I don't know. I imagine alot of the "young male with disposable income" market felt attracted to it because of the list of features like movies and music, and maybe tried a few UMDs, but then lost interest. Particularly if you look at the marketing they did in someway emphasize the multimedia capabilities
In their description: You've tried every method imaginable to see that red laser beam. [...]Wicked Lasers grants you the ability to shoot a red laser beam, green laser beam, or even blue laser beam from your laser pointer. [...]Wavelengths or colors of laser beams vary in visual brightness even when the actual output power is the same.
Yeah, it could be because of that. Or it could be because they're using Lasers 200 friggin times as powerful as stamdard pointers.
I heard that to update your firmware you also have to have the system fully charged, which was pretty annoying for someone I know when he was burning to play his brand new game.
The only two people I know (one I personally know, one's a friend of s friend) who own a PSP are people who just started work and instantly had money to burn.
there will be no need for them to hide a multi-region menu for all of us in the UK that import our films to get them at 60Hz rather than 50Hz
Why would you want to do that? The PAL framerate fits much better to the 24.5 fps that movies are originally shot in, whereas with NTSC, you have to do some jerky resychronisation. Also, PAL offers higher effective resolution than NTSC, and will be especially better if you're using a CRT designed for PAL. Plus, you can get a real RGB signal out of PAL European players, unlike NTSC.
BTW, does anybody know what framerate BR/HDDVD will use? 24fps is supported in the HDTV standard, so the most logical choice for films would be 1080p24. What is it like for US broadcasts? I know that where I live, the HD provider uses different framerates depending on the material they're using.
While most of what I would have to say are explained in the parallel post, I would like to make two more things clear:
1) It hasn't got anything to do with the consumer. The thing is, to have copied something, you have to have created something that is worthy of the descrption "copied". A guide is something fundamentally different from a game.
A simple anology; If a kid draws a picture in school, and another draws something similar, he could say "you copied me". If however, the other kid writes about what his friend drew today, that can't be considered "copied".
4) The guide doesn't refer to Blizzard's official game guide, but to the actual game. He has written his own guide because of the game, not because Blizzard makes a guide aswell. The two products are seperate. It's not a question whether it competes with Blizzard products, but whether it competes with the actual used material (the game), and it doesn't.
Also if the guide were especially bad it may as a side effect lower the percieved value of the actual game.
Now that's one thing I just don't get.
You may not like copyright laws, but Blizzard does have a very strong case here, especially if you add the trademark issues into the mix.
I do like copyright laws because they allow artists to make a living off their work, and thereby gives me better choice and variety. What I don't like are IP-holders like Blizzard who try to maintain absolute control over anything that is said or spoken about their IP, even in blatant cases of fair use.
BTW it isn't Blizzard bringing the case forward here. But I think they know very well themselves how weak they stand. As I said before, unofficial guides are very common, and there is a whole industry around the likes of "Excel for dummies"
What's this got to do with trademark? He isn't selling it as "Official Blizzard/Warcraft guide", and cleary states that in his diclaimer.
... In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Is a guide for a game trying to be a game? I think not. It is a book about using a product that you have already paid for.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
What the guide is using are basically the mechanics in the game, known and discovered by many gamers.
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Apart from a few screenshots in the guide, he is using his own writing.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Will the guide stop people from buying the game? No! In fact, it is very unlikely that anybody who doesn't own the game would even look at such a book. Of course, it might compete with their official guide, but that is a seperate issue, because he doesn't use material from that guide, but from the original game.
Ebay's policy is like that because they can't research every situation of potential copyright infringement, so they close down auctions when they get complaints from what they believe to be respectable sources (such as the IP holder Blizzard).
Blizzard hase done wrong by trying to make them believe there was copyright infringement where there was none.
