OP didn't say anything about UI, as you'd surely know if you had bothered to read the summary:
What I actually need is a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions
*ahem*
And if you bothered to read what Qt was about, then you'd realize that Qt is in fact a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions (as well as a whole lotta other things.)
Then why is it that I can get service that is not capped and is not shaped from TekSavvy? They are already paying almost all of the cost as fees to Bell (their profit margin is extremely low, they have to work with volume of subscriptions) and they are $20+ cheaper in order to compete in the market. On top of that their support isn't a fucking joke.
Oh, right, it's because Bell and Rogers are making a fortune overselling their shitty service and not spending anything to increase capacity or to have useful tech support.
I've been with Tekksavvy for a few years as well. Great ISP. But notice how they changed the pricing scheme? What was before unlimited had a bandwidth cap put on it. If you did want to go the unlimited route, you now had to pay more. Even though they were getting more customers.
I'm not going to deny that Rogers and Bell charge prices that don't seem all that competitive. What I am trying to do is explain their logic, and that of most ISPs.
I think this illustrates how few people understand how consumer broadband works.
The reason consumer broadband is so cheap is that bandwidth is actually shared in pools of people. It's not like having a business-class connection where you have dedicated lines, a guaranteed speed (ie. 1.5MB/s per person), and the price to reflect it.
Consumer broadband is different. Allocate 50MBs to a pool of people, and cap each person at 5MB/s. With casual net usage, that's not a problem. Games are low in bandwidth, and web surfing produces sporadic spikes of intense bandwidth usage. At 50MB/s, you could get maybe a thousand simultaneous users. They all download their pages at blazing speeds, and have low latency on their games. Because its shared, the price is cheap too.
But if you introduce something like bittorrent into that consumer broadband usage model, then we have a problem. Because now, it only takes a relative few to clog up the entire allocated 50MB/s.
ISPs like Rogers who used pool resources are now faced with a dilemma: how you maintain speeds for everyone, while keeping the price low - for everyone? They've chosen to throttle connections. Is it right? Perhaps not.
But it's important to understand that the issue is just not as black and white as some would like it to be. I'm for net neutrality, in terms of being blind to who the end IP is. I don't want Site X to be slower because they didn't pay Rogers a premium. However, I'm not against traffic shaping high-bandwidth services. If you want the bandwidth so bad, then pay for a line with guaranteed speeds.
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -H. L. Mencken
The way I see it, if terrorists with the determination of those that committed the 9/11 attacks wanted to strike - they still would have even with these measures in place. The core of Al-Qaeda had a strong technical arm, one which has sufficient knowledge to bypass government wiretaps (ie. use encrypted VoIP), and other such technical measures. Let's also not forget that the 9/11 terrorists had legitimate passports. The problem wasn't that they stuck out of the system, it was that they knew how to be part of it. The FBI's failure is separate to this whole issue of warrantless wiretaps.
We should not blame those that wanted to remove police-state like behaviour from our system. Wiretaps to any citizen, without due cause, is one such instance. Rather, we should blame those that didn't seek to target the cause. If you are to associate those that seek to better American lives with terrorists, than it is not they which are most detrimental to American society - but you. You who scaremonger. You, who has such a black and white perspective of the world that it can only be broken down into associating pro-American populace with pro-terrorist.
There's talk about directing actors in general (with the author recommending "Directing Actors" by Judith Weston), but face it - if you're a DV Rebel (low-budget-indy-filmmaker), you don't really have the funds whereby a chapter on this would be relevant. Your talent consists of a roster of friends, theatre/filmschool buddies, and family.
I own this book, bought it a weeks ago after listening to an interview with the author. Frankly, what a great purchase. It's one of the best titles I've ever read on the subject. You can catch the interview with the book's author here.
The author even packed in a great extra chapter on cameras in the DVD. To say that this book is simply about making cheap action movies is a misnomer. It's really about how to make good looking products on a skin-tight budget, regardless of content. There's talk about color correction, 24p vs. 60i, tricks for shooting in public, etc. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Other reasons:
123. May not work that well on old machines. I have OO.org installed on my 300MHz laptop, but it's very unresponsive compared to Word 2003.
