I think part of that is the fact that kids really don't buy comics any more. Mom isn't worried about little Timmy coming home with a copy of Transmetropolitan because little Timmy would rather be hit with a baseball bat than blow his allowance on $4 comic books.
Here is what I tell people about AVG to get them over the 'free' thing. Just say that AVG's real business is anti-virus for big business. They give their stuff away free to normal people because it helps lower the total number of viruses on the internet. That makes their real job easier.
People are happy with anything they can attribute SOME sort of selfish motive to.
In theory, this is how the music industry is supposed to/used to/sometimes does work. Someone who is in charge of the money side of getting the music made (dedicated producer, one of the artists, it depends) hears some new band and thinks, hey, I like that. It's kind of cool. So, they go to the band and in exchange for a cut of the proceeds they give them a chance to get better known. This might be letting them open for shows, collaborating on a song or two, producing a CD, whatever.
Then the new band either takes off or not. If they do, a few years down the line, they hear someone know and the cycle repeats. Right now, the section of the industry that has this working best is the rap industry. For all their other faults, they are really good at bringing in new talent(?). You can see it if you look at most rap artists on Wikipedia. Their history goes "was discovered by.." who in turn "was discovered by..." and so on.
I think you can judge the health of any section of the music business based on the percentage of the artists who got their starts playing small gigs until someone bigger gave them a shot.
Re:In a lot of ways, Gimp is more intuitive than P
on
GIMP 2 for Photographers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Because "Computing" isn't a profession. A computer is a tool/household appliance, not a job.
Net Neutrality allows for all sorts of traffic shaping. In your example, the ISP is welcome to carve out a chunk of bandwidth in order to ensure that TV streams get through. What they are not allowed to do is to distinguish between the TV service they offer and the other TV services. They can't play dirty by intentionally slowing down the signal of competing services while giving extra bandwidth to their own.
There is no problem filtering things based on the type of traffic. What we need to prevent is filtering based on where the traffic's origin or destination.
Ah, but Net Neutrality is fine with traffic shaping and prioritization. What it is against is ISP only shaping traffic based on destination/source instead of content. The best example is streaming video. Something everyone agrees takes a big chunk of bandwidth. Now, under Net Neutrality, ISPs are free to limit video streaming in order to preserve resources for other uses. What they are not allowed to do is throttle all the video services except the one provided by them. They also can't go to Google and threaten to only filter Google's services unless Google pays them extra money.
So, if ISPs are really having bandwidth problems, Net Neutrality does nothing to stop them from throttling individual services such as torrents, video streaming/downloading or music. What it prevents is the ISPs using their control of the physical connection to extort money out of individual business and consumers.
You would think so, but no. I'm a recent graduate who is familiar with Blender, Max, Lightwave and Maya. Blender is fundamentally different. In every way. From the way that you move and rotate the viewpoint on up. It isn't that they other 3D packages have the same UI. Far from it. But they are all based on the same general principles.
To follow your programming analogy, it's like learning a second programming language... that's written in Chinese. Educational? Likely. Functional? Likely. Worth the effort, compared to the alternatives? Not so much.
As a recently graduated student focusing on 3D work, I speak from experience here. In the past 6 years, I have used Blender, Lightwave, 3DS and Maya. I can move between any of the later three with roughly a week of refamiliarizing myself with the odd corners and figuring out what is now since the last version I used. Moving back into Blender would take at least a month. If anyone was dumb enough to learn nothing but Blender they would be screwed. NOTHING in blender will translate to any other 3D package.
Hey, as long as we can't talk, we have an excuse for why we keep on shooting at each other. Take that away and it just looks stupid. You don't want us to look stupid, do you?
A general re-branding for the core families of the chip is fine, but it would be better if they re-vamped the model numbers. How it should work (in my own, special, little world) is a general brand name that lets you know what type of ship you are dealing with in general. Then a 6-8 digit model number. It should be easy enough to figure out a naming convention that would give the number of cores, clock speed, and cache. When I am trying to figure out which chip I want to by from them, it would be great if I didn't have to research each (meaningless) model number individually.
I think part of the reason I have such a negative take on this is that a feature like this have the potential to be truly defining. The first game to get it right (and you know one will eventually) is going to re-define the way many games are designed. However, this attempt is so obviously tacked on that I have very low hopes that it will be anything but disappointing. By attaching a shoddy attempt to such a high profile title, the negative reaction could very well discourage other developers from experimenting with it, delaying any better attempts.
