It is about time one of the record labels stood up and realized that what the RIAA is doing isn't protecting copyrights at all but is slowly eroding the music industry out from under them.
Recently on Slashdot an article said the P2P sharing was still going strong. I'm not really all that surprised because when a group of people finds themselves underseige for some reason it doesn't usually make them stop what they are doing. Just ask the people who live in the Isreali West Bank!
Anyway, suing individual music fans isn't going to make the problem go away, but it is going to hurt the music business. There is evidence right now that suggests that its already hurting the industry, but the RIAA refuse to link their weak sales with their own legal activities. They want to blame their customers. The RIAA is right now in a state of denial, and when they finally wake up they'll discover that its too late to fix things. The music industry will never go away, but after all this crap is finally over it will not be the same as it once was. The music industry will be completely different.
This ADD-ON is Microsoft's response to the annoucement that the Sony PS3 will use Blu-Ray. It was an announcement which I understand didn't sit well with Microsoft reps who attended Sony's press conference. From what I hear, the Redmond boys were pretty upset. In a way this is too little too late for the 360. Console ADD-ONS have notoriously been major flops with the exception of the addon for the GameCube that lets you play GameBoy Advance games on your TV. That one actually sold very well, and then theirs the HD for the PS2 which shipped with Final Fantasy XI. That one sold well also. But, few others have succeed. Nearly all of the lightguns released for the different consoles didn't do all that well. Remember the SuperScope for the SNES?
What about Fusion Power. Its been proven to work but takes a lot of science to make it viable. Imagine, Nuclear power without any nuclear waste! Or, what about Large Scale Hydrogen Fuel Cell power plants that do the same thing as small fuel cells but on a vastly larger scale.
Let us not forget DarkLight Industries, which appeared here at Slashdot at one time, which is indeed generating power using their own technology. OTEC is based around real, hard science, so I don't think this project is a hoax or a scam at all. Its likely that it hasn't gone commercial yet due to the cost of the technology which is now low enough to make it practical.
Now we know why the Telcos are so dead against Muni-WiFi. It cuts them out of the deal. Most Muni-WiFi services aren't as fast as DSL or Cable but its fast enough for snappy web browsing and online games. FPS games do fine on a 512kbps connection speed and MMORPG will do even better. Now we're talking about a phone here, but what if you could connect a USB cable to a high-speed cellphone one day and use it as a WiFi adapter? That would be something that's really useful.
As a Disabled American I find it offensive that/. marked this post as "funny". Also the Coward who posted the tasteless remark is wrong.
Steven J. Hawkings developed a rare neurological disorder at a young age which slowly paralyzed him. Afterwards, he throw himself into studying mathmatics, physics, and other sciences with immense furocity. He released a book which became a movie called "A Brief History of Time" which is today still considered a major resourced for information on Quantum Physics. He is a college professor and is highly respected by his students and by fellow scientists around the world.
He has called the new Einstein by some. He even appeared on STTNG in a spot where Data was playing cards with him, Einstein, and Newton. How many other phyicists do you know of appeared on TV as guest stars? The only other great man of science I can recall who has had as much attention is the late, great Carl Sagan. Author of the book "Cosmos" which became a very popular PBS series, and the author of the book "Contact" which became a movie after he passed away from cancer.
Even though Steven Hawkings is bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and must communicate using a computer he controls with his eyes he doesn't let the fact that he is paralyzed get him down. He's an inspiration to everyone who has a disability, whether they are visually impaired (like me) or physically impaired. His body may not work right anymore, but it didn't effect his mind any. The same thing is most people associate physical disability with mental disability far too often.
This is why Hollywood is so afraid of Independent Movie Studios.
First of all, they can't control them because most Inde studios are in another country. Second, there are no laws preventing Inde studios from making films. And third, Hollywood studios don't usually get to share in the profits of a Inde film that makes it big until the time to distribute it on DVD comes along.
Why do you think it took so long for Inde films finally get recognition in the Oscars?
My kids play games, some of them online. Mostly its E rated stuff on the Gamecube but they have some T rated stuff and they've played one or two M rated games on my PC like Unreal Tournament 2k3 and Doom 3. I've seen nothing to suggest they're learning violent behavior from it at all.
A recent study that was done says that there is no connection whatsoever between violent videogames and violent behavior at all. My kids used to watch Power Rangers when they were little and it didn't do anything to them at all. Yes, children are impressionable and they tend to act out what they see but how much of what they see really does truly effect them on a long-term basis. So far from my own observations violent games have NO EFFECT at all.
In fact, my kids learned their primary colors from the Power Rangers, learned how to manage money from playing Kal Online (a free MMORPG at www.ganengane.com), and are learning to be better readers from ANIMAL CROSSING (an E rated title and probably one of the best game titles ever made for the Gamecoube IMHO). They actually play very few M rated games because I myself have very few. I have Vice City, I caught them playing it one time when my back was turned, but they got bored with it really fast and moved onto Leggo StarWars which they played like crazy. Just goes to show that when they are given an M rated game to play doesn't mean its the only thing they'll like to the exclusion of all else. My oldest son used to play Unreal Tournament a lot before we got Animal Crossing. Now its the only thing he plays and I had nothing to do with this shift at all. He made the choice to switch to the less violent game HIMSELF. Parents have to trust in their children's own sense of judgment. They know what is good and what is bad better than some adults do. This is something I think a lot of us adults have forgotten. Just because the law says someone under the age of 18 is considered a minor doesn't automatically mean they don't understand what is and isn't in their own best interests. On the contrary, I know a lot of young people who know what's in their best interests very well.
