The senator (or, more realistically, whichever of his employees reads the letter) are probably not even going to be sure that you mean a computer when you say "box". I think the password example is a good one, but I'd shorten it down to:
For example, say I mistakenly attempt to log into the wrong computer in my school's lab. This simple act affects the computer, as it takes action to check my password and deny me access. No harm has been done, yet by this law I am now guilty of a federal crime.
I'd also point out that a) many schools, unfortunately, are largely dependent on the volunteer work and technical knowledge of their most gifted students to keep their computer systems running, due to a lack of teacher training in those fields and the usual absence of any dedicated school computer staff. Thus, this bill directly impacts the viability of computer technology in the schools. And b) since serious computer crimes are already covered by existing legislation, what purpose does this bill serve except to send young kids to federal prison for, at most, otherwise-noncriminal acts of mischief? Do we want to drive our children (our nations' future, bla bla bla) away from technology for fear of arbitrary criminal prosecution? Won't somebody please think of the children?
Sounds to me that what this guy wants (a corporately-controlled network organized around profit rather than data exchange) is basically AOL without the Internet access. Or any of the other non-Internet network services that, incidentally, all seem to have died off years ago. (Compuserve, Prodigy..? Can't remember)
Why did they fail? Because while that's what the corporations and merchants might want, the customer could care less. Same as that CueCat nonsense: it's fabulous for marketers and companies but not worth it for the customer. And without the customer's money, there's no point to this new infrastructure. So... is there any compelling reason for me, the user, to use this new all-commercial flavour of Internet? It's like hoping to replace all of cable TV with 125 home shopping channels. Thank you, but I'll pass.
Preliminary tests are inconclusive but, I think that this might end up being a chick magnet. I mean what woman couldn't resist a nice terminal server built into a toaster oven?
...One that isn't June frickin' Cleaver maybe?
Seriously, even just as a joke with no harm intended, that kind of comment is going to REPEL female students with startling efficiency (not to mention female teachers, administrators etc. whose support you might need) 'cause it sounds like you think women belong back in the kitchen. And if you're trying to promote your project to the schools (where they're trying to get more girls into computers) that's just going to be one more invisible tickmark against you.
I'd second the snappier-name thing too. You want something that rolls off the tongue of a technologically illiterate school board trustee who craves a reassuringly slick and professional facade. A slicker website might be an idea too.
I'd like to offer "We don't know either." I'm not saying women are indecisive - several here have described their personal gaming preferences quite lucidly, and I could too - but I think that we haven't yet come up with the game genre that's going to provide a massive hit with both genders. This is more a function of how much real innovation and invention is going on in the game industry than anything, rather than the current industry demographics. I'm sure when we do see something like that, it'll be all anyone talks about on the gaming sites. And the gaming companies will never look back once they see the profits from that other half of the population start to roll in.
But I think all this "men want to hunt/women want relationships" pop psychology stuff won't get us anywhere. I read up on Purple Moon's exquisitely market-researched little girls' game titles in the book "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" (a good book, if a little dated now) and the premises just made me want to heave. "Secret Paths in the Garden" where simulated pre-teen girls talk about their simulated adolescent social problems? Or Rockett's first day at school, revolving around making the "right" friends and wearing the "right" clothes? Ugh, give me my escapist fantasy back, I'd like to get out of Barbie's high school now. (Granted, these are games for kids. But I think my disgust as a child would have been equal.) I imagine there's plenty of guys that feel a similar level of disgust with the "T & A & shoot some stuff" school of game development as well, which is just the same kind of demographic pandering but to teenage males. Maybe if the industry thought less about target marketing and more about coming up with wierd, different, attentiuon-grabbing new game concepts then we'd pass all these hopeless, static, tiresome sex-and-violence controversies by the wayside.
I can see your argument, especially with sci-fi type anime, but keep in mind not all anime recalls feudalism and violence in some way: What about other genres like magical-girl or whatnot? (please, nobody start a thats-not-real-anime-cuz-it-sucks thread...)