So, what they are actually saying is that they are adding a tacked on, last minute, third party mode. Then they are going to point to it and say "see we gave everyone what they were yelling for" and when no one is happy with it LucasArts is going to be all smug and start talking about how it shows the Wii was not a viable platform to start with. It is no secret that LucasArts hasn't been a big fan of the Wii because of the less powerful graphics. This is more of a slap in the face than a real attempt to port it to the Wii.
Windows Media Player does a not bad job finding most of the of codecs I run across. Is it perfect? Hell no. Good enough? Usually. Quicktime/iTunes (pisses me off that they are so tied together these days). Has something similar.
Sure he can. He (and 99% of the world) does not care about OSS. He loaded what was billed as a fully featured OS. These days, what part of what a fully featured OS is assumed to provide is default support for a wide range of multimedia. If it doesn't work out of the box, it should be seamless. If Windows or OSX is fed a video or audio file it doesn't support, it goes looking for a codec and often has it installed before you know anything it wrong. If Linux doesn't do this, should he care why?
Does Linux need any of this? Only if it wants to come out of the server room.
Yes, it is a killer app because it falls under the heading of Assumed Feature. It is one f those things that everyone assumes will be present. It is notable only by its absence. When people load their new OS and find that their MP3s don't play, they aren't going to say 'Wow, it was so easy adding MP3 support myself". They are going to say "What type of cheap piece of shit doesn't play MP3s?"
These days, having no native MP3 support is on the level of having no native mouse support. A computer that won't run basic, standard format multimedia out of the box is about as useful and relevant as one that doesn't support a mouse out of the box.
There is no such thing as a guaranteed business model. Just because it would be convenient for the world to work a certain way, or because it has worked that way in the past, does not mean that it will continue to work that way.
These businesses (and many others) have been built on the assumption that in return for content, consumers are willing to be exposed to advertising. If that assumption proves to be false, then they are going to either have to find a new business model, or else convince the consumers that they should watch the adds. If the business is build on people looking at advertisements, and the consumers are refusing to look at advertisements, there is a basic disconnect there that does not bode well.
The other side is that if consumers as a whole refuse to support add supported business, we are going to have to pay in some other way. Figuring out the balance of this struggle isn't just important for websites. It is the same disconnect that we are seeing right now in television.
Anyone who uses Google can figure out that the search results are not simply a blind mathematical formula. Google has always said that their aim is to provide the most relevant results. Not the most fair or unbiased. The most relevant, and they fudge the numbers to give people the results they are expecting. There is a reason that Wikipedia always shows up in the top two or three results. As long as the results that Google returns are what people are looking for, I fail to see how they generating those results matters at all. And if they are not giving people what they want, then some other search engine will.
Yes. Done wrong, more lights can make for a more dangerous environment. If you read the article, part of what it touches on is the fact that poorly designed and placed 'bright' lights actually reduce viability. Properly designed and placed lights would reduce light pollution, save electricity AND make for a more secure environment.
Thanks. I took a look. In almost every respect, it is exactly what I am looking for. Unfortunately, the lack of encryption is a deal-breaker for me. I'm going to keep an eye on it for the future.
uTorrent is one of the cleanest, smallest, most efficient pieces of software I have ever had the pleasure to use. Since switching to OSX a few months ago (I bought a Macbook Pro planning to run XP, and the switch just seemed to happen), my one real regret is that uTorrent is Windows only. I've been reduced to using Azureus, which gets the job done, but is horribly bloated.
So, my nomination is for uTorrent, and if anyone knows of a similar package for OSX I would love to hear it.
A big agreement here. I have no idea if homosexuality, or many other topics for that matter, would make for a good game. I would be really interested in seeing the results of people trying. Yeah, sure, 90% of it would be crap, but 90% of everything is crap. Good art (which includes movies, photos, music, everything) happens because someone says "I wonder if I can make this work". Most of the time it doesn't, but some of the time it does.
Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75 That's a lot of extra pixels.
For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastleg ion/hd/
As someone who has worked in related retail I would like to comment on why they insist on a technician doing the install. They know that many of their customers can do it themselves, make no mistake about that. However, if they even give the option a large number of their customers will take that to mean that they should be able to install it, all evidence to the contrary. A certain percentage of the population is never going to admit that they need help. And let me speak from personal experience when I say that it is almost imposable to grasp the amount of damage that can be caused by someone who thinks they know what they are doing.
From a business point of view, it is easier, cheaper and less hassle to set up everyone than it is to deal with the repercussions of the few who screw up their own installation. As one of the people who could do it myself I don't particularly like it, but if I was running the business I would make the exact same call.
I wonder how many more years it will be before the airwaves are worth more (in terms of dollar value) as a medium for generic data transmission than they are as a medium for a specific technology (TV, radio, cell phone...)
