Or you can get HBO or cinemax which at a minimum of about 15 a month is near worthless assuming you want to watch a movie once a week.
You are way off. HBO has always provided quality programming outside of their movies. Have you ever watched one of their original series? Sopranos? Boardwalk Empire? Entourage? They not only provide a full hour of entertainment for each of their series ad free but you get quality actors, directors, and producers and excellent budgets. The first episode of Boardwalk Empire cost an estimated $20 million dollars and the first season cost somewhere up to $50 million and the first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese.
Have you ever seen Band of Brothers or The Pacific because those were HBO productions and are both amazing.
Do you like boxing? Because HBO hosts their own major boxing matches and after every major sports championships they do a review of the team with highlights and stories. Their Red Sox back in 2004 was amazing to watch and I am not even a Red Sox fan.
HBO also does specials. They did a entire documentary with Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina and it was amazing.
Oh and all of their series can be watched on their website at anytime with your subscription.
Now I will say this. Its almost impossible if not impossible to get an HBO subscription without a standard cable package. But HBO is a prime example of great programming for a fair price. They evolved over time to move from a movie channel to a channel that can provide a wide range of value. They took the right steps to show its worth paying $15 a month. Now Cinemax and Showtime are pushing their own original series.
First off, this emergency system should not be used for something like 9/11. The media in its current state could handle the movement of information such as what happened on 9/11. On 9/11 all of Ted Turners stations were switched to CNN. The FOX corporation changed all of their channels to FOX News. Even the shopping networks went off the air and left a message up telling viewers to switch to the news stations.
This type of system can be useful in something more grand. Such as nuclear explosions in several major cities, a major earthquake, major hurricane, or a major weather system that forms extremely quickly or any event that can take down large amounts of communication systems in a quick moment.. Yes these events are very unlikely to happen but this system is in place because of those scenarios.
Yes, basic economics. If we were to ship all this extra food to other countries their internal economies would collapse. This is a major problem with just sending free stuff to other countries. Imagine being a farmer in a poor country trying to sell your crop and then the UN comes around and just hands out food for free. Would you go to that local farmer or go to the UN?
The argument can be made that it is much cheaper to buy a $200 PC and throw it in the trash every 3 months than buy a $500 one with "3 year support"
Not really. It would be an IT nightmare to replace a PC every 3 months especially in a large organization. When a machine is replaced you cant just replace the box when it arrives from the manufacture. You need to image the HD to the organizations need which means every 3 months a new image will need to be created, tested, and put into play. Any custom network configuration or software will need to be installed. Any form of data that is stored locally will need to be moved. Users will experience downtime for the turn around on hardware. And then you need to dispose of the older hardware in a secure manner.
There is a "Making of the Phantom Menance" video that you can watch on youtube. The look on Rick Mcallum's face after the first cut of The Phantom Menace is priceless. Then they go talk to the editors who tell them they cant fix any of the problems they see. This was a main point on the Red Letter Media review of the movie also. The only thing that saved them was that the movie would be a box office success no matter what.
I think we are really seeing a turning point here. Google has finally passed the point where it has, after a long time, accepted it's not the small geeky company it once was and is now just driving for profits. The scary thing is, they have got in a great position to exploit that now.
Google is maturing if not reached maturity. They did their experimenting but now the bottom line is whats most important. They will focus on the entities they have created that can bring in revenue and will only invest in new entities that have strong potential to grow such as Google+.
The estimate is that in 2012, Netflix's license fees will go from $180 million in 2010 to $1.98 billion in 2012, according to this.
Its going to be very hard for anyone to become the legal clearinghouse for media at a price point most consumers see as reasonable because the studios won't allow it.
Its possible that the new licensing fees includes a larger library for streaming though. Because lets be honest, the current library Netflix has for streaming videos is horrendous. For every decent movie you have about 10-15 that are just terrible and not worth the time.
The original intention was far more, they thought they could get 100 out of each one and fly a lot more often. That didn't work though, for several different reasons. It would have been nice to have a more orderly transition to something else.
And this might be the core reason NASA is having trouble being approved for funding for a new program. The shuttle failed in a lot of areas where it shouldn't have.
It was not practical in the sense of re-usability requiring massive overhauls and inspections after each use which made the turn around time for another launch incredibly long. This ballooned the budget of NASA and honestly probably the main reason why its not receiving the proper funding because the program is bloated and not efficient.
