At one time I strongly agreed with this position. That time was for about 2 weeks in high school before I paid much attention to the actual process of government. The reason we have representative government instead of direct democracy is because keeping up with issues and bills is a full time job for an entire staff of people. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? What about the really boring stuff that almost no one cares about?
The easiest way to demonstrate this point is to ask you what your opinion is on Congressional Bill H.R. 2862? Do you know? Do any of your fiends know? how about H.R. 2744? or H.R. 2360? No? So then why do you feel qualified to vote on them? What makes you think that anyone else is? If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it? Leave the job to people who can devote their full time and resources to it. There is a reason that the founding fathers of the US wanted so many steps of mediation between 'the people' and the people who run the day to day affairs of the country.
They are not going to give up the nuclear program in favor of the space program because from their government's point of view they are the SAME PROGRAM.
Do you really think that the US government's interest in the space program in the 50's and 60's had anything to do with actually going to space? To a small extent it was a nice prestige project, but that was just a nice spin off from the real research. The difference between a 'rocket' and a 'missile' is nothing but a name. You will note that once they had learned to make really reliable rockets (missiles), the funding for NASA almost completely dried up.
Same thing for India now. They have nukes and now all they need is a better way to get them from point A to point B. The difference between 'we launched a satellite and brought it back to earth' and 'we launched a nuke and dropped it where we wanted it' is only the payload.
I'm surprised that anyone would be planning a PS3 version of guitar hero any time soon. From the point of view of sales, it is a loosing proposition. I mean, look at the numbers. The sales numbers that TFA claims for GH2 just about equal the number of PS3s that have been sold in total. Assuming that Sony manages to triple the number of PS3s in homes by the time they release the next Guitar Hero, they would still need to sell a copy to 1 in 3 PS3 owners just to equal the first month's sales of GH2. That is not going to happen. For at least the next year, developing for the PS3 is going to be a losing proposition for developers.
Except that with Indiana Jones, it is a character than everyone involved has been vocal about wanting to bring back. Ford has stated a number of times that he wants to play Indy again. Speilberg has wanted to since they shot the last one. I believe that Sean Connery has also been quoted saying that playing Indy Sr. was the most fun he has ever had in a role. They have spent the past 20 years trying to work around everyone's schedules. The fact that Lucas is involved in it is almost an accident.
While I agree with you in general paranoid principle, I think the last bit is a little naive. It's like saying that if you want to have a safe house, you should be able to build your own in order to make sure there is no secret explode-on-remote-command hardware installed. Yes, people need to pay a little attention, but this type of shit is above and beyond anything that should be expected.
P.S. I want to see Holmes on Homes run across a secret explode-on-remote-command thing in an episode. That would make my week.
I think it is interesting that everyone seems to be assuming that the fight for first/second is between the Wii and whichever of the other two win out. In the article above as well as the other slashdot comments already posted there is a base assumption that the Wii is going to do quite well. It is as if everyone is acknowledging that the Wii already has a certain segment of the market sewn up and that gives the advantage in the three way battle for the rest of it. Now, that could be completely wrong, but I think it is very interesting to see that unspoken assumption in so much of what I read.
Why would you want to have to calibrate it for the TV? The way it is set up right now, it is all relative. It doesn't have to aim exactly where you are pointing, it just has to change its position based on your movements in a consistent manner. The way it is now, i can go from a 23 inch TV to a 9 foot wide projector image with absolutely no calibration. Plug it in and go. That's really special.
I think that the implication you are making here is really disturbing. What you are saying is that if you are willing to throw enough money at people, then you should have the right to do whatever you want, regardless of what they want. I think that the only reasonable 'compensation' in this case is access to the service and people/neighborhoods/cities should be able to demand that in exchange for allowing the company to make use of public property and the hassle of installing it.
These arguments always piss me off. Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them? So this guy is using Opera. That's nice. He says he doesn't care about anything as unimportant as "percentage of the Internet population" that uses the browser. He has chosen to use it and as such it is his god given right to have all the sites he wants to use support it.
Get a life.
Two sides to this. First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers. On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs. If it would cost a business X amount of money to add support for a piece of software and the total amount of cash that will be brought in by new customers because of that software is less than X, it is never going to happen. NEVER.
You see the same thing in the Linux community (and oh god am I going to get modded down/flamed for this), but every time a discussion of Linux adoption comes up and the games laugh someone always says something along the lines of "if only the developers would get their heads on strait and release the games for Linux...". Games don't get released on OS's where it is physically imposable to recoup the cost of development from the install base. Large commercial websites don't support browsers that don't have enough users to pay for it. This base assumption of deserving support is arrogant and counter productive./END RANT
Of course, the discontinueing of these toys wouldn't be needed if people would use their common sense. Then again, I guess that is too hard to expect from the average American.
