Unfortunately this can do more to damage your learning than improve it.
I had a mathematics teacher last year who was quite strict, not that it bothered me too much, her teaching style is her prerogative, however she was an intense fan of the repetition-makes-perfect strategy. I agree, it works, I can do several questions, more if they're complex and I need more practice before I can conclude them in an instant, however she killed maths for me.
Tens to even a hundred simple, repetitive questions with no challenge, none at all. Yet they "needed to be done". It bored me so immensely that I'd do the questions, yes, but after three I would switch off, my mind would go blank at such a chore. I lost all the fun, all the interest in maths I once had. I hated maths, I hated what I once used very often in my free time. Much like a fan of food being forced to eat a thousand sour crackers every day, that person would not eat a gateau later. It didn't enter my brain, I did the exercise, then lost the knowledge completely, there was no love left to keep it there.
So what happened? I flunked maths that year. Essentially I had to relearn the entire course this year in private to resit the examinations and I did amazingly better, because I have a far, far more relaxed teacher. So once demonstrated that I'm able to do something, I can return to pondering about whatever it is that's interesting me that day, which may even be some form of advanced mathematics.
Repetition helps those who would not otherwise learn. Those with a passion for the subject will just get sick of it, and maths itself.
``Ragnarok
To those who say it helps memorise outcomes, that may be true for your "times table" but you're unlikely to encounter such simplicities at a certain level of, for example, advanced trigonometric mechanical integration. Sure you could memorise the outcome of likely answers, but that would be a complete waste of time in every respect. The method is far more important.)
Does Google remind anyone else here of the brainspawn? Surely their spiderbots are the flying brains and their new datacenter will be their Infosphere. They will claim all, and then destroy all new creation!
Ah, the burn-the-CD yourself argument. People don't for some reason or another, trust blank CDs. I have found most people FAR more enthusiastic to try Ubuntu when they have the packaging and the nice sleeve and what not. It makes it look "respectable" and "safe", plus is has nice instructions on the case.
Nowadays I tend to lug around a bag of Ubuntu CDs every day I go to school because *someone* will end up needing or wanting one. Need to get around to ordering some more soon.
How many of you will give out $20 for Half-Life 2 : Episode 1?
In many respects, after all, Half-Life 2 is also just another FPS.
Personally, I will be buying Episode one due to exchange rates, and a love of the Half Life series. Let me explain, the game costs $20, with 10% off special offer means 4-6 hours of game play, which I'll likely replay for:
17.95 USD United States Dollars = 9.53067 GBP United Kingdom Pounds
In the UK, that's very little in comparison to a new game (£40, or £50/60 for newer x360 titles) and I don't know where you get those ultra cheap second hand copies but due to there basically being a lack of any independent stores around here, second hand copies get, at most, 25$ knocked off their price.
Hah! I know that feeling. If we travel back to year nine for a moment I remember marking a RE mock exam for someone else in class. It was a situation where you pass around the paper, let someone else mark it to save teacher's time and what not. Anyway, I had this person's paper and I quickly observe a few things.
1. He answered every question, one to fifty with "because", or more accurately, with "coz". 2. He was glaring at me from across the room in a manner that suggested, "Yo, gimme a good mark mofo or me n mi posse be beating you up." as if I could truly salvage extra marks from his abomination anyway. 3. He only got one question right. He spelt "Jesus" incorrectly, with two zeds, but apparently that was acceptable.
Two percent for him.
On the other hand you also often see the stupidest people get the highest grades due to their advanced obedience to the school. It does very much punish free thought or any sort of expressionism, but I think it's only partly a conspiracy that the drones won't think when typing for fourty years in their cubicles, and more likely administration judging it easier, and more importantly cheaper to work via standardised drone tests.
You may think this is worrying enough to contemplate that this is the top ten percent in this country, but nothing will prepare you for venturing on their myspace pages. Oh, the horror.
It's an odd coincidence you should mention this, these actions have come to bite me horribly just a few days ago.
It's the time of year where I do AS level examinations (A British 16/17 year old set of exams) and as they approached I thought about why I was learning an entire years of maths work in a few days, or more importantly, why I had been comatose for the last year in lessons.
