Actually, I see the 'downloadable demos' as part of a huge chain of problems, which includes the problem of the ads not supporting the magazine.
The price you can get for advertisements depends wholly on the number of people that can be expected to see the ad. If fewer people buy the magazine, fewer advertisers will put their money on it. Combine this with the fact that it's probably quite a bit cheaper per magazine to print a million than print 100 thousand. (I'm guessing at those numbers.)
It's not just the demos that are killing their readership, though. Game reviews show up online before they show up in magazines, despite the magazines getting the game months in advance in order to write the review. Customer opinions show up on the web immediately, also, and they don't show up in magazines at all except maybe in editorial comments, months later.
Cheats, strategies, even advertisements... They all show up on the web faster. (Yes, advertisements... I look for those to see what is coming out soon that I might be interested in, as I'm not really 'into' any gaming communities.) Heck, even the demos often show up faster on the web now.
There's been a TON of Gundam games. Can't call it original.
Resistance seems to be genuinely new, even if it sounds a lot like that other virus game... With Mitochondria Eve... Forget the bloody name. Grr.
What's the third one, that you were sure of? You don't mean Marvel Ultimate Alliance, do you? It's just a clone of another game, the name of which I forget. Another 'comic book heroes join together and fight in third-person overhead view'.
The answer is actually amazingly simple. Programmers. Damn their souls. They find ways to trick the hardware into performing better, or at least APPEARING to perform better, that wasn't designed by the original hardware engineers. They use little-explored functions for un-imagined uses. They generally just use the system hard until you have to emulate the original hardware bug-for-bug or SOME game will fail horribly. There will always be a crazy programmer that managed to make bug X actually be a useful thing.
Of course, there's also those idiot programmers that had NO idea how function Y was supposed to work, used it wrong and got a 'meaningful' answer somehow. Maybe it rounded the float early and shouldn't have, but his code now relies on that bug. Maybe he used it BECAUSE it does that. Who knows.
In the end, it has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the software used on that hardware, and that's why those 'experts' can't answer your question.
My objection to this is that 'widely appealing games' are created by 'gaming geeks' because nobody else has the access to it. If (for example) my sister suddenly had a HUGE gaming idea, and it'd change the world of games forever, she'd have an almost impossible time getting it anywhere NEAR a gaming company, let alone getting it developed and marketted. And if she did manage such a feat, she'd now have to deal with programmers, artists and marketing types all at once, all trying to mainstream her idea. I seriously doubt the actual idea and the actual product would remotely resemble each other.
In some things, the idea man (or woman) has to be the person in charge, or the vision doesn't make it to the final product. I believe creative works like games are in this category.
Oh, it's a horrid, horrid idea, I'll agree with you there. But I think they are thinking what you just said: Throw it into a lower orbit and let the atmosphere take over. This could obviously take quite a while if insufficient force is applied.
You really shouldn't pick apart a piece of someone's text at a time. You're taking what he said out of context.
When he said 'incinerate their trash', it sounds to me like he meant to use the atmosphere to incinerate it. No need for any equipment for that.
As for the little thrust... A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it. Throwing the trash back the way they just came from would have the same result as throwing it toward the earth: Faster re-entry.
I think you missed his point. He's not talking about grading the students, he's talking about grading the teachers. As in 'How well did you improve your own class' type of grade. The discussion was about incentives for teachers who improve the average grade in their class.
Grading the students is involved, obviously, because it's the students' grades that are used to grade the teacher.
I didn't SAY Africans. I've -never- heard an African that speaks that way.
You really should learn to listen.
I live in the South. More African-Americans talk 'that way' than don't, rich, poor or middle class. It doesn't matter here. There are fewer in the upper classes that speak that way, but still more than don't. I'm not looking down on them for it any more than I would anyone with an accent. It's just the way they speak. You, however, appear to be.
Your theory about 'street cred' is absolutely ridiculous, too. Why would some rapper try to build 'street cred' by not talking like people on the street? Amazingly dumb idea.
Examine again who's the prejudice one here and I think you'll find you can't stand the thought of people that talk 'that way', not me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when WinXP came out, it was still possible to order computers with WinME for quite a while afterwards... As much as a year, I think.
And I think the main reason they stopped offering it was that so few people ordered WinME on the computer that it wasn't cost-effective to offer that choice anymore.
