Not to knock your taste in games or anything (I, too, own a Dreamcast), but something doesn't add up. You don't care about graphics, and yet you bought the Dreamcast, the most powerful console at the time of release (and it still holds it's own 6 years later). Then you go on to say that you turn your graphics down to the lowest setting, only to then add that you spend more on hardware than on software. So, all this begs the question: What was the point of your rant?
A "rather" technical website? That site looks more specialized in "nerds" than even Slashdot, which at least has SOME content on it for the average person.
This information is about as useful as the webmaster of www.kernel.org announcing that most of that site's visitors don't even have Windows installed.
The logical reasoning behind this is that the government is taking away television by forbidding analog broadcasting. Therefore, to counter this, they will pay for it so people do not complain.
Of course it's obvious that it's not them who pay but us, the people. However, since Congress is elected by us, anything they do is indirectly representative of our will. Therefore, it can be said that the majority of the population want their taxes to go towards this.
It's called a democracy. If you don't like it, use your first amendment rights to speak up about it and organize people to either vote for politicians who would oppose this bill, or to use your constitutional right to run for office yourself. The only excuse you have for not having politicians who are on your side in office is that your side isn't as involved in the democratic process as your opposition. That, and they're rich, and you're not.
This is contrary to all marketing research done by the industry, which states that a film's international gross is directly related to the star power of the actors on screen. This is where the term "international superstar" derives from, and the example you cited, Jackie Chan, is considered one of the names that can sell a movie in Europe and Asia.
In the 80s, there was a small film studio named Cannon Group. You might've heard of it, they are responsible for quite a few iconic low-budget 80s action films along the lines of Missing in Action, The Delta Force, Death Wish, Masters of the Universe, and many others. They had a LOT of success releasing their films internationally, even when those films were flopping in the United States. The secret behind this was that they cultivated actors and promoted them HEAVILY on the international scene. They and similar overseas-centric film producers (Dino de Laurentiis was a major player) helped turn the likes of Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Charles Bronson, and even Arnold Scwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, into "international superstars", even when many of their films flopped in America. How many American films have had success with Jean Claude Van Damm in the lead role? Yet he is very successful internationally.
You give far too much credit to European audiences. Some research has indicated that certain action films over the years have been released specifically because they would have high international grosses, even when the producers knew that the film had limited chance of success in America. The recent film "The Island" is a perfect example of this. The film grossed a pathetic $35 million in the US, while it has taken in roughly $125 million overseas. And this has nothing to do with the director, Michael Bay, who has filmed more "America is #1" movies than any one other director I'm familiar with.
Also, yes, it is true that certain critically acclaimed dramas are huge hits in Europe while they're rarely even widely released in America (see the French gross of the Chinese film "In the Mood For Love" as an example, bet you've never even heard of it). BUT, this too can be exaplained in far more realistic terms than "European audiences are more cultured." The reason behind these successes it that, unlike in America, European and Asian distributors do not merely target young audiences, and many many European ADULTS go to ADULT (I don't mean porn) movies on a regular basis, similar to how some high-class Americans go to the theater.
But anyway, my whole poitn is: Star power is more important internationally than in the US, and history, as well as market research, prove that much.
Umm, I don't know if you've been paying attention to PC games lately, but that is one of the lowest minimum requirements for a major big-budget game that I've seen in about a year.
Most major game releases today work on nothing but the bleeding edge of gaming hardware (Doom 3, Half Life 2, F.E.A.R., etc). I don't know anyone whose computer can run any of these games (me included), but apparently enough people have that kind of hardware, or else they wouldn't spend millions of dollars creating these games.
Are you joking? That screenshot has less than HALF of the icons and buttons that today's version of IE (and Firefox and Opera) have. Note that they did away with the useless menu bar entirely. I'd imagine that those EIGHT "buttons" that you refer to (count 'em: EIGHT) represent the most used items from the removed menus (each of which had MORE than eight items to choose from).
What a ridiculous thing to whine about.
Of course, to be fair, I agree that the blurred transparancy is rather annoying to me, and clashes quite heavily. Thankfully, Windows allows you to use solid, opaque title bars, too, thus negating yours and my complaint.
As far as your last sentence... you'll switch, believe me. When you see software after software (particularly games) start to trickle in with Vista as a minimum requirement, you'll switch. When was the last time you saw an advanced and useful program that could run on Windows 98?
Unfortunately, you can't just go by news reports. You have to look at MOTIVES behind people's actions.
1) Why does the US want to maintain control? 2) Why does the UN want to take control?
