It isn't a question of them being less interested, it's a question of that market being more or less saturated, and the gaming industry needing to find new people to sell games to.
Re:Nintendo is in trouble with the Revolution
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Nintendo's New Look
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They're like a car company saying to their customers, "You don't want a big SUV - you want our compact car with good fuel economy"
Sounds an awful lot like what VW, and later Toyota and Honda said to their customers-- "You don't want that big lead-sled Buick! You our compact car with good fuel economy!"
you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.
I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.
My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.
I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.
One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.
...I'll bite anyway. Most US school systems seem to be all-windows now. Macs used to be a significant minority here, but they were simply priced out of market, I think
When I was at elementary school (Fairfax Co, VA, ca 1990...yay, that made me sound young!) things were a little more heterogeneous: there were maybe a dozen IBM-compatible PCs running MS-DOS, another dozen old microcomputers (can't remember if they were commodore or atari). Many classrooms, though, had Apple IIgs computers.
The fact that high school kids have never seen a command prompt is not surprising at all. Consider this: most sixth-graders in America today have never known another operating system other than Windows, and may have never known an operating system earlier than Windows 95.
Any system that simplifies or minimizes the logistical load on any military installation or deployment is good for the military. For them, the issue isn't so much the absolute cost, but the availability of electric power when they might need it. Might not have been trivial in an age where field telephones could be energized by hand cranks...but considering the amount of information technology that goes to war with a post-modern army, it's not a bad thing for the guys in uniform to be investigating. If photovoltaics mean that installations in the field will not need as many gallons of diesel fuel to run generators, that diesel can be put to better use ferrying other needed supplies, or evacuating casualties.
As if nobody had ever played emogame...now there's a game with political content....
This is just old-fashioned "cultural work," as the communists used to call it. Use a popular art form to drive home political messages. Songs, dances, operas, novels....all can be used as propaganda. Why not games? The U.S. Army sems to think so--witness the success of the America's Army game.
All I want to know is--did he really need to use video to tell us how much he hates cutscenes? I was expecting maybe examples of well-done games in the video, at least. The content of the video blog entry would have been better-expressed in text.
...so I gues, on reflection, I hate vlogs for the same reason I hate cutscenes: in the overwhelming majority of cases, the informational or emotional content would have been better expressed some other way.
the bleach-fix is the big culprit. C41 and RA4 are just too fussy, and I can't control my environment well enough. The fact that bleach-fix is noxious and needs an additional disposal step means that it's not really a great choice for the home user.
Kodachrome is a weird, weird process. From what I understand, it's really more science than art, as it requires still more rigorous control of time/temp variables, as well as requiring some not-so-nice chemicals.
yes, but it would also mean that GPL3 would apply. what if the original author did not intend for his work to be redistributed along the terms of the new license?
I agree. In the distant future, I forsee a revival of the more archaic, non-silver-based photographic processes--cyanotype, for instance--among the real enthusiasts. Maybe now would be a good time for me to start buying up those old 8x10 view cameras...
Depends what stuff you're talking about. For most hobbyists using conventional b&w chemistry, the chemicals involved are largely benign. The big worry would be the silver dissolved in exhausted fixer, but again, most hobbyists don't produce this in enough volume to make this a problem. If, however, you're talking about commercial-type volumes of this, then you will need to add a silver recovery step to your disposal routine.
(More modest silver recovery is possible for the hobbyist. I used to put pennies in my exhausted fix, so that the silver would replace the copper plating--then I'd give the silvered penny to my kid brother. OK, so that just replaces one heavy-metal with another, but it certainly pays to see a little kid's eyes light up)
Colour photography is much, much nastier, and may have more stringent disposal requirements. And, of course, if you're using 'exotics'--selenium toner, for instance, or pyrogallol-based developers, the storage and disposal rules for those are much more stringent.
One thing I'll say about my photographic hobby--it's certainly kept my education balanced. I'm an historian by training, but photography keeps my mathematics, chemistry, and physics sharp
The future of war is now: advanced technological societies waging war with ever-more precise, ever-more-powerful weaponry, tolerating few if any casualties among their own forces, confronting archaic, pre-modern societies whose only effective counterforces are terror--a willingness both to kill and to die.