124. Has different notation for advanced functions in Calc than Excel. If you're used to it, however, it's not much of a downer. It also lacks some specialty functions with respect to Excel.
As you can see, there's not much bad to say of OO.org. It's one of those few products that's equivalent to, if not outright superior to, the closed-source counterpart. This isn't like switching to Linux, where one may run into devastating hardware support issues. There's really not much wrong that can be done by using OO.org; and at the very worst - it can just be uninstalled anyways.
I'd have to disagree. Mom and Pop buy their computers at Future Shop, Best Buy and Staples. If they hear about Linux on mainstream media, they might ask for it for their next computer, or might just ask next time they're in the store. I'm sure their support departments will gladly install it and migrate their data for their usual hourly fee. Most moms and pops that aren't fortunate enough to have a geek in the family usually treat their computers like I treat my furnace: let the pros deal with it! The more mainstream attention Linux gets, the more we all win. Jerome
Small issues I see with this:
1. Brand Recognition: I actually used to work in Staples, as a computer sales rep. This was at the time a few years back when AMD was ahead of the curve of Intel. Yet, regardless of their actual knowledge on the issue, people insisted on Intel. The brand was that important. Linux is still the little unknown, and that won't jive well with most consumers.
2. Windows applications don't run on Linux. That geneology software gramma bought, the el cheapo card game product they really wanted - it won't work with their machine. Sure there are free alternatives, but it's not the product they chose. And WINE? No guarantees that it'll work. You'd just be causing more problems for the user.
3. Most tech support people working at places like Best Buy or Staples don't even know what Linux is, let alone support it.
I have to agree with this. For one, most casual users don't have the know-how/confidence to install an OS. Even the process of burning an ISO is above the heads of most users, no matter how simple the process, or how much documentation is available. Furthermore, to install a distro these days implies installing it over, or in addition to, a current OS. One that likely does what the casual users already want. So with that in mind - what incentive would there be for users to switch? As the old saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
If the RIAA can get the Russians to shut down allofmp3.com, why cant we (as a society, as internet users, as ISPs who have to deal with this crap etc) use the same pressure to get the Russians, Chinese or whoever to go arrest the people who are WRITING the malware in the first place and lock them up somewhere where they have no computers or internet access and can't use their malware skills to write even more malware.
That AllofMP3 is actually still operating despite this incredible level of international pressure is a testament to just how little power Western governments truly have. The fact of the matter is that much of the critical infrastructure that allows this spam/botnet activity to persist unabated is protected by special interests within Eastern Europe.
There are key US players as well, but despite the frustrating overt nature of their behaviour, the evidence is such that the FBI/SS would never be able to even get so much as a warrant.
Yep, that's pretty much it. You'll notice that most professors will also disallow the citing of their assigned textbooks as well. University textbooks themselves typically being probably the most informed compilation of research into any one field.
But I object to your concept of linking biasness to pure inaccuracy, as a means to validate the former. Wikipedia, despite reports that suggest it more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica, is user contributed. The process of reviewing the contributions isn't exactly the most stringent on Earth, especially when you get to the lesser known topics. So the people that contribute might make mistakes. These aren't due to their biasness, but just because they don't know better. They might say things which aren't actually so. Essentially, the information might be wrong. This isn't because the user promoted a certain point of view, but because they didn't know otherwise. It's like citing any odd website on the Internet in general. Wrong information, is, wrong information. If it's remotely likely to be questionable, it shouldn't be included.
Did anyone else find this quote amusing, from the original article? "I'm not increasing production and I'm not taking any more orders after this. They cost a lot to feed," he [German Farmer] said.
They're too expensive to feed for the German farmer to continue. By German rabbit-breeding standards. Now if the North Korean regime already (and allegedly) finds it too expensive to feed it's own people on even the lowest standards, how is diverting those much needed foodstuffs to rabbits going to solve anything?