Besides all that, there's 2 more things wrong with the whole scenario:
1) PC Manufacturers will simply ship the cheapest version on the default PCs that get sent to stores and offer the different versions through the order-a-pc kiosks and the internet.
2) If people REALLY don't want to pay for Vista, nothing in the world could make them. They will quickly hear from their friends that local PC shops still sell and install XP and that it won't cost them NEARLY as much.
But it won't come to 2. Because people have shown they will willingly pay these kinds of prices for software, even for home and small business use. (There's a plethora of MS products to prove this, including Office and Visual Studio. Both of these products have very good Open Source alternatives, but home users would still rather pay the money and have the best.)
Wow, I didn't expect the fools to come out in force so strong.
I am not racist. You don't have to be racist to know what your own skin color is. You also don't have to be racist to notice that certain people talk certain ways.
Open your ears for a second here. This is important: Only poor African-Americans talk that way, except for a few confused others. That is FAR from saying 'all African-Americans talk that way' and just about as far from 'most'. It's just a simple fact that if you talk like that, you are most likely African-American. Similarly, if you talk with a Chinese accent, you are almost assuredly Chinese. Indian, Irish, English, whatever. They each have their own way of talking. If you are not of that ethnicity, the likelihood of your speaking like that is about nil.
But none of that has anything to do with my disclaimer. It was simply an added bit of a humor and an attempt to stop all the 'you don't know how to talk the slang' comments that were sure to come.
In fact, the prejudiced one here is actually YOU. You assumed, from a little humor, that I am racist. Prejudice. Look it up.
I have friends from many different ethnicities, and I enjoy their varied outlooks on things. Having all friends that are 'whitebread' like me would be extremely boring and confining.
So next time you want to scream at someone, consider whether you are preventing prejudice or spreading it.
Like, yo, da judge said da chick what was dissed by da RIAA can try to prove her case, you know? The RIAA tried to make da man drop the hammer on her, but in a rare twist of fate, da man let da sister have her say. Da judge said this cuz da RIAA didn't back up it's shit, and da chick did.
Disclaimer: I'm not African-American, and I have never been to Africa or the less affluent regions of any major city.
So, your theory is that they found a security hole in a not-released product and to cover up their mistake, they quickly finished the online system they've been working their asses off to complete. Somehow this security hole was able to get them to hurry up when even the imminent release of the console wasn't enough to spur them on.
"Nobody would pay $500 up front for a phone. Most people have cheaper models, and even the ones that have the more expensive phones pay for it through their subscription."
Wrong. I happy paid $450 for my new Cybershot camera phone. And I'm happy with it. If it had been $50 more, I would still have bought it. (The US version would have been, because I'd have had to unlocked it. I was headed for that before I found the european one cheaper.)
You have to remember that it's NOT just a phone. It's a phone, a camera, a music player, a java-based game player, and several other features I use regularly, like the alarm clock.
The PS3 is the same deal. It's not just a game console. It's a media player, etc etc.
Never assume that just because something isn't worth the price to you that it's not worth the price to anyone. Don't even assume that you are in the majority.
I did read the article, after I thought of that. Hence the 'after I RTFA' bit.
I don't see why CSS wouldn't cause the same issues. If you're using lynx, or curl, and many other older browsers, the CSS won't hide the form fields they added.
I've never used a screen reader, but unless they actually read the pixels on the screen and translate them, instead of reading the text, they'll probably be confused, too. And if they are complicated enough to read/process the pixels, the javascript isn't a problem at all.
I hadn't read the article yet, and just the summary, and as soon as they said 'hidden fields' that are attractive to spambots, I thought "Why not hide the fields from the spambot instead?"
It's easy, you just have the javascript create all or part of the form. Or modify the form in some way. It would happen before the user even sees the form, and the spambot would have to implement a javascript parser to get it. (Or a parser, that's unique to your site.)
I would think AJAX would be a huge hamper to them as well.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any 'proof' to back up my observations. That's all they are, really. Calling it 'evolution' may be too grand, and it apparently gets peoples' backs up... But how else to you describe the changes a species undergoes?
For centuries, the only way for people on different continents to mingle reproductively was to take a journey that was fairly likely to kill them. And then in a single century, we make it safe, easy and affordable. People 'mingle' now like it's nothing. You call it a demographic, but I call it the gene pool.