What we are seeing here are the Death Throws of an Industry that has become seriously out-dated severely distanced from reality.
The Reality for them is that the RIAA has lost all relevance at all in today's digital age. Anyone who makes music can make a descent living selling their music online via their own website. A lot of unsigned music groups make a lot just selling to their local fan base this way. This concept "terrifies" the RIAA because it cuts them out of the picture all together. In their minds this is something that needs to be stamped out immediately, and they are trying to do it by killing off P2P. The thing is, thought P2P does carry illegally copied music it also caries uncopyrighted music from freelance artists and groups who just went to give away their music for free. Many of these are formerly of the MOD Music Community who have moved from the.xm,.s3m,.it, and.mod music formats to.mp3 and.ogg formats for better portability. But these people only account for a small percentage of the files available on P2P. They get their music to the masses, people do a search on the web for them, and they find their website with more music. They discover they can buy whole albums, thus cutting out the RIAA middleman. Its free advertising.
There is also the current sorry state of the music industry right now. It seemed like every label has a copycat group that competes with another label's group. It started back in the old days of "New Kids on the Block", then all of a sudden you get "New Addition" and "Boyz to Men". Let set the clock ahead a few years and you get "The Backstreet Boys", then all of a sudden groups like "Nsync" suddenly pop up. What about Allanis Morisette and all of the copycats that cropped up when she became popular, and how many of them are still around today? Then, you have artists and groups pumping out albums that are $15 and $20 a pop and they have maybe one or two good songs on them and the rest are only average, while you can just get the music you want via legit outfits like iTunes and Napster for a fraction of the cost.
Its clear that the RIAA's business model is mired in corruption and greed. They are an industry that has been resisting change for too long and has now become obsolete and unnecessary. Add to that the limitations of the current copyright/trademark system in this country which wasn't designed for this Digial Age and thus that compounds the problem. Last but not least we have the DMCA which was the worst possible thing that could have ever been created. It gave the RIAA ammo it shouldn't have been allowed to have in the first place and now we have this sorry state of affairs we see today with this court case. They've had things their way for too long. Its time somebody knocked the RIAA down a few notches.
Putting the CPU, Chipset, Bios, RAM, and device controllers onto the same chip would erase many of the major bottlenecks effecting today's high-end PCs. Its these bottlenecks, which things like PCI-Express and SATA is trying to eliminate, that keeps today's fast PCs from being as fast as they truely should be.
I'm not sure but I see some parallels between all of this and the McCarthy Era. Back then it was the scare over Communism, which ended up ruining a lot of lives and ending a lot of careers for people who didn't deserve it. Today its the fear of Terrorism, and its going to cause the same things to happen. The Patriot Act and all that's been happening since 9/11 is EXACTLY what Osama Bin Laudin wanted to happen. We played right into their hands. 9/11 was just the catalyst needed to cause of this to take place, sad but true. While the government thinks its trying to protect us from terrorism the Terrorist are looking at all of the rights we enjoyed being taken away in the name of National Security and are having themselves a good old belly laugh.
We're giving the Terrorists what they want, we are acting in fear of them and that is the aim of Terrorism to induce fear in order to get what you want. The Terrorist want America to live in fear of them because they hate us, they know they'll never get us to leave the Middle East and cut off ties to Israel so they'll be content to keep us afraid of them and forcing the government to take away more and more of our rights in the process.
Anonymous Coward writes: "The native religion of Japan, Shinto, teaches that everything has a spirit. While many poo-poo this as a backward and strange throwback to an animastic past the west shrugged off a long time ago, this view is much more practical than is often realised. Viewing everything as a spirit that exists in relation to everything else encourages the development of a much more sensitive and context aware mentality."
Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan second only to Budhism. Only 5% of Japan's vast population is Christian or Catholic. Christmas is still celebrated by most of Japan anyway. Shinto is a ancient religion, its origins date back the Old Stone Age between 100,000 & 10,000 B.C. It ranks as one of the oldest "active" religions on Earth.
The Shinto religion has no establish code of morality like Christianity and other major religions. Its a system based more on people policing their own behavior rather than following a set of pre-written commandments (ie; The Ten Commandments). Japan in general, is one of the few civilizations on Earth that still has a widely practiced Honor-based social system. Though the social-class was outlawed long before the onset of WWII, most Japanese live by the Samurai Code (Bushido Code) which calls for ritual suicide (seppoku) as a way to redeem one's lost honor.
They are a people of extreme contrasts. On one said they are one of the most technologically advanced cultures on the planet and on the other hand they a people who still have on foot in the ancient past. They are desparately trying to keep a hold of their ancient culture and beliefs in the fact of advancing technology. I blame the Tokogawa Shojunate and the closing of Japan's boarders during this era as the reason for Japan's precieved backwardness. When Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor in the 1800's the world was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, but Japan was frozen in time and its people lived the same way they had as if they were still in the Middle Ages. Japan had to play catchup with the rest of the world and they did so with furocious tennacity. This is why the Japanese are more open to embracing new technology faster than most Western cultures.