Usually there's a logic to this. Unfortunately, the same people powering this decision are the same people that had the foresight of building a massive hotel that couldn't be finished (you know what I'm talking about if you're familiar with Pyongyang.)
North Korea spends %50 of it's expenditures on Military. It is a massive force, as all citizens are required to spend 10 years in it. A massive force which is a consumer of food, and is reputed to steal it at their behest. Kim Il-Sung is credited for pushing forth "revolutionary" agricultural techniques, that in reality were disastrous failures. North Korea's recent public escapades, among other previous activities, have jeopardized vital capital from South Korea (NK = cheap labour.) It has little credibility in the international marketplace, as the regime is notorious for failing to repay debts. At the same time, the regime doesn't want to initiate trade relations, because it goes against it's Juche philosophy. In truth, these are all acts of twisted paranoia for the sake of the regime's self-preservation. The starvation isn't a product of North Korea's poverty or lack of natural resources. It's a product of North Korea's regime.
A regime that would rather see the misery of all it's citizens than reunifying under the leadership of the south.
New Zealand is a country of 4 million people. It gets a lot of attention on Slashdot because people speak English there. There are 121 countries that have more people than New Zealand.
In other words, you're saying that if Slashdotters banded together, and we made an effort to mail the proper NZ representatives, we could make a difference? And that there's a cat stuck on the roof of the Parliament?!
The most surprising bit is that implementing cracks of this nature is nothing new. That's how cracks work for flexlm based products (Maya, ArcGIS.) You would thus think that MS would have learned from their failures and made a more resilient system. And by resilient I mean one that could last more than a week before being ultimately cracked.
You must be reading the US edition, which is indeed crap. In terms of geography, I live about halfway between the UK and US, yet the US edition costs a bit more. It also has half the width and much more advertising-per-content, as well as overmuch "eye-candy" (e.g., large explosions on the covers which don't serve to illustrate anything other than the reviewers' excitement).
The UK edition is great. Why anyone with a choice would ever read the US edition I will never understand.
Oh I couldn't agree more.
I used to really like PC Gamer (US). In fact, I have pretty much every mag from 1999 up until early 2006. I really lost interest when the magazine became more and more blatant hype about games that honestly didn't deserve it. It seemed like their covers was just "YET ANOTHER WW2 SHOOTER!", and their magazine filled with equally shallow reviews. I realised how all their reviews slowly became dominated by graphical prowess as opposed to... say... how fun the games actually were. Not that graphics aren't important, but it seems that PCG now uses it as their only criteria (barring a few notable exceptions...)
Maybe it was always like that, and its just that I wasn't 13 anymore. But then I discovered PCGamer UK, and it was like night and day. Yes, it was far more expensive ($20 vs. $10 an issue), but damn. The reviews were just so much more... balanced. They also covered games that weren't just in the top 10. Yes, PCG-US covered some indy titles - but not like this. And talk about good editorials too. PCG-US editorials were too pro-industry, seemingly misunderstanding the concerns of gamers.
The difference is simple. PCG-US is paid for by, in part, ads. Lots and lots of ads. PCG-UK is paid for by subscriptions and individual purchases of the magazine. Not gaming industry behemoths. So where do you think the loyalties of the editors lie? Things won't change any time soon, as that "paid by industry" financing is pretty much the standard with American publications. If PCG-US ditched the ads and jacked up the price, no doubt they'd lose out to their competitors (all one of them.)
PS. I do miss Trotter as well. In fact, I miss much of the old staff. Vede ain't that bad, I always liked his personal anecdotes. Despite my lost of interest in PCG-US, I can say that from the issues I've seen TheVede has done a great job pushing through a nice new design style. Still, the magazine just blows.
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Key aspects of Amazon.com Inc.'s retailing Web site are improperly built on technologies developed at IBM Corp., Big Blue alleged Monday in two lawsuits against Amazon.
