Right now terrorist groups around the world have a lot of cash, a lot of weapons, and a lot of their members in prisons or in hiding. Governments around the world are mastering a new sort of doublespeak where they deny that they are locking terrorists, their supporters, and any innocents who end up in the line of fire; the most successful terrorists these days are in cities that slack off for a little while (The London Bombings), Palestinians bombing Israelis, and every suicidal wack-job that can afford bus fare into Iraq. Since September 11 dozens of terroist plots have been foiled around the world. If you're a terrorist, trying to pull off another big bombing is looking harder everyday, and actually getting away with it is probably impossible (Assuming you aren't a suicide bomber.).
So then you see old reports floating around in that certain intelligence, defense, etc. agencies of your enemies are known for boneheaded employees that violate policy and do stupid stuff like connecting NT4 desktops to both the internet and classified government WANs because you find using a KVM inconvenient. So you buy a botnet from the Russian mob, hire someone to hack the botnet to find it's way into some of these systems, and look for interesting intel to leak. Or maybe you look for more poorly secured Visa/Mastercard servers to hack into, but after you steal all of the credit card numbers, you send important credit card servers into spasms - after all, who cares if you get caught? You're in Pakistan and the guy doing the hacking is moving around the Middle East working from satellite connections in underground net cafes, credit card fraud convinctions are not a big issue. Or hey, maybe you really want to screw with western economies, so you watch the airline web sites 24/7, waiting for a security slipup that lets you get into Sabre's computers, and knock them offline, taking out air-travel in the US for at least a few hours.
Or maybe you're a gun nut working at a power plant, and convinced that Hillary Clinton will win the 2008 election and bring the Illuminati in to take your guns away, so you decide to kill the power to New York City on election day. Or a DBA and anti-abortion activist who isn't committed to bombing clinics or sniping doctors, but happy to cut off Blue Cross payments to every doctor and hospital that offers abortions in the USA.
My point here is that Islamic extremists have a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of nutty little helpers, and they're bound to get bored and look for new ways to screw with the western world. Domestic terrorists are in a similar position, but for them it's even harder to resort to traditional attacks, because in their case the FBI actually speaks their language. At some point they'll decide that cyberterrorism sounds like a good idea and try it out.
I spent several years in video game retail. Given that was all back in the 1990s, but aside from Microsoft coming into the picture, things haven't changed much. Right of the bat, the best advice I have is to get the hell out before you lose your shirt. Video game profit margins are pathetic - most big retailers treat games as the would any other loss leader, picking up their profits on items like generic controllers and memory cards that sell at a 500% to 900% markup, and if a big game actually sells well enough for them to profit from the cost of keeping it in the store, it's a fluke.
That said, if you really want to make money, here are some tips: 1. Don't try to make profits selling games. Sell acessories, like new controllers and memory cards. Don't let a single customer leave without pushing him or her to buy a memory card or strategy guide. The easiest people to sell to are people who play sports and racing games, because they build up collections of saved games for every year of their favorite EA games as well as replays for racing games. 2. Jump on the used game bandwagon. There's a lot of profit to be made buying a game for $5.00 and selling it for $15.00, especially since you aren't even paying distributors to ship them. If a game sits around too long, dump it on eBay for a tiny profit and charge the sucker who buys it $5.00 for shipping, mail it media mail for under $2.00 and keep the other $3.00. 3. Sell niche items. Keep weird stuff like Playstation-to-Dreamcast adapters, everything-to-USB adapters, and high-end joysticks from Hori and MAS Systems in stock. When you aren't busy with customers, sell these items on eBay. 4. If there is a local market, start importing hot Japanese releases. 5. Try to build up a business selling board games, RPGs, and CCGs. Just be careful not to invest too much money up front, because you don't want to get stuck with a backstock.
Again, good luck. There's little place left for independent game retailers, so if you plan to survive, find a niche, start expanding, and hope to get bought out by Gamestop or a similar company that just doesn't want to bother competing to wipe you out, because that's really the only good option an independent retailer has anymore.
I currently own a Dreamcast, Gamecube, and and Xbox. I used to own a Playstation 2, but I got rid of it after I got sick of Sony strongarming game manufacturers away from making 2D games. Of all those systems, the Dreamcast is still the one I use the one most often. Even if a new game pulls me to my computers or another console for a while, I eventually go back to the Dreamcast for the original releases of Street Fighter Zero 3, Ikaruga, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It is definately my favorite system of the current generation of consoles, and I regularly finding myself wishing that those morons at Sega had been willing not only to hire Bernie Stolar and pay him the big bucks, but to listen to him and not screw up the Dreamcast launch in every single region they introduced it.