Slashdot Mirror
I think part of that is the fact that kids really don't buy comics any more. Mom isn't worried about little Timmy coming home with a copy of Transmetropolitan because little Timmy would rather be hit with a baseball bat than blow his allowance on $4 comic books.
Here is what I tell people about AVG to get them over the 'free' thing. Just say that AVG's real business is anti-virus for big business. They give their stuff away free to normal people because it helps lower the total number of viruses on the internet. That makes their real job easier.
People are happy with anything they can attribute SOME sort of selfish motive to.
In theory, this is how the music industry is supposed to/used to/sometimes does work. Someone who is in charge of the money side of getting the music made (dedicated producer, one of the artists, it depends) hears some new band and thinks, hey, I like that. It's kind of cool. So, they go to the band and in exchange for a cut of the proceeds they give them a chance to get better known. This might be letting them open for shows, collaborating on a song or two, producing a CD, whatever.
Then the new band either takes off or not. If they do, a few years down the line, they hear someone know and the cycle repeats.
Right now, the section of the industry that has this working best is the rap industry. For all their other faults, they are really good at bringing in new talent(?). You can see it if you look at most rap artists on Wikipedia. Their history goes "was discovered by.." who in turn "was discovered by..." and so on.
I think you can judge the health of any section of the music business based on the percentage of the artists who got their starts playing small gigs until someone bigger gave them a shot.
Because "Computing" isn't a profession. A computer is a tool/household appliance, not a job.
Net Neutrality allows for all sorts of traffic shaping. In your example, the ISP is welcome to carve out a chunk of bandwidth in order to ensure that TV streams get through. What they are not allowed to do is to distinguish between the TV service they offer and the other TV services. They can't play dirty by intentionally slowing down the signal of competing services while giving extra bandwidth to their own.
There is no problem filtering things based on the type of traffic. What we need to prevent is filtering based on where the traffic's origin or destination.
Ah, but Net Neutrality is fine with traffic shaping and prioritization. What it is against is ISP only shaping traffic based on destination/source instead of content.
The best example is streaming video. Something everyone agrees takes a big chunk of bandwidth. Now, under Net Neutrality, ISPs are free to limit video streaming in order to preserve resources for other uses. What they are not allowed to do is throttle all the video services except the one provided by them. They also can't go to Google and threaten to only filter Google's services unless Google pays them extra money.
So, if ISPs are really having bandwidth problems, Net Neutrality does nothing to stop them from throttling individual services such as torrents, video streaming/downloading or music. What it prevents is the ISPs using their control of the physical connection to extort money out of individual business and consumers.
You would think so, but no. I'm a recent graduate who is familiar with Blender, Max, Lightwave and Maya. Blender is fundamentally different. In every way. From the way that you move and rotate the viewpoint on up. It isn't that they other 3D packages have the same UI. Far from it. But they are all based on the same general principles.
To follow your programming analogy, it's like learning a second programming language... that's written in Chinese. Educational? Likely. Functional? Likely. Worth the effort, compared to the alternatives? Not so much.
As a recently graduated student focusing on 3D work, I speak from experience here.
In the past 6 years, I have used Blender, Lightwave, 3DS and Maya.
I can move between any of the later three with roughly a week of refamiliarizing myself with the odd corners and figuring out what is now since the last version I used. Moving back into Blender would take at least a month.
If anyone was dumb enough to learn nothing but Blender they would be screwed. NOTHING in blender will translate to any other 3D package.
Hey, as long as we can't talk, we have an excuse for why we keep on shooting at each other. Take that away and it just looks stupid. You don't want us to look stupid, do you?
A general re-branding for the core families of the chip is fine, but it would be better if they re-vamped the model numbers. How it should work (in my own, special, little world) is a general brand name that lets you know what type of ship you are dealing with in general. Then a 6-8 digit model number. It should be easy enough to figure out a naming convention that would give the number of cores, clock speed, and cache. When I am trying to figure out which chip I want to by from them, it would be great if I didn't have to research each (meaningless) model number individually.
I think part of the reason I have such a negative take on this is that a feature like this have the potential to be truly defining. The first game to get it right (and you know one will eventually) is going to re-define the way many games are designed. However, this attempt is so obviously tacked on that I have very low hopes that it will be anything but disappointing. By attaching a shoddy attempt to such a high profile title, the negative reaction could very well discourage other developers from experimenting with it, delaying any better attempts.
So, what they are actually saying is that they are adding a tacked on, last minute, third party mode. Then they are going to point to it and say "see we gave everyone what they were yelling for" and when no one is happy with it LucasArts is going to be all smug and start talking about how it shows the Wii was not a viable platform to start with. It is no secret that LucasArts hasn't been a big fan of the Wii because of the less powerful graphics. This is more of a slap in the face than a real attempt to port it to the Wii.