It should read:
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Key aspects of Amazon.com Inc.'s retailing Web site are improperly built on very general concepts involving technology developed at IBM Corp., Big Blue alleged Monday in two lawsuits against Amazon.
I thought the advertisement [raboplus.co.nz] at the site was much more interesting than the article itself.
I was actually going to say something along the same lines. I clicked on the ad as I was amused by any country that refers to its citizenry as kiwis (consider me ignorant.) I saw their video, which I assumed was advertising for something very different than it turned out to be. I loled.
A few. For example, Apollo One was a particularly infamous incident where a ground escape system would have been useful.
Perhaps better would have been a door the astronaut crew could have opened to get out of the burning capsule in the first place.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but to download "The Daily Show" via iTunes, it costs $9.99US for up to 16 episodes. So per month, that'll add up to over $10. Maybe something around $15US/month. Now who'se the person that thought charging this much was a good idea?
I mean can you imagine the bill of using iTunes vs. Tivo? Buying the Simpsons... Family Guy... Daily Show... The News... Daily Planet... Let's see... that adds up $75/month. For 5 shows. No wonder people pirate this crap!
No no, its a fair view. I am making painting a wide brush, that is true. What I'm referring to is what I perceive for most publications, not all. Nevertheless, my main critique stands: magazines will tend to include what sells. Jack Thompson sells. It's controversy the likes of which interests even mainstream media.
However, you'll be hard pressed to find those same mags cover issues that might be of equal importance to the gaming world, but more obscure in nature. Matters which might escape the attention span of a 5 year old.
That's because GameFirst incorrectly assumes that the gaming media are journalists. They are not. Or so at least in North America.
There seems to be two different standards at play here. American gaming mags in particular, for instance, are paid mostly by game publishers via advertisements. European mags, for the most part, do not rely on these publishers for income. That's why European mags are so frickin' expensive.
However, you can see that the focus is quite different for the two. American gaming "journalists" hype the latest games from big publishers, ignore all the indie titles, and never question disturbing practices in the industry. There are two reasons for this. For one, because they don't want to endanger their money stream. For another, because sensationalist and shallow "reporting" is what sells. It's all about money. Integrity has no place in such a world.
I must say, however, that European gaming mags do cover social aspects, cons, indie titles, in addition to your stereotypical big publisher stuff. Why? Because they're less dependant on sucking up to those same publishers.
"Hey Bob? I know how we spent millions of dollars developing this technology and all. But the cryptographic key that's in the USB part of the disc is data right?"
"Yeah... and?"
"Well... They can't change the key that's on the USB part, because the encrypted data itself on the disc will have to remain static right?"
"What's your point?"
"Then wouldn't we have saved ourselves millions and millions of dollars by just having that key on the optical disc part to begin with?"
Was this comment absolutely necessary or even relevant to the story? Has free speach suddenly become restricted for a person that is "just a wee bit" one way or the other? The entire point of the accusation of censorship is that any speech at any level was moderated.
Yep, it was necessary. The news was coming from a site that literally hates liberals. Their journalistic integrity on giving balanced accounts of events is compromised. For that bias to be made aware is thus quite important. I mean, you wouldn't trust neo-nazis to give straight news about the events in Israel would ya? So why trust conservative nuts to give straight news on things democrat related?
Which brings me to one thing I'll never get about the US. These "conservative" people are supposedly pro-democratic, and yet consider anyone being part of any party other than the Republicans as unpatriotic/stupid/what-have-you. The likes of this "Anne Coulter" are about as pro-democratic as Kim Jong Il.
Slashdot Mirror
OP didn't say anything about UI, as you'd surely know if you had bothered to read the summary:
What I actually need is a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions
*ahem*
And if you bothered to read what Qt was about, then you'd realize that Qt is in fact a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions (as well as a whole lotta other things.)
