"That's a good question, though. You can already get satellite internet if you really want it, but it's expensive, relatively slow, and has high latency, given the distance of the satellite. Why would anybody who has other high-speed options actually want satellite internet?"
This isn't a great answer, but I'll offer it. My dad goes on camping trips a lot. I remember him mentioning that he brought his dish with him a couple of times. If he could have gotten internet that way, bonus!
That said, I wouldn't call that mass market or anything. Heh. I just wish we had that when I went camping with him.
"I am delighted by all three consoles personally, and simply have a penchant for accurate information about them instead of misleading groundless accusations."
Ah... so why are you replying to my post then? The price reason is valid and the other two you've conveniently ignored. I'm delighted by world peace and an end to hunger, but I don't understand this irrational desire that some have to blindly defend any given console under the guise of being rational.
"It's been awhile since we had some negative sony press. I was starting to get worried. Way to go!"
Like or hate the anti-Sony press, it's happening at a time where Sony could still do something about it. If that's not enough, then oh well, Sony earned it. That's the standard excuse for poo-pooing future Microsoft releases.
That takes more time and more talent to write. It'd be a pain in the butt if mobile phone or digital camera processors were so slow everything had to be super optimized just to be useful. Heck, I remember using one of the first digital cameras. Relatively speaking, it took forever just for it to capture, encode, and save the image to memory. Nowadays you can get cameras that take the pictures super fast. I say we should have faster processing AND better software. Not just one or the other.
" I could understand if Apple is worried about people using the term iPod, but Pod is a common word. What's next, Apple trying to stop people from using the word Book since it might be confused with iBook?"
Apple's defending the trademark so that a company doesn't come out with an MP3 player called the ePod that looks suspiciously similar to the iPod. I'm not defending their actions here, but to a degree it's understandable. Last thing they need is to find themselves in a case like that and have to sift through a bunch of previous infractions first. Basically what I'm saying is that trademark law works in such a way that they have a fire lit under them to be Litigious Bastards.
"Will I be able to play virtual console games across the internet like the person was sitting across the room?"
Unless some games are specifically tooled for this purpose, I wouldn't expect it at all. None of those games were made with the idea that the other player would have a ~100ms response time.
"YouTube does have a community but its biggest boon comes from embedding videos into other pages, especially blogs. "
I think you underestimate just how massive Youtube's site is. It's not uncommon to find vids that have 500+ comments attached to them. I know lots of people who go to Youtube just to find silly stuff and share it with their friends. Great time killer. My experience, of course, is simply anecdotal. I'm having a hard time imagining YouTube's fate being sealed very quickly.
Okay. How would the world be different without them?
Allow me to explain my point of view: If Kleenex or Coca Cola never came into being, it's difficult for me to imagine something under a different name wouldn't have taken their places. I'll admit I may be narrowing the view a bit too much, but I'm a little reluctant to call something world changing simply because I respect the brand. Yes, Google's become a big part of my life, but it also feels like something that was bound to happen one way or another. That sort of make sense?
"Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does."
Erm. Okay. Let's pretend that a.) VB will do everything you need and b.) You have the expertise to do it, there's still the time investment. Can you write that VB app in a timely enough fashion to recoup that $100 expense. Chances are: Probably not. It's hard to call software overpriced in that case. I'm a Lightwave user with a talent for writing my own plugins. I still find other plugins worth purchasing. Hopefully in understanding this, you'll get my point of view.
"Then there's music. Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all."
Just so you know in advance, my post is not a complete rebuttal to yours. I agree with your point here, but for different reasons. The artist and/or the record label typically lose $0 in sales due to piracy. What they lose instead is potential sales. There is no way to measure whether the lack of that song for download would have earned a sale. You can count the billions of songs flying around the net every month, but you just cannot match it to an actual percentage of a drop in revenue. (This is one of the reasons the RIAA has had trouble proving P2P is a real threat AND why iTunes has sold over a hundred million songs.) What's ridiculous about the RIAA's stance on this issue is the 'open-your-mouth-and-close-your-eyes' business model. You have to pay for the album and... well you better hope you like it. No satisfaction guarantee. The ability to preview the album is limited. You just have to have faith in what you're buying. Welp, this model isn't working, hence the reason why people would go to the net, even in the days when it took up to an hour to download a single song. Of course, this is just my humble opinion, but I think the RIAA created their situation they think they're in with their crummy business model.
"Then again, sometimes piracy is a bad thing. Especially for the movie industry. Millions (if not billions) of dollars go into the making of a movie. While, yes, theater sales bring in tons of cash, DVD releases are also a huge factor in a movie's income. Downloading a movie hurts people a lot more than downloading music."