Up to the age of sixteen in the UK schooling is compulsory, and even in a "grammar" (think "allegedly" top 10%) school we can only move as fast as the slowest pupil. This was especially bad in mathematics classes. Last year and the year before we studied simple concepts, some which were new to me and which I was happy to learn, for a while. Repetitive exercises of applying a single formula to about three hundred questions for hours upon end, and I couldn't do it. I found it horrific and painful to my mind, such boring simple waste of time. In the end I learnt to multitask and made my mind focus on something else while my hand roughly filled in the questions on homework excercises.
Roll on this year, I had lost all passion for school mathematics long ago, but I choose to study it anyway as only A level candidates and above are allowed to take the course. Brilliant I assume. Unfortunately, the work may have gotten harder eventually, but I just slept through lessons. Not because I'm arrogant and could simply pass at a whim, it's just the most hated possible method of learning I have.
Fast forward in time to mock examinations. What do I get for my maths? Twenty-three percent. Five days intense study of my own textbook and online after school, I get an A in those papers, with the exam about a day away. That was dangerous. I know it's my fault for zoning and not doing any work for such a long period, and not checking my own progress, however, due to tending to all the stupidest people, I did find it painful to continue any sort of work. Before it's suggested, no, school systems only allow one way of working, and it's going to be damn sure to be Their Way.
In comparison, lets take physics. I love physics as a subject as it teaches the nature of the universe and all other sciences are based on it. To me it represents a set of "Core Truths" if you will. The school also has the most enthusiastic hyperactive physics teacher I have ever seen and this bode well for me and about five other geeks. She let us skip a lot of the course since we already knew it, for example a third of a physics AS course is simple mechanics when, as we're all also doing maths, we could comprehend much more difficult scenarios, and let us do what we wanted, as long as we produce something at the end. She's used the textbook maybe, once, or twice in her lessons as far as I can remember and gives as much variety as possible in teaching methods.
That's brilliant for a kid like me. A real problem for a lot of intelligent people I believe is simple boredom. The work's easy, so we don't work. We fall behind. We no longer care. We do badly in exams. We think it's unfair. We know it's our fault but we were driven to it.
The system here does pander to the middle intelligence child with good memory. Memory is all you need to pass a test here, no thinking involved. I guarantee it! It occurs to the point that intelligent children are penalised often for being intelligent and answering questions correctly. Here's a following example based on when my school taught IT:
I walk into the IT room for a lesson after having been ill for about two weeks, and apparently we have a test. They don't mean much so I take it and I answer as best as I can from general knowledge. One of the questions was, "How does a scanner send an image to a computer?". I ponder for a second and think. In the end I put down something along the lines of "Normally a xenon, or a flurescant lamp is transported underneath the paper to cause contrast which is picked up by CCDs which break down the results into a binary RGB colour scheme that is then digitised and transport
//Be warned, it's a long one. Indeed the issue of females is a giant flaw in their logic.
Girls are VICIOUS, and I'm not simply referring to their treatment of many males, they're incredibly vicious to each other. Psychologically and physically they'll happily tear up girls who don't conform partly to assert their position, partly because they can. How many girls have been driven to suicide because of this?
It's appalling some of the things I see occur at a neighbour school of mine, an all girls grammar school. So much spite and hatred. My all male earlier education seemed much tamer and more civilised, with no real fight in recorded history. Setting fire to years worth of work and beating none grouped girls to a fine paste seems to occur regularly.
Girls often use this shield, they know it exists. They can taunt, attack, steal, and mug guys to any extent because they know if they retaliate they will be the ones in any sort of trouble. The girls will fake sorrow and assault, the Police will think of the male as despicable, the community as a whole thinks it's tragic how girls will get picked on just because they're weaker.
Since the/. audience is mostly male, lets take this analogy taken from a real incident involving my maths co-worker. You are walking home from work/class, and a group of five girls approach you talking "trash". Of course, firstly you just ignore them and walk on. They then catch up to you, push you over and take your rucksack, beginning to look through it and chucking various papers and books out, tearing the occasional one. If this was a male, you could punch him in the face, and a lot of you wouldn't hesitate. My classmate here did retaliate by grappling one of the girls, taking back his items and running. It was bad, we all agreed, and it would costs to replace a few things but it wasn't the end of the world. Until the Police showed up.
Charge was assault on the girl, and she faked and lied about the incident, and of course all her friends backed her up. Stereotypes abound everyone thought he was the evil-doer. Girls couldn't be violent like that, what a liar. Every middle class parent I talked to thought he was AWFUL until they finally got the CCTV footage. Even then some people, mostly mothers, refused to believe he was innocent.