-Information researched from the book "Japanese Culture" from Honolulu Univerity Press.
I find it interesting that Windows is getting to be more like Linux with every turn. XP, under the hood, already handles directory paths and devices just like Linux. The top-end of the OS does a good job of hiding it by adding a C:\ drive letter scheme on top of it. From what I've heard of Vista they aren't going to be hiding much of this anymore in order to make the OS seem more like Linux.
Can anyone please direct us to a site with screenshots of the Vista desktop?
I agree that Nintendo has what I wholehearted believe to be a major success waiting to happen in the Revolution. It is a system that tries not to aim too high like the 360 and the PS3. Not eveyone has HD, so the lack of HD support isn't that important. Focusing on gameplay is possibly the best idea they've had yet. Not that the Revolution won't have good graphics capabilities, so far I've seen that it will almost rival the next-gen systems in this area, but dazzling graphics aren't what games are all about. Too many game makers have made the mistake of equating mind-blowing graphics as the sign of a great game. Well, it can look ultra-realistic but if the gameplay isn't up to par then its bound to fail. A great game doesn't need astoundingly realistic graphics. Look at Animal Crossing and Link Four Swords which didn't have astonishingly amazing graphics but they played well and had a lot of gameplay options. That's the key, that is what Nintendo is aiming for, and its a formula that will make the Revolution truely a revolution in the gaming industry. When it hits the shelves we'll see a revitalization in the gaming development community. We'll see fresh new ideas and gameplay styles that don't exist on other consoles.
There really isn't much difference between Home and Professional versions of XP other than the server components and security features, basically they ARE the same OS with the same kernel.
A friend of mine has a AMD Athlon 64 X2 system and his copy of XP sees it as a dual processors. So Home, which is the same under the hood, will do the same.
Wrappers for other graphics protocols have been around for a long time. You can still get Glide Wrappers for games that specifically require a 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo graphics card. Most of the newest wrappers work great. eVoodoo for instance is one of the best.
What wrappers do, in "Windows", is take the function calls ment for Glide (or whatever graphics subsystem the program needs) and translates them into function calls that DirectX can understand. I've heard of Glide wrappers for Linux that translates into OpenGL.
Anyway, DirectX in Vista will have something like a wrapper for OpenGL since there will not be any actual OpenGL drivers in the OS. This could be good or bad but the move does make sense. Instead of having two separate graphics subsystems in Vista they are narrowing it down to just one and keeping the ability to use programs that requires OpenGL. Most game developers have left OpenGL far behind anyway including Id Software a company that used OpenGL almost exclusively for years until Doom 3 and Quake 4 arrived which use DirectX. It wouldn't be too hard to add in OpenGL Optimization into the wrapper code so programs that use OpenGL won't suffer a performance hit. I cna also understand why Vista will need high graphics and memory requirements. The whole reason why the GUI was put into the kernel for NT 4.0 was for improved speed, but at the loss of stability. Taking it out again will improve stability, something that Windows needs badly. Todays faster CPUs and graphics card GPUs shouldn't really have a problem with Vista. Builtin video on motherboards usually aren't that good, but this move might convince manufaturers to start offering builtin video that is much better quality or switch to using standard video cards instead which is what they should have been doing in the first place.
What I think needs to be done is to package HTML and all the components for a webpage into a small, highly compressed binary file utilizing an open standard, or perhaps creating XML-based binaries similar to how ODF files work.
The reason for this is to decrease the load on web servers when a webpage is loaded. Separate connections are made to download the.HTML file and all of the graphics, and sometimes if something is out of place a link or page is broken. A Binary file approach to HTML could fix this. Images and other web componnets would be embedded into a single, compressed download. Pointers could be used to point to specific pieces of another web document the same way you can create links in Word and OpenOffice documents to other portions of a separate document or how PDF files can link to other parts of another PDF file. Using a method like this would reduce the amount of space needed for most webpages and making updates to them would be easier also. I also don't see why browsers couldn't be made to support both existing HTML and a new binary file standard. Perhaps it would even require a new Protocol.
Re:Been Done Before... Sorta
on
Build Your Own MMOG
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· Score: 2, Informative
Half-Life certainly changed things. The game showed that FPS didn't have to be run, shoot and shoot some more type games. It was a thinking man's game.
Another game, though greated underrated, is Deus Ex. It used the Unreal Engoine and introduced gamers to the world of Cyberpunk and to a form of gameplay that didn't revolve around hosing down room after room with bullets. It was also an RPG of sorts, though it wasn't the first RPG built to play like a FPS. That honor goes to The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall which used the Quake engine.
More innovative use of popular modern day engines can be seen in games like Splinter Cell which used the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, and the MMORPG Lineage uses a highly modified Unreal Tournament 2003 engine.
Quake 3: Arena wasn't much of a game as compared to Unreal Tournament. UT offered many more gameplay features and better bot AI, but the Q3A engine itself was a decent graphics engine. It was used to make games such as the Medal of Honor series, the Call of Duty series, the critically acclaimed Star Trek Voyager Elite Force and its sequel, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein as well as Enemy Territory.