Talk about someone with a grudge against Americans. Sure, make fun of them when they earn it (which is often, I will concede), but this is a bit much. Considering the target market is between 4 and 10 years of age, I think expecting a constant level of common sense IS a bit much to ask. That's why children are treated like children.
What I want is a system where I can designate what gets accelerated. 90% of what I use commonly is small programs that only take a second or two to load up anyways. It is the big stuff that I may not use every day that I want to be able to designate.
That's why I am more interested in the solid state and RAM drives that I have been seeing than in the hybrids. Those let me install what I want to them. Everything else can go on a traditional drive.
I agree. This is a one shot deal, as in once the scanning is done you are never going to have more of these to do. Take them to some sort of professional shop, either a photo shop (not a 24 hour developer, but a high end photography store) or design shop or whatever else you can find. Places that specialize in old photos and restoration are other good places to check. Many of these place will digitize your slides for far less than the cost of turning them into prints. Even with a large volume it is almost always cheaper then whatever bizarre hardware you can find to buy, and even if it costs a little more, at least it is done by professionals on extremely high end equipment that you could never afford. Drum scanners were mentioned above, they are wonderful things. The other part of this is that scanning a lot of slides without the proper equipment is slow. Do you really want to spend the next three months of your free time doing nothing but feeding a single slide into the scanner, scanning it, checking it and then doing the next one?
Pay the cash and get it done professionally. Less hassle, quicker, higher quality and potentially cheaper.
Shocking, they are going to charge for movies? No, really?
There is nothing wrong with movie companies charging for their product. There is something wrong with movie companies charging for a crippled and limited versions of their product. there is a differnce. If the movie companies want to toss their conent out there, I say more power to them and there are worse ways to do it than through uTorrent. I would be happy to drop $2 or whatever for fast, good quality copies of episodes for series I like as they come out.
Yes, there are a few fractal shapes such as trees that are routinely procedurally generated, but even then not always. As someone who knows I can say yes, 90% of those walk cycles are either done by hand or generated from mo-cap data. Why? Because every game engine uses slightly different bone and rigging set-ups. You can't take a walk cycle or any other animation from one game and use in anything else. Even some games that are built on the same engine are not compatible, depending on how much customization has been done. If you can right a program that can generate realistic biped motion out of any random set of bones and you can write your own checks. Even Spore (the most advanced procedural game ever) does not claim to be able to generate anything of the sort, only that what is generated is consistent with the creature designed.
Yes, every character, every box, every building are made polygon by polygon. ALL OF THEM. There is a reason that AAA next gen games have 20-50 million dollar price tags attached. That is a lot of assets to generate.
Actually, the impression that I got wasn't that they were holding it for weeks with poor Wii releases, but weeks were they would have otherwise poor VC releases. They are planning on releasing 1-5 new VC games every week. Most weeks this is going to be a couple B list titles and one or two C list titles. Every month or two, they will release one of the A list titles (SMB, etc..) instead.
From the point of view of giving everyone their favourite game right away, not the best. From the point of view of building constant attention and interest in the VC, I think it is the right way to go. Every Monday, everyone is going to be waiting to see what goes up this week. Some people will grab a game, play it for a week and then grab something from the next Mondays offering.
At one time I strongly agreed with this position. That time was for about 2 weeks in high school before I paid much attention to the actual process of government. The reason we ahve representitive government instead of direct democracy is because keeping up with issues and bills is a full time job for an entire staff of people. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? What about the really boring stuff that almost no one caress about?
The easiest way to demonstrate this point is to ask you what your opinion is on Congressional Bill H.R. 2862? Do you know? Do any of your fiends know? how about H.R. 2744? or H.R. 2360? No? Leave the job to people who can devote their full time and resources to it.
-Fianlly, I appologise for the spelling of this post. It is being typed off quickly on a terminal without any spell check. Sorry.
More accurately, I think almost a decade has passed since EA has had a good name with those who pay attention to the industry
The vast majority of gamers don't care. All they know is that on a lot of the games they play, they have to sit through the same 30 second logo at the beginning. Almost no one goes to the store to specifically buy (or not buy) a game from EA or any other developer. They go to buy a title or series.