I think this is a reasonable statement. Not for the movie budgets, though. Movies are usually watched once or twice. Songs can become part of you for years. Movies, however, have an edge over music when it comes to sales value. Computers today aren't typically well geared for watching movies. Even a pirated movie still has value to the MPAA. Suppose somebody goes to the trouble to download a movie they've never purchased. Suppose Hollywood then makes a sequel to said movie, or a movie of a similar genre that the 'pirate' would probably enjoy. Is he or she really going to wait 3+ months after the release for the DVDs to arrive so he can download one at a decent quality? (I'm intentionally skipping the 'video camera in a theater' or screener copy. That's a hole in my argument I'm just not prepared for. At least I'm honest.:P) If Hollywood does their job right, they can turn that previous lost sale into a new sale. Unfortunately, their brains don't work like this. I still cannot believe they ran anti-piracy ads in the theater. I'll never forget sitting through 20 minutes of previews, watching the propganda, then hearing several people in the audience go "Wait... you can download movies from the net? How do you do that?" Heh.
Anyway, I agree with your point that DVD downloads probably do more monetary damage than MP3 downloads, at least on an individual level. I do think, though, that there's a much stronger potential to recover
"Uh, hello. Did you miss the./ article just previously where google has become a verb. I'd call that changing the world. I'd call yours 1/2 a man summary."
Okay. So did Coca Cola and Kleenex change the world?
"Apple ][? iMac? Kaypro? TRS-80? Half these things aren't even PCs, because a PC is by definition IBM-compatible."
I would have modded this -.5 Naieve instead of Troll. Oh well.
In the olden days, what we call PCs were called IBM Clones. Everything else was called PC in some form or another. (As memory serves, it was usually spelled out as 'personal computer'.) Over time, x86 machines took over and marketshares for everything else were in the single digits. The term PC, by de-facto, became 'a Windows machine using an Intel or AMD processor'. I'm not saying the definition was/is super-strict, (Linux boxes have been called PCs, for example...) but when you see mags like PC Gamer, you start building a new impression of what PC commonly refers to.
What parent poster is saying isn't totally false. We've all heard of Mac vs. 'PC' debates. I don't think the current generation is as aware of why the PC distinction took place originally. Back in the olden days, a computer occupied a huge room and only the gov't or big corps had them. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic here, but the reason my definition of PC changed was because I've been reading a lot of Asimov. His stories were rather vague about people having their own computers, but there was always some big major computer (Multivac) that everything was centralized to. It wasn't until.. what.. the 70's until people actually had significant computing power in their homes.
I think we should cut the guy a little slack. It probably would have been a little clearer if the title had said Personal Computers instead of PCs. (Though I'll grant that his post was superficially nitpicky.)
"I've owned 4 apple ac adapters and one dell ac adapter. Guess which one broke."
I had 3 AC adapters for my Dell, none of them broke. My cousin had a Mac that came to life and demanded he spend a bunch of money on an OS upgrade, but his Windows 3.1 machine is still going strong.
Are we done playing Anecdote WarsTM? I've got all kinds of unverifiable yet ultimately meaningless claims to share until you get my point.
"At that time, the show and special effects were near cutting edge, and a lot of the concepts in the show were new and strange- cool!"
Was Star Trek one of the first shows aired in color? If so, was that part of the appeal? Erm... Apologies for the phrasing of that question. I'm not asking because I'm gunning for a 'gimmick' argument. I'm just curious. I'm under the impression that the 60's was a heck of a decade for a geek like me, I'm just fishing for more info. It must have been an interesting time when computers weren't ubiquitous and all the new ideas were bubbling to the surface. Then the moon landing... wow. I wonder what would have happened had TOS started airing a few years later.
"It's beyond me while people always fall in love with such crap. Or is it a some kind of relax when you turn off your brain partially and watch Star Trek for example?"
I never really enjoyed FireFly or Farscape. Is that because my tastes are 'superior' to everybody else's, or is it because everybody else is getting something I'm not? I'd love to go with the former, afterall it's more flattering. Chances are, though, it's the latter. My point is that I wouldn't go around elevating myself because I don't like a popular show.
"So I guess violence is OK in the US then. But the devil will grab you be the b...s if you show a nipple somewhere. Quite funny;-) And sad...."
That depends on how you look at it. Which do you think is more likely: Your teenager child causing pregnancy, or shooting up a school? When I was in school, by far, it was the former.
