After the poor show at E3, I'm starting to doubt whether Nintendo can hold on to its lead for much longer. They like to think that it's the casual games selling Wiis, but the AAA titles are what the hardcore gamers want - and it's the hardcore gamers who'll decide the outcome of the console wars.
That's the traditional mentality, and it's precisely why Playstation and Xbox are losing the sales competition this round. Hardcore gamers only determine the outcome of a war between "hardcore" consoles. Nintendo opted to tap into a whole new market, and did a very good job of it. Nintendo didn't have to put up a great show at E3 because a huge part of their target audience for the Wii are not people who would ever visit E3, or be interested in much of anything there.
Wii is the inexpensive system with the fun controller that people buy and play 15 minutes or an hour or two at a stretch when they have a little spare time. It's the system you buy in addition to your other entertainment equipment, including your other video game systems. Whether that's a PS3, 360, or a PC is almost irrelevant. They're doing the Zelda, Mario, and Metroid games just to satisfy the fans of those franchises and keep them coming back for more. As for the rest of the "hardcore" gaming crowd, Nintendo really doesn't need them or care about them.
In summary, the Wii is winning because it's really not in competition with the other consoles. It made a market of its own, where it really has no direct competition. In fact, I daresay the DS is more direct competition for the Wii than any other video game system.
Yep. EA's track record speaks for itself, and very loudly. I was completely unsurprised to find out that the warhammer MMO would have massive amounts of content cut to launch at a specific date. In fact, it was a resounding I-told-you so dating back to the precise moment I found out Mythic was bought up by EA. EA does not need more new releases from old franchises to fuck up. They need to focus on fixing the ones they already have.
You might be happy having other people subsidising your internet usage, but the other lighter users probably aren't that happy about paying more so you can download whatever it is you download.
For the most part, I'm pretty sure those people don't mind. Most of those kinds of people prefer to pay extra for extra capacity they won't use 99% of the time, just so they have it available in that rare situation where they do want it. Not that I'm saying I think it's right or fair that other people help subsidize my own bandwidth usage. But it seems to me, most users like the current situation.
but in the scheme of things it seems a bit ridiculous to have pricing that absolutely relies on people not actually using the full service that they're paying for. Put simply: the ISPs are advertising something they cannot possibly deliver, and are relying on people simply not being able to find enough to do on the internet so they don't have to provide the service they sold their customers.
It does *seem* ridiculous, and you'll get no argument from me on that count. But any alternative system will mean that on average everyone pays more. The light users still won't actually pay less (certainly not by any significant amount); the heavy users will just pay more. Also worthy of note is that most industries with such a type of supply will always outsell the supply, simply because they need to to compete in the current market. Airlines do this, theaters do this, ballparks do this, concerts do this. They all sell a certain percentage more than they can actually deliver, because they know a certain number of paying customers will not show up for delivery of their purchase. We can thank the low-price Walmart mentality for this trend.
It's nice in sentiment. In reality though, it doesn't work. See, ISPs do need to be profitable to stay in business. The way they do that is by making money on the bandwidth they sell. At the price bandwidth goes for these days, they really cannot stay profitable if every single person were to use every mbit of their bandwidth all the time. People who torrent a lot or keep their bandwidth use maxed otherwise generally cost the ISP more than the monthly payment. It's those other low-use customers who simply don't want to wait on dialup for eBay or Yahoo to load that make them money. If every user were allowed to open their wireless and allow everyone to use their connection for free instead of paying for it, ISPs would have no choice but to raise prices to stay afloat. Personally, I'm happy with the current situation where those low-use customers pay for some of my bandwidth.
No shit sherlock. That's why he mentioned wind in the first sentence of his post. It's excusable to not RTFA before you post, but you do need to at least read the post you're responding to.
I love the Wii, and I think the new MotionPlus will be great. But I have to disagree with you on this. If anything, I think the Wii controller would actually be worse for RTSs than standard console controllers. You need more buttons, and the ability to point and click a bit more easily and precisely doesn't make that big a difference for an RTS.
And, (big surprise) not one of those has ever been a big hit on a console, despite most of them being exactly that on PC. In fact, most of those more or less sucked on console.