No, it's more of a grey area. It's still copyright infringement, and technically against the civil laws. It is more of a recognition that people are going to do it anyway and it is easier all around to do some minimal compensation up front. It like driving a little over the speed limit on a road where EVERYONE does it. Not technically legal, but not not something that will be enforced unless you take it to ridiculous levels.
Yes, we do, and thanks to it the courts told the CRIA (RIAA of Canada) to screw off when they tried to start the same litigation idiocy that is going on in the states right now. It's funny, the industry lobbied really hard to get the levy passed in the 1990's when no one had yet realised how the internet would change things. Now they are lobbying as hard as they can to get it removed so they can start suing people. Not having any luck so far from what I can tell.
As long as there are going to be cops monitoring public places by camera, this sounds like as good a way as any to tell them where to be looking at any given time. I think this has far more to do with narrowing down the information overload than actual additional surveillance. It would be almost physically imposable for any organization to monitor an entire city, regardless of how many cameras are in place. This is nothing more than a way to narrow that down into something manageable.
And until Adobe stops dragging their feet on Linux (and even BSD) support, fuck Flash, too. Let's face it, the browser plugin situation is a disaster
Using Linux is your choice. YOURS. You have made the choice to use an OS that has roughly 3% market share. Not only that, but an OS where interoperability between distros is far from assured. Oddly enough, the fact that Adobe supports 95% of the market sounds like more than enough for me. The browser plug-in situation is great! Flash is compatible on more types of computers than 99% of the programs out there. Flash is more cross-browser and cross-platform compatible than many HTML/CSS websites. If you have chosen to use an OS that is not supported by a piece of software that has become a major part of the web, that is your choice. The rest of the world is under no obligation to support a platform just because you happen to use it.
My guess? The orbit has the orbiter going over the proposed landing spot in the morning. Yes, if they wait long enough or re-task it evening shots might give them a more accurate result, but it is likely a case of 'what we have is good enough'. The shots they have give the information they need, so it is not worth the time and effort to take better ones. More useful to move on to other tasks.
I ahve to give Nintendo credit for how they are handling this. Anyone remember how long it took microsoft to even admit the possability of defective 360s? For Nintendo to stand up and say that a few people have had issues and then to cover instant replacement and shipping for free is a really respectable move. These days many people don't distinguish vbetween brand loyalty and 'fanboyism', but there are real reasons to respect one company over another.
Slashdot Mirror
At one time I strongly agreed with this position. That time was for about 2 weeks in high school before I paid much attention to the actual process of government. The reason we have representative government instead of direct democracy is because keeping up with issues and bills is a full time job for an entire staff of people. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? What about the really boring stuff that almost no one cares about?
The easiest way to demonstrate this point is to ask you what your opinion is on Congressional Bill H.R. 2862? Do you know? Do any of your fiends know? how about H.R. 2744? or H.R. 2360? No? So then why do you feel qualified to vote on them? What makes you think that anyone else is? If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it? Leave the job to people who can devote their full time and resources to it. There is a reason that the founding fathers of the US wanted so many steps of mediation between 'the people' and the people who run the day to day affairs of the country.
They are not going to give up the nuclear program in favor of the space program because from their government's point of view they are the SAME PROGRAM.
Do you really think that the US government's interest in the space program in the 50's and 60's had anything to do with actually going to space? To a small extent it was a nice prestige project, but that was just a nice spin off from the real research. The difference between a 'rocket' and a 'missile' is nothing but a name. You will note that once they had learned to make really reliable rockets (missiles), the funding for NASA almost completely dried up.
Same thing for India now. They have nukes and now all they need is a better way to get them from point A to point B. The difference between 'we launched a satellite and brought it back to earth' and 'we launched a nuke and dropped it where we wanted it' is only the payload.
I'm surprised that anyone would be planning a PS3 version of guitar hero any time soon. From the point of view of sales, it is a loosing proposition. I mean, look at the numbers. The sales numbers that TFA claims for GH2 just about equal the number of PS3s that have been sold in total. Assuming that Sony manages to triple the number of PS3s in homes by the time they release the next Guitar Hero, they would still need to sell a copy to 1 in 3 PS3 owners just to equal the first month's sales of GH2. That is not going to happen. For at least the next year, developing for the PS3 is going to be a losing proposition for developers.
Except that with Indiana Jones, it is a character than everyone involved has been vocal about wanting to bring back. Ford has stated a number of times that he wants to play Indy again. Speilberg has wanted to since they shot the last one. I believe that Sean Connery has also been quoted saying that playing Indy Sr. was the most fun he has ever had in a role. They have spent the past 20 years trying to work around everyone's schedules. The fact that Lucas is involved in it is almost an accident.