Classes that Qt offers:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.5/classes.html
Then why is it that I can get service that is not capped and is not shaped from TekSavvy? They are already paying almost all of the cost as fees to Bell (their profit margin is extremely low, they have to work with volume of subscriptions) and they are $20+ cheaper in order to compete in the market. On top of that their support isn't a fucking joke.
Oh, right, it's because Bell and Rogers are making a fortune overselling their shitty service and not spending anything to increase capacity or to have useful tech support.
I've been with Tekksavvy for a few years as well. Great ISP. But notice how they changed the pricing scheme? What was before unlimited had a bandwidth cap put on it. If you did want to go the unlimited route, you now had to pay more. Even though they were getting more customers.
I'm not going to deny that Rogers and Bell charge prices that don't seem all that competitive. What I am trying to do is explain their logic, and that of most ISPs.
I think this illustrates how few people understand how consumer broadband works.
The reason consumer broadband is so cheap is that bandwidth is actually shared in pools of people. It's not like having a business-class connection where you have dedicated lines, a guaranteed speed (ie. 1.5MB/s per person), and the price to reflect it.
Consumer broadband is different. Allocate 50MBs to a pool of people, and cap each person at 5MB/s. With casual net usage, that's not a problem. Games are low in bandwidth, and web surfing produces sporadic spikes of intense bandwidth usage. At 50MB/s, you could get maybe a thousand simultaneous users. They all download their pages at blazing speeds, and have low latency on their games. Because its shared, the price is cheap too.
But if you introduce something like bittorrent into that consumer broadband usage model, then we have a problem. Because now, it only takes a relative few to clog up the entire allocated 50MB/s.
ISPs like Rogers who used pool resources are now faced with a dilemma: how you maintain speeds for everyone, while keeping the price low - for everyone? They've chosen to throttle connections. Is it right? Perhaps not.
But it's important to understand that the issue is just not as black and white as some would like it to be. I'm for net neutrality, in terms of being blind to who the end IP is. I don't want Site X to be slower because they didn't pay Rogers a premium. However, I'm not against traffic shaping high-bandwidth services. If you want the bandwidth so bad, then pay for a line with guaranteed speeds.
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
-H. L. Mencken
The way I see it, if terrorists with the determination of those that committed the 9/11 attacks wanted to strike - they still would have even with these measures in place. The core of Al-Qaeda had a strong technical arm, one which has sufficient knowledge to bypass government wiretaps (ie. use encrypted VoIP), and other such technical measures. Let's also not forget that the 9/11 terrorists had legitimate passports. The problem wasn't that they stuck out of the system, it was that they knew how to be part of it. The FBI's failure is separate to this whole issue of warrantless wiretaps.
We should not blame those that wanted to remove police-state like behaviour from our system. Wiretaps to any citizen, without due cause, is one such instance. Rather, we should blame those that didn't seek to target the cause. If you are to associate those that seek to better American lives with terrorists, than it is not they which are most detrimental to American society - but you. You who scaremonger. You, who has such a black and white perspective of the world that it can only be broken down into associating pro-American populace with pro-terrorist.
I own this book, bought it a weeks ago after listening to an interview with the author. Frankly, what a great purchase. It's one of the best titles I've ever read on the subject. You can catch the interview with the book's author here.
The author even packed in a great extra chapter on cameras in the DVD. To say that this book is simply about making cheap action movies is a misnomer. It's really about how to make good looking products on a skin-tight budget, regardless of content. There's talk about color correction, 24p vs. 60i, tricks for shooting in public, etc. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Other reasons:
123. May not work that well on old machines. I have OO.org installed on my 300MHz laptop, but it's very unresponsive compared to Word 2003.
124. Has different notation for advanced functions in Calc than Excel. If you're used to it, however, it's not much of a downer. It also lacks some specialty functions with respect to Excel.
As you can see, there's not much bad to say of OO.org. It's one of those few products that's equivalent to, if not outright superior to, the closed-source counterpart. This isn't like switching to Linux, where one may run into devastating hardware support issues. There's really not much wrong that can be done by using OO.org; and at the very worst - it can just be uninstalled anyways.