Anyone who thinks that in the future wars will all be nice and bloodless, largely carried out by our obedient robotic proxies is invited to step out of his cubicle and look at where real wars are being fought, all over the world: In Iraq and Afghanistan, where, despite an awesome imbalance of firepower, the United States continues to fight a slowly simmering counterinsurgency operation. Or, for a different taste, how about Sri Lanka, where Tamil Tiger militants pioneered the use of suicide bombings? Or perhaps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where gangs of drugged-up child soldiers used amputation and disfigurement as a means of terrorizing the population?
It would appear that the future of war will look a lot more than its past than most people would willingly admit.
...and when Ilford isn't around, there might still be Seagull and Foma and Efke.
Chemical photography is going to become like etching and engraving: a specialized art or trade. This makes me sad, because I used to enjoy chemical photography a great deal...but I just don't have the time/space for my darkroom anymore.
WRT the withdrawal of Konica/Minolta: I'm not surprised. My next thought is--who's next? Asahi-Pentax? As a Pentax user, that'd make me very sad, as I've always liked their bodies & lenses....
You know, it sounds suspiciously like the features of last.fm, which collects data on your listening habits, then reports back to its servers, and recommends new things to listen to. The killer here is that using those data it queues up a streaming audio player that plays music similar to the stuff you listen to anyway.
Actually, I rather like this feature on last.fm, and I don't particularly mind broadcasting the type of music/audio I'm listening to at any given moment. The "neighbour radio" (last.fm's term for it) is the best part--it lets me tune out my cubemate's preference for '80s soft rock.
While I'm resigned to EVFs for video, I refuse to use them for stills.
My usual photographic working environment is a beer-soaked, smoke-filled, crowded dive bar with a band hammering away on stage. Trying to take still photos of live action in this kind of environment (around 2 or 3 EV, sometimes lower than that)is hard enough. An EVF in those lighting conditions lags a lot, making it nearly impossible to compose critically where your subject is moving fast.
There's also the matter of critical focus. If you take pictures on a summer day, and your camera just hits f/16 and scale focuses, an EVF is perfectly adequate. But try manual focusing at f/2--not happening. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: most AF systems crap out at around EV 3 and start hunting. You can focus better manually, or use the old "prefocus and wait" trick to "trap" your subjects in focus).
I use a Pentax *ist DS, which I bought because it had a great optical viewfinder system. It's easy to manual-focus on the ground glass (something that's hard for me on the Canon digiRebel's v/f, which gives you something to look *through* rather than something to look *at*, IME). The glass pentaprism makes it brighter than the digiRebel's v/f as well--the latter has a mirrorbox. I would much rather have a proper viewfinder than every electronic whizzbang feature on my camera; the electronics are just the recording medium, after all. The real action is in the optics; all the wizardry can wait until I get home and fire up the GIMP.
Sony's high-end digicams are a "neither fish nor fowl" proposition, and I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone. They are priced almost at the level of real DSLRs, and have impressive (and often excessive) feature sets. But their lenses are neither interchangeable nor particularly fast, and at the top end, the cameras are bulky and awkward to handle. People who buy them would have been better off either with a smaller and handier digicam, or a proper DSLR.
The issue is that Microsoft is using its monopoly on personal computer operating systems to attempt to monopolize the market on applications running on that same operating system.
Besides, the idea of going after, say, Ubuntu seems pretty silly. First, Ubuntu doesn't have monopoly status that it can abuse to take control of the applications market. Secondly, those application's don't really belong to Ubuntu in any meaningful sense other than that they can run on Ubuntu and they are included with the distribution.
The 360 and PS3 amount to basically a giant pissing match between Sony and MS... the problem is that they forgot what the real aim of a console is: Easy, Fun, Enjoyment. Not Ghz, RAM, Polygons FTW.
No, they haven't forgoten what the aim of a console is: profit.
If he does felony time, he won't be a voter anymore. Convicted felons are disenfranchised.
In any event, considering the general low level of participation in elections in the United States, I think it's pretty safe to assume that the kid wouldn't have voted anyway. Odds are far better that he would have voted on American Idol.
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...although, as a true Linux believer, would you have to run powerpoint on WINE?