From where I sit it's not surprising at all that sex in video games is a bigger contraversy. I don't see it as being about what is okay, but rather what the bigger priorities are.
"And if you believe that games should be freely buyable, would you consider allowing porn and any rated movie to also be freely buyable? What about cigerettes and alcohol?"
Porn? Welp, I haven't been faced with this decision, so I can only theorize. When I was high school, I knew several girls that ended up pregnant. I know NOBODY that went on a murdering spree. For that reason, I'd be far more concerned about porn than I would be about video games. Whether or not that translates into allowing or disallowing porn, well I'd rather answer that when I'm actually faced with the decision. I personally do not see the silliness in being more concerned about sex-related media than violenct video games. Teenagers, by nature, want to have sex. A lot of teenagers cannot bear the responsibility if they screw it up. I imagine it's hard for a parent to know when the right time is to have that talk. Bombardment of sex related topics on a youngin can really mess up that schedule. Whether it is damaging or not, well it's hard to say. If you ask me, that's a case by case thing. But I can certainly understand it driving parents to become uncomfortable.
Alcohol? Cigarettes? Both are addictive and dangerous. I'm not sure I need to go into too much detail, here. Alcohol, in particular, can lead to some very disturbing late-night calls. I have a friend who, while drunk, jumped out of a moving car. Spent a good chunk of his senior year nursing a bad case of road rash. I'd rather not imagine what his father went through during that little episode. Fortunately, it ended up ok. I bet he's still thankful for that.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's a good question, though. You can already get satellite internet if you really want it, but it's expensive, relatively slow, and has high latency, given the distance of the satellite. Why would anybody who has other high-speed options actually want satellite internet?"
This isn't a great answer, but I'll offer it. My dad goes on camping trips a lot. I remember him mentioning that he brought his dish with him a couple of times. If he could have gotten internet that way, bonus!
That said, I wouldn't call that mass market or anything. Heh. I just wish we had that when I went camping with him.
"We refer to this as 'techie karma' or the 'magic touch'. For some reason, it doesn't work as well with females."
I've had this happen a couple of times. Sysadmin walks in, the computer's fine. The term we use is "Daddy's in the room".
Mr. Duvalid, this is YOUR boss. I see that you posted on Slashdot one minute before you clocked out. Come see me Monday morning, bright and early.
"I am delighted by all three consoles personally, and simply have a penchant for accurate information about them instead of misleading groundless accusations."
Ah... so why are you replying to my post then? The price reason is valid and the other two you've conveniently ignored. I'm delighted by world peace and an end to hunger, but I don't understand this irrational desire that some have to blindly defend any given console under the guise of being rational.
"...which until recently has introduced only the most negative takes possible on the PS3 for whatever reason."
The reason is that Sony made a total ass of themselves at E3.
"(Microsoft payola being the leading bet among the conspiracy minded)."
Microsoft didn't pay Sony to release the PS3 at $600, to rush a lame feature into the controller, or to overhype their specs.
"It's been awhile since we had some negative sony press. I was starting to get worried. Way to go!"
Like or hate the anti-Sony press, it's happening at a time where Sony could still do something about it. If that's not enough, then oh well, Sony earned it. That's the standard excuse for poo-pooing future Microsoft releases.
"Wal-Mart is notorious for selling the clean/edited/lame version of everything. ;)"
It is? I purchased OZ dvds from there. If those are the clean/edited/lame versions... ugh.
"Maybe we should just get faster software."
That takes more time and more talent to write. It'd be a pain in the butt if mobile phone or digital camera processors were so slow everything had to be super optimized just to be useful. Heck, I remember using one of the first digital cameras. Relatively speaking, it took forever just for it to capture, encode, and save the image to memory. Nowadays you can get cameras that take the pictures super fast. I say we should have faster processing AND better software. Not just one or the other.
" I could understand if Apple is worried about people using the term iPod, but Pod is a common word. What's next, Apple trying to stop people from using the word Book since it might be confused with iBook?"
Apple's defending the trademark so that a company doesn't come out with an MP3 player called the ePod that looks suspiciously similar to the iPod. I'm not defending their actions here, but to a degree it's understandable. Last thing they need is to find themselves in a case like that and have to sift through a bunch of previous infractions first. Basically what I'm saying is that trademark law works in such a way that they have a fire lit under them to be Litigious Bastards.
"Will I be able to play virtual console games across the internet like the person was sitting across the room?"
Unless some games are specifically tooled for this purpose, I wouldn't expect it at all. None of those games were made with the idea that the other player would have a ~100ms response time.