RTS will never work well on a console because no one wants to buy the type of controller you'd need. The shortcuts and things the GP mentioned for RTS's is barely half of what you can do with a keyboard in most RTSs. So sure, you can put one on a Console. But it'll have to be massively dumbed-down to work. And due to the very nature of consoles, that's not likely to change, ever.
I have no idea whether you're wrong or you're right. At this point, that can't really be considered more than a rumor. But EA's track record for PC games over the last 6 years speaks for itself: almost every game in that span has been released well before it was ready, and been full of bugs. Some were barely playable, not even finished enough to be considered a proper beta.
It's not just that Blizzard holds back their games until they are ready, it's that they have fans that will WAIT until Blizzard's games come out. That is a luxury that most other studios don't have.
Did you actually read what you just wrote? Read it again. And then think about it.
Who besides fans will wait on a game? And if you have good fans, they will wait. If you don't have an established fan base yet, it doesn't matter how soon you release - no one's waiting.
No matter how you cut it, it's always best to wait to release the game until it's ready for primetime.
Nothing to do with EA
Yeah right. Because EA has never done anything ever to screw over a good franchise they bought. Nope.
After RTF, I don't doubt that he has some sort of fuel that works as advertised. What I remain skeptical about is exactly what that fuel is (sounds an awful lot like alcohol), and if his claims are actually completely legitimate, he still doesn't mention just how much power it takes to produce the stuff.
The problem with that as I understand it is for [insert agency] to obtain permission to search said computers. It's not a criminal case, so they can't simply get a warrant. Or at least that's what I was told, and the logic seems sound.
It's worse, because eventually everyone who wants the older version has it. And then no one wants to be the first to break compatibility and upgrade. A software company could literally put themselves out of business by making their product too good. It's already hard enough for a software company to keep that from happening; it would be worse on several orders of magnitude if their old versions became legally free simply because they no longer sold them. Software companies would need to break or remove functionality from their software before releasing it, simply to stay afloat - and even that might end up not being enough.
abandonded is very easy to define. when it is not available for purchase from the rights owner.
Well, then by that definition, forcing abandoned software to be legally free is a terrible idea.
this would be a bi-directional state, so once an old arcade game becomes available on xbox arcade or wii it would be infringement to distribute the ROM, but as soon as that game became unavailable again it would be legal.
Um... I really don't think that would work too well. Once something is in the public domain, it's there. There's no taking it back again.
Apparently, slashdot isn't the only site that can use some help in the proof-reading department.
Seagate's new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate's innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology."
Despite Seagate's claims, the new 500GB Momentus are not the first "half-terabyte notebook hard drives." Not only have Hitachi and Fujistu already announced their 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drives earlier this year, but Samsung's 500GB, 2.5-inch, Sprintpoint M6 (model HM500LI) has been shipping since March. Oh well, you can't blame Samsung(??) for trying. Both of Samsung's(?!?) 2.5-inch, Momentus drives are expected to start shipping sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, and pricing has not be set yet.
More on topic, 1.5TB drives are awesome. Can't wait to pick one up. My current 600 gigs of space is constantly filling up.:-(
Seems to me it would be a fair enough rule that software with a sizeable installed base that is abandoned by its creators should be opened to the community, so it can live on or die on its own merits.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree somewhat with this idea - though perhaps more with the specifics added to it by others, than your original idea quoted here.
First, how do we define "abandoned" in this case. The best hard line I can think of off-hand is "when official support is discontinued". But if that is where the line would be drawn, it puts software developers/publishers in a very difficult position. Their own older software because their biggest enemy and competition, like WinXP vs. Vista, except to a much greater extent. For an example, let's bring Win2K into the mix. If Win2K was now legally free to obtain and use because of support being discontinued, how many customers would have purchased XP? And more, how many would have purchased Vista? For the most part Win2K can do all the essential functions that either of the newer versions can do, and with a lot less bloat and overhead to boot. Many users still prefer Win2K, even at an equal price point. So with such an "abandonware is free" rule, now the software company has to tread a very careful path, so as to make their next version just enough better to entice users to switch from the old version, but yet not so good as to make a better version unfeasible. Service packs and major patches would become history; such updates would have to become a new pay-for version of the product. Otherwise, the only option is to keep supporting old versions of software merely so it doesn't become "abandonware" (and therefore free). Even worse would be if the hard line for becoming abandonware is whether or not the product is still sold by the publisher. Then they would not only be locked into perpetually providing support, but also keeping the old product available for sale to compete with the newer versions.