It isn't a question of them being less interested, it's a question of that market being more or less saturated, and the gaming industry needing to find new people to sell games to.
Sounds an awful lot like what VW, and later Toyota and Honda said to their customers-- "You don't want that big lead-sled Buick! You our compact car with good fuel economy!"
you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.
I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.
My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.
I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.
One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.
...I'll bite anyway. Most US school systems seem to be all-windows now. Macs used to be a significant minority here, but they were simply priced out of market, I think
When I was at elementary school (Fairfax Co, VA, ca 1990...yay, that made me sound young!) things were a little more heterogeneous: there were maybe a dozen IBM-compatible PCs running MS-DOS, another dozen old microcomputers (can't remember if they were commodore or atari). Many classrooms, though, had Apple IIgs computers.
The fact that high school kids have never seen a command prompt is not surprising at all. Consider this: most sixth-graders in America today have never known another operating system other than Windows, and may have never known an operating system earlier than Windows 95.
I'd hazard a guess that most AOL users aren't actually that up with the internet lingo. If they were...they'd be on other ISPs.
The dialectic gets you coming and going, comrade.
Any system that simplifies or minimizes the logistical load on any military installation or deployment is good for the military. For them, the issue isn't so much the absolute cost, but the availability of electric power when they might need it. Might not have been trivial in an age where field telephones could be energized by hand cranks...but considering the amount of information technology that goes to war with a post-modern army, it's not a bad thing for the guys in uniform to be investigating. If photovoltaics mean that installations in the field will not need as many gallons of diesel fuel to run generators, that diesel can be put to better use ferrying other needed supplies, or evacuating casualties.
As if nobody had ever played emogame...now there's a game with political content....
This is just old-fashioned "cultural work," as the communists used to call it. Use a popular art form to drive home political messages. Songs, dances, operas, novels....all can be used as propaganda. Why not games? The U.S. Army sems to think so--witness the success of the America's Army game.
All I want to know is--did he really need to use video to tell us how much he hates cutscenes? I was expecting maybe examples of well-done games in the video, at least. The content of the video blog entry would have been better-expressed in text.
...so I gues, on reflection, I hate vlogs for the same reason I hate cutscenes: in the overwhelming majority of cases, the informational or emotional content would have been better expressed some other way.
...which means that all those new computer sold to students are using IE. Not all those students are migrating to FF.
Every new computer that runs Windows is a new IE user. Not so for Firefox or any other browser. Nothing to see here. Move on.
That'd be ideology and purity, not commerical viability.
the bleach-fix is the big culprit. C41 and RA4 are just too fussy, and I can't control my environment well enough. The fact that bleach-fix is noxious and needs an additional disposal step means that it's not really a great choice for the home user.
Kodachrome is a weird, weird process. From what I understand, it's really more science than art, as it requires still more rigorous control of time/temp variables, as well as requiring some not-so-nice chemicals.
FSF/GNU doesn't care about the business world, only about its own ideological purity.
yes, but it would also mean that GPL3 would apply. what if the original author did not intend for his work to be redistributed along the terms of the new license?
I agree. In the distant future, I forsee a revival of the more archaic, non-silver-based photographic processes--cyanotype, for instance--among the real enthusiasts. Maybe now would be a good time for me to start buying up those old 8x10 view cameras...
Depends what stuff you're talking about. For most hobbyists using conventional b&w chemistry, the chemicals involved are largely benign. The big worry would be the silver dissolved in exhausted fixer, but again, most hobbyists don't produce this in enough volume to make this a problem. If, however, you're talking about commercial-type volumes of this, then you will need to add a silver recovery step to your disposal routine.
(More modest silver recovery is possible for the hobbyist. I used to put pennies in my exhausted fix, so that the silver would replace the copper plating--then I'd give the silvered penny to my kid brother. OK, so that just replaces one heavy-metal with another, but it certainly pays to see a little kid's eyes light up)
Colour photography is much, much nastier, and may have more stringent disposal requirements. And, of course, if you're using 'exotics'--selenium toner, for instance, or pyrogallol-based developers, the storage and disposal rules for those are much more stringent.