It's long been known that certain races of humans have genetic predisposition to certain diseases. This is enough in itself to tell me that different races carry different genes. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where group X and group Y both have a very low percentage of genetic disease A. But when their genes mingle, disease A is suddenly quite a bit more likely. I don't think it has happened yet, and it's unlikely to ever actually happen... But it could!
Other less tangible effects are afoot, though. Certain groups tend to produce offspring that look MUCH better than either of the 2 of them seperately. It's a minor thing to a non-human species, but as we humans select mates based on this criteria, it's a huge thing evolution-wise.
Now as far as evolution creating a new species, no. I'm not going to see a new species erupt from homo sapiens, even if we perfect anti-aging. Something would take me out before then, no matter how hard I worked to survive. I'm talking the small changes that don't result in a new species yet.
They say evolution is 'survival of the fittest', but that's not really true. It's 'survival of those who reproduce best.'
I know what you mean about Slashdot discussions, too... One day, I was called stupid simply because I have a Mensa membership. Amazing. Unfortunately, my reply went over their heads because I didn't dumb it down enough. I actually had replies that were stating my point back to me as if I didn't understand what I was saying. -sigh- I've decided to use 'mensans are stupid' as another marker for stupidity, instead of trying to argue with them. This goes on the list with people who use 'ur' for 'your' and people with names like 'xxsephiroth14xx' because too many other people already took that name. Saves me a world of grief.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I see the 'downloadable demos' as part of a huge chain of problems, which includes the problem of the ads not supporting the magazine.
The price you can get for advertisements depends wholly on the number of people that can be expected to see the ad. If fewer people buy the magazine, fewer advertisers will put their money on it. Combine this with the fact that it's probably quite a bit cheaper per magazine to print a million than print 100 thousand. (I'm guessing at those numbers.)
It's not just the demos that are killing their readership, though. Game reviews show up online before they show up in magazines, despite the magazines getting the game months in advance in order to write the review. Customer opinions show up on the web immediately, also, and they don't show up in magazines at all except maybe in editorial comments, months later.
Cheats, strategies, even advertisements... They all show up on the web faster. (Yes, advertisements... I look for those to see what is coming out soon that I might be interested in, as I'm not really 'into' any gaming communities.) Heck, even the demos often show up faster on the web now.
There's been a TON of Gundam games. Can't call it original.
Resistance seems to be genuinely new, even if it sounds a lot like that other virus game... With Mitochondria Eve... Forget the bloody name. Grr.
What's the third one, that you were sure of? You don't mean Marvel Ultimate Alliance, do you? It's just a clone of another game, the name of which I forget. Another 'comic book heroes join together and fight in third-person overhead view'.
The colour is faked?? Shove me some proof of that. All I see is:
. html
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5734583728
Display -- 7.5-inch "dual-mode" 1200 x 900 pixel display
* Mono display: High-resolution, reflective monochrome mode
* Color display: Standard-resolution, quincunx-sampled, transmissive color mode
Doesn't sound very 'fake' to me... Just lower resolution.
You do realize they can only sell what exists, right? The summary is saying that there won't BE a million units to sell in the US.
The answer is actually amazingly simple. Programmers. Damn their souls. They find ways to trick the hardware into performing better, or at least APPEARING to perform better, that wasn't designed by the original hardware engineers. They use little-explored functions for un-imagined uses. They generally just use the system hard until you have to emulate the original hardware bug-for-bug or SOME game will fail horribly. There will always be a crazy programmer that managed to make bug X actually be a useful thing.
Of course, there's also those idiot programmers that had NO idea how function Y was supposed to work, used it wrong and got a 'meaningful' answer somehow. Maybe it rounded the float early and shouldn't have, but his code now relies on that bug. Maybe he used it BECAUSE it does that. Who knows.
In the end, it has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the software used on that hardware, and that's why those 'experts' can't answer your question.
You obviously know a lot more Japanese than I do ;) I was just going to pronunciation... The grammar bit is a nice touch.
My objection to this is that 'widely appealing games' are created by 'gaming geeks' because nobody else has the access to it. If (for example) my sister suddenly had a HUGE gaming idea, and it'd change the world of games forever, she'd have an almost impossible time getting it anywhere NEAR a gaming company, let alone getting it developed and marketted. And if she did manage such a feat, she'd now have to deal with programmers, artists and marketing types all at once, all trying to mainstream her idea. I seriously doubt the actual idea and the actual product would remotely resemble each other.