We had six shuttles in the fleet, 1 which was only used for testing and not missions, 3 which were used for actual missions, and 2 that we lost. Losing 40% of your operational fleet is pretty bad considering the cost behind a single shuttle.
You see the trend here? Cost. I would love to see a strong budget for NASA but its just not happening until NASA finds a cost-effective replacement. Of course people complain about the military budget and why some of that funding is not moved to NASA. But a big difference here is that from a public and political view, the military is bringing in results we see on the news every day. NASA on the other hand, I don't know what they have done in the past 20 years outside of their launches. This is why the Simspons episode where Homer goes into space is so funny, because it showed back in the mid 90s how much nobody really cared about the space program.
What Win7 image are you using? I seriously didn't know Win7 came with an official option to put it on a usb stick for install. Also: How big does the stick have to be?
Not only do they have instructions but there is also a video with walk-through steps.
Now when you install Linux, you arrive at a machine ready to go. With office and internet applications already installed. When I install any version of Windows I will still need to install drivers and applications afterwards.
Drivers? Maybe for the video card but for the most part most generic devices have drivers installed by default so they can work. If you need to gain extra abilities of the hardware (sound cards, printers, scanners, etc) you will need to install additional drivers but guess what, you would have to do that for LINUX also, and you better hope your vendor supports it or else you're SOL. Oh I am forgetting Wireless cards, but hey, those have tons of problems on LINUX already let alone Windows.
As for the software point you made. Any OS will need additional software installed, and frankly the software that comes with LINUX although free is not widely used, and what happens when you need to use something that is Windows specific? Well now you need to install WINE and pray that it works without an issue, or you need to dual-boot.
I will say up until Windows 7 we had a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but since then they have greatly improved the experience. Their installation is easy, they offer free Anti-Virus software, and their OS is very stable. LINUX might be a good alternative but its not without its problems.
Don't forget about those of us who were on Facebook back when it was only University/College students. Once they opened the flood gates to everyone it lost that "secret society" appeal.
Well, it only took them 75 years to find the Titanic.
No, the majority of the time was waiting for the technology to catch up so they could verify where it sank. They always knew the general location of where it was from the last coordinates sent from the Titanic as well as the rescue ships documenting where they picked up the passengers. The 75 year wait was waiting for correct technology to be developed so they could send something down 2 miles to say, "yep there it is".
I see comments below a lot of the reviews on the major sites defending the game, claiming that the reviewers are holding it up to unfair standards due to its development time.
PCGAMER gave it an 80%, giving it leniency for the years of development. If a car was 14 years in a development and came out at full price and didnt have an engine then I cant give it leniency when it cant compete with anything else on the market.
From what it appears most of the processing is done on the console side and sent through a wireless signal. So the unit itself will be pretty light weight and wont need to contain a lot of processing power to display the image and send and receive information. The cost will mainly be in the battery and the screen. As for the end cost, Nintendo can afford to release their next console at a loss, they were profitable with the Nintendo Wii from launch day and could take a loss to be competitive.
From my perspective the console looks interesting but so did the Wii when it was first shown. The problem was execution, outside of the Nintendo games I didn't feel that the Wii lived to its hype with the motion controllers. They were pretty basic until they got the motion plus add-on which should have been on the controllers in the first place. Most 3rd party games felt and played like cheap flash game ports and the graphics were out dated from release date. But from the E3 lineup of developers as well as the graphics demonstration it looks like they corrected these issues.
One additional plus is that the peripherals from the Wii are usable on this system and that is something that really has never been done before.
Ghost Hunters was a decent show for the first season. As with most of these shows like Ghost Hunters as time goes on they start adding drama and all this side crap that has nothing to do with the original intent of the show and it starts to lose its charm. This happened to American Chopper and Mythbusters also, and two other shows that are showing this trend are American Pickers (Shatner episode) and Pawn Stars.
For Pawn Stars it was the episode where some guy tries selling The Who Woodstock contract for like $3000, and the son barters him down to $50 because he really wants this for his dad and the seller agrees because the son convinces him it might not be legit. So the seller agrees to go from a $3000 to a $50 price tag. Personally I think this scene was staged because why would anyone just drop down their asking price by 98%? Then of course the son buys it and the father explains how this contract was a reprint issued with Who albums. It was an added comical scene that was not needed and made the son look like an idiot when he knows his stuff.
