That's a very good point, and I agree with you. But I would bet Christopher Tolkien has had some hand in the Tolkien Trust and he has done quite a bit of work on the Lord of the Rings Universe, whether you agree that's good or bad.
But I can't believe that New Line is trying to say that they made less than one million dollars on the movies though. That's got to be worst than Cutthroat Island.
Part of me was hoping this would never be resolved and that this would eventually cause a media revolution. Whether it was the rise of local access channels or simultaneous live airing and official torrent release, I thought there was a small chance it might have really changed things from top to bottom.
Of course it will reduce the price of the Playstation 3. Why do you think when consoles are first released they're $200-$300 (last generation for example) and then five years later they're floating around $100 retail? Some of it has to do with the bottom line, but most of it has to do with the falling price of components over time due to exactly what was listed in the summary, exactly what is happening here. This one event might not directly lead to a price drop, but enough of these do.
There are some more interesting comparisons, like how it took less time from Kennedy's big space speech to when we landed men on the moon, or Windows Vista development time.
Not sure what you're looking at but the cheapest 32GB drive on there is $419. Unless when you say "32gb" you actually mean 32 gigabits which is 4 gigabytes then you can get one for $55.99.
And that's why these tiered plans may be a good idea (on paper) because then more than 5% of their customers will be making good use of what they pay for. According to Time Warner, 95% of their customers don't want to utilize their "unlimited" bandwidth, so they'll charge them for the 5 gigs they do use (at a cheaper cost, right?) and when they use 5 gigs, they've actually used what they paid for. I'm personally a heavy bandwidth user so I'm not sure how I feel about all this, but it seems to answer your question.
it gets all location information from gyroscopes and accelerometers. This is exactly what the Wii remote is, except the Wii remote adds in the functionality of the IR pointing device. The Wii remote is built on two ideas: the gyroscopes and accelerometers delivering feedback on movements and the IR device allowing it to interact directly with the television. What Jamie so cleverly found is a device that is only the first half of what the Wii remote is built on.
Same thing for me, and I went to an American school. There were emacs sessions for every CS student (not sure if they were mandatory but I always went) and we were encouraged to code in whatever environment we were comfortable in.
Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't the cable companies, et al. already receive many billions of dollars from the government that they have seemed to squander away on their CEOs and crappy advertisements?
Yeah, that's an awesome map, if anyone's wondering which cables had the problem it seems to be the one looping around the southern tip of Africa (actually connects Britain to Japan) and then another cable that travels from the Mediterranean and through the Red Sea over to Singapore.
I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.
Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.
A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.
Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.
My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.
Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.
Well, we probably exchange 2-4 movies a month and have never been denied. Do you know what it is capped at? And their queue page slogs pretty slowly because there's so much AJAX processing going on. That's my biggest complaint about the site. Oh, and how they don't support two queues. That seems like such an obvious design decision at this point.
It seems like you would be better off with Blockbuster's service than Netflix. My wife and I use Blockbuster because there's one right down the street and if we really want another movie after watching our mailed ones, we can bring them to the store and exchange them each for free for one movie. Since you're already going to Blockbuster sometimes, this seems like it would make sense for you too.
This reminds me of the chapter in Snow Crash that focuses on YT's mom's job for the feds. Federal employees have to constantly take lie detector tests and all emails have a suggested reading time. If the employee reads a note faster than expected, they're probably skimming and not taking in all the information. If the employee takes too long to read, then they're probably slow or distracted. It was a great chapter tucked into the middle of the book.
For those interested, Vuze Inc. is made up of the developers of Azureus, the open source bit torrent client. These guys obviously have a stake in what's going on because their newer app, Vuze, has deals with some media organizations to serve their content via P2P.
Lack of coverage and donations? I would agree that at least coverage wise, the tsunami did not grab the nation the same way 9/11 did, but looking at the money donated is another story.
The United States government donated nearly one billion dollars and another 1.9 billion came from its citizens and NGOs. That's nearly 3 billion dollars total. A total of 10 billion dollars was given to relief from around the world.
Granted, that comes to around 0.0026% of our GDP (someone correct me if I'm reading that wrong, permilles aren't my strong suit), but it's still a massive out pouring of money if you ask me.
You feel sorry for people who's first game is SMB3? So basically you feel sorry for everyone under the age of 20. Personally, I feel sorry for people with elitist attitudes that feel unless someone "suffered" through exactly what they "suffered" through, that they obviously don't have the right to tell their story.
Well let's see, my first game was Super Mario Bros. So I suppose I don't fit under your arbitrary collection of gamers since SMB1 came out 3-5 years before SMB3 depending on what part of the world you lived in.
But I suppose ignorance is bliss, right? Let those kids have their fun while we point and laugh and go back to work.
I just saw the movie Children of Men the other day, for those that don't know, it takes place about 20 years in the future where a baby has not been born in over 18 years. No one knows why everyone is infertile but one of the many theories was air pollution! Seems like an interesting coincidence.
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That's a very good point, and I agree with you. But I would bet Christopher Tolkien has had some hand in the Tolkien Trust and he has done quite a bit of work on the Lord of the Rings Universe, whether you agree that's good or bad.