Why would I want to waste my time searching for advertisments that I have to watch, when I can just type a term into Google and view the ads that come up tied to that search term? Or even better, I could just search for something in Google base. Either way I can pull up multiple web sites for products, compare them, and then track down the best price. That's a hell of a lot easier and more efficient than sitting around watching commercials on TV and fast-forwarding through them until I find a good one.
"...it means the end of flash, but I know its just a dream."
Given the poor performance and incredible bloat of Adobe's recent releases, the end of Flash may not be a dream much longer. All we have to do is convince Adobe to add some of their shitty 3D code to Flash and nobody will want to watch a Flash movie again.
"I still cannot fathom how games can come under such scrutiny while television and movies show things far, far more brutal, sadistic, and sexually depraved."
Games get the scrutiny because the mainstream media owns the TV and movie companies, so they avoid running stories that criticize them.
"...but I don't see why you need to call those who are religious idiots or insane."
Because they ARE idiots or lunatics. Living life based on ancient myths, legends, and fairy tales simply because it makes one feel good, is a despicable thing. The greatest advantage humans have over the other animals on this planet is our ability to reason, and religion is a direct rejection of our ability to reason in favor of being lazy and accepting silly stories as the basis of all existance.
Very few people give a damn what crabby open-source nerds will or won't do in terms of software purchasing. This sort of business model doesn't target people like you as a customer, it targets the morons of the earth - the people generally not bright enough to understand the differences in distribution models other than "this one doesn't require me to get off of the couch", and not techincally adept enough to just pirate the damned game in the first place. Valve's success with their vile authentication schemes for Half-Life 2 have already proven that with enough good marketing, people will gladly pay for software that decides how they'll use it.
Comparing the two systems doesn't work too well if one looks at the cost of development. It takes a lot less money to develop for the DS because graphics are simple and low-res, which means art teams can be tiny, and since most of the games are for kids, it's ok to keep re-using sprites from old games. Also, what little 3D the DS can pull off is very limited, so one doesn't need several hotshot 3D programmers trying to get every last polygon and shader trick possible running at acceptable framerates. Handheld games are also usually shorter than console games - 10 hours of total play is considered long for non-RPG games. Creating a full-blown 3d console game, OTOH, requires a huge team of designers, artists, and programmers, and budgets are often pushed into the tens-of-millions of dollars. That's a huge risk, while in comparison it's not really a big deal to risk between a few-hundred thousand (or even a few million) dollars on a handheld.
This guy has seen too many movies in which humans and aliens run the same CPU architecture and operating system. And shouldn't anyone nerdy enough to write about SETI know better?
Media coverage of computers - particularly magazines that focus on tech - has always been biased to the point of printing outright lies to suck up to big advertisers. Remember the old "Upgrading costs more than new computers" myth Ziff-Davis publications perpetuated for years? Or all those post-bubble cover stories about how CA's new CEO had turned the company around with great new products and huge new customer accounts, when that was clearly not the case, and the company was just cooking the books?
Computing media is some of the worst crap on earth - and anyone who puts much faith in them as good sources of information is a moron.
Lack of funding at the Museum of Natural History is not a new thing. More than one exhibit in the museum haven't been updated in decades. This has created one of Washington's worst museums; plenty of items on display are covered in dust, fiberglass replicas of important objects created for children to handle are broken, and most artifacts from ancient cultures lack displays indicating dates, locales, and/or provenance. There are even items on display with tages typed on a typewriter and accented by hand in blue ink, in a few cases misspellings are crossed out and corrected above.
While I certainly believe that American Corporations are afraid to touch the issue of evolution right now, it's also a stretch to claim that fear of being tied to evolution is the reason this museum has a hard time coming up with funds.
"They're a-okay if you want to run a business in their territory..."
Perhaps a business along the lines of building Google Tiny Dragon datacenters for sale to the militaries, governments, and private entities of the nations that don't have the sort of telcom infrastructure that one finds in the US, Canada, Western Europe, and South Korea?
What you're missing here is something proponents of solar/wind power often miss out on - the technology has been around for years, but the costs of creating, installing, and operating such sources of power are higher than the costs of just getting electricity from the grid in many parts of the world. That's why the solar water systems popular in the 1980s have all but disappeared - people realized that costs of running, maintaining, and replacing the pumps made solar more expensive than gas or electricity.