If anything I'd say (this is all AFAIK) that there's angst over the current loss of economic and social stability relative to the bubble-economy era. Salarymen no longer have a lifelong gravy train, young women aren't interested in abandoning their careers for housewife-mommyhood (birth rate is down, and single women have the most disposable income now), they're years behind with the Internet... and, incidentally, the slow economy is ripping the anime industry to bits over there. From what I understand the current anime in Japan is getting pretty wierd and angsty.
Not everyone in Japan relates to Meiji: militarism and violence is severely discredited over there post-WWII, and most Japanese don't know how to tie a kimono properly themselves. But everyone likes looking at explosions:)
Re:Great, except that...
on
Deja.com Vu!
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· Score: 1
Who judges what's worthy of archiving though? For instance, I'd hate to see the hilarious old Otaku Wars posts of alt.fan.sailor-moon torched mainly because there's no longer the need to debate what would happen in the series finale of 1997. OK, you may hate Sailor Moon, but my point is there's often more to a lot of newsgroups than just time-sensitive information, even if that is their stated topic.
The Canadian government is pretty good with it's web sites, but I still shudder in horror of one website/presentation devoted to income tax law changes. We were looking if there had been a change to capital gains taxes or something else similarly specific. The document was set up with no index, about one paragraph of text per page and big infographics throughout, and some other politically expedient tax change was droned on about for pages on end. After clicking through about thirty or more next> buttons (by which point most would have given up), we finally stumbled upon one uninformative sentence on the topic written in happy press-release speak.
They were obviously following a commercial news-site layout: designed for maximum banner ad usage and nice fluffy buzzword happytalk.
Anyways, my point: blatantly obvious navigation (e.g. don't make people guess if fishing licenses are under "wildlife" "conservation" or "resources"), indexing and navigational redundancy, and have the hardcore documentation up there alongside the press releases and "for dummies" executive summaries. Don't be afraid to link to other relevant government agencies either. Plus, go for super simple design: it's far more important to have compatibility with ancient browsers and 14.4 modem speeds than a slick, hip commercial interface that will look painfully dated in two years. Unless you're trying to draw companies into a high-tech mentorship program or something else where there's a specific need to look all whiz-bangy to make an impression.
If the stats have changed that much, right on! I will gladly eat my words (Last I heard the high estimate was 25%, and that was from '97). But I'm still skeptical. How does Fox News define a gamer? It could range from anyone who's ever picked up a controller to people who spend every spare waking moment smashing buttons. And are they talking about adults or kids?
There's also the issue that, regardless, successful games are still generally made by guys for guys... at best, games are very gender-segregated, just like toys. And my issue is, I can't help but think that will put some kind of a crimp on that huge potential and impact of video games that Katz is writing about.
Female gamers play the same games as men, but once you've outgrown or outplayed the rather juvenile and unchallenging "girl games", there's not a lot of alternatives. Not that I think I'd want to see a "women's game" put out by the industry as it is now, if the current crop of "girl games" are any kind of indication... (Martha Stewart's Garage Sale Shopdown! "Fight for the antique table lamps, but watch out for the radioactive Fiesta ware!")
Arguably the most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now, it's transforming the imaginations, attentions spans, reflexes and strategic thinking of an entire generation, perhaps even our neural systems themselves.
One issue: most girls of said "entire generation" still don't play video games to any significant extent.
If they do, it's an utterly different experience from what Katz is talking about, and certainly subject to much less moral panic. Perhaps not deservingly so... most such titles are obsessed with consumerism, appearance and conformity in ways that can arguably have more real negative effects on a kid in the long run than some fantasy violence, but they're socially sanctioned as "educational".
I know that "girl games" are just a small fraction of the industry, and the lack-of-female-gamers issue can be tiresome, but it's hard to have a generational revolution when (as yet) only half the generation is even there to see it.
Wait a second... are you trying to date humans back to the days of Pangaea?
It strikes me as much more likely that a pre-Egypt civilization capable of building pyramids would be able to circumnavigate the globe, than that humans have existed for hundreds of millions of years but couldn't figure out how to cross an ocean until a thousand or so years ago. Even the earliest hominid fossils they've found only date back about 5 million years.