The answer to the first one is usually first given as a rather selfish "it's ours, we invented it" answer. The answer to the second can be deduced if you look at who are the biggest proponents of the UN take-over: China, Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia (Source). Once that is established, the answer to the first question changes, and rightfully so.
You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Lets have the intelligence, lets have the DECENCY to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.
-- Lawrence Garfield (Danny DeVito), "Other People's Money"
Stiff punishments exist as much to be carried out as they do to DETER people from comitting crime. If you know that you can be sent to prison for 20 years for doing something, you'll be less likely to do it. If you know that you'll get probation and community service, or even a couple of months of jail time, you know that the millions you can make on your illegal activities will probably justify this risk.
I must say that I have not encountered this after finishing 7th grade. All throghout high school, the smart kids were the ones who made fun of the idiots and people bragged about getting higher test scores than their classmates. Of course I went to an inner-city high school, so maybe the whole nerd vs jock thing is mostly a subburban thing. We didn't even have a football team (not a popular sport in the inner-city).
The whole point is that people who are nerdy are usually shy and socially inept. The "popular" kids are always very social and extroverted. Most people earning the big bucks in this world, aside from the lonely scientist in his lab, are all extremely extroverted. All people in positions of authority are very extroverted and social.
Extroverted geniuses have a free ticket to wealth and a good social/family life. Everyone else has to work a bit at it, but generally the more social you are, the better your chances.
Woah, wait. You actually WONDER why IRC stagnated while IM took off? Could it possibly be because the concept of a chat client consisting of nothing but a thin Buddy List window requiring no knowledge of "networks" or "netsplits" or "channels" was a massive leap forward in online chat applications? Could it possibly be that, more often than not, people prefer to talk one on one and not in a public chat room with a dozen or more other people? Could it possibly be because IM was the "default" chat method for everyone who signed up to AOL, the most user-plentiful internet provider of all time?
I bet you that 90% of all AIM users (which is tens of millions of people) have never once used, much less heard of, IRC... and you're suggesting that they somehow "switched" to AIM to avoid some arcane technical issue or made a conscious choice to use it over IRC?
Instant Messaging is superior to IRC in many, many ways. That, and the massive marketting of IM by a wealthy Internet conglomorate, ensured that it is now the de facto standard in online chat.
Did you see the Family Guy episode where Peter is acting like a woman and decides to call and chit-chat with Quagmire from the tub?
[Phone ringing] Quagmire: Hello? Peter Griffin: Hey, Quagmire. Quagmire: Hey, Peter. What's up? Peter Griffin: Not much. Quagmire: Well, what do you want? Peter Griffin: Nothin'. I'm just calling to talk. What you thinking about? Quagmire: What do you mean? You called me! Peter Griffin: I just wanted to say hi. So, what are you...
[Click]
Now you know why teenage girls love IM. And if the person in your example is a guy, then he's just exhibiting those same feminine traits as Peter.
Does this joke honestly make sense in this day and age? As an unemployed graduate with a computer science degree, I say no, no it does not make sense in this day and age.:(
Bloggers are the equivalent of editorial writers. They put a spotlight on a specific issue and add their own personal slant on it by writing opinions on it.
Conversely, journalists USUALLY strive to do nothing but present the facts of the specific issue they're covering, and hardly ever use words like "I" or "In my opinion" or "I think", something that bloggers ALWAYS do.
Some people would argue that newspaper editorial writers are journalists. I disagree, they are not. People like Bob Novak are not journalists, people like Bill O'Reilly are not journalists, people like Al Franken are not journalists. The same applies to DailyKos, Andrew Sullivan, et al.
Of course that's my opinion. As such, I just negated this post having any journalistic integrity.
You're confusing non-violent dissatisfaction with a product with people lashing out against the arrogance of many in the Open Source community.
See, on the one hand, you have hard-working developers who try to basically make their product for themselves and other developers. On the other, you have Open Source evangelists who frequently bash commercial software and generally call people stupid for not running Open Source alternatives instead (OpenOffice instead of MS Office, GAIM instead of AIM, GIMP instead of Photoshop, etc). Those of us who, rather than taking "sides" simply look for the best solution to our needs, look at this and are quite frankly taken aback by this continued arrogance on the part of some.
See, they promise us a better product, and many times that product is worse. Even when we point this out, they still insult us for being "sheep" or any number of other things. It's at THIS point that we start to outright complain that the products they shove in our face isn't up to par.