I think the real issues here that need to be addressed are software patents and ridiculous copyright durations. If those get properly fixed, abandonware would become free by default at an appropriate time.
That's why every website that allows you to contribute to it has a terms of service you have to agree to before they allow you access. And in that TOS (if you bother to read it) it also tells you that you have no rights to whatever you contribute to it, and that they reserve the right to remove it at their discretion whenever they choose for any reason. The reason the "private house" analogy breaks down here is you're somewhat limited to what you can do to remove someone from your private physical property without breaking a law (generally, you'd go to jail for shooting someone because they said something that offended you in your house). Online however, there's no such problem. There's no chance whatsoever of killing or even injuring someone when you remove them from your website. Therefore, there's a lot more free reign in exercising your rights over your website you own.
That's a terrible analogy. But I'll run with it a bit. In your (awful) analogy, there's a reason why most cities have sound ordinances. It's so if you play that "damn negro music" loud enough for the public to hear it and be offended by it, you can be fined. A hosting site like Flickr is really nothing like your car analogy. The content on such a website is freely available to be viewed by the public, but the site itself is not public property. Therefore, the owner of that private property has the right to remove anything they choose.
A better analogy would be if you tried to host a little porn convention in your local Walmart.
The difference is, everything on the internet is a whole different ballgame. There is no "public property" online. Any website you browse/log in to/whatever is owned by an individual, company, or government. Therefore, you must follow the rules they set forth for their site. Their site, their rules. If you don't like them, you're free to not use them.
Slashdot Mirror
After the poor show at E3, I'm starting to doubt whether Nintendo can hold on to its lead for much longer. They like to think that it's the casual games selling Wiis, but the AAA titles are what the hardcore gamers want - and it's the hardcore gamers who'll decide the outcome of the console wars.
That's the traditional mentality, and it's precisely why Playstation and Xbox are losing the sales competition this round. Hardcore gamers only determine the outcome of a war between "hardcore" consoles. Nintendo opted to tap into a whole new market, and did a very good job of it. Nintendo didn't have to put up a great show at E3 because a huge part of their target audience for the Wii are not people who would ever visit E3, or be interested in much of anything there.
Wii is the inexpensive system with the fun controller that people buy and play 15 minutes or an hour or two at a stretch when they have a little spare time. It's the system you buy in addition to your other entertainment equipment, including your other video game systems. Whether that's a PS3, 360, or a PC is almost irrelevant. They're doing the Zelda, Mario, and Metroid games just to satisfy the fans of those franchises and keep them coming back for more. As for the rest of the "hardcore" gaming crowd, Nintendo really doesn't need them or care about them.
In summary, the Wii is winning because it's really not in competition with the other consoles. It made a market of its own, where it really has no direct competition. In fact, I daresay the DS is more direct competition for the Wii than any other video game system.
Yep. EA's track record speaks for itself, and very loudly. I was completely unsurprised to find out that the warhammer MMO would have massive amounts of content cut to launch at a specific date. In fact, it was a resounding I-told-you so dating back to the precise moment I found out Mythic was bought up by EA. EA does not need more new releases from old franchises to fuck up. They need to focus on fixing the ones they already have.
You might be happy having other people subsidising your internet usage, but the other lighter users probably aren't that happy about paying more so you can download whatever it is you download.
For the most part, I'm pretty sure those people don't mind. Most of those kinds of people prefer to pay extra for extra capacity they won't use 99% of the time, just so they have it available in that rare situation where they do want it. Not that I'm saying I think it's right or fair that other people help subsidize my own bandwidth usage. But it seems to me, most users like the current situation.
but in the scheme of things it seems a bit ridiculous to have pricing that absolutely relies on people not actually using the full service that they're paying for. Put simply: the ISPs are advertising something they cannot possibly deliver, and are relying on people simply not being able to find enough to do on the internet so they don't have to provide the service they sold their customers.