Now Warren Specter, the mastermind behind Deus Ex, is going to use the Half-Life 2 Source Engine in a new game project. Not to mention all of the real-world training sims that are in development using the Source Engine. One of them trains surgeons. Its the Source Engine's astonishingly good physics modeling engine that makes this possible.
Oh, and lets not forget America's Army, the game that doubles as a recruiting tool for the U.S. Armed Forces. It was built using the Unreal Engine and has been upgraded to the UT2k4 engine recently.
I'm an Otaku - An Anime Fan Elite and Anime Fan Fiction Writer.
Japanese Anime has seen an explosion of popularity in the US over the past few years. What attributed to this was the broadcast of Anime on TV. Cartoon Network's Toonami accelerated this and the popularity of Pokemon also helped. Not all Anime is for kids, though, but the mentality of most American's is to catalogue all animated TV shows as kids shows. This is dangerous thinking, and its caused several good series to be ruined when released in the US.
"Dragonball Z" and "Card Captor Sakura" are two series that were released in the US in a highly edited form. Fans spoke out and now you can get unedited versions. The distributers of Anime have been very good at listening to the fans. The number of "edited" Anime DVDs on store shelves has dropped dramatically since the 90's due to the fans. I'm waiting for the fan blacklash against 4Kids for their hackjob on "One Piece".
It goes like this, the Anime producers in the US make money because they make the fans happy. Make them unhappy and you start to loose money. Unless the rest of the music/movie industry they listen to their customers and the fans. The RIAA should take notice.
I'm visually handicapped, not enough so that I can't see a large computer monitors, and I know others who are visually and physically handicapped in some way.
I can tell you that they would all welcome a new technology that would allow people who have lost limbs to grow them back or regenerate eyes so they could see. You underestimate the the lobbying powers of Disabled Americans. We have a great deal of influence, almost as much as the AARP and the NRA, and they both have immense clout.
Congress can ignore some of us some of the time but they can't ignore all of us all the of the time. If its proven that limbs and organs can be regenerated by activating such a gene in the human genome then mark my words we'll make them make it legal.
As OpenSource alternatives to commercial software becomes available (eg. OpenOffice, GIMP, FireFox) it will make the commercial software makers work harder to improve their proprietary versions.
OSS is getting very popular because its free. Lets face it, our economy sucks right now. We are in the throws of a Depression, whether you choose to call it that or not doesn't change the fact of what it is. People are turning to FREE software that does nearly almsot as good a job as the commercial stuff because it saves them money. Now, IE may be free (you get a copy with every copy of Windows) but FireFox is free too and safer to use because its not vulnerable to "most" of the security attacks that are possible with IE.
What effect will this have? That's a good question. In a perfect world when OSS gets more popular commercial programs should start getting better and cheaper. In the world we live in companies like MS start crying and whining to the government and try to find sneaky ways to discredit competitors (if they can't buy them out)...like the whole embarassing SCO/Linux Comedy or how MS reacted like a spoiled kid over the Mass. ODF Document Standard decision. There will be instances where we'll see commercial software improve and get cheaper, but we'll also see more blogs like these that try to paint a picture in the minds of others that OSS is evil and dangerous to our economy. What they don't know though is that most of us know who's pulling the strings when it comes to these things. Nice try Mr. Balmer but we're not buying it. We/.ers are so easily fooled. Stop acting like a spoiled little kid, quit trying to get rid of your competition and actually improve your products and lower your prices.
Stage 1: Land, really hard. Stage 2: Cry and whine while huge bump forms on the probe. Stage 3: Hit asteroid with really huge wooden mallet while screaming
"BAKA!"
I still have a copy of the original Unreal Engine version of Deus Ex and its still a great game. It was a refreshing change from the same old cookie-cutter "run & shoot and shoot some more" types of FPS. The sequel, well, I've tried the demo and its really nice I still haven't gotten a full version of that yet.
As for the Source Engine. As an owner of a copy of Half-Life 2 I have to say its an awesome graphics engine. I've been a fan of Unreal Engine series for a long time and haven't seen any other game that could surpass what Epic has been able to do, but the Souce Engine easily beats it. There are some scenes in HL2 that look absolutely photorealistic. I'd say Warren's use of the Engine is a good idea.
As for Steam, its a good idea/bad idea sort of thing depending on your point of view. For dialup useres its a pain downloading huge full game installs and updates. Took 30 minutes to update HL2 when I bought it. DSL, cable, and high-speed WiFi users won't have that much of a problem since their downloads will go faster. Hopefully, the game will be sold in CD in stores as well as on Steam so low-bandwidth users without credit cards can get the game.
I use GIMP for editing images for my website. I especially like v2.0 since they implimented GTK++. The interface has gotten better, though the file browser on the Win32 version needs an update from the Linux-style one they have now.
Yes, it need improvment. Yes, its harder to use than say Photoshop, but if you can't plunk down $100 or $200 for a professional commercial software program then GIMP is just good enough to do the job.
From what I've been reading up on the problem it's all due to inadequete cooling. This could spawn a new business of developing and selling cooling technologies for the next-gen systems like there is one now for PCs.
Its entirely possible. Watch, I bet the first XBox 360 cooling products will hit as early as 1st quarter next year if not sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
It is about time one of the record labels stood up and realized that what the RIAA is doing isn't protecting copyrights at all but is slowly eroding the music industry out from under them.