I have been able go to my local bookstore and buy guides to games for years. I'm sure I can go find some kind of guide for WoW if I wanted to. What gets me about this case is why Blizzard all of a sudden goes after the little guy selling a couple of hundred books on Ebay when this kind of thing has been common practice for years. It's basically the same things magazines do when giving you tips for using computer programs, discuss strategies for "Dungeons and Dragons", or (*gasp*) write guides for computer games.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the crowd that played roms for free would have bought the revolution, but are so discusted by Nintendo saying "Piracy is bad" that they have decided to keep on emulating.
It's a little more expensive than you were expecting, but at least there are some companies out there that think of that.
However, I have honestly never broken a disc or even scratched it badly. I really don't think there are that many people who would got to the trouble of backing up all their games just to be on the safe side.
Aswell, region-free compatability isn't automatically given with DVD either. Granted, many european TVs do support some kind of NTSC-functionality, but unless the Player manufacturer specifically integrates framerate and resolution converters, you have the same problem as with VHS. Many manufacturers simply ignore the region codes now anyway.
Ask yourselves... if selling DVDs for $2-$3US was not profitable enough, why would they even bother selling DVDs at such prices in places like China?
They try to maximize profits by selling content they have already produced (primarily for a different market). But selling them for 15$ just wouldn't work there, so they are prepared to sell them for less (still making profit though).
If they were to treat their market globally, they would have to set a uniform price. That would mean they would have to pay the chinese workers in their factories more so that they could afford their products (oh noes!!), and accept lower profit margins from their US and European customers (double oh noes).
By isolating the different markets, they can screw everyone.
You might have a few viable arguments there, but you seem to be greatly overestimating the capacity of Blu-Ray. Assuming you use the 50 gig versions, you have five times the space of a dual-layer DVD for how many times the price exactly?
Films are now commonly stored on hard drives anyway. Not really an advantage to switch to blu-ray.
For me, the next generation of DVDs is just to small a jump for me to jump the band wagon. The leap from floppy's to CDs was huge and from CDs to DVDs large. But the only reason I could think of for supporting Blu-Ray would be because of high-definition movies, and the only reason for that is that studios don't want to offer DIVX compression on regular DVDs.
The talk about holographic versatile discs (Storage of hundreds of Gigabytes) has got me more interested than the imminent release of BVD/HDDVD.
Without significant advantages, I would say that the better medium would be the one that maintains the reliability and compatability of existing technology while offering an advancement at a cheap price. At the moment that seems to be HDDVD.
I already won't buy a player that listens to a "don't play me because I'm only for germany lol kthx bi" bit
Although it is a very frustrating limitation, what alternatives are you using? It wasn't any different with analog because of the different Video signals. Even worse, there were signal incompatabilities within Europe.
Many DVD-players nowadays however are multi-region capable.
So where's the EXE to make Windows run on my laptop? It's an iBook. Where's the EXE to make Windows run on my server? It's an Intel that Windows install CDs and disks won't boot on, but FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD run just fine.
We're talking about using Linux as an OS replacement for consumer-grade PCs. Everything else isn't relevant here.
Your attitude (and a lot of people's attitudes) is that hardware supported by Linux and not Windows doesn't count, but hardware supported by Windows and not Linux does count. That's a stupid double standard.
No it's not. I was simply replying to a comment praising the compatability in Linux and claiming it is better than Windows.
When I buy PC hardware, I can be pretty sure it will run in Windows. That's just the way it is. Or would a manufacturer really sell hardware that doesn't work with most people's computers?
I'm not blaming anybody. The point is though, that's the way it is. Whether it's the developers fault or not isn't important when you just want something to work.
Some hardware works great with linux, other hardware doesn't. The problem is that it's totally inconsistant.
If something doesn't plug'n play in Windows, it means dropping in a CD or at the most download an.exe file at the manufacturers website. Under Linux, you can only dream of such simple solutions.
My printer isn't supported in Linux. So I have to select a similar device, which only work good when printing text. Thing is, I also use the PC as a printserver in my house. How convinient is that?
Why wait hours for some friggin water to electrolyze when you can replace the gas in seconds? That's one of the main advantages over batteries.
