Just another nerd.
I’ve never played any of the Halo games (the original Unreal Tournament was the last FPS I really played), but I can definitely appreciate the beauty of these Halo 3 laser tag toys. Think Geek’s got these, but the pistol goes for $79.99 and the rifle for $129.99.
Is the Sun special? That’s the claim that’s been occasionally made — that the Sun has a number of relatively rare features that are especially conducive to life. For example, it has been claimed the Sun has a relatively small mass or a particular level of iron that make it”fine-tuned” for life.
But a study by scientists at Australian National University suggest there’s really nothing special about the Sun,
With his ANU colleague José Robles and others, [Charles] Lineweaver has now analysed 11 features of the Sun that might affect its ability to have habitable planets. They included its mass, age, rotation speed and orbital distance from the centre of the Milky Way.
Then they compared these with well-measured statistics for other stars to answer the question – overall, does the Sun stand out from the crowd any more than some other randomly chosen star would?
The Sun did stand out in two ways: it is more massive than 95% of nearby stars and its orbit around the centre of our galaxy is more circular than those of 93% of nearby stars.
But when all 11 properties were taken on board, the Sun looked very ordinary. Robles’s team calculates that there would be only about one chance in three that a star selected at random would be “more typical” than the Sun.
What is different about the Earth is the particular orbit that it has around the Sun. Find a planet that is in a similar orbit around another star, and you have something that might be particulary conducive for life. But, if Lineweaver and his colleagues are right, it really doesn’t matter what kind of star that is.
It looks like Marvel has abandoned the relationship it had with Graphic Imaging Technology, which had scanned and then published to DVD archives of many Marvel titles. Instead, Marvel is going to start re-releasing DVD archives of its titles using the same Flash-based system that it uses for its online offerings.
God forbid it actually release them in the CBR/CBZ format which are widely used by people who actually read digital comics already.
The initial Iron Man volume at right comes out in September and will retail for $29.99. If they’re comparable to the scans on Marvel’s sites, they’ll be an improvement over Graphic Imaging Technology’s scans, but there are nice, higher resolution scans available in the CBR/CBZ format.
If I were Marvel, I’d scan all my back issues in relatively high resolution, wrap them in CBR/CBZ format and sell them at, say, 25 or 50 cents an issue. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to sell very recent issues, but if they offered online everything older than, say, two years they’d make a killing.
Instead, they’ll just continue to lose all that revenue from the warez sites that still offer a much better product.
The Brick Testament is the Bible illustrated with Legos. For example, check out the nice illustrated version of Jesus’ teachings on divorce. Many of the Old Testament ones are especially compelling.
Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead tells GameIndustry.Biz that PC manufacturers are happy that piracy is rampant on the PC,
Q: It’s the barrier-for-entry thing isn’t it? It’s really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There’s lots of things that they could do but typically just they just line up on the wrong side of the argument in my opinion. They have lots of reasons as to why they do that, but I think that there’s been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content – even if you’re supposed to pay for it on PCs – is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games.
Q: You think they’re secretly happy about it?
Todd Hollenshead: Yeah I think they are. I think that if you went in and could see what’s going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I’m not saying there’s some conspiracy or something like that – but I think the thing is they realise that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer.
And I think that just based on their actions…what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I’m talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they’ll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you’re just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem.
Of course one of the reasons piracy continues to flourish is that the same cracks needed to pirate a game are also needed by legitimate users half the time to just get the damn game to run.
Stardock has shown that you can have enormous sales and make a lot of money in PC games without treating the customer like the enemy. Clueless hacks like Hollenshead will never get that and wonder why their games don’t sell.
Also, Hollenshead also mentions a bit about World of Warcraft sayin,g
It is a big problem – people even say it impacts the World of Warcraft stuff, but obviously not to a great extent, and I think that the subscription is one proven economic solution to the piracy situation on the PC. I think part of it is that, to me from a market standpoint, I think of WOW as eBay: the reason eBay wins as the auction site is that’s where everybody goes, so that’s where everybody want to list their items so that’s where all the buyers want to go to shop. WoW is where everybody plays, so that’s where everybody wants to play, so the cost of entry there is insignificant relative to what the whole experience is about – playing with all these people.
In Blizzard’s case, though, World of Warcraft is more like a Stardock product than an Id product.
First, World of Warcraft will play on an enormous number of computers — you don’t have to be running the latest graphics card in SLI mode to have a decent experience with WoW.
Second, Blizzard makes it easy for me to play WoW on whatever computer I am. Hell, I can log into my account and download the original game and the expansion and run it anywhere. Same thing with Stardock — I install Sins of a Solar Empire on my laptop and go.
Contrast that with the typical games where a) you have to constantly have the CD/DVD in the drive while playing, and b) you have to wonder what the hell problems the copy protection is going to cause to your system. WIth a game you’ve bought at a store, you’re better off buying it and waiting until someone’s releases a crack to remove the copy protection — and after doing that repeatedly with games you spent $60 or $70 on, you start to get the point of wondering why bother with buying it in the first place since you’re breaking the law removing the copy protection anyway.
Just in case you want to be Grendel for Halloween, Graphitti Designs sells a Grendel mask that will only sent you back $4.95.