It does *seem* ridiculous, and you'll get no argument from me on that count. But any alternative system will mean that on average everyone pays more. The light users still won't actually pay less (certainly not by any significant amount); the heavy users will just pay more. Also worthy of note is that most industries with such a type of supply will always outsell the supply, simply because they need to to compete in the current market. Airlines do this, theaters do this, ballparks do this, concerts do this. They all sell a certain percentage more than they can actually deliver, because they know a certain number of paying customers will not show up for delivery of their purchase. We can thank the low-price Walmart mentality for this trend.
This is in no way offtopic. The linked articles are about exactly the same thing: using satellite dishes for wifi networking. The original article in fact dates back to June of '02.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/04/211208&mode=nested&tid=99
Parent, GP, and GGP are all Informative.
It's nice in sentiment. In reality though, it doesn't work. See, ISPs do need to be profitable to stay in business. The way they do that is by making money on the bandwidth they sell. At the price bandwidth goes for these days, they really cannot stay profitable if every single person were to use every mbit of their bandwidth all the time. People who torrent a lot or keep their bandwidth use maxed otherwise generally cost the ISP more than the monthly payment. It's those other low-use customers who simply don't want to wait on dialup for eBay or Yahoo to load that make them money. If every user were allowed to open their wireless and allow everyone to use their connection for free instead of paying for it, ISPs would have no choice but to raise prices to stay afloat. Personally, I'm happy with the current situation where those low-use customers pay for some of my bandwidth.
You're not too good at tracking threads are you?
Appropriate mod for your post is -1 Fail.
I, for one welcome our new intentionally-robot-breaking non-robotic overlords.
No shit sherlock. That's why he mentioned wind in the first sentence of his post. It's excusable to not RTFA before you post, but you do need to at least read the post you're responding to.
I love the Wii, and I think the new MotionPlus will be great. But I have to disagree with you on this. If anything, I think the Wii controller would actually be worse for RTSs than standard console controllers. You need more buttons, and the ability to point and click a bit more easily and precisely doesn't make that big a difference for an RTS.
And, (big surprise) not one of those has ever been a big hit on a console, despite most of them being exactly that on PC. In fact, most of those more or less sucked on console.
RTS will never work well on a console because no one wants to buy the type of controller you'd need. The shortcuts and things the GP mentioned for RTS's is barely half of what you can do with a keyboard in most RTSs. So sure, you can put one on a Console. But it'll have to be massively dumbed-down to work. And due to the very nature of consoles, that's not likely to change, ever.
I have no idea whether you're wrong or you're right. At this point, that can't really be considered more than a rumor. But EA's track record for PC games over the last 6 years speaks for itself: almost every game in that span has been released well before it was ready, and been full of bugs. Some were barely playable, not even finished enough to be considered a proper beta.
It's not just that Blizzard holds back their games until they are ready, it's that they have fans that will WAIT until Blizzard's games come out. That is a luxury that most other studios don't have.
Did you actually read what you just wrote? Read it again. And then think about it.
Who besides fans will wait on a game? And if you have good fans, they will wait. If you don't have an established fan base yet, it doesn't matter how soon you release - no one's waiting.
No matter how you cut it, it's always best to wait to release the game until it's ready for primetime.
Nothing to do with EA
Yeah right. Because EA has never done anything ever to screw over a good franchise they bought. Nope.
After RTF, I don't doubt that he has some sort of fuel that works as advertised. What I remain skeptical about is exactly what that fuel is (sounds an awful lot like alcohol), and if his claims are actually completely legitimate, he still doesn't mention just how much power it takes to produce the stuff.
The problem with that as I understand it is for [insert agency] to obtain permission to search said computers. It's not a criminal case, so they can't simply get a warrant. Or at least that's what I was told, and the logic seems sound.
It's worse, because eventually everyone who wants the older version has it. And then no one wants to be the first to break compatibility and upgrade. A software company could literally put themselves out of business by making their product too good. It's already hard enough for a software company to keep that from happening; it would be worse on several orders of magnitude if their old versions became legally free simply because they no longer sold them. Software companies would need to break or remove functionality from their software before releasing it, simply to stay afloat - and even that might end up not being enough.
abandonded is very easy to define. when it is not available for purchase from the rights owner.