Young males may get all the blame, but the masterminds and manipulators tend to come without the Y chromosome.
``Ragnarok
(All evidence based on years of patching up and consoling the odder/geekier girls as well as experience of friends, co-workers, and self.)
Ah but it won't, because think about it, if they can justify only putting a few episodes on per HD-DVD, they can call it a boxset, and sell box off seperately for higher profit. There's also more "perceived" value to a customer in a boxset because there's more of it physically, thus the studio can justify higher prices for such items.
I don't get this thirst for superior quality so we can see every nasal hair the actor possesses. If it's good enough not to miss plot detail why does it matter? Sure it's a nice gimmick for a while but in the end does it really change your entertainment?
I'll openly admit I torrent a lot of shows and I'm perfectly happy to watch them on my big 'ole monitor. Firefly epsiodes for example (they were never shown on TV here, although after downloading me and friends now gladly invested in a boxset each) are 233MB a piece, for about 44 minutes of video at 576x320. I blow it to full screen on the 19 inch LCD while I sit in front of it, and it's more than enough quality to enjoy.
Would I have enjoyed it more if I could have counted Jayne's stubble? No. Not really.
Let me explain, I'm a teenager, I have teenage geek friends, and XP is abhorrently pirated to no end. Hell, most of the people I know have the XP corp. key MEMORISED. There's a reason for this. They build a lot of computers, and they have to reformat a lot. I'm not meaning their machines, but you know how it is. Friends/relatives/schools always call on "that computer whizz" to fix their machines, and it's mortally wounded with a backup and reformat the only sane course of surgical success.
Most geeks don't have the heart to tell their grandmother that a new windows copy is going to cost £130 (price checked on ebuyer) and they're not going to tell them to use Linux because they'll never manage, having only just mastered their left mouse buttons.
Windows is seen as an annoying necessity to run certain apps and games. It's £130 for a terrible but essential product, and it's felt that there's no alternative. For the things they want to do with their computers, there isn't an alternative and as a result there's disdain for Microsoft. Windows is seen as an overpriced arm lock, so no one has trouble pirating it. Partly, people ENJOY that it hurts Microsoft because they have a particularly high disdain for their products and practices. Whether this is ethically correct is another discussion.
Games are entirely different. You don't HAVE to buy it before everything else, and teenagers LIKE games, and want to support the games they do like. There is the limiting factor that to play online with an illegal copy is difficult in comparison to loading some.bin files with daemon tools, but even with purely single player games like Oblivion, which my friends downloaded before it came out here in the UK, still bought it ON RELEASE DAY to make sure the staff will get off their throne of success and will damn well make a sequel.
In short, Games: A fun product we can choose to support as it brings us entertainment. Windows: A terrible overpriced product we are forced to pay through our noses for, only to have it accuse us of being criminals and die slowly whatever we do, while limiting competition through proprietary means.
It's not a case of. "If we can pirate it, we will.". Believe it or not, teens do have morals.
Fifth was the only one to gain a sense of morality, but he was considered weak and inferior, a quality that eventually killed him through Replicarter. Remember even Fifth happily tortured Carter for hurting his feelings, and something as emotionally immature and unpredictable as that is almost as dangerous as something which is cold and logical, and wanting your demise.
The Replicators continued to happily replicate and destroy until they were all stopped by an Ancient weapon along with simultaneous activation of every Stargate in the galaxy, so you know, the moral of the story is, to destroy this evil, we need to activate every phone line and DDoS AT&T.
To my british friends I have only found one way to describe the Bell situation in the US, without droning on for hours. They slowly build, gathering, gaining knowledge and power, before exploiting it, only to be smashed into small segments, before reassembling into smaller forms, but eventually merging back into the original, or even more advanced core unit,
Considering consumers arn't going to be rash when they buy a several hundred/thousand dollar media player for Hi-Def disks, how many people are *really* going to pick up a next generation player? People remember the betamax affair, and know that this could ultimately get messy. Everyone will wait until companies solve their petty squabbles.
As for me, I'll continue not caring about slightly higher definition movies packed onto highly DRMed disks costing more and delivering little. Apart from as a medium for extra storage and backup, is any geek here really all too excited about the next-gen media?
I do believe above poster is correct: Marketting. Very specific marketting.
