My older cousin got me playing Doom (y'know, the one that causes kids to go on school shooting rampages) before i was old enough read and write.

Would i be pursuing a career in the graphic design industry if i had never played computer games? Who could tell? Maybe I'd be a successful athlete/astronaut/president? I wouldn't argue with the idea that one interest leads to other similar interests.

Thanks for your comment. I really should have made sure to be more clear! http://www.videosift.com/video/Wesley-Clark-VERY-interesting-criticism-of-John-McCain#comment-452226

(Good luck on your graphic design website )

My concern is what I am able to do when I sit down at a keyboard. I have used some non-Mac computers, but I prefer working with a Mac interface. Several of the pre-press production jobs I’ve had involved my working on a Mac all day long, so I really appreciate the advances that have come along since. Perhaps when I’ve adjusted to this new operating system I can tout the new features I really like.

In purchasing a new machine I opted to go all out to keep open the possibilities of what I plan to do with it. The dealer, that helped me purchase this machine, helps set up graphic designers all over town. I trust his expertise in helping me choose a machine. He’s had Macs since the very beginning and has helped users solve technical issues for years now. I have the means now; so it’s about the timing. As for the specs, I was merely replying to DFT’s question. I’ll let you and the others argue the hardware.

Nobody expects copy protection to last more than a week tops nowadays, and that's likely the whole point. Bring out some new version of SecuRom that takes people a while to crack and at least the impatient pirates will buy it. I mean it's not like even your average Joe can't go to gamecopyworld, download a crack and follow some basic instructions.

It does somewhat confuse me though when they introduce copy protection that tries to go beyond that. Case in point, Mass Effect. What could possibly be the point of weekly validation? Granted they went back on their decision due to fan outcry but it really makes you wonder what kind of technological neophyte and luddites are tasked with coming up with these ideas.

It's insidious, but hey, since piracy isn't going away, neither is this kind of copy protection.

Whether you like it or not, ordinary people will likely not know of the copy protection on a game before they pick it up from their local videogames store (that charges twice the online price at least here in Australia) because they thought the art on the cover was pretty and they think guns are cool.

Even if they do, is that likely to affect their decision? Probably not, as long as it works hey? Regardless, it's hardly fair to treat the programmers, the graphics designers, the voice actors as a unilateral entity with the management and the profit maximising pressure from the distributors. After all, their salaries come from the same source.

If anything I suspect games will simply transcend to multiplayer only (where servers can explicitly restrict access of play to legitimate distinct CD keys which cannot be generated), or will be playable with internet access only through some kind of elaborate content streaming system. At the very least, you're going to see PC gaming marginalised, generally being the format on which piracy is easiest and which is generally dominated by the most tech-savy consumers.

Which would all be a tragedy for the future of videogames as a respectable storytelling medium and beyond simply providing inane, gratuitous doses of violence that politicians and fame-seeking Jack Thompson-wannabes can use as the scapegoat that is corrupting our children.

EDIT - Oh isn't Zonbie in the game industry? *demands professional input*

1. membership policy

(i used to be impressed that this site actually had a barrier to entry, the P system was genius, no selflinking was genius, the users here were mostly quality because of it, i guess i kinda thought the barrier to entry might rise over time to keep the "normal" people out... critical mass was reached... i see no need to have an open membership policy after the site is buzzing enough. look what happened. we got millions of new low quality members and the old ones left)

2. no interface designer or graphic designer, and no clear definition of the project, resulting in the coder doing what he does best i.e. coding and coding and coding and coding regardless of outcome, and the outcome can't be measured anyway because there was no definition of the project.

3. bizarre belief in web 2.0 voodoo despite all the evidence against it and the many rational reasons to totally reject it.

4. using the excuse that "videosift is better than youtube" to defend all sorts of retarded behaviour.

5. Should be called UserSift because the users define the content of the site, so it's more important to collect the right users than it is to worry about individual videos being up/downvoted. big picture, people.

My name is Dan, everybody knows me as dan gandhi, even though that is not my legal name.

I am in my 30s (I don't keep track anymore, nov 74 if you want to do the math). I'm a straight-white-male living in Pittsburgh PA. with my S.O. who teaches elementary school as a sub, while trying to start a web/graphic design business.

I do lots of little things for $$, some web work, writing js and php code for my S.O.'s web business. Currently I'm refurbishing a house that we plan to rent out.

I spend far too much time on my computer, which is where I spend most of my fun time surfing the web and playing games on my linux box.