Well, then by that definition, forcing abandoned software to be legally free is a terrible idea.
this would be a bi-directional state, so once an old arcade game becomes available on xbox arcade or wii it would be infringement to distribute the ROM, but as soon as that game became unavailable again it would be legal.
Um... I really don't think that would work too well. Once something is in the public domain, it's there. There's no taking it back again.
Apparently, slashdot isn't the only site that can use some help in the proof-reading department.
Seagate's new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate's innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology."
Despite Seagate's claims, the new 500GB Momentus are not the first "half-terabyte notebook hard drives." Not only have Hitachi and Fujistu already announced their 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drives earlier this year, but Samsung's 500GB, 2.5-inch, Sprintpoint M6 (model HM500LI) has been shipping since March. Oh well, you can't blame Samsung(??) for trying. Both of Samsung's(?!?) 2.5-inch, Momentus drives are expected to start shipping sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, and pricing has not be set yet.
More on topic, 1.5TB drives are awesome. Can't wait to pick one up. My current 600 gigs of space is constantly filling up. :-(
Seems to me it would be a fair enough rule that software with a sizeable installed base that is abandoned by its creators should be opened to the community, so it can live on or die on its own merits.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree somewhat with this idea - though perhaps more with the specifics added to it by others, than your original idea quoted here.
First, how do we define "abandoned" in this case. The best hard line I can think of off-hand is "when official support is discontinued". But if that is where the line would be drawn, it puts software developers/publishers in a very difficult position. Their own older software because their biggest enemy and competition, like WinXP vs. Vista, except to a much greater extent. For an example, let's bring Win2K into the mix. If Win2K was now legally free to obtain and use because of support being discontinued, how many customers would have purchased XP? And more, how many would have purchased Vista? For the most part Win2K can do all the essential functions that either of the newer versions can do, and with a lot less bloat and overhead to boot. Many users still prefer Win2K, even at an equal price point. So with such an "abandonware is free" rule, now the software company has to tread a very careful path, so as to make their next version just enough better to entice users to switch from the old version, but yet not so good as to make a better version unfeasible. Service packs and major patches would become history; such updates would have to become a new pay-for version of the product. Otherwise, the only option is to keep supporting old versions of software merely so it doesn't become "abandonware" (and therefore free). Even worse would be if the hard line for becoming abandonware is whether or not the product is still sold by the publisher. Then they would not only be locked into perpetually providing support, but also keeping the old product available for sale to compete with the newer versions.
I think the real issues here that need to be addressed are software patents and ridiculous copyright durations. If those get properly fixed, abandonware would become free by default at an appropriate time.
Actually, I can picture both Mark and Mila in those roles. I think it should be a good movie.
And having played (and immensely enjoyed) both Max Payne games, I can't wait.
You might want to do some research on "feudalism" and "tyranny" before posting more ignorant garbage.
That's why every website that allows you to contribute to it has a terms of service you have to agree to before they allow you access. And in that TOS (if you bother to read it) it also tells you that you have no rights to whatever you contribute to it, and that they reserve the right to remove it at their discretion whenever they choose for any reason. The reason the "private house" analogy breaks down here is you're somewhat limited to what you can do to remove someone from your private physical property without breaking a law (generally, you'd go to jail for shooting someone because they said something that offended you in your house). Online however, there's no such problem. There's no chance whatsoever of killing or even injuring someone when you remove them from your website. Therefore, there's a lot more free reign in exercising your rights over your website you own.
You should find out the difference between "own" and "lease". And then there's also this thing called "contract" that usually goes along with "lease".
That's a terrible analogy. But I'll run with it a bit. In your (awful) analogy, there's a reason why most cities have sound ordinances. It's so if you play that "damn negro music" loud enough for the public to hear it and be offended by it, you can be fined. A hosting site like Flickr is really nothing like your car analogy. The content on such a website is freely available to be viewed by the public, but the site itself is not public property. Therefore, the owner of that private property has the right to remove anything they choose.
A better analogy would be if you tried to host a little porn convention in your local Walmart.
The difference is, everything on the internet is a whole different ballgame. There is no "public property" online. Any website you browse/log in to/whatever is owned by an individual, company, or government. Therefore, you must follow the rules they set forth for their site. Their site, their rules. If you don't like them, you're free to not use them.