An old computer is better than no computer. We're not talking about burgeoning IT developers here. We're talking about people who have no other access to computers, who need to learn the basics - even stuff as fundamental as how to use a mouse. These are becoming survival skills, and even a little computer literacy will go a long way. Surely you're not arguing that nothing is better than something?
My home comp for years was largely cobbled out of my older brother's old cast-offs. I sure don't think I'd be better off now if I hadn't had it at all.
Hey, I didn't mean that as a shot against you! If that's the decision the two of you made and it works for both of you, that's sweet. I'm more concerned about guys like twitter and such, who seem to think that moms should never work, period, and that it's solely the wife's duty to rearrange her career around her kids.
Supply and demand dictate that the women who ignore their children to toil beside me reduce my potential earnings.
Same logic applies to the men who so the same, doesn't it?
If you decided on this before you got married, fine, that's a decision that you made together and you're living your lives the way you want. That's great. But it's not the one and only proper way to raise a kid.
The university studies on child care that I recall hearing of clearly concluded that daycare was not a bad influence on children. Go figure: I'm sure small children have been minded in groups since the dawn of man.
You seem to think that childcare is an essentially and necessarily feminine pursuit, and career is an essentially masculine one (the emasculating "Mr. Mom", considering having your wife not work as your "reward", sounds like a lot of your pride is wrapped up in your career and breadwinner duties). And you're heaping all the child-care responsibility and guilt on women: you seem to think that if they have kids, they should become stay-at-home moms (or else turn their children into sociopaths?). And that outdated rhetoric is what annoys me. Why is it any less irresponsible for a man to not devote all his daily life to child care, than it is for a woman to do the same?
I especially love the ones that stake out the moral high ground as responsible parents because their wives (not them, but their wives) have cut back their hours or stayed home to raise the kids.
If your wife makes less than $25,000 you are loosing money on that second car, day care, and her wardrobe, so quit slaving her.
Very few women I know really like the "liberation" and "empowerment" of work. What double think.
Yikes - Are you serious? How many women do you know? I don't know *any* women like that.
It strikes me that the solution to the problem might be for the woman to find a job where she gets paid more than a pittance, and find a daycare where they don't just pen kids and let 'em suffer, rather than giving up completely on having her own career. You're writing as if the wife's working was the husband's decision, and she can't possibly be the family breadwinner.
Besides, I bet you don't always feel "liberated" and "empowered" by work either. But it sure would beat being isolated at home all day with the kids, and completely dependent on one person you only see early in the morning and late at night, don'cha think?
ZapMe seems to be asking the schools, "We'll pay you with loans of unreliable computer equipment for the right to distract your kids during class." If one of their classmates were to disrupt and distract the class similarly, they'd likely get suspended. Following this logic, perhaps the guy at Mira Costa could loan the school a malfunctioning computer in exchange for his refusal to accept the homecoming crown and various other "disruptive" acts. Ya think?
I seriously doubt Gates would denounce the concept of competition, especially via a semi-public e-mail. Especially considering the trouble e-mail has gotten him into before.
"And for crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what happened to Vinod, right?"
I'd say that's a pretty strong hint that this is fake.
try barenaked.net MP3 zone
They even have a version they played... what, last new years' eve?... which is officially the last time they'll ever play the song. Now that was a deliberate setup for live MP3 bootlegs if there ever was one.
The second version (the same-length-as-single one) was released a week or two afterwards, after fans were talking about home splicing uninterrupted versions of the song. (And believe me, they monitor the mailing lists and such: I put up a BNL fan page and got e-mail praise from the band's manager within 3 hours!) Just because it was released later, it was less widely distributed. I hear tales of a third version but I haven't found it to date...
From a longtime BNL fan: BNL have actually been pretty tolerant of mp3 boots of their live shows: there are several well-known archives of full shows, free for download, and they've been around for years. And what a lot of people are after is not the 18000th live rendition of "Brian Wilson," but the improv bits and between-song banter the band does on the live shows (a lot of fans, myself included, think it was criminal that these were left off their official live CD).