Recently on Slashdot an article said the P2P sharing was still going strong. I'm not really all that surprised because when a group of people finds themselves underseige for some reason it doesn't usually make them stop what they are doing. Just ask the people who live in the Isreali West Bank!
Anyway, suing individual music fans isn't going to make the problem go away, but it is going to hurt the music business. There is evidence right now that suggests that its already hurting the industry, but the RIAA refuse to link their weak sales with their own legal activities. They want to blame their customers. The RIAA is right now in a state of denial, and when they finally wake up they'll discover that its too late to fix things. The music industry will never go away, but after all this crap is finally over it will not be the same as it once was. The music industry will be completely different.
Yes, Futurama is coming back!
:-)
All hail Bender! All hail Bender!
More death by snu-snu!!!!
Sorry, but I just had to get that out of my system.
This ADD-ON is Microsoft's response to the annoucement that the Sony PS3 will use Blu-Ray. It was an announcement which I understand didn't sit well with Microsoft reps who attended Sony's press conference. From what I hear, the Redmond boys were pretty upset. In a way this is too little too late for the 360. Console ADD-ONS have notoriously been major flops with the exception of the addon for the GameCube that lets you play GameBoy Advance games on your TV. That one actually sold very well, and then theirs the HD for the PS2 which shipped with Final Fantasy XI. That one sold well also. But, few others have succeed. Nearly all of the lightguns released for the different consoles didn't do all that well. Remember the SuperScope for the SNES?
What about Fusion Power. Its been proven to work but takes a lot of science to make it viable. Imagine, Nuclear power without any nuclear waste! Or, what about Large Scale Hydrogen Fuel Cell power plants that do the same thing as small fuel cells but on a vastly larger scale.
Let us not forget DarkLight Industries, which appeared here at Slashdot at one time, which is indeed generating power using their own technology. OTEC is based around real, hard science, so I don't think this project is a hoax or a scam at all. Its likely that it hasn't gone commercial yet due to the cost of the technology which is now low enough to make it practical.
Now we know why the Telcos are so dead against Muni-WiFi. It cuts them out of the deal. Most Muni-WiFi services aren't as fast as DSL or Cable but its fast enough for snappy web browsing and online games. FPS games do fine on a 512kbps connection speed and MMORPG will do even better. Now we're talking about a phone here, but what if you could connect a USB cable to a high-speed cellphone one day and use it as a WiFi adapter? That would be something that's really useful.
As a Disabled American I find it offensive that /. marked this post as "funny". Also the Coward who posted the tasteless remark is wrong.
Steven J. Hawkings developed a rare neurological disorder at a young age which slowly paralyzed him. Afterwards, he throw himself into studying mathmatics, physics, and other sciences with immense furocity. He released a book which became a movie called "A Brief History of Time" which is today still considered a major resourced for information on Quantum Physics. He is a college professor and is highly respected by his students and by fellow scientists around the world.
He has called the new Einstein by some. He even appeared on STTNG in a spot where Data was playing cards with him, Einstein, and Newton. How many other phyicists do you know of appeared on TV as guest stars? The only other great man of science I can recall who has had as much attention is the late, great Carl Sagan. Author of the book "Cosmos" which became a very popular PBS series, and the author of the book "Contact" which became a movie after he passed away from cancer.
Even though Steven Hawkings is bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and must communicate using a computer he controls with his eyes he doesn't let the fact that he is paralyzed get him down. He's an inspiration to everyone who has a disability, whether they are visually impaired (like me) or physically impaired. His body may not work right anymore, but it didn't effect his mind any. The same thing is most people associate physical disability with mental disability far too often.
This is why Hollywood is so afraid of Independent Movie Studios.
First of all, they can't control them because most Inde studios are in another country. Second, there are no laws preventing Inde studios from making films. And third, Hollywood studios don't usually get to share in the profits of a Inde film that makes it big until the time to distribute it on DVD comes along.
Why do you think it took so long for Inde films finally get recognition in the Oscars?
I'm a Parent from the state of Michigan.
My kids play games, some of them online. Mostly its E rated stuff on the Gamecube but they have some T rated stuff and they've played one or two M rated games on my PC like Unreal Tournament 2k3 and Doom 3. I've seen nothing to suggest they're learning violent behavior from it at all.
A recent study that was done says that there is no connection whatsoever between violent videogames and violent behavior at all. My kids used to watch Power Rangers when they were little and it didn't do anything to them at all. Yes, children are impressionable and they tend to act out what they see but how much of what they see really does truly effect them on a long-term basis. So far from my own observations violent games have NO EFFECT at all.
In fact, my kids learned their primary colors from the Power Rangers, learned how to manage money from playing Kal Online (a free MMORPG at www.ganengane.com), and are learning to be better readers from ANIMAL CROSSING (an E rated title and probably one of the best game titles ever made for the Gamecoube IMHO). They actually play very few M rated games because I myself have very few. I have Vice City, I caught them playing it one time when my back was turned, but they got bored with it really fast and moved onto Leggo StarWars which they played like crazy. Just goes to show that when they are given an M rated game to play doesn't mean its the only thing they'll like to the exclusion of all else. My oldest son used to play Unreal Tournament a lot before we got Animal Crossing. Now its the only thing he plays and I had nothing to do with this shift at all. He made the choice to switch to the less violent game HIMSELF. Parents have to trust in their children's own sense of judgment. They know what is good and what is bad better than some adults do. This is something I think a lot of us adults have forgotten. Just because the law says someone under the age of 18 is considered a minor doesn't automatically mean they don't understand what is and isn't in their own best interests. On the contrary, I know a lot of young people who know what's in their best interests very well.