Of course, it won't always be that way - China is working on a lot of green energy and architecture programs to provide energy for all of the cities they'll be building in the near future, and once they get the costs down, everyone will reap the rewards.
"Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.:)"
It always amazes me how many people really believe that the American people could, with their piddly collection of what amounts to a pile of pea-shooters in comparison to the arms of the Federal Government, actually overthrow our government should it turn to tyrrany. Compared to the police and military wrath our government could unleash, the weapons of unruly citizens really would be 'sporting goods,' and such an attempt to remind Congress about anything would be over just as fast as it started.
Maybe this will actually drag some people to the Metreon!
Re:Offtopic?!? Hey Mods, B-O-O-K that spells book!
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"Since when does being well read on Stephen King count as being literate?"
Being literate does not assume that one only reads great works. It is just as important to be aware of highly influential works, and as the most eminent horror -and possibly the most popular American - writer of the late-twentieth century, it is important for a literate individual to be aware of King's major works simply so that one is able to comprehend King's influence on other writers, as well as the influence other writers have had on King.
That said, not all of Steven King's books are long-winded, profane, oversexed retellings of campfire stories. Books like Carrie, The Shining, and probably a few other King novels will long be remembered as American classics, and as for all of the crappy books, well, nobody was forced to buy them.
"One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April."
It took me six months to get my hands on a Playstation 2 due to similar "shortages." Of course, it only took me another ten minutes to realize that this was because artificial shortages are a great way to cover up a system that has almost no worthwhile games available at the launch, or any time soon afterward.
"People who are so stupid and ignorant and uneducated that you have to explain to them what the "360" refers to?"
I don't think that one needs to be stupid or ignorant to get the 360 reference. I'm sure that plenty of people got sick of caring about all of the numbers attached to computers and related projects a long time ago, and simply don't think about them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now terrorist groups around the world have a lot of cash, a lot of weapons, and a lot of their members in prisons or in hiding. Governments around the world are mastering a new sort of doublespeak where they deny that they are locking terrorists, their supporters, and any innocents who end up in the line of fire; the most successful terrorists these days are in cities that slack off for a little while (The London Bombings), Palestinians bombing Israelis, and every suicidal wack-job that can afford bus fare into Iraq. Since September 11 dozens of terroist plots have been foiled around the world. If you're a terrorist, trying to pull off another big bombing is looking harder everyday, and actually getting away with it is probably impossible (Assuming you aren't a suicide bomber.).
So then you see old reports floating around in that certain intelligence, defense, etc. agencies of your enemies are known for boneheaded employees that violate policy and do stupid stuff like connecting NT4 desktops to both the internet and classified government WANs because you find using a KVM inconvenient. So you buy a botnet from the Russian mob, hire someone to hack the botnet to find it's way into some of these systems, and look for interesting intel to leak. Or maybe you look for more poorly secured Visa/Mastercard servers to hack into, but after you steal all of the credit card numbers, you send important credit card servers into spasms - after all, who cares if you get caught? You're in Pakistan and the guy doing the hacking is moving around the Middle East working from satellite connections in underground net cafes, credit card fraud convinctions are not a big issue. Or hey, maybe you really want to screw with western economies, so you watch the airline web sites 24/7, waiting for a security slipup that lets you get into Sabre's computers, and knock them offline, taking out air-travel in the US for at least a few hours.
Or maybe you're a gun nut working at a power plant, and convinced that Hillary Clinton will win the 2008 election and bring the Illuminati in to take your guns away, so you decide to kill the power to New York City on election day. Or a DBA and anti-abortion activist who isn't committed to bombing clinics or sniping doctors, but happy to cut off Blue Cross payments to every doctor and hospital that offers abortions in the USA.
My point here is that Islamic extremists have a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of nutty little helpers, and they're bound to get bored and look for new ways to screw with the western world. Domestic terrorists are in a similar position, but for them it's even harder to resort to traditional attacks, because in their case the FBI actually speaks their language. At some point they'll decide that cyberterrorism sounds like a good idea and try it out.