While I agree with you in general paranoid principle, I think the last bit is a little naive. It's like saying that if you want to have a safe house, you should be able to build your own in order to make sure there is no secret explode-on-remote-command hardware installed. Yes, people need to pay a little attention, but this type of shit is above and beyond anything that should be expected.
P.S. I want to see Holmes on Homes run across a secret explode-on-remote-command thing in an episode. That would make my week.
I think it is interesting that everyone seems to be assuming that the fight for first/second is between the Wii and whichever of the other two win out. In the article above as well as the other slashdot comments already posted there is a base assumption that the Wii is going to do quite well. It is as if everyone is acknowledging that the Wii already has a certain segment of the market sewn up and that gives the advantage in the three way battle for the rest of it. Now, that could be completely wrong, but I think it is very interesting to see that unspoken assumption in so much of what I read.
Why would you want to have to calibrate it for the TV? The way it is set up right now, it is all relative. It doesn't have to aim exactly where you are pointing, it just has to change its position based on your movements in a consistent manner. The way it is now, i can go from a 23 inch TV to a 9 foot wide projector image with absolutely no calibration. Plug it in and go. That's really special.
I think that the implication you are making here is really disturbing. What you are saying is that if you are willing to throw enough money at people, then you should have the right to do whatever you want, regardless of what they want. I think that the only reasonable 'compensation' in this case is access to the service and people/neighborhoods/cities should be able to demand that in exchange for allowing the company to make use of public property and the hassle of installing it.
These arguments always piss me off. Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them? So this guy is using Opera. That's nice. He says he doesn't care about anything as unimportant as "percentage of the Internet population" that uses the browser. He has chosen to use it and as such it is his god given right to have all the sites he wants to use support it.
/END RANT
Get a life.
Two sides to this. First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers.
On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs. If it would cost a business X amount of money to add support for a piece of software and the total amount of cash that will be brought in by new customers because of that software is less than X, it is never going to happen. NEVER.
You see the same thing in the Linux community (and oh god am I going to get modded down/flamed for this), but every time a discussion of Linux adoption comes up and the games laugh someone always says something along the lines of "if only the developers would get their heads on strait and release the games for Linux...". Games don't get released on OS's where it is physically imposable to recoup the cost of development from the install base. Large commercial websites don't support browsers that don't have enough users to pay for it. This base assumption of deserving support is arrogant and counter productive.
Talk about someone with a grudge against Americans. Sure, make fun of them when they earn it (which is often, I will concede), but this is a bit much. Considering the target market is between 4 and 10 years of age, I think expecting a constant level of common sense IS a bit much to ask. That's why children are treated like children.
What I want is a system where I can designate what gets accelerated. 90% of what I use commonly is small programs that only take a second or two to load up anyways. It is the big stuff that I may not use every day that I want to be able to designate.
That's why I am more interested in the solid state and RAM drives that I have been seeing than in the hybrids. Those let me install what I want to them. Everything else can go on a traditional drive.
I agree. This is a one shot deal, as in once the scanning is done you are never going to have more of these to do. Take them to some sort of professional shop, either a photo shop (not a 24 hour developer, but a high end photography store) or design shop or whatever else you can find. Places that specialize in old photos and restoration are other good places to check. Many of these place will digitize your slides for far less than the cost of turning them into prints. Even with a large volume it is almost always cheaper then whatever bizarre hardware you can find to buy, and even if it costs a little more, at least it is done by professionals on extremely high end equipment that you could never afford. Drum scanners were mentioned above, they are wonderful things. The other part of this is that scanning a lot of slides without the proper equipment is slow. Do you really want to spend the next three months of your free time doing nothing but feeding a single slide into the scanner, scanning it, checking it and then doing the next one?
Pay the cash and get it done professionally. Less hassle, quicker, higher quality and potentially cheaper.
Shocking, they are going to charge for movies? No, really?
There is nothing wrong with movie companies charging for their product. There is something wrong with movie companies charging for a crippled and limited versions of their product. there is a differnce. If the movie companies want to toss their conent out there, I say more power to them and there are worse ways to do it than through uTorrent. I would be happy to drop $2 or whatever for fast, good quality copies of episodes for series I like as they come out.
Yeah, Max's footsteps make some really wonderful and realistic animations.
heh
If you think that either of those made it within 100 miles of the development chain for any decent looking game you are nuts.
You, sir, are out of your mind.