Sure, you need evangelists to promote your community's software. However, those evangelists are generally putting the entire community in a bad light, making all you guys look like arrogant (and sometimes ignorant) children. So, look at this very Slashdot discussion. You have people left and right saying people are stupid for still running the official IM clients instead of Gaim. Then you get someone who's fed up with it start to basically say, "Oh shut up, you idiots! GAIM still doesn't have X feature working, I won't use it until it does!" While this is a rude response for a GAIM developer to hear, it is an understandable response to the rabid evangelicals.
Is a TV commercial for a product considered a "loss leader"? After all, a company can spend ten million dollars to air the commercial, and no one pays them for watching it.
This is what Instand Messengers are. They're commercials and "portals" to the company's services.
Of course, I don't know much about marketspeak, so maybe commercials ARE loss leaders. But that seems like a very broad term.
What makes you think that they aren't making money from their IM services?
It seems pretty obvious to me that the main reason these companies offer these services is to attract people to more of their services. Have you looked at Yahoo Messenger lately? It's filled with links and features to various Yahoo services. Same with MSN and AOL messengers. They give you links up the ass to basically everything that their company offers.
Additionally, many people on Yahoo, MSN, and AOL messengers often use that company's e-mail services. If you took a look at AOL's upcoming replacement for AIM that's currently in beta (called Triton), you'd see that they have integrated AOL Mail with the client, along with AOL Radio, and many many other features. Hell, they actually automatically bundle extra software when you run the installation (including AOL Explorer, which is a very decent replacement for IE).
Basically, the IM clients are gateways to the services of each respective company, and I think this business plan has been quite successful so far. Otherwise, they'd've abandoned these services years ago.
"You" meaning the "user", or "you" meaning "him" specifically? I'm personally a "user", not a programmer, and I have no ability to contribute to Open Source software. However, when Open Source software is advertised to the masses the way GAIM is, I would like to use it. Just because it's open source, does that mean I waive any right to complain about lack of features or to request features for someone else to include? Are there no users of open source software and only developers?
GAIM has a ton of features (more than the official clients), but it lacks some of those features which many of us find necessary or, at the very least, useful. Webcam support is one of them.
Who cares about screenshots? Just link to the general KDE screenshots, all distros that use it look pretty much the same, like a slightly pretier version of Windows 98 with GIGANTIC tooltips for the blind.
By the way, are there any KDE themes that try to mimic real-world objects? Like how Vista's theme makes it seem like the minimize/maximize/close buttons and items on the task bar have LED lights under them that glow when you move your mouse over them?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... wow.
Not to knock your taste in games or anything (I, too, own a Dreamcast), but something doesn't add up. You don't care about graphics, and yet you bought the Dreamcast, the most powerful console at the time of release (and it still holds it's own 6 years later). Then you go on to say that you turn your graphics down to the lowest setting, only to then add that you spend more on hardware than on software. So, all this begs the question: What was the point of your rant?
Heh, coincidentally, season one will be available on December 26th. Check Amazon.
Did you just buy a DVD box set of SeaQuest DSV?
A "rather" technical website? That site looks more specialized in "nerds" than even Slashdot, which at least has SOME content on it for the average person.
This information is about as useful as the webmaster of www.kernel.org announcing that most of that site's visitors don't even have Windows installed.
The logical reasoning behind this is that the government is taking away television by forbidding analog broadcasting. Therefore, to counter this, they will pay for it so people do not complain.
Of course it's obvious that it's not them who pay but us, the people. However, since Congress is elected by us, anything they do is indirectly representative of our will. Therefore, it can be said that the majority of the population want their taxes to go towards this.
It's called a democracy. If you don't like it, use your first amendment rights to speak up about it and organize people to either vote for politicians who would oppose this bill, or to use your constitutional right to run for office yourself. The only excuse you have for not having politicians who are on your side in office is that your side isn't as involved in the democratic process as your opposition. That, and they're rich, and you're not.
This is contrary to all marketing research done by the industry, which states that a film's international gross is directly related to the star power of the actors on screen. This is where the term "international superstar" derives from, and the example you cited, Jackie Chan, is considered one of the names that can sell a movie in Europe and Asia.
In the 80s, there was a small film studio named Cannon Group. You might've heard of it, they are responsible for quite a few iconic low-budget 80s action films along the lines of Missing in Action, The Delta Force, Death Wish, Masters of the Universe, and many others. They had a LOT of success releasing their films internationally, even when those films were flopping in the United States. The secret behind this was that they cultivated actors and promoted them HEAVILY on the international scene. They and similar overseas-centric film producers (Dino de Laurentiis was a major player) helped turn the likes of Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Charles Bronson, and even Arnold Scwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, into "international superstars", even when many of their films flopped in America. How many American films have had success with Jean Claude Van Damm in the lead role? Yet he is very successful internationally.