What we are seeing here are the Death Throws of an Industry that has become seriously out-dated severely distanced from reality.
.xm, .s3m, .it, and .mod music formats to .mp3 and .ogg formats for better portability. But these people only account for a small percentage of the files available on P2P. They get their music to the masses, people do a search on the web for them, and they find their website with more music. They discover they can buy whole albums, thus cutting out the RIAA middleman. Its free advertising.
The Reality for them is that the RIAA has lost all relevance at all in today's digital age. Anyone who makes music can make a descent living selling their music online via their own website. A lot of unsigned music groups make a lot just selling to their local fan base this way. This concept "terrifies" the RIAA because it cuts them out of the picture all together. In their minds this is something that needs to be stamped out immediately, and they are trying to do it by killing off P2P. The thing is, thought P2P does carry illegally copied music it also caries uncopyrighted music from freelance artists and groups who just went to give away their music for free. Many of these are formerly of the MOD Music Community who have moved from the
There is also the current sorry state of the music industry right now. It seemed like every label has a copycat group that competes with another label's group. It started back in the old days of "New Kids on the Block", then all of a sudden you get "New Addition" and "Boyz to Men". Let set the clock ahead a few years and you get "The Backstreet Boys", then all of a sudden groups like "Nsync" suddenly pop up. What about Allanis Morisette and all of the copycats that cropped up when she became popular, and how many of them are still around today? Then, you have artists and groups pumping out albums that are $15 and $20 a pop and they have maybe one or two good songs on them and the rest are only average, while you can just get the music you want via legit outfits like iTunes and Napster for a fraction of the cost.
Its clear that the RIAA's business model is mired in corruption and greed. They are an industry that has been resisting change for too long and has now become obsolete and unnecessary. Add to that the limitations of the current copyright/trademark system in this country which wasn't designed for this Digial Age and thus that compounds the problem. Last but not least we have the DMCA which was the worst possible thing that could have ever been created. It gave the RIAA ammo it shouldn't have been allowed to have in the first place and now we have this sorry state of affairs we see today with this court case. They've had things their way for too long. Its time somebody knocked the RIAA down a few notches.
Putting the CPU, Chipset, Bios, RAM, and device controllers onto the same chip would erase many of the major bottlenecks effecting today's high-end PCs. Its these bottlenecks, which things like PCI-Express and SATA is trying to eliminate, that keeps today's fast PCs from being as fast as they truely should be.
I'm not sure but I see some parallels between all of this and the McCarthy Era. Back then it was the scare over Communism, which ended up ruining a lot of lives and ending a lot of careers for people who didn't deserve it. Today its the fear of Terrorism, and its going to cause the same things to happen. The Patriot Act and all that's been happening since 9/11 is EXACTLY what Osama Bin Laudin wanted to happen. We played right into their hands. 9/11 was just the catalyst needed to cause of this to take place, sad but true. While the government thinks its trying to protect us from terrorism the Terrorist are looking at all of the rights we enjoyed being taken away in the name of National Security and are having themselves a good old belly laugh.
We're giving the Terrorists what they want, we are acting in fear of them and that is the aim of Terrorism to induce fear in order to get what you want. The Terrorist want America to live in fear of them because they hate us, they know they'll never get us to leave the Middle East and cut off ties to Israel so they'll be content to keep us afraid of them and forcing the government to take away more and more of our rights in the process.
Anonymous Coward writes:
"The native religion of Japan, Shinto, teaches that everything has a spirit. While many poo-poo this as a backward and strange throwback to an animastic past the west shrugged off a long time ago, this view is much more practical than is often realised. Viewing everything as a spirit that exists in relation to everything else encourages the development of a much more sensitive and context aware mentality."
Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan second only to Budhism. Only 5% of Japan's vast population is Christian or Catholic. Christmas is still celebrated by most of Japan anyway. Shinto is a ancient religion, its origins date back the Old Stone Age between 100,000 & 10,000 B.C. It ranks as one of the oldest "active" religions on Earth.
The Shinto religion has no establish code of morality like Christianity and other major religions. Its a system based more on people policing their own behavior rather than following a set of pre-written commandments (ie; The Ten Commandments). Japan in general, is one of the few civilizations on Earth that still has a widely practiced Honor-based social system. Though the social-class was outlawed long before the onset of WWII, most Japanese live by the Samurai Code (Bushido Code) which calls for ritual suicide (seppoku) as a way to redeem one's lost honor.
They are a people of extreme contrasts. On one said they are one of the most technologically advanced cultures on the planet and on the other hand they a people who still have on foot in the ancient past. They are desparately trying to keep a hold of their ancient culture and beliefs in the fact of advancing technology. I blame the Tokogawa Shojunate and the closing of Japan's boarders during this era as the reason for Japan's precieved backwardness. When Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor in the 1800's the world was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, but Japan was frozen in time and its people lived the same way they had as if they were still in the Middle Ages. Japan had to play catchup with the rest of the world and they did so with furocious tennacity. This is why the Japanese are more open to embracing new technology faster than most Western cultures.