Actually this is a good point. When the PSN finally comes back on we will all be forced to change our passwords, I guarantee they will put up a new EULA that says by agreeing to this you give the right to sue us or join in a class action lawsuit. Now of course EULA have questionable legality but they will do anything to cover themselves and throwing in a few new sentences might be enough for a judge to side with Sony.
iD Software did this. The Doom source code for DOS contained third party sound code. The source code for LINUX though didn't contain this code and they said in the release that someone would need to fix it.
Doom was officially supported, Carmack made sure it was easy to modify after all the work he saw going into tools to reverse engineer Wolfenstenin. He designed Doom to have WAD support so anyone could modify the game easily.
Instead of looking like a complete jerk you could have provided sources to correct him but you didn't. From my research the quote he is using is coming from Google on their response to tracking users which can be found in the link below.
And I am surprised Steve Jobs response to this is basically "WELL EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT!", that doesn't make the situation better, the other guys at least warned you.
Brilliant marketing plan and it will sell like hotcakes.
Maybe, the big seller of the Wii was the low initial cost and ease of use. My mother, father, grandfather could figure out the Wii by flailing their arms. Hand them over a controller with directional pads, tiny joysticks, multiple buttons and you just alienated the market that really bought into the Wii. For the majority of my friends who own multiple consoles we might hold back on this new Nintendo console. For the most of us this will be the first time we might not buy into a launch console from Nintendo because the Wii really did fall flat. Its online experience is garbage compared to the 360 or PS3 (seriously the friend codes system), the games are mostly designed to be simple and not really engaging, it really wasn't much cheaper when you purchased all the controllers and nun-chucks.
Except for some of the Nintendo exclusives it wasn't worth the purchase. How many times can I play the same rehashed Mario / Zelda story?
Their core market for the Wii was the family that was willing to spend the $250 on a gaming console. Now they might come out with a system thats $400 and totally alienate that market. And as for the core gaming market they migth back off until we know for sure were not getting shovel ware.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you can get HBO or cinemax which at a minimum of about 15 a month is near worthless assuming you want to watch a movie once a week.
You are way off. HBO has always provided quality programming outside of their movies. Have you ever watched one of their original series? Sopranos? Boardwalk Empire? Entourage? They not only provide a full hour of entertainment for each of their series ad free but you get quality actors, directors, and producers and excellent budgets. The first episode of Boardwalk Empire cost an estimated $20 million dollars and the first season cost somewhere up to $50 million and the first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese.
Have you ever seen Band of Brothers or The Pacific because those were HBO productions and are both amazing.
Do you like boxing? Because HBO hosts their own major boxing matches and after every major sports championships they do a review of the team with highlights and stories. Their Red Sox back in 2004 was amazing to watch and I am not even a Red Sox fan.
HBO also does specials. They did a entire documentary with Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina and it was amazing.
Oh and all of their series can be watched on their website at anytime with your subscription.
Now I will say this. Its almost impossible if not impossible to get an HBO subscription without a standard cable package. But HBO is a prime example of great programming for a fair price. They evolved over time to move from a movie channel to a channel that can provide a wide range of value. They took the right steps to show its worth paying $15 a month. Now Cinemax and Showtime are pushing their own original series.
First off, this emergency system should not be used for something like 9/11. The media in its current state could handle the movement of information such as what happened on 9/11. On 9/11 all of Ted Turners stations were switched to CNN. The FOX corporation changed all of their channels to FOX News. Even the shopping networks went off the air and left a message up telling viewers to switch to the news stations.
This type of system can be useful in something more grand. Such as nuclear explosions in several major cities, a major earthquake, major hurricane, or a major weather system that forms extremely quickly or any event that can take down large amounts of communication systems in a quick moment.. Yes these events are very unlikely to happen but this system is in place because of those scenarios.
A science fiction book contains information that might be wrong. Go figure.
Basic economics.
Yes, basic economics. If we were to ship all this extra food to other countries their internal economies would collapse. This is a major problem with just sending free stuff to other countries. Imagine being a farmer in a poor country trying to sell your crop and then the UN comes around and just hands out food for free. Would you go to that local farmer or go to the UN?
The argument can be made that it is much cheaper to buy a $200 PC and throw it in the trash every 3 months than buy a $500 one with "3 year support"
Not really. It would be an IT nightmare to replace a PC every 3 months especially in a large organization. When a machine is replaced you cant just replace the box when it arrives from the manufacture. You need to image the HD to the organizations need which means every 3 months a new image will need to be created, tested, and put into play. Any custom network configuration or software will need to be installed. Any form of data that is stored locally will need to be moved. Users will experience downtime for the turn around on hardware. And then you need to dispose of the older hardware in a secure manner.