Windows Media Player does a not bad job finding most of the of codecs I run across. Is it perfect? Hell no. Good enough? Usually. Quicktime/iTunes (pisses me off that they are so tied together these days). Has something similar.
Sure he can. He (and 99% of the world) does not care about OSS. He loaded what was billed as a fully featured OS. These days, what part of what a fully featured OS is assumed to provide is default support for a wide range of multimedia. If it doesn't work out of the box, it should be seamless. If Windows or OSX is fed a video or audio file it doesn't support, it goes looking for a codec and often has it installed before you know anything it wrong. If Linux doesn't do this, should he care why?
Does Linux need any of this? Only if it wants to come out of the server room.
Yes, it is a killer app because it falls under the heading of Assumed Feature. It is one f those things that everyone assumes will be present. It is notable only by its absence. When people load their new OS and find that their MP3s don't play, they aren't going to say 'Wow, it was so easy adding MP3 support myself". They are going to say "What type of cheap piece of shit doesn't play MP3s?"
These days, having no native MP3 support is on the level of having no native mouse support. A computer that won't run basic, standard format multimedia out of the box is about as useful and relevant as one that doesn't support a mouse out of the box.
If there was ever a game begging to be ported to the Wii...
There is no such thing as a guaranteed business model. Just because it would be convenient for the world to work a certain way, or because it has worked that way in the past, does not mean that it will continue to work that way.
These businesses (and many others) have been built on the assumption that in return for content, consumers are willing to be exposed to advertising. If that assumption proves to be false, then they are going to either have to find a new business model, or else convince the consumers that they should watch the adds. If the business is build on people looking at advertisements, and the consumers are refusing to look at advertisements, there is a basic disconnect there that does not bode well.
The other side is that if consumers as a whole refuse to support add supported business, we are going to have to pay in some other way. Figuring out the balance of this struggle isn't just important for websites. It is the same disconnect that we are seeing right now in television.
Anyone who uses Google can figure out that the search results are not simply a blind mathematical formula. Google has always said that their aim is to provide the most relevant results. Not the most fair or unbiased. The most relevant, and they fudge the numbers to give people the results they are expecting. There is a reason that Wikipedia always shows up in the top two or three results. As long as the results that Google returns are what people are looking for, I fail to see how they generating those results matters at all. And if they are not giving people what they want, then some other search engine will.
Yes. Done wrong, more lights can make for a more dangerous environment. If you read the article, part of what it touches on is the fact that poorly designed and placed 'bright' lights actually reduce viability. Properly designed and placed lights would reduce light pollution, save electricity AND make for a more secure environment.
Thanks. I took a look. In almost every respect, it is exactly what I am looking for. Unfortunately, the lack of encryption is a deal-breaker for me. I'm going to keep an eye on it for the future.
uTorrent is one of the cleanest, smallest, most efficient pieces of software I have ever had the pleasure to use. Since switching to OSX a few months ago (I bought a Macbook Pro planning to run XP, and the switch just seemed to happen), my one real regret is that uTorrent is Windows only. I've been reduced to using Azureus, which gets the job done, but is horribly bloated.
So, my nomination is for uTorrent, and if anyone knows of a similar package for OSX I would love to hear it.
A big agreement here. I have no idea if homosexuality, or many other topics for that matter, would make for a good game. I would be really interested in seeing the results of people trying. Yeah, sure, 90% of it would be crap, but 90% of everything is crap. Good art (which includes movies, photos, music, everything) happens because someone says "I wonder if I can make this work". Most of the time it doesn't, but some of the time it does.
Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75
g ion/hd/
That's a lot of extra pixels.
For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastle
As someone who has worked in related retail I would like to comment on why they insist on a technician doing the install. They know that many of their customers can do it themselves, make no mistake about that. However, if they even give the option a large number of their customers will take that to mean that they should be able to install it, all evidence to the contrary. A certain percentage of the population is never going to admit that they need help. And let me speak from personal experience when I say that it is almost imposable to grasp the amount of damage that can be caused by someone who thinks they know what they are doing.
From a business point of view, it is easier, cheaper and less hassle to set up everyone than it is to deal with the repercussions of the few who screw up their own installation. As one of the people who could do it myself I don't particularly like it, but if I was running the business I would make the exact same call.
I wonder how many more years it will be before the airwaves are worth more (in terms of dollar value) as a medium for generic data transmission than they are as a medium for a specific technology (TV, radio, cell phone...)