In some things, the idea man (or woman) has to be the person in charge, or the vision doesn't make it to the final product. I believe creative works like games are in this category.
Hm, almost... It'd actually be more like:
/nitpick
surashudotedu
Yours is funnier than mine, though... Can't fix that and let the OCD win, too.
The proper response was:
o_O i c wut u did thar.
It actually sums up everything you said and also jabs them a bit about their inability to think it through. I quite like it.
Oh, it's a horrid, horrid idea, I'll agree with you there. But I think they are thinking what you just said: Throw it into a lower orbit and let the atmosphere take over. This could obviously take quite a while if insufficient force is applied.
You really shouldn't pick apart a piece of someone's text at a time. You're taking what he said out of context.
When he said 'incinerate their trash', it sounds to me like he meant to use the atmosphere to incinerate it. No need for any equipment for that.
As for the little thrust... A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it. Throwing the trash back the way they just came from would have the same result as throwing it toward the earth: Faster re-entry.
I think you missed his point. He's not talking about grading the students, he's talking about grading the teachers. As in 'How well did you improve your own class' type of grade. The discussion was about incentives for teachers who improve the average grade in their class.
Grading the students is involved, obviously, because it's the students' grades that are used to grade the teacher.
"very few actual Africans who speak that way."
I didn't SAY Africans. I've -never- heard an African that speaks that way.
You really should learn to listen.
I live in the South. More African-Americans talk 'that way' than don't, rich, poor or middle class. It doesn't matter here. There are fewer in the upper classes that speak that way, but still more than don't. I'm not looking down on them for it any more than I would anyone with an accent. It's just the way they speak. You, however, appear to be.
Your theory about 'street cred' is absolutely ridiculous, too. Why would some rapper try to build 'street cred' by not talking like people on the street? Amazingly dumb idea.
Examine again who's the prejudice one here and I think you'll find you can't stand the thought of people that talk 'that way', not me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when WinXP came out, it was still possible to order computers with WinME for quite a while afterwards... As much as a year, I think.
And I think the main reason they stopped offering it was that so few people ordered WinME on the computer that it wasn't cost-effective to offer that choice anymore.
Besides all that, there's 2 more things wrong with the whole scenario:
1) PC Manufacturers will simply ship the cheapest version on the default PCs that get sent to stores and offer the different versions through the order-a-pc kiosks and the internet.
2) If people REALLY don't want to pay for Vista, nothing in the world could make them. They will quickly hear from their friends that local PC shops still sell and install XP and that it won't cost them NEARLY as much.
But it won't come to 2. Because people have shown they will willingly pay these kinds of prices for software, even for home and small business use. (There's a plethora of MS products to prove this, including Office and Visual Studio. Both of these products have very good Open Source alternatives, but home users would still rather pay the money and have the best.)
Wow, I didn't expect the fools to come out in force so strong.
I am not racist. You don't have to be racist to know what your own skin color is. You also don't have to be racist to notice that certain people talk certain ways.
Open your ears for a second here. This is important: Only poor African-Americans talk that way, except for a few confused others. That is FAR from saying 'all African-Americans talk that way' and just about as far from 'most'. It's just a simple fact that if you talk like that, you are most likely African-American. Similarly, if you talk with a Chinese accent, you are almost assuredly Chinese. Indian, Irish, English, whatever. They each have their own way of talking. If you are not of that ethnicity, the likelihood of your speaking like that is about nil.
But none of that has anything to do with my disclaimer. It was simply an added bit of a humor and an attempt to stop all the 'you don't know how to talk the slang' comments that were sure to come.
In fact, the prejudiced one here is actually YOU. You assumed, from a little humor, that I am racist. Prejudice. Look it up.
I have friends from many different ethnicities, and I enjoy their varied outlooks on things. Having all friends that are 'whitebread' like me would be extremely boring and confining.
So next time you want to scream at someone, consider whether you are preventing prejudice or spreading it.
Like, yo, da judge said da chick what was dissed by da RIAA can try to prove her case, you know? The RIAA tried to make da man drop the hammer on her, but in a rare twist of fate, da man let da sister have her say. Da judge said this cuz da RIAA didn't back up it's shit, and da chick did.