1. Brand Recognition: I actually used to work in Staples, as a computer sales rep. This was at the time a few years back when AMD was ahead of the curve of Intel. Yet, regardless of their actual knowledge on the issue, people insisted on Intel. The brand was that important. Linux is still the little unknown, and that won't jive well with most consumers.
2. Windows applications don't run on Linux. That geneology software gramma bought, the el cheapo card game product they really wanted - it won't work with their machine. Sure there are free alternatives, but it's not the product they chose. And WINE? No guarantees that it'll work. You'd just be causing more problems for the user.
3. Most tech support people working at places like Best Buy or Staples don't even know what Linux is, let alone support it.
There are key US players as well, but despite the frustrating overt nature of their behaviour, the evidence is such that the FBI/SS would never be able to even get so much as a warrant.
Yep, that's pretty much it. You'll notice that most professors will also disallow the citing of their assigned textbooks as well. University textbooks themselves typically being probably the most informed compilation of research into any one field.
But I object to your concept of linking biasness to pure inaccuracy, as a means to validate the former. Wikipedia, despite reports that suggest it more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica, is user contributed. The process of reviewing the contributions isn't exactly the most stringent on Earth, especially when you get to the lesser known topics. So the people that contribute might make mistakes. These aren't due to their biasness, but just because they don't know better. They might say things which aren't actually so. Essentially, the information might be wrong. This isn't because the user promoted a certain point of view, but because they didn't know otherwise. It's like citing any odd website on the Internet in general. Wrong information, is, wrong information. If it's remotely likely to be questionable, it shouldn't be included.
Did anyone else find this quote amusing, from the original article?
"I'm not increasing production and I'm not taking any more orders after this. They cost a lot to feed," he [German Farmer] said.
They're too expensive to feed for the German farmer to continue. By German rabbit-breeding standards. Now if the North Korean regime already (and allegedly) finds it too expensive to feed it's own people on even the lowest standards, how is diverting those much needed foodstuffs to rabbits going to solve anything?
Usually there's a logic to this. Unfortunately, the same people powering this decision are the same people that had the foresight of building a massive hotel that couldn't be finished (you know what I'm talking about if you're familiar with Pyongyang.)
North Korea spends %50 of it's expenditures on Military. It is a massive force, as all citizens are required to spend 10 years in it. A massive force which is a consumer of food, and is reputed to steal it at their behest. Kim Il-Sung is credited for pushing forth "revolutionary" agricultural techniques, that in reality were disastrous failures. North Korea's recent public escapades, among other previous activities, have jeopardized vital capital from South Korea (NK = cheap labour.) It has little credibility in the international marketplace, as the regime is notorious for failing to repay debts. At the same time, the regime doesn't want to initiate trade relations, because it goes against it's Juche philosophy. In truth, these are all acts of twisted paranoia for the sake of the regime's self-preservation. The starvation isn't a product of North Korea's poverty or lack of natural resources. It's a product of North Korea's regime.
A regime that would rather see the misery of all it's citizens than reunifying under the leadership of the south.
okay, that was my creepy quotient for the day.
Non-Kiwis of the world unite!
The most surprising bit is that implementing cracks of this nature is nothing new. That's how cracks work for flexlm based products (Maya, ArcGIS.) You would thus think that MS would have learned from their failures and made a more resilient system. And by resilient I mean one that could last more than a week before being ultimately cracked.
I used to really like PC Gamer (US). In fact, I have pretty much every mag from 1999 up until early 2006. I really lost interest when the magazine became more and more blatant hype about games that honestly didn't deserve it. It seemed like their covers was just "YET ANOTHER WW2 SHOOTER!", and their magazine filled with equally shallow reviews. I realised how all their reviews slowly became dominated by graphical prowess as opposed to... say... how fun the games actually were. Not that graphics aren't important, but it seems that PCG now uses it as their only criteria (barring a few notable exceptions...)