-Information researched from the book "Japanese Culture" from Honolulu Univerity Press.
I find it interesting that Windows is getting to be more like Linux with every turn. XP, under the hood, already handles directory paths and devices just like Linux. The top-end of the OS does a good job of hiding it by adding a C:\ drive letter scheme on top of it. From what I've heard of Vista they aren't going to be hiding much of this anymore in order to make the OS seem more like Linux.
Can anyone please direct us to a site with screenshots of the Vista desktop?
I agree that Nintendo has what I wholehearted believe to be a major success waiting to happen in the Revolution. It is a system that tries not to aim too high like the 360 and the PS3. Not eveyone has HD, so the lack of HD support isn't that important. Focusing on gameplay is possibly the best idea they've had yet. Not that the Revolution won't have good graphics capabilities, so far I've seen that it will almost rival the next-gen systems in this area, but dazzling graphics aren't what games are all about. Too many game makers have made the mistake of equating mind-blowing graphics as the sign of a great game. Well, it can look ultra-realistic but if the gameplay isn't up to par then its bound to fail. A great game doesn't need astoundingly realistic graphics. Look at Animal Crossing and Link Four Swords which didn't have astonishingly amazing graphics but they played well and had a lot of gameplay options. That's the key, that is what Nintendo is aiming for, and its a formula that will make the Revolution truely a revolution in the gaming industry. When it hits the shelves we'll see a revitalization in the gaming development community. We'll see fresh new ideas and gameplay styles that don't exist on other consoles.
There really isn't much difference between Home and Professional versions of XP other than the server components and security features, basically they ARE the same OS with the same kernel.
A friend of mine has a AMD Athlon 64 X2 system and his copy of XP sees it as a dual processors. So Home, which is the same under the hood, will do the same.
Wrappers for other graphics protocols have been around for a long time. You can still get Glide Wrappers for games that specifically require a 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo graphics card. Most of the newest wrappers work great. eVoodoo for instance is one of the best.
What wrappers do, in "Windows", is take the function calls ment for Glide (or whatever graphics subsystem the program needs) and translates them into function calls that DirectX can understand. I've heard of Glide wrappers for Linux that translates into OpenGL.
Anyway, DirectX in Vista will have something like a wrapper for OpenGL since there will not be any actual OpenGL drivers in the OS. This could be good or bad but the move does make sense. Instead of having two separate graphics subsystems in Vista they are narrowing it down to just one and keeping the ability to use programs that requires OpenGL. Most game developers have left OpenGL far behind anyway including Id Software a company that used OpenGL almost exclusively for years until Doom 3 and Quake 4 arrived which use DirectX. It wouldn't be too hard to add in OpenGL Optimization into the wrapper code so programs that use OpenGL won't suffer a performance hit. I cna also understand why Vista will need high graphics and memory requirements. The whole reason why the GUI was put into the kernel for NT 4.0 was for improved speed, but at the loss of stability. Taking it out again will improve stability, something that Windows needs badly. Todays faster CPUs and graphics card GPUs shouldn't really have a problem with Vista. Builtin video on motherboards usually aren't that good, but this move might convince manufaturers to start offering builtin video that is much better quality or switch to using standard video cards instead which is what they should have been doing in the first place.
What I think needs to be done is to package HTML and all the components for a webpage into a small, highly compressed binary file utilizing an open standard, or perhaps creating XML-based binaries similar to how ODF files work.
.HTML file and all of the graphics, and sometimes if something is out of place a link or page is broken. A Binary file approach to HTML could fix this. Images and other web componnets would be embedded into a single, compressed download. Pointers could be used to point to specific pieces of another web document the same way you can create links in Word and OpenOffice documents to other portions of a separate document or how PDF files can link to other parts of another PDF file. Using a method like this would reduce the amount of space needed for most webpages and making updates to them would be easier also. I also don't see why browsers couldn't be made to support both existing HTML and a new binary file standard. Perhaps it would even require a new Protocol.
The reason for this is to decrease the load on web servers when a webpage is loaded. Separate connections are made to download the
Half-Life certainly changed things. The game showed that FPS didn't have to be run, shoot and shoot some more type games. It was a thinking man's game.
Another game, though greated underrated, is Deus Ex. It used the Unreal Engoine and introduced gamers to the world of Cyberpunk and to a form of gameplay that didn't revolve around hosing down room after room with bullets. It was also an RPG of sorts, though it wasn't the first RPG built to play like a FPS. That honor goes to The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall which used the Quake engine.
More innovative use of popular modern day engines can be seen in games like Splinter Cell which used the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, and the MMORPG Lineage uses a highly modified Unreal Tournament 2003 engine.
Quake 3: Arena wasn't much of a game as compared to Unreal Tournament. UT offered many more gameplay features and better bot AI, but the Q3A engine itself was a decent graphics engine. It was used to make games such as the Medal of Honor series, the Call of Duty series, the critically acclaimed Star Trek Voyager Elite Force and its sequel, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein as well as Enemy Territory.