Let me explain.
Halo really isn't that great a FPS. I played it, I completed it, and it was fairly fun, but in no way was it "combat evolved". The controls were fine, my girlfriend managed to complete it using a damn poor logitech mouse she scrounged from an uncle. It was simply marketting injection.
Most children, or, most normal children, before the advent of console online gaming around here had no idea what "playing online" meant, or to them it was some horribly complicated process involving "servers" and "listings" and "pings" and computer problems, and stress, and even more conjunctive clauses with problems I could mention. PC games were GEEKY and difficult, the PC in the study couldn't run games very well and it was a family PC so access was further restricted.
Halo then appears with the Xbox, and has a complete marketting blitz, all the kids are hyped and brainwashed by the media within seconds. They rush out, buy Xboxs, come home, play and are blown away. They can push some buttons and they're playing against people! With guns and vehicles, you can even bring friends.
All these none geeks suddenly have the treasured experiences we've had for years, and it's new to them. They think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, because they haven't had better.
If you went back in time to when tape walkman's were around and busted out an iPod, you'd think it's amazing, best music player EVER. It succeeded the same way as Halo. Directed marketting at people who in all normal circumstances wouldn't use MP3 players due to their "complexity".
Add a little groupthink, and voila, nearly everyone believes Halo is the best thing since sliced bread.
As the pressure from the industry gets more and more intense programmers, hackers, cryptology experts, and an entire armada of geeks will usher in an era of feasable and user friendly anonymous P2P to share music as people please.
Drive the knife deeper, kill fair use, kill your customer's confidence. Push them underground. Make them stronger.
It's true, most people will sit down and take it, they will buy their RIAA licenced "music" and sit back listening to whatever's at number one, but more and more people will splinter, because in the end, the RIAA can't win. They need us to survive, but we in no way need them.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately this can do more to damage your learning than improve it.
I had a mathematics teacher last year who was quite strict, not that it bothered me too much, her teaching style is her prerogative, however she was an intense fan of the repetition-makes-perfect strategy. I agree, it works, I can do several questions, more if they're complex and I need more practice before I can conclude them in an instant, however she killed maths for me.
Tens to even a hundred simple, repetitive questions with no challenge, none at all. Yet they "needed to be done". It bored me so immensely that I'd do the questions, yes, but after three I would switch off, my mind would go blank at such a chore. I lost all the fun, all the interest in maths I once had. I hated maths, I hated what I once used very often in my free time. Much like a fan of food being forced to eat a thousand sour crackers every day, that person would not eat a gateau later. It didn't enter my brain, I did the exercise, then lost the knowledge completely, there was no love left to keep it there.
So what happened? I flunked maths that year. Essentially I had to relearn the entire course this year in private to resit the examinations and I did amazingly better, because I have a far, far more relaxed teacher. So once demonstrated that I'm able to do something, I can return to pondering about whatever it is that's interesting me that day, which may even be some form of advanced mathematics.
Repetition helps those who would not otherwise learn. Those with a passion for the subject will just get sick of it, and maths itself.
``Ragnarok
To those who say it helps memorise outcomes, that may be true for your "times table" but you're unlikely to encounter such simplicities at a certain level of, for example, advanced trigonometric mechanical integration. Sure you could memorise the outcome of likely answers, but that would be a complete waste of time in every respect. The method is far more important.)
Lets just say, we do it to make sure it's dead.
Not quite sure what we're murdering though. Probably our bank accounts...
``Ragnarok
You know, if you had piratd it you could have actually used your purchased product....
``Ragnarok
Does Google remind anyone else here of the brainspawn? Surely their spiderbots are the flying brains and their new datacenter will be their Infosphere. They will claim all, and then destroy all new creation!
n )
They will destroy us all! Ahh!
(For those who don't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainspawn#Brainspaw
Don't worry, it was on Digg too!
``Ragnarok
(Joke, haha, y'know? I can see someone already firing up the flame-mail 3000 if I don't clarify)
...that they'd call it YAHOOTUBE.
They didn't. Bastards.
``Ragnarok
Ah, the burn-the-CD yourself argument. People don't for some reason or another, trust blank CDs. I have found most people FAR more enthusiastic to try Ubuntu when they have the packaging and the nice sleeve and what not. It makes it look "respectable" and "safe", plus is has nice instructions on the case.