Maybe it was always like that, and its just that I wasn't 13 anymore. But then I discovered PCGamer UK, and it was like night and day. Yes, it was far more expensive ($20 vs. $10 an issue), but damn. The reviews were just so much more... balanced. They also covered games that weren't just in the top 10. Yes, PCG-US covered some indy titles - but not like this. And talk about good editorials too. PCG-US editorials were too pro-industry, seemingly misunderstanding the concerns of gamers.
The difference is simple. PCG-US is paid for by, in part, ads. Lots and lots of ads. PCG-UK is paid for by subscriptions and individual purchases of the magazine. Not gaming industry behemoths. So where do you think the loyalties of the editors lie? Things won't change any time soon, as that "paid by industry" financing is pretty much the standard with American publications. If PCG-US ditched the ads and jacked up the price, no doubt they'd lose out to their competitors (all one of them.)
PS. I do miss Trotter as well. In fact, I miss much of the old staff. Vede ain't that bad, I always liked his personal anecdotes. Despite my lost of interest in PCG-US, I can say that from the issues I've seen TheVede has done a great job pushing through a nice new design style. Still, the magazine just blows.
It should read:
I was actually going to say something along the same lines. I clicked on the ad as I was amused by any country that refers to its citizenry as kiwis (consider me ignorant.) I saw their video, which I assumed was advertising for something very different than it turned out to be. I loled.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but to download "The Daily Show" via iTunes, it costs $9.99US for up to 16 episodes. So per month, that'll add up to over $10. Maybe something around $15US/month. Now who'se the person that thought charging this much was a good idea?
I mean can you imagine the bill of using iTunes vs. Tivo? Buying the Simpsons... Family Guy... Daily Show... The News... Daily Planet... Let's see... that adds up $75/month. For 5 shows. No wonder people pirate this crap!
No no, its a fair view. I am making painting a wide brush, that is true. What I'm referring to is what I perceive for most publications, not all. Nevertheless, my main critique stands: magazines will tend to include what sells. Jack Thompson sells. It's controversy the likes of which interests even mainstream media.
However, you'll be hard pressed to find those same mags cover issues that might be of equal importance to the gaming world, but more obscure in nature. Matters which might escape the attention span of a 5 year old.
That's because GameFirst incorrectly assumes that the gaming media are journalists. They are not. Or so at least in North America.
There seems to be two different standards at play here. American gaming mags in particular, for instance, are paid mostly by game publishers via advertisements. European mags, for the most part, do not rely on these publishers for income. That's why European mags are so frickin' expensive.
However, you can see that the focus is quite different for the two. American gaming "journalists" hype the latest games from big publishers, ignore all the indie titles, and never question disturbing practices in the industry. There are two reasons for this. For one, because they don't want to endanger their money stream. For another, because sensationalist and shallow "reporting" is what sells. It's all about money. Integrity has no place in such a world.
I must say, however, that European gaming mags do cover social aspects, cons, indie titles, in addition to your stereotypical big publisher stuff. Why? Because they're less dependant on sucking up to those same publishers.
"Hey Bob? I know how we spent millions of dollars developing this technology and all. But the cryptographic key that's in the USB part of the disc is data right?"
"Yeah... and?"
"Well... They can't change the key that's on the USB part, because the encrypted data itself on the disc will have to remain static right?"
"What's your point?"
"Then wouldn't we have saved ourselves millions and millions of dollars by just having that key on the optical disc part to begin with?"
"..."
Yep, it was necessary. The news was coming from a site that literally hates liberals. Their journalistic integrity on giving balanced accounts of events is compromised. For that bias to be made aware is thus quite important. I mean, you wouldn't trust neo-nazis to give straight news about the events in Israel would ya? So why trust conservative nuts to give straight news on things democrat related?
Which brings me to one thing I'll never get about the US. These "conservative" people are supposedly pro-democratic, and yet consider anyone being part of any party other than the Republicans as unpatriotic/stupid/what-have-you. The likes of this "Anne Coulter" are about as pro-democratic as Kim Jong Il.