Now Warren Specter, the mastermind behind Deus Ex, is going to use the Half-Life 2 Source Engine in a new game project. Not to mention all of the real-world training sims that are in development using the Source Engine. One of them trains surgeons. Its the Source Engine's astonishingly good physics modeling engine that makes this possible.
Oh, and lets not forget America's Army, the game that doubles as a recruiting tool for the U.S. Armed Forces. It was built using the Unreal Engine and has been upgraded to the UT2k4 engine recently.
I'm an Otaku - An Anime Fan Elite and Anime Fan Fiction Writer.
Japanese Anime has seen an explosion of popularity in the US over the past few years. What attributed to this was the broadcast of Anime on TV. Cartoon Network's Toonami accelerated this and the popularity of Pokemon also helped. Not all Anime is for kids, though, but the mentality of most American's is to catalogue all animated TV shows as kids shows. This is dangerous thinking, and its caused several good series to be ruined when released in the US.
"Dragonball Z" and "Card Captor Sakura" are two series that were released in the US in a highly edited form. Fans spoke out and now you can get unedited versions. The distributers of Anime have been very good at listening to the fans. The number of "edited" Anime DVDs on store shelves has dropped dramatically since the 90's due to the fans. I'm waiting for the fan blacklash against 4Kids for their hackjob on "One Piece".
It goes like this, the Anime producers in the US make money because they make the fans happy. Make them unhappy and you start to loose money. Unless the rest of the music/movie industry they listen to their customers and the fans. The RIAA should take notice.
I'm visually handicapped, not enough so that I can't see a large computer monitors, and I know others who are visually and physically handicapped in some way.
I can tell you that they would all welcome a new technology that would allow people who have lost limbs to grow them back or regenerate eyes so they could see. You underestimate the the lobbying powers of Disabled Americans. We have a great deal of influence, almost as much as the AARP and the NRA, and they both have immense clout.
Congress can ignore some of us some of the time but they can't ignore all of us all the of the time. If its proven that limbs and organs can be regenerated by activating such a gene in the human genome then mark my words we'll make them make it legal.
So true mwfolsom, so true.
/.ers are so easily fooled. Stop acting like a spoiled little kid, quit trying to get rid of your competition and actually improve your products and lower your prices.
As OpenSource alternatives to commercial software becomes available (eg. OpenOffice, GIMP, FireFox) it will make the commercial software makers work harder to improve their proprietary versions.
OSS is getting very popular because its free. Lets face it, our economy sucks right now. We are in the throws of a Depression, whether you choose to call it that or not doesn't change the fact of what it is. People are turning to FREE software that does nearly almsot as good a job as the commercial stuff because it saves them money. Now, IE may be free (you get a copy with every copy of Windows) but FireFox is free too and safer to use because its not vulnerable to "most" of the security attacks that are possible with IE.
What effect will this have? That's a good question. In a perfect world when OSS gets more popular commercial programs should start getting better and cheaper. In the world we live in companies like MS start crying and whining to the government and try to find sneaky ways to discredit competitors (if they can't buy them out)...like the whole embarassing SCO/Linux Comedy or how MS reacted like a spoiled kid over the Mass. ODF Document Standard decision. There will be instances where we'll see commercial software improve and get cheaper, but we'll also see more blogs like these that try to paint a picture in the minds of others that OSS is evil and dangerous to our economy. What they don't know though is that most of us know who's pulling the strings when it comes to these things. Nice try Mr. Balmer but we're not buying it. We
Stage 1: Land, really hard.
Stage 2: Cry and whine while huge bump forms on the probe.
Stage 3: Hit asteroid with really huge wooden mallet while screaming
"BAKA!"
I still have a copy of the original Unreal Engine version of Deus Ex and its still a great game. It was a refreshing change from the same old cookie-cutter "run & shoot and shoot some more" types of FPS. The sequel, well, I've tried the demo and its really nice I still haven't gotten a full version of that yet.
As for the Source Engine. As an owner of a copy of Half-Life 2 I have to say its an awesome graphics engine. I've been a fan of Unreal Engine series for a long time and haven't seen any other game that could surpass what Epic has been able to do, but the Souce Engine easily beats it. There are some scenes in HL2 that look absolutely photorealistic. I'd say Warren's use of the Engine is a good idea.
As for Steam, its a good idea/bad idea sort of thing depending on your point of view. For dialup useres its a pain downloading huge full game installs and updates. Took 30 minutes to update HL2 when I bought it. DSL, cable, and high-speed WiFi users won't have that much of a problem since their downloads will go faster. Hopefully, the game will be sold in CD in stores as well as on Steam so low-bandwidth users without credit cards can get the game.
I use GIMP for editing images for my website. I especially like v2.0 since they implimented GTK++. The interface has gotten better, though the file browser on the Win32 version needs an update from the Linux-style one they have now.
Yes, it need improvment. Yes, its harder to use than say Photoshop, but if you can't plunk down $100 or $200 for a professional commercial software program then GIMP is just good enough to do the job.
For web design its perfect.
From what I've been reading up on the problem it's all due to inadequete cooling. This could spawn a new business of developing and selling cooling technologies for the next-gen systems like there is one now for PCs.
Its entirely possible. Watch, I bet the first XBox 360 cooling products will hit as early as 1st quarter next year if not sooner.