There is a "Making of the Phantom Menance" video that you can watch on youtube. The look on Rick Mcallum's face after the first cut of The Phantom Menace is priceless. Then they go talk to the editors who tell them they cant fix any of the problems they see. This was a main point on the Red Letter Media review of the movie also. The only thing that saved them was that the movie would be a box office success no matter what.
Or its just a really slow internet connection.
I think we are really seeing a turning point here. Google has finally passed the point where it has, after a long time, accepted it's not the small geeky company it once was and is now just driving for profits. The scary thing is, they have got in a great position to exploit that now.
Google is maturing if not reached maturity. They did their experimenting but now the bottom line is whats most important. They will focus on the entities they have created that can bring in revenue and will only invest in new entities that have strong potential to grow such as Google+.
Wrong, they got there quicker with the German engineers.
The estimate is that in 2012, Netflix's license fees will go from $180 million in 2010 to $1.98 billion in 2012, according to this.
Its going to be very hard for anyone to become the legal clearinghouse for media at a price point most consumers see as reasonable because the studios won't allow it.
Its possible that the new licensing fees includes a larger library for streaming though. Because lets be honest, the current library Netflix has for streaming videos is horrendous. For every decent movie you have about 10-15 that are just terrible and not worth the time.
Who needs Facebook games when there are VirtualNES.com (Java) and Newgrounds (Flash)?
My parents.
The original intention was far more, they thought they could get 100 out of each one and fly a lot more often. That didn't work though, for several different reasons. It would have been nice to have a more orderly transition to something else.
And this might be the core reason NASA is having trouble being approved for funding for a new program. The shuttle failed in a lot of areas where it shouldn't have.
It was not practical in the sense of re-usability requiring massive overhauls and inspections after each use which made the turn around time for another launch incredibly long. This ballooned the budget of NASA and honestly probably the main reason why its not receiving the proper funding because the program is bloated and not efficient.
We had six shuttles in the fleet, 1 which was only used for testing and not missions, 3 which were used for actual missions, and 2 that we lost. Losing 40% of your operational fleet is pretty bad considering the cost behind a single shuttle.
You see the trend here? Cost. I would love to see a strong budget for NASA but its just not happening until NASA finds a cost-effective replacement. Of course people complain about the military budget and why some of that funding is not moved to NASA. But a big difference here is that from a public and political view, the military is bringing in results we see on the news every day. NASA on the other hand, I don't know what they have done in the past 20 years outside of their launches. This is why the Simspons episode where Homer goes into space is so funny, because it showed back in the mid 90s how much nobody really cared about the space program.
What Win7 image are you using? I seriously didn't know Win7 came with an official option to put it on a usb stick for install. Also: How big does the stick have to be?
Google found this in .0032 seconds.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd535816.aspx
Not only do they have instructions but there is also a video with walk-through steps.
Now when you install Linux, you arrive at a machine ready to go. With office and internet applications already installed. When I install any version of Windows I will still need to install drivers and applications afterwards.
Drivers? Maybe for the video card but for the most part most generic devices have drivers installed by default so they can work. If you need to gain extra abilities of the hardware (sound cards, printers, scanners, etc) you will need to install additional drivers but guess what, you would have to do that for LINUX also, and you better hope your vendor supports it or else you're SOL. Oh I am forgetting Wireless cards, but hey, those have tons of problems on LINUX already let alone Windows.
As for the software point you made. Any OS will need additional software installed, and frankly the software that comes with LINUX although free is not widely used, and what happens when you need to use something that is Windows specific? Well now you need to install WINE and pray that it works without an issue, or you need to dual-boot.
I will say up until Windows 7 we had a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but since then they have greatly improved the experience. Their installation is easy, they offer free Anti-Virus software, and their OS is very stable. LINUX might be a good alternative but its not without its problems.
Don't forget about those of us who were on Facebook back when it was only University/College students. Once they opened the flood gates to everyone it lost that "secret society" appeal.
Well, it only took them 75 years to find the Titanic.
No, the majority of the time was waiting for the technology to catch up so they could verify where it sank. They always knew the general location of where it was from the last coordinates sent from the Titanic as well as the rescue ships documenting where they picked up the passengers. The 75 year wait was waiting for correct technology to be developed so they could send something down 2 miles to say, "yep there it is".