Nowadays I tend to lug around a bag of Ubuntu CDs every day I go to school because *someone* will end up needing or wanting one. Need to get around to ordering some more soon.
``Ragnarok
How many of you will give out $20 for Half-Life 2 : Episode 1?
In many respects, after all, Half-Life 2 is also just another FPS.
Personally, I will be buying Episode one due to exchange rates, and a love of the Half Life series. Let me explain, the game costs $20, with 10% off special offer means 4-6 hours of game play, which I'll likely replay for:
17.95 USD United States Dollars = 9.53067 GBP United Kingdom Pounds
In the UK, that's very little in comparison to a new game (£40, or £50/60 for newer x360 titles) and I don't know where you get those ultra cheap second hand copies but due to there basically being a lack of any independent stores around here, second hand copies get, at most, 25$ knocked off their price.
£10 sounds good enough to me.
``Ragnarok
Hah! I know that feeling. If we travel back to year nine for a moment I remember marking a RE mock exam for someone else in class. It was a situation where you pass around the paper, let someone else mark it to save teacher's time and what not. Anyway, I had this person's paper and I quickly observe a few things.
1. He answered every question, one to fifty with "because", or more accurately, with "coz".
2. He was glaring at me from across the room in a manner that suggested, "Yo, gimme a good mark mofo or me n mi posse be beating you up." as if I could truly salvage extra marks from his abomination anyway.
3. He only got one question right. He spelt "Jesus" incorrectly, with two zeds, but apparently that was acceptable.
Two percent for him.
On the other hand you also often see the stupidest people get the highest grades due to their advanced obedience to the school. It does very much punish free thought or any sort of expressionism, but I think it's only partly a conspiracy that the drones won't think when typing for fourty years in their cubicles, and more likely administration judging it easier, and more importantly cheaper to work via standardised drone tests.
You may think this is worrying enough to contemplate that this is the top ten percent in this country, but nothing will prepare you for venturing on their myspace pages. Oh, the horror.
``Ragnarok
It's an odd coincidence you should mention this, these actions have come to bite me horribly just a few days ago.
It's the time of year where I do AS level examinations (A British 16/17 year old set of exams) and as they approached I thought about why I was learning an entire years of maths work in a few days, or more importantly, why I had been comatose for the last year in lessons.
Up to the age of sixteen in the UK schooling is compulsory, and even in a "grammar" (think "allegedly" top 10%) school we can only move as fast as the slowest pupil. This was especially bad in mathematics classes. Last year and the year before we studied simple concepts, some which were new to me and which I was happy to learn, for a while. Repetitive exercises of applying a single formula to about three hundred questions for hours upon end, and I couldn't do it. I found it horrific and painful to my mind, such boring simple waste of time. In the end I learnt to multitask and made my mind focus on something else while my hand roughly filled in the questions on homework excercises.
Roll on this year, I had lost all passion for school mathematics long ago, but I choose to study it anyway as only A level candidates and above are allowed to take the course. Brilliant I assume. Unfortunately, the work may have gotten harder eventually, but I just slept through lessons. Not because I'm arrogant and could simply pass at a whim, it's just the most hated possible method of learning I have.
Fast forward in time to mock examinations. What do I get for my maths? Twenty-three percent. Five days intense study of my own textbook and online after school, I get an A in those papers, with the exam about a day away. That was dangerous. I know it's my fault for zoning and not doing any work for such a long period, and not checking my own progress, however, due to tending to all the stupidest people, I did find it painful to continue any sort of work. Before it's suggested, no, school systems only allow one way of working, and it's going to be damn sure to be Their Way.
In comparison, lets take physics. I love physics as a subject as it teaches the nature of the universe and all other sciences are based on it. To me it represents a set of "Core Truths" if you will. The school also has the most enthusiastic hyperactive physics teacher I have ever seen and this bode well for me and about five other geeks. She let us skip a lot of the course since we already knew it, for example a third of a physics AS course is simple mechanics when, as we're all also doing maths, we could comprehend much more difficult scenarios, and let us do what we wanted, as long as we produce something at the end. She's used the textbook maybe, once, or twice in her lessons as far as I can remember and gives as much variety as possible in teaching methods.
That's brilliant for a kid like me. A real problem for a lot of intelligent people I believe is simple boredom. The work's easy, so we don't work. We fall behind. We no longer care. We do badly in exams. We think it's unfair. We know it's our fault but we were driven to it.