You give far too much credit to European audiences. Some research has indicated that certain action films over the years have been released specifically because they would have high international grosses, even when the producers knew that the film had limited chance of success in America. The recent film "The Island" is a perfect example of this. The film grossed a pathetic $35 million in the US, while it has taken in roughly $125 million overseas. And this has nothing to do with the director, Michael Bay, who has filmed more "America is #1" movies than any one other director I'm familiar with.
Also, yes, it is true that certain critically acclaimed dramas are huge hits in Europe while they're rarely even widely released in America (see the French gross of the Chinese film "In the Mood For Love" as an example, bet you've never even heard of it). BUT, this too can be exaplained in far more realistic terms than "European audiences are more cultured." The reason behind these successes it that, unlike in America, European and Asian distributors do not merely target young audiences, and many many European ADULTS go to ADULT (I don't mean porn) movies on a regular basis, similar to how some high-class Americans go to the theater.
But anyway, my whole poitn is: Star power is more important internationally than in the US, and history, as well as market research, prove that much.
Umm, I don't know if you've been paying attention to PC games lately, but that is one of the lowest minimum requirements for a major big-budget game that I've seen in about a year.
Most major game releases today work on nothing but the bleeding edge of gaming hardware (Doom 3, Half Life 2, F.E.A.R., etc). I don't know anyone whose computer can run any of these games (me included), but apparently enough people have that kind of hardware, or else they wouldn't spend millions of dollars creating these games.
Are you joking? That screenshot has less than HALF of the icons and buttons that today's version of IE (and Firefox and Opera) have. Note that they did away with the useless menu bar entirely. I'd imagine that those EIGHT "buttons" that you refer to (count 'em: EIGHT) represent the most used items from the removed menus (each of which had MORE than eight items to choose from).
What a ridiculous thing to whine about.
Of course, to be fair, I agree that the blurred transparancy is rather annoying to me, and clashes quite heavily. Thankfully, Windows allows you to use solid, opaque title bars, too, thus negating yours and my complaint.
As far as your last sentence... you'll switch, believe me. When you see software after software (particularly games) start to trickle in with Vista as a minimum requirement, you'll switch. When was the last time you saw an advanced and useful program that could run on Windows 98?
This article cites China, South Africa, India and Brazil.
Unfortunately, you can't just go by news reports. You have to look at MOTIVES behind people's actions.
1) Why does the US want to maintain control?
2) Why does the UN want to take control?
The answer to the first one is usually first given as a rather selfish "it's ours, we invented it" answer. The answer to the second can be deduced if you look at who are the biggest proponents of the UN take-over: China, Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia (Source). Once that is established, the answer to the first question changes, and rightfully so.
Heh, well, if he passed psychiatric testing, then he's NOT a loony, is he. :P
You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Lets have the intelligence, lets have the DECENCY to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.
-- Lawrence Garfield (Danny DeVito), "Other People's Money"
Stiff punishments exist as much to be carried out as they do to DETER people from comitting crime. If you know that you can be sent to prison for 20 years for doing something, you'll be less likely to do it. If you know that you'll get probation and community service, or even a couple of months of jail time, you know that the millions you can make on your illegal activities will probably justify this risk.
I must say that I have not encountered this after finishing 7th grade. All throghout high school, the smart kids were the ones who made fun of the idiots and people bragged about getting higher test scores than their classmates. Of course I went to an inner-city high school, so maybe the whole nerd vs jock thing is mostly a subburban thing. We didn't even have a football team (not a popular sport in the inner-city).
The whole point is that people who are nerdy are usually shy and socially inept. The "popular" kids are always very social and extroverted. Most people earning the big bucks in this world, aside from the lonely scientist in his lab, are all extremely extroverted. All people in positions of authority are very extroverted and social.
Extroverted geniuses have a free ticket to wealth and a good social/family life. Everyone else has to work a bit at it, but generally the more social you are, the better your chances.
We have 3% inflation.
Woah, wait. You actually WONDER why IRC stagnated while IM took off? Could it possibly be because the concept of a chat client consisting of nothing but a thin Buddy List window requiring no knowledge of "networks" or "netsplits" or "channels" was a massive leap forward in online chat applications? Could it possibly be that, more often than not, people prefer to talk one on one and not in a public chat room with a dozen or more other people? Could it possibly be because IM was the "default" chat method for everyone who signed up to AOL, the most user-plentiful internet provider of all time?