Yes, there are a few fractal shapes such as trees that are routinely procedurally generated, but even then not always. As someone who knows I can say yes, 90% of those walk cycles are either done by hand or generated from mo-cap data. Why? Because every game engine uses slightly different bone and rigging set-ups. You can't take a walk cycle or any other animation from one game and use in anything else. Even some games that are built on the same engine are not compatible, depending on how much customization has been done. If you can right a program that can generate realistic biped motion out of any random set of bones and you can write your own checks. Even Spore (the most advanced procedural game ever) does not claim to be able to generate anything of the sort, only that what is generated is consistent with the creature designed.
Yes, every character, every box, every building are made polygon by polygon. ALL OF THEM. There is a reason that AAA next gen games have 20-50 million dollar price tags attached. That is a lot of assets to generate.
God, can you imagine the liability from that?
"well, we were fairly sure he was going to kill someone, but if we hadn't let it happen we wouldn't know if the test was valid"
heh
Actually, the impression that I got wasn't that they were holding it for weeks with poor Wii releases, but weeks were they would have otherwise poor VC releases. They are planning on releasing 1-5 new VC games every week. Most weeks this is going to be a couple B list titles and one or two C list titles. Every month or two, they will release one of the A list titles (SMB, etc..) instead.
From the point of view of giving everyone their favourite game right away, not the best. From the point of view of building constant attention and interest in the VC, I think it is the right way to go. Every Monday, everyone is going to be waiting to see what goes up this week. Some people will grab a game, play it for a week and then grab something from the next Mondays offering.
At one time I strongly agreed with this position. That time was for about 2 weeks in high school before I paid much attention to the actual process of government. The reason we ahve representitive government instead of direct democracy is because keeping up with issues and bills is a full time job for an entire staff of people. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? What about the really boring stuff that almost no one caress about?
The easiest way to demonstrate this point is to ask you what your opinion is on Congressional Bill H.R. 2862? Do you know? Do any of your fiends know? how about H.R. 2744? or H.R. 2360? No? Leave the job to people who can devote their full time and resources to it.
-Fianlly, I appologise for the spelling of this post. It is being typed off quickly on a terminal without any spell check. Sorry.
More accurately, I think almost a decade has passed since EA has had a good name with those who pay attention to the industry
The vast majority of gamers don't care. All they know is that on a lot of the games they play, they have to sit through the same 30 second logo at the beginning. Almost no one goes to the store to specifically buy (or not buy) a game from EA or any other developer. They go to buy a title or series.
No, it's more of a grey area. It's still copyright infringement, and technically against the civil laws. It is more of a recognition that people are going to do it anyway and it is easier all around to do some minimal compensation up front. It like driving a little over the speed limit on a road where EVERYONE does it. Not technically legal, but not not something that will be enforced unless you take it to ridiculous levels.
Yes, we do, and thanks to it the courts told the CRIA (RIAA of Canada) to screw off when they tried to start the same litigation idiocy that is going on in the states right now. It's funny, the industry lobbied really hard to get the levy passed in the 1990's when no one had yet realised how the internet would change things. Now they are lobbying as hard as they can to get it removed so they can start suing people. Not having any luck so far from what I can tell.
As long as there are going to be cops monitoring public places by camera, this sounds like as good a way as any to tell them where to be looking at any given time. I think this has far more to do with narrowing down the information overload than actual additional surveillance. It would be almost physically imposable for any organization to monitor an entire city, regardless of how many cameras are in place. This is nothing more than a way to narrow that down into something manageable.
Using Linux is your choice. YOURS. You have made the choice to use an OS that has roughly 3% market share. Not only that, but an OS where interoperability between distros is far from assured. Oddly enough, the fact that Adobe supports 95% of the market sounds like more than enough for me. The browser plug-in situation is great! Flash is compatible on more types of computers than 99% of the programs out there. Flash is more cross-browser and cross-platform compatible than many HTML/CSS websites. If you have chosen to use an OS that is not supported by a piece of software that has become a major part of the web, that is your choice. The rest of the world is under no obligation to support a platform just because you happen to use it.
My guess? The orbit has the orbiter going over the proposed landing spot in the morning. Yes, if they wait long enough or re-task it evening shots might give them a more accurate result, but it is likely a case of 'what we have is good enough'. The shots they have give the information they need, so it is not worth the time and effort to take better ones. More useful to move on to other tasks.
I ahve to give Nintendo credit for how they are handling this. Anyone remember how long it took microsoft to even admit the possability of defective 360s? For Nintendo to stand up and say that a few people have had issues and then to cover instant replacement and shipping for free is a really respectable move. These days many people don't distinguish vbetween brand loyalty and 'fanboyism', but there are real reasons to respect one company over another.