The system here does pander to the middle intelligence child with good memory. Memory is all you need to pass a test here, no thinking involved. I guarantee it! It occurs to the point that intelligent children are penalised often for being intelligent and answering questions correctly. Here's a following example based on when my school taught IT:
I walk into the IT room for a lesson after having been ill for about two weeks, and apparently we have a test. They don't mean much so I take it and I answer as best as I can from general knowledge. One of the questions was, "How does a scanner send an image to a computer?". I ponder for a second and think. In the end I put down something along the lines of "Normally a xenon, or a flurescant lamp is transported underneath the paper to cause contrast which is picked up by CCDs which break down the results into a binary RGB colour scheme that is then digitised and transport
....Except Halo 3.
*Large chunk of consumers leave*
Indeed the issue of females is a giant flaw in their logic.
Girls are VICIOUS, and I'm not simply referring to their treatment of many males, they're incredibly vicious to each other. Psychologically and physically they'll happily tear up girls who don't conform partly to assert their position, partly because they can. How many girls have been driven to suicide because of this?
It's appalling some of the things I see occur at a neighbour school of mine, an all girls grammar school. So much spite and hatred. My all male earlier education seemed much tamer and more civilised, with no real fight in recorded history. Setting fire to years worth of work and beating none grouped girls to a fine paste seems to occur regularly.
Girls often use this shield, they know it exists. They can taunt, attack, steal, and mug guys to any extent because they know if they retaliate they will be the ones in any sort of trouble. The girls will fake sorrow and assault, the Police will think of the male as despicable, the community as a whole thinks it's tragic how girls will get picked on just because they're weaker.
Since the
Charge was assault on the girl, and she faked and lied about the incident, and of course all her friends backed her up. Stereotypes abound everyone thought he was the evil-doer. Girls couldn't be violent like that, what a liar. Every middle class parent I talked to thought he was AWFUL until they finally got the CCTV footage. Even then some people, mostly mothers, refused to believe he was innocent.
Young males may get all the blame, but the masterminds and manipulators tend to come without the Y chromosome.
``Ragnarok
(All evidence based on years of patching up and consoling the odder/geekier girls as well as experience of friends, co-workers, and self.)
"If you can't do it with one bullet, don't do it at all."
``Ragnarok
We'll all be eatin' steak.
``Ragnarok
(Firefly, Objects in Space)
Ah but it won't, because think about it, if they can justify only putting a few episodes on per HD-DVD, they can call it a boxset, and sell box off seperately for higher profit. There's also more "perceived" value to a customer in a boxset because there's more of it physically, thus the studio can justify higher prices for such items.
No, I believe they quite like boxsets.
``Ragnarok
...Who just, doesn't care?
I don't get this thirst for superior quality so we can see every nasal hair the actor possesses. If it's good enough not to miss plot detail why does it matter? Sure it's a nice gimmick for a while but in the end does it really change your entertainment?
I'll openly admit I torrent a lot of shows and I'm perfectly happy to watch them on my big 'ole monitor. Firefly epsiodes for example (they were never shown on TV here, although after downloading me and friends now gladly invested in a boxset each) are 233MB a piece, for about 44 minutes of video at 576x320. I blow it to full screen on the 19 inch LCD while I sit in front of it, and it's more than enough quality to enjoy.
Would I have enjoyed it more if I could have counted Jayne's stubble? No. Not really.
``Ragnarok
With great difficulty?
``Ragnarok
Not true, games are seen differently.
.bin files with daemon tools, but even with purely single player games like Oblivion, which my friends downloaded before it came out here in the UK, still bought it ON RELEASE DAY to make sure the staff will get off their throne of success and will damn well make a sequel.
Let me explain, I'm a teenager, I have teenage geek friends, and XP is abhorrently pirated to no end. Hell, most of the people I know have the XP corp. key MEMORISED. There's a reason for this. They build a lot of computers, and they have to reformat a lot. I'm not meaning their machines, but you know how it is. Friends/relatives/schools always call on "that computer whizz" to fix their machines, and it's mortally wounded with a backup and reformat the only sane course of surgical success.
Most geeks don't have the heart to tell their grandmother that a new windows copy is going to cost £130 (price checked on ebuyer) and they're not going to tell them to use Linux because they'll never manage, having only just mastered their left mouse buttons.