But I can't believe that New Line is trying to say that they made less than one million dollars on the movies though. That's got to be worst than Cutthroat Island.
With reality TV, you don't even need actors let alone scripts to make a show.
Part of me was hoping this would never be resolved and that this would eventually cause a media revolution. Whether it was the rise of local access channels or simultaneous live airing and official torrent release, I thought there was a small chance it might have really changed things from top to bottom.
Ah well, at least The Office will be back.
Of course it will reduce the price of the Playstation 3. Why do you think when consoles are first released they're $200-$300 (last generation for example) and then five years later they're floating around $100 retail? Some of it has to do with the bottom line, but most of it has to do with the falling price of components over time due to exactly what was listed in the summary, exactly what is happening here. This one event might not directly lead to a price drop, but enough of these do.
There are some more interesting comparisons, like how it took less time from Kennedy's big space speech to when we landed men on the moon, or Windows Vista development time.
Not sure what you're looking at but the cheapest 32GB drive on there is $419. Unless when you say "32gb" you actually mean 32 gigabits which is 4 gigabytes then you can get one for $55.99.
And that's why these tiered plans may be a good idea (on paper) because then more than 5% of their customers will be making good use of what they pay for. According to Time Warner, 95% of their customers don't want to utilize their "unlimited" bandwidth, so they'll charge them for the 5 gigs they do use (at a cheaper cost, right?) and when they use 5 gigs, they've actually used what they paid for. I'm personally a heavy bandwidth user so I'm not sure how I feel about all this, but it seems to answer your question.
My mistake, thanks for correcting me.
So a sports bar isn't in the wrong when they try to "outreach" to people who aren't regular bar-goers?
Same thing for me, and I went to an American school. There were emacs sessions for every CS student (not sure if they were mandatory but I always went) and we were encouraged to code in whatever environment we were comfortable in.
Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't the cable companies, et al. already receive many billions of dollars from the government that they have seemed to squander away on their CEOs and crappy advertisements?
Yeah, that's an awesome map, if anyone's wondering which cables had the problem it seems to be the one looping around the southern tip of Africa (actually connects Britain to Japan) and then another cable that travels from the Mediterranean and through the Red Sea over to Singapore.
Let me know when you make a Fleshlight version.
That's a really good idea.
This text added to reach the 100 character minimum so that it isn't marked as spam.
Agreed, but what happens when they skin their site with images provided by advertisers? Those wouldn't qualify as ads, unfortunately.
I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.
Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.
A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.
Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.
My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.
Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.
Well, we probably exchange 2-4 movies a month and have never been denied. Do you know what it is capped at? And their queue page slogs pretty slowly because there's so much AJAX processing going on. That's my biggest complaint about the site. Oh, and how they don't support two queues. That seems like such an obvious design decision at this point.
Now that's an appropriate signature.
It seems like you would be better off with Blockbuster's service than Netflix. My wife and I use Blockbuster because there's one right down the street and if we really want another movie after watching our mailed ones, we can bring them to the store and exchange them each for free for one movie. Since you're already going to Blockbuster sometimes, this seems like it would make sense for you too.
This reminds me of the chapter in Snow Crash that focuses on YT's mom's job for the feds. Federal employees have to constantly take lie detector tests and all emails have a suggested reading time. If the employee reads a note faster than expected, they're probably skimming and not taking in all the information. If the employee takes too long to read, then they're probably slow or distracted. It was a great chapter tucked into the middle of the book.
For those interested, Vuze Inc. is made up of the developers of Azureus, the open source bit torrent client. These guys obviously have a stake in what's going on because their newer app, Vuze, has deals with some media organizations to serve their content via P2P.
Lack of coverage and donations? I would agree that at least coverage wise, the tsunami did not grab the nation the same way 9/11 did, but looking at the money donated is another story.
First I would encourage you to look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_response_to_the_2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#List_of_Donors
The United States government donated nearly one billion dollars and another 1.9 billion came from its citizens and NGOs. That's nearly 3 billion dollars total. A total of 10 billion dollars was given to relief from around the world.
Granted, that comes to around 0.0026% of our GDP (someone correct me if I'm reading that wrong, permilles aren't my strong suit), but it's still a massive out pouring of money if you ask me.
You feel sorry for people who's first game is SMB3? So basically you feel sorry for everyone under the age of 20. Personally, I feel sorry for people with elitist attitudes that feel unless someone "suffered" through exactly what they "suffered" through, that they obviously don't have the right to tell their story.
Well let's see, my first game was Super Mario Bros. So I suppose I don't fit under your arbitrary collection of gamers since SMB1 came out 3-5 years before SMB3 depending on what part of the world you lived in.
But I suppose ignorance is bliss, right? Let those kids have their fun while we point and laugh and go back to work.
I just saw the movie Children of Men the other day, for those that don't know, it takes place about 20 years in the future where a baby has not been born in over 18 years. No one knows why everyone is infertile but one of the many theories was air pollution! Seems like an interesting coincidence.