I spent several years in video game retail. Given that was all back in the 1990s, but aside from Microsoft coming into the picture, things haven't changed much. Right of the bat, the best advice I have is to get the hell out before you lose your shirt. Video game profit margins are pathetic - most big retailers treat games as the would any other loss leader, picking up their profits on items like generic controllers and memory cards that sell at a 500% to 900% markup, and if a big game actually sells well enough for them to profit from the cost of keeping it in the store, it's a fluke.
That said, if you really want to make money, here are some tips:
1. Don't try to make profits selling games. Sell acessories, like new controllers and memory cards. Don't let a single customer leave without pushing him or her to buy a memory card or strategy guide. The easiest people to sell to are people who play sports and racing games, because they build up collections of saved games for every year of their favorite EA games as well as replays for racing games.
2. Jump on the used game bandwagon. There's a lot of profit to be made buying a game for $5.00 and selling it for $15.00, especially since you aren't even paying distributors to ship them. If a game sits around too long, dump it on eBay for a tiny profit and charge the sucker who buys it $5.00 for shipping, mail it media mail for under $2.00 and keep the other $3.00.
3. Sell niche items. Keep weird stuff like Playstation-to-Dreamcast adapters, everything-to-USB adapters, and high-end joysticks from Hori and MAS Systems in stock. When you aren't busy with customers, sell these items on eBay.
4. If there is a local market, start importing hot Japanese releases.
5. Try to build up a business selling board games, RPGs, and CCGs. Just be careful not to invest too much money up front, because you don't want to get stuck with a backstock.
Again, good luck. There's little place left for independent game retailers, so if you plan to survive, find a niche, start expanding, and hope to get bought out by Gamestop or a similar company that just doesn't want to bother competing to wipe you out, because that's really the only good option an independent retailer has anymore.
I currently own a Dreamcast, Gamecube, and and Xbox. I used to own a Playstation 2, but I got rid of it after I got sick of Sony strongarming game manufacturers away from making 2D games. Of all those systems, the Dreamcast is still the one I use the one most often. Even if a new game pulls me to my computers or another console for a while, I eventually go back to the Dreamcast for the original releases of Street Fighter Zero 3, Ikaruga, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It is definately my favorite system of the current generation of consoles, and I regularly finding myself wishing that those morons at Sega had been willing not only to hire Bernie Stolar and pay him the big bucks, but to listen to him and not screw up the Dreamcast launch in every single region they introduced it.
Why would I want to waste my time searching for advertisments that I have to watch, when I can just type a term into Google and view the ads that come up tied to that search term? Or even better, I could just search for something in Google base. Either way I can pull up multiple web sites for products, compare them, and then track down the best price. That's a hell of a lot easier and more efficient than sitting around watching commercials on TV and fast-forwarding through them until I find a good one.
"...it means the end of flash, but I know its just a dream."
Given the poor performance and incredible bloat of Adobe's recent releases, the end of Flash may not be a dream much longer. All we have to do is convince Adobe to add some of their shitty 3D code to Flash and nobody will want to watch a Flash movie again.
"I still cannot fathom how games can come under such scrutiny while television and movies show things far, far more brutal, sadistic, and sexually depraved."
Games get the scrutiny because the mainstream media owns the TV and movie companies, so they avoid running stories that criticize them.
"...but I don't see why you need to call those who are religious idiots or insane."
Because they ARE idiots or lunatics. Living life based on ancient myths, legends, and fairy tales simply because it makes one feel good, is a despicable thing. The greatest advantage humans have over the other animals on this planet is our ability to reason, and religion is a direct rejection of our ability to reason in favor of being lazy and accepting silly stories as the basis of all existance.
Very few people give a damn what crabby open-source nerds will or won't do in terms of software purchasing. This sort of business model doesn't target people like you as a customer, it targets the morons of the earth - the people generally not bright enough to understand the differences in distribution models other than "this one doesn't require me to get off of the couch", and not techincally adept enough to just pirate the damned game in the first place. Valve's success with their vile authentication schemes for Half-Life 2 have already proven that with enough good marketing, people will gladly pay for software that decides how they'll use it.
Comparing the two systems doesn't work too well if one looks at the cost of development. It takes a lot less money to develop for the DS because graphics are simple and low-res, which means art teams can be tiny, and since most of the games are for kids, it's ok to keep re-using sprites from old games. Also, what little 3D the DS can pull off is very limited, so one doesn't need several hotshot 3D programmers trying to get every last polygon and shader trick possible running at acceptable framerates. Handheld games are also usually shorter than console games - 10 hours of total play is considered long for non-RPG games. Creating a full-blown 3d console game, OTOH, requires a huge team of designers, artists, and programmers, and budgets are often pushed into the tens-of-millions of dollars. That's a huge risk, while in comparison it's not really a big deal to risk between a few-hundred thousand (or even a few million) dollars on a handheld.