I'm a college dropout, studied computer "science" for a few years, until I lost interest in what they wanted to teach me (I also started getting laid, which put a serious dent in my already minimal interest in academics). I never learned how to do things which I do not enjoy.

My name is Farhad. I was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a country in Central Asia. Post collapse of the USSR, my family moved to Zambia in Africa. We stayed there for 9 years before moving to Kuwait where I completed my High school. In 2003 I went to Montreal, Canada for a Economics degree, however after 4 years it was not something that I really enjoyed so I decided to leave to take up a job in the IT field before making up my mind about were else to go later.

I work for a company in the Web Development and IT Support fields, my interests however extend out to video editing, graphical design and computer gaming. I enjoy history, economics, politics and military strategy. You can find me in Kuwait reading a Harpers Magazine looking pissed off at the general population.

My real name doesn't matter, but my nick is a play on it. I live in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, working for the Government of Canada as a Research Analyst. It's not really reflective of what I do - but that's not all that clear either.

I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I completed a Commerce degree with a minor in Political Science. I have worked odd jobs as a graphic designer, brokerage assistant, bus boy, movie usher, filing clerk, web developer and printing press apprentice.

After University I lived in Hong Kong for 2 years where I was an Operations Manager for a local magazine and website, producing the monthly magazine (graphic design and layout) and the website (using Open Source software and tweaking the PHP code). I also taught orphans for a year (age 3 to 6) - I had 60 students I taught twice per week. My 2 years in Hong Kong was facilitated by VideoSift's constant stream of interesting videos from around the world of things worldly and beyond. I didn't need my 2 channels of chinese TV, but I did keep my Chinese movies. I can speak Chinese and read quite a bit too.

When I came back to Canada, I moved to the Nation's capital to work in the Public Service, and I am completing my Masters in Public Admin. I refuse to pay for cable television, but I do have a penchant for movies. My TV doesn't even get TV service (but is connected to a VCR and DVD player); VideoSift has essentially replaced my Television as my source of video information. I enjoy how it makes me an active participant in choosing the sources of video and information that I watch (rather than passively with the commercials on regular TV) and I have learned alot and been exposed to a lot that has expanded my mind.

I'm working on something I'm not yet ready to write about and that is not interesting enough yet to warrant the time.
My avatar is of me taped by my roommates to a formerly-abandoned cross outside our apartment during a Hallowe'en party I hosted in 2003. More photos here. (I was later carried down the street 2 blocks and propped up against a Café where other costumed onlookers shared in the reveling. I later carried the cross back to the apartment while being whipped by a skeleton Halloween decoration by my Judaism-supporting roommate.)

ughhh. Thanks for that, but I have now wasted quality brush-burning time, trying to figure this J.Steele guys appeal.....
answer: Not much Talent, whole-lotta spammage.

He's made a name for himself with, as you say, hackneyed pseudo-talent combined with his knowledge of internet key words, graphic design, and, most likely, answering every e-mail he gets from other, fabric-chair-printed ass-skins like himself........I see a career in advertising, and more cheesy, stream of unconsciousness flash.

(am I simply being an asshole???-I really know nothing about the guy)

>> ^spoco2:
Sure you can do all sorts of great styling things with divs, but it can be HELL to get it to look right on Firefox and IE and all others...

might I suggest that

* {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

at the top of the CSS solves most of these problems.

The render engines are slightly different, but the main cause of problems is that the default CSS files for browsers are different. Reset everything to 0px, and define it yourself, and always use numbers in px or em. "border: thin" means different things in different browsers, but "border: 2px" is consistant.

>> ^charliem:


HTML is code, it's markup, it's not programming, but it's enCODEd. I code HTML/CSS with vi , FF and gray-matter-pro, my partner is a graphic designer who uses dream-weaver to design web pages, I code, she does not.

ewwww how to completely balls up a good graphic design!
and I thought I was already running Firefox 2, and it's nearly 2008.
confused.

Stefan Sagmeister used the same effect on his "Made you look" Book (though not as impressive as this one).

Great for everyone into graphic design!

Currently reading William Blake's poetry+graphic design, Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Try about $1400. Thats enough for a specced up dual-core MacBook. Plenty of grunt for video editing, graphic design and other processor/memory intensive apps.

by the way, my personal crusade would be typography, and this dude's book cover is first thing on my list for burning.

if you want to be taken seriously in business, you need good graphic design! moron!