BTW, you won't get far trying to electrolyze water using AC.
Not to mention, the fuel cell will degrade with time - impurities in the fuel, and (if it's a polymer cell), degradation in the polymer itself.
Which is why there are alot of hopes set on hydrogen. Storing it isn't that much of a problem anymore.
One of the main problems with using fuel cells in cars is however that the catalysts need alot of platinum. Thus, they are very expensive, and certainly not suitable for mass production.
There is the promising idea of using carbon nanostructures to replace the platinum catalysts, but they're still a few years away.
You're assumption of comparable efficiency is totally wrong though. An Otto motor will have something like 33% efficiency, if you're using a Diesel motor you might get one or two percent more.
An electric motor on the other hand has about 95% efficiency, and PMFC's have upward from 70%. So total distance would probably be comparable if you're using mathanol. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is in a totally different league.
After changing the graphics card on my system recently, I booted up, and Windows worked just as it ever had.
When booting SUSE however, it didn't want to start X-Window. Then, I tried creating a new config file, as I thought it's probably fixed on a wrong driver, and set it to basic VGA. But it still wouldn't work, and kept coming with bizarre errors messages about the mouse.
After spending ages looking for a possible solution, I just decided to do it the old way and reinstall. After I'd finished that, I had a few problems with screen resolution and the fonts were also all the wrong size.
Very frustrating. It cost me alot of time. I'm not saying that Windows is any better, but it isn't as if Linux doesn't cause any hassle either.
I actually found it pretty fun, because it was something new. Granted, I was hoping for a few more dungeons (although they are probably the most superbly designed in any Zelda game).
Ocarina of Time even got me a little bored of dungeons nearing the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. I imagine alot of the "young male with disposable income" market felt attracted to it because of the list of features like movies and music, and maybe tried a few UMDs, but then lost interest. Particularly if you look at the marketing they did in someway emphasize the multimedia capabilities
Shit, are those things legal?
In their description: You've tried every method imaginable to see that red laser beam. [...]Wicked Lasers grants you the ability to shoot a red laser beam, green laser beam, or even blue laser beam from your laser pointer. [...]Wavelengths or colors of laser beams vary in visual brightness even when the actual output power is the same.
Yeah, it could be because of that. Or it could be because they're using Lasers 200 friggin times as powerful as stamdard pointers.
I heard that to update your firmware you also have to have the system fully charged, which was pretty annoying for someone I know when he was burning to play his brand new game.
The only two people I know (one I personally know, one's a friend of s friend) who own a PSP are people who just started work and instantly had money to burn.
there will be no need for them to hide a multi-region menu for all of us in the UK that import our films to get them at 60Hz rather than 50Hz
Why would you want to do that? The PAL framerate fits much better to the 24.5 fps that movies are originally shot in, whereas with NTSC, you have to do some jerky resychronisation. Also, PAL offers higher effective resolution than NTSC, and will be especially better if you're using a CRT designed for PAL.
Plus, you can get a real RGB signal out of PAL European players, unlike NTSC.
BTW, does anybody know what framerate BR/HDDVD will use? 24fps is supported in the HDTV standard, so the most logical choice for films would be 1080p24. What is it like for US broadcasts? I know that where I live, the HD provider uses different framerates depending on the material they're using.
While most of what I would have to say are explained in the parallel post, I would like to make two more things clear:
1) It hasn't got anything to do with the consumer. The thing is, to have copied something, you have to have created something that is worthy of the descrption "copied". A guide is something fundamentally different from a game.
A simple anology;
If a kid draws a picture in school, and another draws something similar, he could say "you copied me". If however, the other kid writes about what his friend drew today, that can't be considered "copied".
4) The guide doesn't refer to Blizzard's official game guide, but to the actual game. He has written his own guide because of the game, not because Blizzard makes a guide aswell.
The two products are seperate. It's not a question whether it competes with Blizzard products, but whether it competes with the actual used material (the game), and it doesn't.