Most of the fans downloading the song knew it was pre-release and tampered with: hell, that's *why* they downloaded it! Once word got out about it everyone wanted to hear the interruptions, transcriptions of the jokes appeared in the mailing lists and newsgroups right alongside the song lyrics, people speculated about the identity of Morpheu_10 (sp?) the source of the downloads, etc. The fans loved it, and really, who else cares? It was done wel and in good humour. A lot of bands could do this badly, but I'd like to think BNL set a good example. Not bad for a band that claims that the Internet doesn't really exist;)
BTW: anybody who thinks they can just look at the song length is wrong. I have two different versions of the "Pinch me" ad and one is the same length as the song.
Keep in mind, The Bill & Melinda Gates Library Foundation has been giving out "Trojan Horse" computers for libraries, in a sense: they make the libraries dependent on MS software, and while the computers are free, they'll have to pay for upgrades and servicing like everyone else. (Your tax dollars, shrinking library budgets, etc. etc.) And they get a tax deduction and good press for it, too.
Meanwhile, a reliable Open Source system that's not too cryptic to implement could save libraries a lot of (your) money and might even help keep the most cash-strapped public libs from being shut down due to "budget constraints." Something to think about.
Maybe the lack of innovation is because of the myopic view of the audience: Video games are still, by and large, made for 8-to-25-year-old guys. And, not surprisingly, game companies then focus on things that young guys (supposedly) like: Babes, gore, cars, science fiction, martial arts, militaria. And then you get stuck in a rut, 'cause there's only so many ways you can mine those stereotypical male interests (which, frankly, probably are only truly the interests of a small minority of guys).
I know there were plenty of failures when game co's tried to reach out to the girls' market ("Let's make an educational game about sitting around and talking about our feelings in a garden!" Seriously, that was the premise of "Secret Paths." No wonder Purple Moon went broke) but that too had a lot to so with stereotypes. OTOH, lots of male reviewers commented on the gender-inappropriateness of them enjoying a domestic-management game like the Sims, but they enjoyed it!
Think about the success of the Sims, That's due in no small part to women buying and playing the game. How many other games can you imagine your whole family playing? If the market wasn't so narrowly focused and segregated on one demographic, maybe we'd see less of the same stuff over and over again. And with more potential game players, there's a bigger market and more room for interesting and bizarre niches for everyone to discover.
If you can get CBC, they aren't delaying their Olympic TV coverage. They're doing something like, oh, 15 hours live per day? And I've found their coverage much better - far less time on those tedious, soft-focus, time-sucking, flag-in-the-background athlete biographies that NBC seems enamored with. And they actually are willing to show events in which US or Canadian athletes are not in medal contention for. And they at least try to find commentators with a clue about the sports in question (John Tesh commmentating gymnastics? WTF?)
No idea how this affects any web coverage on their part though... But who needs transpacific cell phone calls if your satellite dish will do?
That assumes that the clothing tags make sense. How many times have you seen a pair of cheap pants made of indestructible polyester that say "dry clean only?" I assure you that any women you know have, at least...
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today.
That's right! They need advertising money to bribe the music retailers with! Uh... I mean... nevermind.
For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen!
Not that we use payola, mind you, no sir. We just write them polite letters. Yeah, lots of polite letters.
Between 1983 and 1996, the average price of a CD fell by more than 40%.
In related news, the prices of cell phones, mono VCRs, and Atari game systems also dropped by more than 40% in the same time frame. See what a good deal you consumers get?
By all measures, when you consider how long people have the music and how often they can go back and get "re-entertained" CDs truly are an incredible value for the money.
At least, until we figure out how to charge you per listen.
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The senator (or, more realistically, whichever of his employees reads the letter) are probably not even going to be sure that you mean a computer when you say "box". I think the password example is a good one, but I'd shorten it down to:
For example, say I mistakenly attempt to log into the wrong computer in my school's lab. This simple act affects the computer, as it takes action to check my password and deny me access. No harm has been done, yet by this law I am now guilty of a federal crime.
I'd also point out that a) many schools, unfortunately, are largely dependent on the volunteer work and technical knowledge of their most gifted students to keep their computer systems running, due to a lack of teacher training in those fields and the usual absence of any dedicated school computer staff. Thus, this bill directly impacts the viability of computer technology in the schools. And b) since serious computer crimes are already covered by existing legislation, what purpose does this bill serve except to send young kids to federal prison for, at most, otherwise-noncriminal acts of mischief? Do we want to drive our children (our nations' future, bla bla bla) away from technology for fear of arbitrary criminal prosecution? Won't somebody please think of the children?