Windows is seen as an annoying necessity to run certain apps and games. It's £130 for a terrible but essential product, and it's felt that there's no alternative. For the things they want to do with their computers, there isn't an alternative and as a result there's disdain for Microsoft. Windows is seen as an overpriced arm lock, so no one has trouble pirating it. Partly, people ENJOY that it hurts Microsoft because they have a particularly high disdain for their products and practices. Whether this is ethically correct is another discussion.
Games are entirely different. You don't HAVE to buy it before everything else, and teenagers LIKE games, and want to support the games they do like. There is the limiting factor that to play online with an illegal copy is difficult in comparison to loading some
In short,
Games: A fun product we can choose to support as it brings us entertainment.
Windows: A terrible overpriced product we are forced to pay through our noses for, only to have it accuse us of being criminals and die slowly whatever we do, while limiting competition through proprietary means.
It's not a case of. "If we can pirate it, we will.". Believe it or not, teens do have morals.
``Ragnarok
They patented double clicks? I always wondered why linux distros tended to come in only single click default veriaties...
``Rag
My muscles are augmented.
Fifth was the only one to gain a sense of morality, but he was considered weak and inferior, a quality that eventually killed him through Replicarter. Remember even Fifth happily tortured Carter for hurting his feelings, and something as emotionally immature and unpredictable as that is almost as dangerous as something which is cold and logical, and wanting your demise.
The Replicators continued to happily replicate and destroy until they were all stopped by an Ancient weapon along with simultaneous activation of every Stargate in the galaxy, so you know, the moral of the story is, to destroy this evil, we need to activate every phone line and DDoS AT&T.
To my british friends I have only found one way to describe the Bell situation in the US, without droning on for hours. They slowly build, gathering, gaining knowledge and power, before exploiting it, only to be smashed into small segments, before reassembling into smaller forms, but eventually merging back into the original, or even more advanced core unit,
"Think of them as Replicators "
Considering consumers arn't going to be rash when they buy a several hundred/thousand dollar media player for Hi-Def disks, how many people are *really* going to pick up a next generation player? People remember the betamax affair, and know that this could ultimately get messy. Everyone will wait until companies solve their petty squabbles.
As for me, I'll continue not caring about slightly higher definition movies packed onto highly DRMed disks costing more and delivering little. Apart from as a medium for extra storage and backup, is any geek here really all too excited about the next-gen media?
``Marcel
I do believe above poster is correct: Marketting. Very specific marketting.
Let me explain.
Halo really isn't that great a FPS. I played it, I completed it, and it was fairly fun, but in no way was it "combat evolved". The controls were fine, my girlfriend managed to complete it using a damn poor logitech mouse she scrounged from an uncle. It was simply marketting injection.
Most children, or, most normal children, before the advent of console online gaming around here had no idea what "playing online" meant, or to them it was some horribly complicated process involving "servers" and "listings" and "pings" and computer problems, and stress, and even more conjunctive clauses with problems I could mention. PC games were GEEKY and difficult, the PC in the study couldn't run games very well and it was a family PC so access was further restricted.
Halo then appears with the Xbox, and has a complete marketting blitz, all the kids are hyped and brainwashed by the media within seconds. They rush out, buy Xboxs, come home, play and are blown away. They can push some buttons and they're playing against people! With guns and vehicles, you can even bring friends.
All these none geeks suddenly have the treasured experiences we've had for years, and it's new to them. They think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, because they haven't had better.
If you went back in time to when tape walkman's were around and busted out an iPod, you'd think it's amazing, best music player EVER. It succeeded the same way as Halo. Directed marketting at people who in all normal circumstances wouldn't use MP3 players due to their "complexity".
Add a little groupthink, and voila, nearly everyone believes Halo is the best thing since sliced bread.
It's just a matter of exposing common markets...
``Ragnarok
As the pressure from the industry gets more and more intense programmers, hackers, cryptology experts, and an entire armada of geeks will usher in an era of feasable and user friendly anonymous P2P to share music as people please.
Drive the knife deeper, kill fair use, kill your customer's confidence. Push them underground. Make them stronger.
It's true, most people will sit down and take it, they will buy their RIAA licenced "music" and sit back listening to whatever's at number one, but more and more people will splinter, because in the end, the RIAA can't win. They need us to survive, but we in no way need them.
Biting the hand that feeds you?
``Ragnarok