Disclaimer: I'm not African-American, and I have never been to Africa or the less affluent regions of any major city.
Seriously. It WAS in English.
So, your theory is that they found a security hole in a not-released product and to cover up their mistake, they quickly finished the online system they've been working their asses off to complete. Somehow this security hole was able to get them to hurry up when even the imminent release of the console wasn't enough to spur them on.
Put the tinfoil hat away.
Oh, as a side note... I am NOT buying the PS3 this year, but it has nothing to do with price. I likely will never buy it.
"Nobody would pay $500 up front for a phone. Most people have cheaper models, and even the ones that have the more expensive phones pay for it through their subscription."
Wrong. I happy paid $450 for my new Cybershot camera phone. And I'm happy with it. If it had been $50 more, I would still have bought it. (The US version would have been, because I'd have had to unlocked it. I was headed for that before I found the european one cheaper.)
You have to remember that it's NOT just a phone. It's a phone, a camera, a music player, a java-based game player, and several other features I use regularly, like the alarm clock.
The PS3 is the same deal. It's not just a game console. It's a media player, etc etc.
Never assume that just because something isn't worth the price to you that it's not worth the price to anyone. Don't even assume that you are in the majority.
Upon reading the headline, this was also my thought.
Then I actually read the summary and it's only the pain receptor that is shared. It would not stop or slow the venom.
Please, read before you respond.
"I hadn't read the article yet," is NOT the same as "I haven't read the article yet,"
I've read it. You can stop posting the same 'rtfa' over and over. Jeez.
I did read the article, after I thought of that. Hence the 'after I RTFA' bit.
I don't see why CSS wouldn't cause the same issues. If you're using lynx, or curl, and many other older browsers, the CSS won't hide the form fields they added.
I've never used a screen reader, but unless they actually read the pixels on the screen and translate them, instead of reading the text, they'll probably be confused, too. And if they are complicated enough to read/process the pixels, the javascript isn't a problem at all.
I hadn't read the article yet, and just the summary, and as soon as they said 'hidden fields' that are attractive to spambots, I thought "Why not hide the fields from the spambot instead?"
It's easy, you just have the javascript create all or part of the form. Or modify the form in some way. It would happen before the user even sees the form, and the spambot would have to implement a javascript parser to get it. (Or a parser, that's unique to your site.)
I would think AJAX would be a huge hamper to them as well.
Informative!? I see toys, clothes and video games, but no gadgets.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any 'proof' to back up my observations. That's all they are, really. Calling it 'evolution' may be too grand, and it apparently gets peoples' backs up... But how else to you describe the changes a species undergoes?
For centuries, the only way for people on different continents to mingle reproductively was to take a journey that was fairly likely to kill them. And then in a single century, we make it safe, easy and affordable. People 'mingle' now like it's nothing. You call it a demographic, but I call it the gene pool.
It's long been known that certain races of humans have genetic predisposition to certain diseases. This is enough in itself to tell me that different races carry different genes. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where group X and group Y both have a very low percentage of genetic disease A. But when their genes mingle, disease A is suddenly quite a bit more likely. I don't think it has happened yet, and it's unlikely to ever actually happen... But it could!
Other less tangible effects are afoot, though. Certain groups tend to produce offspring that look MUCH better than either of the 2 of them seperately. It's a minor thing to a non-human species, but as we humans select mates based on this criteria, it's a huge thing evolution-wise.
Now as far as evolution creating a new species, no. I'm not going to see a new species erupt from homo sapiens, even if we perfect anti-aging. Something would take me out before then, no matter how hard I worked to survive. I'm talking the small changes that don't result in a new species yet.
They say evolution is 'survival of the fittest', but that's not really true. It's 'survival of those who reproduce best.'
I know what you mean about Slashdot discussions, too... One day, I was called stupid simply because I have a Mensa membership. Amazing. Unfortunately, my reply went over their heads because I didn't dumb it down enough. I actually had replies that were stating my point back to me as if I didn't understand what I was saying. -sigh- I've decided to use 'mensans are stupid' as another marker for stupidity, instead of trying to argue with them. This goes on the list with people who use 'ur' for 'your' and people with names like 'xxsephiroth14xx' because too many other people already took that name. Saves me a world of grief.