Sounds to me that what this guy wants (a corporately-controlled network organized around profit rather than data exchange) is basically AOL without the Internet access. Or any of the other non-Internet network services that, incidentally, all seem to have died off years ago. (Compuserve, Prodigy..? Can't remember)
Why did they fail? Because while that's what the corporations and merchants might want, the customer could care less. Same as that CueCat nonsense: it's fabulous for marketers and companies but not worth it for the customer. And without the customer's money, there's no point to this new infrastructure. So... is there any compelling reason for me, the user, to use this new all-commercial flavour of Internet? It's like hoping to replace all of cable TV with 125 home shopping channels. Thank you, but I'll pass.
...One that isn't June frickin' Cleaver maybe?
Seriously, even just as a joke with no harm intended, that kind of comment is going to REPEL female students with startling efficiency (not to mention female teachers, administrators etc. whose support you might need) 'cause it sounds like you think women belong back in the kitchen. And if you're trying to promote your project to the schools (where they're trying to get more girls into computers) that's just going to be one more invisible tickmark against you.
I'd second the snappier-name thing too. You want something that rolls off the tongue of a technologically illiterate school board trustee who craves a reassuringly slick and professional facade. A slicker website might be an idea too.
So what do women want (in video games, that is)?
I'd like to offer "We don't know either." I'm not saying women are indecisive - several here have described their personal gaming preferences quite lucidly, and I could too - but I think that we haven't yet come up with the game genre that's going to provide a massive hit with both genders. This is more a function of how much real innovation and invention is going on in the game industry than anything, rather than the current industry demographics. I'm sure when we do see something like that, it'll be all anyone talks about on the gaming sites. And the gaming companies will never look back once they see the profits from that other half of the population start to roll in.
But I think all this "men want to hunt/women want relationships" pop psychology stuff won't get us anywhere. I read up on Purple Moon's exquisitely market-researched little girls' game titles in the book "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" (a good book, if a little dated now) and the premises just made me want to heave. "Secret Paths in the Garden" where simulated pre-teen girls talk about their simulated adolescent social problems? Or Rockett's first day at school, revolving around making the "right" friends and wearing the "right" clothes? Ugh, give me my escapist fantasy back, I'd like to get out of Barbie's high school now. (Granted, these are games for kids. But I think my disgust as a child would have been equal.) I imagine there's plenty of guys that feel a similar level of disgust with the "T & A & shoot some stuff" school of game development as well, which is just the same kind of demographic pandering but to teenage males. Maybe if the industry thought less about target marketing and more about coming up with wierd, different, attentiuon-grabbing new game concepts then we'd pass all these hopeless, static, tiresome sex-and-violence controversies by the wayside.
I can see your argument, especially with sci-fi type anime, but keep in mind not all anime recalls feudalism and violence in some way: What about other genres like magical-girl or whatnot? (please, nobody start a thats-not-real-anime-cuz-it-sucks thread...)
If anything I'd say (this is all AFAIK) that there's angst over the current loss of economic and social stability relative to the bubble-economy era. Salarymen no longer have a lifelong gravy train, young women aren't interested in abandoning their careers for housewife-mommyhood (birth rate is down, and single women have the most disposable income now), they're years behind with the Internet... and, incidentally, the slow economy is ripping the anime industry to bits over there. From what I understand the current anime in Japan is getting pretty wierd and angsty.
Not everyone in Japan relates to Meiji: militarism and violence is severely discredited over there post-WWII, and most Japanese don't know how to tie a kimono properly themselves. But everyone likes looking at explosions :)
Who judges what's worthy of archiving though? For instance, I'd hate to see the hilarious old Otaku Wars posts of alt.fan.sailor-moon torched mainly because there's no longer the need to debate what would happen in the series finale of 1997. OK, you may hate Sailor Moon, but my point is there's often more to a lot of newsgroups than just time-sensitive information, even if that is their stated topic.