Also if the guide were especially bad it may as a side effect lower the percieved value of the actual game.
Now that's one thing I just don't get.
You may not like copyright laws, but Blizzard does have a very strong case here, especially if you add the trademark issues into the mix.
I do like copyright laws because they allow artists to make a living off their work, and thereby gives me better choice and variety.
What I don't like are IP-holders like Blizzard who try to maintain absolute control over anything that is said or spoken about their IP, even in blatant cases of fair use.
BTW it isn't Blizzard bringing the case forward here. But I think they know very well themselves how weak they stand. As I said before, unofficial guides are very common, and there is a whole industry around the likes of "Excel for dummies"
What's this got to do with trademark? He isn't selling it as "Official Blizzard/Warcraft guide", and cleary states that in his diclaimer.
... In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Is a guide for a game trying to be a game? I think not. It is a book about using a product that you have already paid for.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
What the guide is using are basically the mechanics in the game, known and discovered by many gamers.
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Apart from a few screenshots in the guide, he is using his own writing.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Will the guide stop people from buying the game? No! In fact, it is very unlikely that anybody who doesn't own the game would even look at such a book. Of course, it might compete with their official guide, but that is a seperate issue, because he doesn't use material from that guide, but from the original game.
Ebay's policy is like that because they can't research every situation of potential copyright infringement, so they close down auctions when they get complaints from what they believe to be respectable sources (such as the IP holder Blizzard).
Blizzard hase done wrong by trying to make them believe there was copyright infringement where there was none.
I have been able go to my local bookstore and buy guides to games for years. I'm sure I can go find some kind of guide for WoW if I wanted to. What gets me about this case is why Blizzard all of a sudden goes after the little guy selling a couple of hundred books on Ebay when this kind of thing has been common practice for years.
It's basically the same things magazines do when giving you tips for using computer programs, discuss strategies for "Dungeons and Dragons", or (*gasp*) write guides for computer games.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the crowd that played roms for free would have bought the revolution, but are so discusted by Nintendo saying "Piracy is bad" that they have decided to keep on emulating.
"A Link To The Past" was the first thing the music in the trailer reminded me of. (it's the dark world theme)
Like this?
It's a little more expensive than you were expecting, but at least there are some companies out there that think of that.
However, I have honestly never broken a disc or even scratched it badly. I really don't think there are that many people who would got to the trouble of backing up all their games just to be on the safe side.
Maybe, but as I said, there are no alternatives.
Aswell, region-free compatability isn't automatically given with DVD either. Granted, many european TVs do support some kind of NTSC-functionality, but unless the Player manufacturer specifically integrates framerate and resolution converters, you have the same problem as with VHS.
Many manufacturers simply ignore the region codes now anyway.
Ask yourselves... if selling DVDs for $2-$3US was not profitable enough, why would they even bother selling DVDs at such prices in places like China?
They try to maximize profits by selling content they have already produced (primarily for a different market). But selling them for 15$ just wouldn't work there, so they are prepared to sell them for less (still making profit though).
If they were to treat their market globally, they would have to set a uniform price. That would mean they would have to pay the chinese workers in their factories more so that they could afford their products (oh noes!!), and accept lower profit margins from their US and European customers (double oh noes).
By isolating the different markets, they can screw everyone.
I've always known them as corsairs, but there are probably multiple synonyms.
Moreover, the war itself has basically wiped out Iraq's oil production capacity
Which basically means thier plan didn't work, like the grandparent stated. That doesn't mean there was no plan.
You might have a few viable arguments there, but you seem to be greatly overestimating the capacity of Blu-Ray. Assuming you use the 50 gig versions, you have five times the space of a dual-layer DVD for how many times the price exactly?
Films are now commonly stored on hard drives anyway. Not really an advantage to switch to blu-ray.
For me, the next generation of DVDs is just to small a jump for me to jump the band wagon.