This guy has seen too many movies in which humans and aliens run the same CPU architecture and operating system. And shouldn't anyone nerdy enough to write about SETI know better?
Media coverage of computers - particularly magazines that focus on tech - has always been biased to the point of printing outright lies to suck up to big advertisers. Remember the old "Upgrading costs more than new computers" myth Ziff-Davis publications perpetuated for years? Or all those post-bubble cover stories about how CA's new CEO had turned the company around with great new products and huge new customer accounts, when that was clearly not the case, and the company was just cooking the books?
Computing media is some of the worst crap on earth - and anyone who puts much faith in them as good sources of information is a moron.
Ooops.
Lack of funding at the Museum of Natural History is not a new thing. More than one exhibit in the museum haven't been updated in decades. This has created one of Washington's worst museums; plenty of items on display are covered in dust, fiberglass replicas of important objects created for children to handle are broken, and most artifacts from ancient cultures lack displays indicating dates, locales, and/or provenance. There are even items on display with tages typed on a typewriter and accented by hand in blue ink, in a few cases misspellings are crossed out and corrected above.
While I certainly believe that American Corporations are afraid to touch the issue of evolution right now, it's also a stretch to claim that fear of being tied to evolution is the reason this museum has a hard time coming up with funds.
With Dell building AMD systems, I'll never have to build my PCs by hand again. The times sure are a-changin.
"They're a-okay if you want to run a business in their territory..."
Perhaps a business along the lines of building Google Tiny Dragon datacenters for sale to the militaries, governments, and private entities of the nations that don't have the sort of telcom infrastructure that one finds in the US, Canada, Western Europe, and South Korea?
What you're missing here is something proponents of solar/wind power often miss out on - the technology has been around for years, but the costs of creating, installing, and operating such sources of power are higher than the costs of just getting electricity from the grid in many parts of the world. That's why the solar water systems popular in the 1980s have all but disappeared - people realized that costs of running, maintaining, and replacing the pumps made solar more expensive than gas or electricity.
Of course, it won't always be that way - China is working on a lot of green energy and architecture programs to provide energy for all of the cities they'll be building in the near future, and once they get the costs down, everyone will reap the rewards.
The original poster needs to learn the distinction between laughing at, and laughing with. Geeks in pop culture fit into the former category.
"Is there any situation where you can see yourself open to the possibility of using an Ad-Supported operating system?"
Yeah, but they involve me being dead.
"Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment. :)"
It always amazes me how many people really believe that the American people could, with their piddly collection of what amounts to a pile of pea-shooters in comparison to the arms of the Federal Government, actually overthrow our government should it turn to tyrrany. Compared to the police and military wrath our government could unleash, the weapons of unruly citizens really would be 'sporting goods,' and such an attempt to remind Congress about anything would be over just as fast as it started.
I think his point was that if you don't have the money for a good, modern TV but you spend $300-$400 for a new game console, you're stupid.
You'll do what every little country eventually does - cave in and and pick up standards used by the US or EU.
Maybe this will actually drag some people to the Metreon!
"Since when does being well read on Stephen King count as being literate?"
Being literate does not assume that one only reads great works. It is just as important to be aware of highly influential works, and as the most eminent horror -and possibly the most popular American - writer of the late-twentieth century, it is important for a literate individual to be aware of King's major works simply so that one is able to comprehend King's influence on other writers, as well as the influence other writers have had on King.
That said, not all of Steven King's books are long-winded, profane, oversexed retellings of campfire stories. Books like Carrie, The Shining, and probably a few other King novels will long be remembered as American classics, and as for all of the crappy books, well, nobody was forced to buy them.
"One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April."
It took me six months to get my hands on a Playstation 2 due to similar "shortages." Of course, it only took me another ten minutes to realize that this was because artificial shortages are a great way to cover up a system that has almost no worthwhile games available at the launch, or any time soon afterward.
"People who are so stupid and ignorant and uneducated that you have to explain to them what the "360" refers to?"
I don't think that one needs to be stupid or ignorant to get the 360 reference. I'm sure that plenty of people got sick of caring about all of the numbers attached to computers and related projects a long time ago, and simply don't think about them at all.