The people who are rabidly against the concept of intelligent design are nothing more than arrogant freaks who declare that man may be able to build evolving life in the lab but nobody else in the universe has ever been able to do so, nor ever will"
Opponents of intelligent design oppose it because intelligent design is nothing but a bunch of Christian extremists posing as scientists trying to slowly bring the book of Genesis into science classrooms, and throw out the entire idea of evolution in the process. Right now there's not a single shred of evidence that the world was designed, only fairy tales about invisible men who live in the sky and speak things into existence. A true science class about the possibilities of world building would probably welcomed on many college campuses - but it's definately too advanced for middle or high school students.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's a shame that movie was so dull and preachy, or they might have actually educated the general public about this stuff.
This is a book that inspired a revolution that lead to the murders of somewhere between sixty and eighty million people - China has been so good at covering things up nobody is even sure about the real numbers. I'm not saying that Homeland Security should be allowed to put books on a watch list, but hey, Mao's Little Red Book is not just a book.
"Why did he have to provide his "name, address, phone number and Social Security number" ... to read a book?"
Probably so that the school (most of which use social security numbers as student id numbers) could make sure that he was actually a student and not just someone trying to steal a book.
"As near as I know, the only reason to take a company public is for the owners of that company to make money by selling part or all of their stake in that company."
I think that you just summed up the important benefit of going public. Porsches don't grow on trees.
The grass is blurry because Sony's designers only put four megabytes of video RAM into the PS2, so in PS2 games there is no such thing as a hi-res texture. Thank god that after five years of hideous PS2 graphics Sony had the sense to outsource the hardware of the PS3!
"BuildForge provides development automation solutions for Real-World Application Lifecycle Management.
"BuildForge FullControl is a powerful, adaptive framework that allows development teams to automate, integrate, and analyze their development lifecycle using the tools they have in place today."
I copied/pasted that from the BuildForge website. Raise your hand if hearing the above slogans parroted by some annoying MBA in charge of your department would cause you to immediately post your resume on the internet.
What I really don't understand is why SOE/Lucasarts didn't just make this update a sequel. SWG is far too long in the tooth for a major update to bring in new players - those of us who never picked up the game because it takes five minutes to kill a wamp rat with a blaster pistol have already played newer, better games and are probably not too inclined to start playing a game in which the designers only made changes based on player feedback over two years after release!
Sony's execs have a hard-on for 3D games with trendy themes, especially when it comes to US releases. Anything else pretty much has to be released as either a value title that either has a low price or combines multiple games on one disc. This is especially bad for companies that want to do sprite-based games or port obscure Japanese games to the US like Working Designs did.
The really annoying thing is, Sony doesn't seem to mind at all when it is the one publishing the game (Ico and Shadow of the Colossus), or if a cult-hit like Katmari Damacy is an exclusive port.
This kind of crap is why I'm not buying Sony stuff anymore. Microsoft is more than happy to help publishers get their obscure Japanese stuff onto the Xbox. Hell, Microsoft even funded a port of Guilty Gear #Reload to the Japanese Xbox just to win over Japanese gamers, and it was then ported to the USA! That beats the hell out of Sony and Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card.
The Square Enix of 2005 is not the Squaresoft that produced all those great games you remember. After the company invested over $250 million (US) in a poorly-planned CGI movie production facility that was quickly obsoleted by competitors running on commodity hardware and Linux, the "Final Fantasy" movie they planned to recoup the loss with bombed in nearly every nation it was released. Hironobu Sakaguchi, long the creative heart of Squaresoft, was the director of the movie, and was ostracized by the rest of the employees afterward finally gave in to Japanese tradition and quit. It's a pretty safe bet that similar fates befell most of the other Squaresoft old timers, and some less than stellar management after the failure of the FF movie lead the company into massive debt, which opened it up for a takeover by Enix.
Now Squaresoft is just a brand name Enix markets to bring in easy cash to gamers looking to feed their hunger for nostalgia. Smart gamers would do well to stay far away from future FF games...
"We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players."
Hmmm... sales suck on CD, sales suck online... maybe it's time for the record industry to reconsider its current business model of pushing albums where the musicians lose almost all control to producers who churn out an album with three good songs and ten filler tracks.