The leap from floppy's to CDs was huge and from CDs to DVDs large. But the only reason I could think of for supporting Blu-Ray would be because of high-definition movies, and the only reason for that is that studios don't want to offer DIVX compression on regular DVDs.
The talk about holographic versatile discs (Storage of hundreds of Gigabytes) has got me more interested than the imminent release of BVD/HDDVD.
Without significant advantages, I would say that the better medium would be the one that maintains the reliability and compatability of existing technology while offering an advancement at a cheap price. At the moment that seems to be HDDVD.
I already won't buy a player that listens to a "don't play me because I'm only for germany lol kthx bi" bit
Although it is a very frustrating limitation, what alternatives are you using? It wasn't any different with analog because of the different Video signals.
Even worse, there were signal incompatabilities within Europe.
Many DVD-players nowadays however are multi-region capable.
In which case encouraging military enrollment can be classed as propaganda, it's not a product.
However you define propaganda, the principles are the same in this case.
So where's the EXE to make Windows run on my laptop? It's an iBook. Where's the EXE to make Windows run on my server? It's an Intel that Windows install CDs and disks won't boot on, but FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD run just fine.
We're talking about using Linux as an OS replacement for consumer-grade PCs. Everything else isn't relevant here.
Your attitude (and a lot of people's attitudes) is that hardware supported by Linux and not Windows doesn't count, but hardware supported by Windows and not Linux does count. That's a stupid double standard.
No it's not. I was simply replying to a comment praising the compatability in Linux and claiming it is better than Windows.
When I buy PC hardware, I can be pretty sure it will run in Windows. That's just the way it is. Or would a manufacturer really sell hardware that doesn't work with most people's computers?
I'm not blaming anybody. The point is though, that's the way it is. Whether it's the developers fault or not isn't important when you just want something to work.
Some hardware works great with linux, other hardware doesn't. The problem is that it's totally inconsistant.
.exe file at the manufacturers website. Under Linux, you can only dream of such simple solutions.
If something doesn't plug'n play in Windows, it means dropping in a CD or at the most download an
My printer isn't supported in Linux. So I have to select a similar device, which only work good when printing text. Thing is, I also use the PC as a printserver in my house. How convinient is that?
Why wait hours for some friggin water to electrolyze when you can replace the gas in seconds? That's one of the main advantages over batteries. BTW, you won't get far trying to electrolyze water using AC.
Not to mention, the fuel cell will degrade with time - impurities in the fuel, and (if it's a polymer cell), degradation in the polymer itself.
Which is why there are alot of hopes set on hydrogen. Storing it isn't that much of a problem anymore.
One of the main problems with using fuel cells in cars is however that the catalysts need alot of platinum. Thus, they are very expensive, and certainly not suitable for mass production.
There is the promising idea of using carbon nanostructures to replace the platinum catalysts, but they're still a few years away.
You're assumption of comparable efficiency is totally wrong though.
An Otto motor will have something like 33% efficiency, if you're using a Diesel motor you might get one or two percent more.
An electric motor on the other hand has about 95% efficiency, and PMFC's have upward from 70%.
So total distance would probably be comparable if you're using mathanol.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is in a totally different league.
After changing the graphics card on my system recently, I booted up, and Windows worked just as it ever had.
When booting SUSE however, it didn't want to start X-Window. Then, I tried creating a new config file, as I thought it's probably fixed on a wrong driver, and set it to basic VGA. But it still wouldn't work, and kept coming with bizarre errors messages about the mouse.
After spending ages looking for a possible solution, I just decided to do it the old way and reinstall.
After I'd finished that, I had a few problems with screen resolution and the fonts were also all the wrong size.
Very frustrating. It cost me alot of time. I'm not saying that Windows is any better, but it isn't as if Linux doesn't cause any hassle either.
What kind of Fanboy does one have to be to mark this a troll?
I actually found it pretty fun, because it was something new. Granted, I was hoping for a few more dungeons (although they are probably the most superbly designed in any Zelda game).
Ocarina of Time even got me a little bored of dungeons nearing the end.