One thing I'll say about my photographic hobby--it's certainly kept my education balanced. I'm an historian by training, but photography keeps my mathematics, chemistry, and physics sharp
The future of war is now: advanced technological societies waging war with ever-more precise, ever-more-powerful weaponry, tolerating few if any casualties among their own forces, confronting archaic, pre-modern societies whose only effective counterforces are terror--a willingness both to kill and to die.
Anyone who thinks that in the future wars will all be nice and bloodless, largely carried out by our obedient robotic proxies is invited to step out of his cubicle and look at where real wars are being fought, all over the world: In Iraq and Afghanistan, where, despite an awesome imbalance of firepower, the United States continues to fight a slowly simmering counterinsurgency operation. Or, for a different taste, how about Sri Lanka, where Tamil Tiger militants pioneered the use of suicide bombings? Or perhaps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where gangs of drugged-up child soldiers used amputation and disfigurement as a means of terrorizing the population?
It would appear that the future of war will look a lot more than its past than most people would willingly admit.
...and when Ilford isn't around, there might still be Seagull and Foma and Efke.
Chemical photography is going to become like etching and engraving: a specialized art or trade. This makes me sad, because I used to enjoy chemical photography a great deal...but I just don't have the time/space for my darkroom anymore.
WRT the withdrawal of Konica/Minolta: I'm not surprised. My next thought is--who's next? Asahi-Pentax? As a Pentax user, that'd make me very sad, as I've always liked their bodies & lenses....
You know, it sounds suspiciously like the features of last.fm, which collects data on your listening habits, then reports back to its servers, and recommends new things to listen to. The killer here is that using those data it queues up a streaming audio player that plays music similar to the stuff you listen to anyway.
Actually, I rather like this feature on last.fm, and I don't particularly mind broadcasting the type of music/audio I'm listening to at any given moment. The "neighbour radio" (last.fm's term for it) is the best part--it lets me tune out my cubemate's preference for '80s soft rock.
While I'm resigned to EVFs for video, I refuse to use them for stills.
My usual photographic working environment is a beer-soaked, smoke-filled, crowded dive bar with a band hammering away on stage. Trying to take still photos of live action in this kind of environment (around 2 or 3 EV, sometimes lower than that)is hard enough. An EVF in those lighting conditions lags a lot, making it nearly impossible to compose critically where your subject is moving fast.
There's also the matter of critical focus. If you take pictures on a summer day, and your camera just hits f/16 and scale focuses, an EVF is perfectly adequate. But try manual focusing at f/2--not happening. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: most AF systems crap out at around EV 3 and start hunting. You can focus better manually, or use the old "prefocus and wait" trick to "trap" your subjects in focus).
I use a Pentax *ist DS, which I bought because it had a great optical viewfinder system. It's easy to manual-focus on the ground glass (something that's hard for me on the Canon digiRebel's v/f, which gives you something to look *through* rather than something to look *at*, IME). The glass pentaprism makes it brighter than the digiRebel's v/f as well--the latter has a mirrorbox. I would much rather have a proper viewfinder than every electronic whizzbang feature on my camera; the electronics are just the recording medium, after all. The real action is in the optics; all the wizardry can wait until I get home and fire up the GIMP.
Sony's high-end digicams are a "neither fish nor fowl" proposition, and I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone. They are priced almost at the level of real DSLRs, and have impressive (and often excessive) feature sets. But their lenses are neither interchangeable nor particularly fast, and at the top end, the cameras are bulky and awkward to handle. People who buy them would have been better off either with a smaller and handier digicam, or a proper DSLR.
The issue is that Microsoft is using its monopoly on personal computer operating systems to attempt to monopolize the market on applications running on that same operating system.
Besides, the idea of going after, say, Ubuntu seems pretty silly. First, Ubuntu doesn't have monopoly status that it can abuse to take control of the applications market. Secondly, those application's don't really belong to Ubuntu in any meaningful sense other than that they can run on Ubuntu and they are included with the distribution.
No, they haven't forgoten what the aim of a console is: profit.
If he does felony time, he won't be a voter anymore. Convicted felons are disenfranchised.
In any event, considering the general low level of participation in elections in the United States, I think it's pretty safe to assume that the kid wouldn't have voted anyway. Odds are far better that he would have voted on American Idol.
Today being World AIDS Day, it would be a good day to educate them.