"I have a cable modem, my friend across the country has one. A little free VoIP software and we've forgotten about the telco."
The telco is still there. Comcast doesn't have its own huge backbone running connections out to all of its own users around the USA, it uses the backbones provided by the big telco monopolies to do that. So if they decide to create special high-priority networks accessible only at a premium charge, and degrade the quality of the existing networks to make VOIP unusable, you'll have to pay extra for a premium Comcast account that can send data over the premium networks.
Unfortunately its next to impossible for anyone else to move in an build new networks that can challenge the big telcos, because years of overregulation kept everyone else out of the business for so long. So if the telcos manage to pull this one off, everyone who wants low-latency access will be paying extra to the big telcos unless a huge number of people pool their resources to build new backbones, which would most likely require government involvement that will make such actions illegal under the anti-municipal internet laws that the telcos will doublessly get pushed through at the federal level at the same time they get Congress to allow them to build the premium backbones.
Why are people still whining about KDE vs. Gnome? I found the ultimate solution to all my Linux interface issues a long time ago and I haven't had to worry about all this KDE vs. Gnome nonsense since.
You expect internet geeks to actually be thoughtful and considerate of others in their lives? Keep dreaming.
I'm not going to dispute a single point Brown made in that article because I have all of the same gripes about OpenOffice, which I started using way back when it was still being produced by Stardivision. I will, however, point out that Brown's remarks do NOT apply to the majority of open source software I have used - the exception being almost every Linux distro I ever used. Most open source apps are tiny and slick, don't need more than a few people (often one will do the job just fine) to document or fix them. OpenOffice is a rarity in the Open Source world - a bloated pile of cruft that just keeps growing. But most Open Source software was not created by a company with a bloat fetish before being bought out by another company with a bloat fetish, and then released as Open Source software to a crowd of bloat fetishists all looking to take down another bloat fetishist.
What the Open Source community needs to take from Brown's article, and plenty of other critiques of Open Office, is that it's time to stop holding up Open Office as a shining success story. Pick something better, like Firefox, or the ability of BSD to adapt to everything from DVD players to cars to OS X.
"Doing an emulator for something like the SNES is hard"
They aren't using emulation - XBox 360 owners get to download new game binaries coded for the 360 because Microsoft knew emulation would be a bad way to go.
Next week the Army will release its new mission statement, which will explain how it will use vitual tanks to guard the information superhighway.
"...they are also responsible for conducting research to let the designers know what their target audience wants..."
So what happens when the target audience doesn't have a clue what he wants? Most consumers -and most people in the game industry- had no idea that computers were capable of generating games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Quake until after John Carmack found ways to make playable 3D games on consumer hardware, so they couldn't even express those desires. The same can be said for the two-player fighting genre that never existed until Capcom created Street Fighter II, or for the entire concept that turned into Katmari Damacy.
All marketing can find out from consumers is what they want to see more of the same of. This is useful for companies like EA that just want to keep making the same game over-and-over with yearly visual tweaks, or for letting Eidos know that nobody wants to see Lara Croft in another game, but market surveys are all but worthless when it comes to bringing new ideas to market.
One would think that before Microsoft decided to run with the PPC chips they would have looked at the problems Apple had. Apple ran into similar supply issues with the G5, not to mention IBM's inability to live up to promises it made about speed increases. Those problems were affecting Apple a long time ago, and the stories were all over the tech gossip sites. Perhaps if Microsoft had kept stealing ideas from Apple and dumped the PPC chips for Intel this wouldn't be a problem.
Now I can finally wipe my ass with the Washington Times, The National Standard, and White House press releases!
Scott McClellan, get ready to kiss this ass!
"...but people have to respect intellectual property."
If respect for intellectual property is something Creative holds so highly, why are they trying to enforce a patent for something that they didn't invent?
On what planet is Wikipedia a reliable source for things like sales numbers? Those could have been pulled from any worthless Sony press release that was never vetted by anyone outside the company - hell they could have even been posted BY Sony. If you're going to quote sales numbers, at least use a website that has some credibility.