"YouTube does have a community but its biggest boon comes from embedding videos into other pages, especially blogs. "
I think you underestimate just how massive Youtube's site is. It's not uncommon to find vids that have 500+ comments attached to them. I know lots of people who go to Youtube just to find silly stuff and share it with their friends. Great time killer. My experience, of course, is simply anecdotal. I'm having a hard time imagining YouTube's fate being sealed very quickly.
Okay. How would the world be different without them?
Allow me to explain my point of view: If Kleenex or Coca Cola never came into being, it's difficult for me to imagine something under a different name wouldn't have taken their places. I'll admit I may be narrowing the view a bit too much, but I'm a little reluctant to call something world changing simply because I respect the brand. Yes, Google's become a big part of my life, but it also feels like something that was bound to happen one way or another. That sort of make sense?
"Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does."
:P) If Hollywood does their job right, they can turn that previous lost sale into a new sale. Unfortunately, their brains don't work like this. I still cannot believe they ran anti-piracy ads in the theater. I'll never forget sitting through 20 minutes of previews, watching the propganda, then hearing several people in the audience go "Wait... you can download movies from the net? How do you do that?" Heh.
Erm. Okay. Let's pretend that a.) VB will do everything you need and b.) You have the expertise to do it, there's still the time investment. Can you write that VB app in a timely enough fashion to recoup that $100 expense. Chances are: Probably not. It's hard to call software overpriced in that case. I'm a Lightwave user with a talent for writing my own plugins. I still find other plugins worth purchasing. Hopefully in understanding this, you'll get my point of view.
"Then there's music. Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all."
Just so you know in advance, my post is not a complete rebuttal to yours. I agree with your point here, but for different reasons. The artist and/or the record label typically lose $0 in sales due to piracy. What they lose instead is potential sales. There is no way to measure whether the lack of that song for download would have earned a sale. You can count the billions of songs flying around the net every month, but you just cannot match it to an actual percentage of a drop in revenue. (This is one of the reasons the RIAA has had trouble proving P2P is a real threat AND why iTunes has sold over a hundred million songs.) What's ridiculous about the RIAA's stance on this issue is the 'open-your-mouth-and-close-your-eyes' business model. You have to pay for the album and... well you better hope you like it. No satisfaction guarantee. The ability to preview the album is limited. You just have to have faith in what you're buying. Welp, this model isn't working, hence the reason why people would go to the net, even in the days when it took up to an hour to download a single song. Of course, this is just my humble opinion, but I think the RIAA created their situation they think they're in with their crummy business model.
"Then again, sometimes piracy is a bad thing. Especially for the movie industry. Millions (if not billions) of dollars go into the making of a movie. While, yes, theater sales bring in tons of cash, DVD releases are also a huge factor in a movie's income. Downloading a movie hurts people a lot more than downloading music."
I think this is a reasonable statement. Not for the movie budgets, though. Movies are usually watched once or twice. Songs can become part of you for years. Movies, however, have an edge over music when it comes to sales value. Computers today aren't typically well geared for watching movies. Even a pirated movie still has value to the MPAA. Suppose somebody goes to the trouble to download a movie they've never purchased. Suppose Hollywood then makes a sequel to said movie, or a movie of a similar genre that the 'pirate' would probably enjoy. Is he or she really going to wait 3+ months after the release for the DVDs to arrive so he can download one at a decent quality? (I'm intentionally skipping the 'video camera in a theater' or screener copy. That's a hole in my argument I'm just not prepared for. At least I'm honest.
Anyway, I agree with your point that DVD downloads probably do more monetary damage than MP3 downloads, at least on an individual level. I do think, though, that there's a much stronger potential to recover
"I wonder if you realize that there's no clear line between offensive and defensive applications."
If wonder if you'd really give a shit about that distinction if your country was suddenly invaded.
"Uh, hello. Did you miss the ./ article just previously where google has become a verb. I'd call that changing the world. I'd call yours 1/2 a man summary."
Okay. So did Coca Cola and Kleenex change the world?
I wonder if they realize that most militaries not only attack, but they also defend.
"This is not newsworthy. This is computer science 101."
Yeah, we get it. Slashdot doesn't always post news stories. This has been going on for YEARS. Your post isn't newsworhty, either.
"Apple ][? iMac? Kaypro? TRS-80? Half these things aren't even PCs, because a PC is by definition IBM-compatible."
I would have modded this -.5 Naieve instead of Troll. Oh well.