I see comments below a lot of the reviews on the major sites defending the game, claiming that the reviewers are holding it up to unfair standards due to its development time.
PCGAMER gave it an 80%, giving it leniency for the years of development. If a car was 14 years in a development and came out at full price and didnt have an engine then I cant give it leniency when it cant compete with anything else on the market.
From what it appears most of the processing is done on the console side and sent through a wireless signal. So the unit itself will be pretty light weight and wont need to contain a lot of processing power to display the image and send and receive information. The cost will mainly be in the battery and the screen. As for the end cost, Nintendo can afford to release their next console at a loss, they were profitable with the Nintendo Wii from launch day and could take a loss to be competitive.
From my perspective the console looks interesting but so did the Wii when it was first shown. The problem was execution, outside of the Nintendo games I didn't feel that the Wii lived to its hype with the motion controllers. They were pretty basic until they got the motion plus add-on which should have been on the controllers in the first place. Most 3rd party games felt and played like cheap flash game ports and the graphics were out dated from release date. But from the E3 lineup of developers as well as the graphics demonstration it looks like they corrected these issues.
One additional plus is that the peripherals from the Wii are usable on this system and that is something that really has never been done before.
Ghost Hunters was a decent show for the first season. As with most of these shows like Ghost Hunters as time goes on they start adding drama and all this side crap that has nothing to do with the original intent of the show and it starts to lose its charm. This happened to American Chopper and Mythbusters also, and two other shows that are showing this trend are American Pickers (Shatner episode) and Pawn Stars.
For Pawn Stars it was the episode where some guy tries selling The Who Woodstock contract for like $3000, and the son barters him down to $50 because he really wants this for his dad and the seller agrees because the son convinces him it might not be legit. So the seller agrees to go from a $3000 to a $50 price tag. Personally I think this scene was staged because why would anyone just drop down their asking price by 98%? Then of course the son buys it and the father explains how this contract was a reprint issued with Who albums. It was an added comical scene that was not needed and made the son look like an idiot when he knows his stuff.
Actually this is a good point. When the PSN finally comes back on we will all be forced to change our passwords, I guarantee they will put up a new EULA that says by agreeing to this you give the right to sue us or join in a class action lawsuit. Now of course EULA have questionable legality but they will do anything to cover themselves and throwing in a few new sentences might be enough for a judge to side with Sony.
I read that a major problem was that Wordperfect didn't have a GUI until 1993 and by then Microsoft was ahead of them by 3 years.
iD Software did this. The Doom source code for DOS contained third party sound code. The source code for LINUX though didn't contain this code and they said in the release that someone would need to fix it.
Doom was officially supported, Carmack made sure it was easy to modify after all the work he saw going into tools to reverse engineer Wolfenstenin. He designed Doom to have WAD support so anyone could modify the game easily.
Instead of looking like a complete jerk you could have provided sources to correct him but you didn't. From my research the quote he is using is coming from Google on their response to tracking users which can be found in the link below.
And I am surprised Steve Jobs response to this is basically "WELL EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT!", that doesn't make the situation better, the other guys at least warned you.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gDbgW-3buo00Q1EEts94wISIIFwA?docId=818ec774dfc747e4bc8c2be545995bd2
Brilliant marketing plan and it will sell like hotcakes.
Maybe, the big seller of the Wii was the low initial cost and ease of use. My mother, father, grandfather could figure out the Wii by flailing their arms. Hand them over a controller with directional pads, tiny joysticks, multiple buttons and you just alienated the market that really bought into the Wii. For the majority of my friends who own multiple consoles we might hold back on this new Nintendo console. For the most of us this will be the first time we might not buy into a launch console from Nintendo because the Wii really did fall flat. Its online experience is garbage compared to the 360 or PS3 (seriously the friend codes system), the games are mostly designed to be simple and not really engaging, it really wasn't much cheaper when you purchased all the controllers and nun-chucks.
Except for some of the Nintendo exclusives it wasn't worth the purchase. How many times can I play the same rehashed Mario / Zelda story?
Their core market for the Wii was the family that was willing to spend the $250 on a gaming console. Now they might come out with a system thats $400 and totally alienate that market. And as for the core gaming market they migth back off until we know for sure were not getting shovel ware.
It really shows how brittle and easily compromised the infrastructure is.
They probably have rebel sympathizers on the inside assisting them.