They were obviously following a commercial news-site layout: designed for maximum banner ad usage and nice fluffy buzzword happytalk.
Anyways, my point: blatantly obvious navigation (e.g. don't make people guess if fishing licenses are under "wildlife" "conservation" or "resources"), indexing and navigational redundancy, and have the hardcore documentation up there alongside the press releases and "for dummies" executive summaries. Don't be afraid to link to other relevant government agencies either. Plus, go for super simple design: it's far more important to have compatibility with ancient browsers and 14.4 modem speeds than a slick, hip commercial interface that will look painfully dated in two years. Unless you're trying to draw companies into a high-tech mentorship program or something else where there's a specific need to look all whiz-bangy to make an impression.
If the stats have changed that much, right on! I will gladly eat my words (Last I heard the high estimate was 25%, and that was from '97). But I'm still skeptical. How does Fox News define a gamer? It could range from anyone who's ever picked up a controller to people who spend every spare waking moment smashing buttons. And are they talking about adults or kids?
There's also the issue that, regardless, successful games are still generally made by guys for guys... at best, games are very gender-segregated, just like toys. And my issue is, I can't help but think that will put some kind of a crimp on that huge potential and impact of video games that Katz is writing about.
Female gamers play the same games as men, but once you've outgrown or outplayed the rather juvenile and unchallenging "girl games", there's not a lot of alternatives. Not that I think I'd want to see a "women's game" put out by the industry as it is now, if the current crop of "girl games" are any kind of indication... (Martha Stewart's Garage Sale Shopdown! "Fight for the antique table lamps, but watch out for the radioactive Fiesta ware!")
Arguably the most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now, it's transforming the imaginations, attentions spans, reflexes and strategic thinking of an entire generation, perhaps even our neural systems themselves.
One issue: most girls of said "entire generation" still don't play video games to any significant extent.
If they do, it's an utterly different experience from what Katz is talking about, and certainly subject to much less moral panic. Perhaps not deservingly so... most such titles are obsessed with consumerism, appearance and conformity in ways that can arguably have more real negative effects on a kid in the long run than some fantasy violence, but they're socially sanctioned as "educational".
I know that "girl games" are just a small fraction of the industry, and the lack-of-female-gamers issue can be tiresome, but it's hard to have a generational revolution when (as yet) only half the generation is even there to see it.
It strikes me as much more likely that a pre-Egypt civilization capable of building pyramids would be able to circumnavigate the globe, than that humans have existed for hundreds of millions of years but couldn't figure out how to cross an ocean until a thousand or so years ago. Even the earliest hominid fossils they've found only date back about 5 million years.
My home comp for years was largely cobbled out of my older brother's old cast-offs. I sure don't think I'd be better off now if I hadn't had it at all.
Hey, I didn't mean that as a shot against you! If that's the decision the two of you made and it works for both of you, that's sweet. I'm more concerned about guys like twitter and such, who seem to think that moms should never work, period, and that it's solely the wife's duty to rearrange her career around her kids.
Same logic applies to the men who so the same, doesn't it?
If you decided on this before you got married, fine, that's a decision that you made together and you're living your lives the way you want. That's great. But it's not the one and only proper way to raise a kid.
The university studies on child care that I recall hearing of clearly concluded that daycare was not a bad influence on children. Go figure: I'm sure small children have been minded in groups since the dawn of man.
You seem to think that childcare is an essentially and necessarily feminine pursuit, and career is an essentially masculine one (the emasculating "Mr. Mom", considering having your wife not work as your "reward", sounds like a lot of your pride is wrapped up in your career and breadwinner duties). And you're heaping all the child-care responsibility and guilt on women: you seem to think that if they have kids, they should become stay-at-home moms (or else turn their children into sociopaths?). And that outdated rhetoric is what annoys me. Why is it any less irresponsible for a man to not devote all his daily life to child care, than it is for a woman to do the same?
I especially love the ones that stake out the moral high ground as responsible parents because their wives (not them, but their wives) have cut back their hours or stayed home to raise the kids.
Yikes - Are you serious? How many women do you know? I don't know *any* women like that.