In the olden days, what we call PCs were called IBM Clones. Everything else was called PC in some form or another. (As memory serves, it was usually spelled out as 'personal computer'.) Over time, x86 machines took over and marketshares for everything else were in the single digits. The term PC, by de-facto, became 'a Windows machine using an Intel or AMD processor'. I'm not saying the definition was/is super-strict, (Linux boxes have been called PCs, for example...) but when you see mags like PC Gamer, you start building a new impression of what PC commonly refers to.
What parent poster is saying isn't totally false. We've all heard of Mac vs. 'PC' debates. I don't think the current generation is as aware of why the PC distinction took place originally. Back in the olden days, a computer occupied a huge room and only the gov't or big corps had them. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic here, but the reason my definition of PC changed was because I've been reading a lot of Asimov. His stories were rather vague about people having their own computers, but there was always some big major computer (Multivac) that everything was centralized to. It wasn't until.. what.. the 70's until people actually had significant computing power in their homes.
I think we should cut the guy a little slack. It probably would have been a little clearer if the title had said Personal Computers instead of PCs. (Though I'll grant that his post was superficially nitpicky.)
"I've owned 4 apple ac adapters and one dell ac adapter. Guess which one broke."
I had 3 AC adapters for my Dell, none of them broke. My cousin had a Mac that came to life and demanded he spend a bunch of money on an OS upgrade, but his Windows 3.1 machine is still going strong.
Are we done playing Anecdote WarsTM? I've got all kinds of unverifiable yet ultimately meaningless claims to share until you get my point.
"At that time, the show and special effects were near cutting edge, and a lot of the concepts in the show were new and strange- cool!"
Was Star Trek one of the first shows aired in color? If so, was that part of the appeal? Erm... Apologies for the phrasing of that question. I'm not asking because I'm gunning for a 'gimmick' argument. I'm just curious. I'm under the impression that the 60's was a heck of a decade for a geek like me, I'm just fishing for more info. It must have been an interesting time when computers weren't ubiquitous and all the new ideas were bubbling to the surface. Then the moon landing... wow. I wonder what would have happened had TOS started airing a few years later.
"After 3 Apple laptops, I've had no problems, I've had a G3 iBook, a G4 Alubook and now I am on a G4 iBook."
I owned a Dell laptop that never caught fire.
"It's beyond me while people always fall in love with such crap. Or is it a some kind of relax when you turn off your brain partially and watch Star Trek for example?"
I never really enjoyed FireFly or Farscape. Is that because my tastes are 'superior' to everybody else's, or is it because everybody else is getting something I'm not? I'd love to go with the former, afterall it's more flattering. Chances are, though, it's the latter. My point is that I wouldn't go around elevating myself because I don't like a popular show.
"does my girlfriends pussy smell of fishes?"
No. She smells of inflatable plastic.
"So I guess violence is OK in the US then. But the devil will grab you be the b...s if you show a nipple somewhere. Quite funny ;-) And sad...."
That depends on how you look at it. Which do you think is more likely: Your teenager child causing pregnancy, or shooting up a school? When I was in school, by far, it was the former.
From where I sit it's not surprising at all that sex in video games is a bigger contraversy. I don't see it as being about what is okay, but rather what the bigger priorities are.
"And if you believe that games should be freely buyable, would you consider allowing porn and any rated movie to also be freely buyable? What about cigerettes and alcohol?"
Porn? Welp, I haven't been faced with this decision, so I can only theorize. When I was high school, I knew several girls that ended up pregnant. I know NOBODY that went on a murdering spree. For that reason, I'd be far more concerned about porn than I would be about video games. Whether or not that translates into allowing or disallowing porn, well I'd rather answer that when I'm actually faced with the decision. I personally do not see the silliness in being more concerned about sex-related media than violenct video games. Teenagers, by nature, want to have sex. A lot of teenagers cannot bear the responsibility if they screw it up. I imagine it's hard for a parent to know when the right time is to have that talk. Bombardment of sex related topics on a youngin can really mess up that schedule. Whether it is damaging or not, well it's hard to say. If you ask me, that's a case by case thing. But I can certainly understand it driving parents to become uncomfortable.
Alcohol? Cigarettes? Both are addictive and dangerous. I'm not sure I need to go into too much detail, here. Alcohol, in particular, can lead to some very disturbing late-night calls. I have a friend who, while drunk, jumped out of a moving car. Spent a good chunk of his senior year nursing a bad case of road rash. I'd rather not imagine what his father went through during that little episode. Fortunately, it ended up ok. I bet he's still thankful for that.