I bet you that 90% of all AIM users (which is tens of millions of people) have never once used, much less heard of, IRC... and you're suggesting that they somehow "switched" to AIM to avoid some arcane technical issue or made a conscious choice to use it over IRC?
Instant Messaging is superior to IRC in many, many ways. That, and the massive marketting of IM by a wealthy Internet conglomorate, ensured that it is now the de facto standard in online chat.
Does this joke honestly make sense in this day and age? As an unemployed graduate with a computer science degree, I say no, no it does not make sense in this day and age. :(
Bloggers are the equivalent of editorial writers. They put a spotlight on a specific issue and add their own personal slant on it by writing opinions on it.
Conversely, journalists USUALLY strive to do nothing but present the facts of the specific issue they're covering, and hardly ever use words like "I" or "In my opinion" or "I think", something that bloggers ALWAYS do.
Some people would argue that newspaper editorial writers are journalists. I disagree, they are not. People like Bob Novak are not journalists, people like Bill O'Reilly are not journalists, people like Al Franken are not journalists. The same applies to DailyKos, Andrew Sullivan, et al.
Of course that's my opinion. As such, I just negated this post having any journalistic integrity.
You're confusing non-violent dissatisfaction with a product with people lashing out against the arrogance of many in the Open Source community.
See, on the one hand, you have hard-working developers who try to basically make their product for themselves and other developers. On the other, you have Open Source evangelists who frequently bash commercial software and generally call people stupid for not running Open Source alternatives instead (OpenOffice instead of MS Office, GAIM instead of AIM, GIMP instead of Photoshop, etc). Those of us who, rather than taking "sides" simply look for the best solution to our needs, look at this and are quite frankly taken aback by this continued arrogance on the part of some.
See, they promise us a better product, and many times that product is worse. Even when we point this out, they still insult us for being "sheep" or any number of other things. It's at THIS point that we start to outright complain that the products they shove in our face isn't up to par.
Sure, you need evangelists to promote your community's software. However, those evangelists are generally putting the entire community in a bad light, making all you guys look like arrogant (and sometimes ignorant) children. So, look at this very Slashdot discussion. You have people left and right saying people are stupid for still running the official IM clients instead of Gaim. Then you get someone who's fed up with it start to basically say, "Oh shut up, you idiots! GAIM still doesn't have X feature working, I won't use it until it does!" While this is a rude response for a GAIM developer to hear, it is an understandable response to the rabid evangelicals.
Is a TV commercial for a product considered a "loss leader"? After all, a company can spend ten million dollars to air the commercial, and no one pays them for watching it.
This is what Instand Messengers are. They're commercials and "portals" to the company's services.
Of course, I don't know much about marketspeak, so maybe commercials ARE loss leaders. But that seems like a very broad term.
What makes you think that they aren't making money from their IM services?
It seems pretty obvious to me that the main reason these companies offer these services is to attract people to more of their services. Have you looked at Yahoo Messenger lately? It's filled with links and features to various Yahoo services. Same with MSN and AOL messengers. They give you links up the ass to basically everything that their company offers.
Additionally, many people on Yahoo, MSN, and AOL messengers often use that company's e-mail services. If you took a look at AOL's upcoming replacement for AIM that's currently in beta (called Triton), you'd see that they have integrated AOL Mail with the client, along with AOL Radio, and many many other features. Hell, they actually automatically bundle extra software when you run the installation (including AOL Explorer, which is a very decent replacement for IE).
Basically, the IM clients are gateways to the services of each respective company, and I think this business plan has been quite successful so far. Otherwise, they'd've abandoned these services years ago.
"You" meaning the "user", or "you" meaning "him" specifically? I'm personally a "user", not a programmer, and I have no ability to contribute to Open Source software. However, when Open Source software is advertised to the masses the way GAIM is, I would like to use it. Just because it's open source, does that mean I waive any right to complain about lack of features or to request features for someone else to include? Are there no users of open source software and only developers?
GAIM has a ton of features (more than the official clients), but it lacks some of those features which many of us find necessary or, at the very least, useful. Webcam support is one of them.
Who cares about screenshots? Just link to the general KDE screenshots, all distros that use it look pretty much the same, like a slightly pretier version of Windows 98 with GIGANTIC tooltips for the blind.
By the way, are there any KDE themes that try to mimic real-world objects? Like how Vista's theme makes it seem like the minimize/maximize/close buttons and items on the task bar have LED lights under them that glow when you move your mouse over them?