It strikes me that the solution to the problem might be for the woman to find a job where she gets paid more than a pittance, and find a daycare where they don't just pen kids and let 'em suffer, rather than giving up completely on having her own career. You're writing as if the wife's working was the husband's decision, and she can't possibly be the family breadwinner.
Besides, I bet you don't always feel "liberated" and "empowered" by work either. But it sure would beat being isolated at home all day with the kids, and completely dependent on one person you only see early in the morning and late at night, don'cha think?
ZapMe seems to be asking the schools, "We'll pay you with loans of unreliable computer equipment for the right to distract your kids during class." If one of their classmates were to disrupt and distract the class similarly, they'd likely get suspended. Following this logic, perhaps the guy at Mira Costa could loan the school a malfunctioning computer in exchange for his refusal to accept the homecoming crown and various other "disruptive" acts. Ya think?
I seriously doubt Gates would denounce the concept of competition, especially via a semi-public e-mail. Especially considering the trouble e-mail has gotten him into before. "And for crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what happened to Vinod, right?" I'd say that's a pretty strong hint that this is fake.
try barenaked.net MP3 zone They even have a version they played... what, last new years' eve?... which is officially the last time they'll ever play the song. Now that was a deliberate setup for live MP3 bootlegs if there ever was one.
The second version (the same-length-as-single one) was released a week or two afterwards, after fans were talking about home splicing uninterrupted versions of the song. (And believe me, they monitor the mailing lists and such: I put up a BNL fan page and got e-mail praise from the band's manager within 3 hours!) Just because it was released later, it was less widely distributed. I hear tales of a third version but I haven't found it to date...
Most of the fans downloading the song knew it was pre-release and tampered with: hell, that's *why* they downloaded it! Once word got out about it everyone wanted to hear the interruptions, transcriptions of the jokes appeared in the mailing lists and newsgroups right alongside the song lyrics, people speculated about the identity of Morpheu_10 (sp?) the source of the downloads, etc. The fans loved it, and really, who else cares? It was done wel and in good humour. A lot of bands could do this badly, but I'd like to think BNL set a good example. Not bad for a band that claims that the Internet doesn't really exist ;)
BTW: anybody who thinks they can just look at the song length is wrong. I have two different versions of the "Pinch me" ad and one is the same length as the song.
Meanwhile, a reliable Open Source system that's not too cryptic to implement could save libraries a lot of (your) money and might even help keep the most cash-strapped public libs from being shut down due to "budget constraints." Something to think about.
Maybe the lack of innovation is because of the myopic view of the audience: Video games are still, by and large, made for 8-to-25-year-old guys. And, not surprisingly, game companies then focus on things that young guys (supposedly) like: Babes, gore, cars, science fiction, martial arts, militaria. And then you get stuck in a rut, 'cause there's only so many ways you can mine those stereotypical male interests (which, frankly, probably are only truly the interests of a small minority of guys).
I know there were plenty of failures when game co's tried to reach out to the girls' market ("Let's make an educational game about sitting around and talking about our feelings in a garden!" Seriously, that was the premise of "Secret Paths." No wonder Purple Moon went broke) but that too had a lot to so with stereotypes. OTOH, lots of male reviewers commented on the gender-inappropriateness of them enjoying a domestic-management game like the Sims, but they enjoyed it!
Think about the success of the Sims, That's due in no small part to women buying and playing the game. How many other games can you imagine your whole family playing? If the market wasn't so narrowly focused and segregated on one demographic, maybe we'd see less of the same stuff over and over again. And with more potential game players, there's a bigger market and more room for interesting and bizarre niches for everyone to discover.
No idea how this affects any web coverage on their part though... But who needs transpacific cell phone calls if your satellite dish will do?
That assumes that the clothing tags make sense. How many times have you seen a pair of cheap pants made of indestructible polyester that say "dry clean only?" I assure you that any women you know have, at least...
That's right! They need advertising money to bribe the music retailers with! Uh... I mean... nevermind.
Not that we use payola, mind you, no sir. We just write them polite letters. Yeah, lots of polite letters.
In related news, the prices of cell phones, mono VCRs, and Atari game systems also dropped by more than 40% in the same time frame. See what a good deal you consumers get? At least, until we figure out how to charge you per listen.