Regardless, I don't think global warming can be lab-tested and "proven" in a sense that you can prove most other theories. The real question here, though: Can we really afford to ignore the possability it may be right?
Well I agree on both points, and I don't think many people will disagree; where most people end up having a problem is to what extent we should be impacting our economy and way of life when all we have is an unproven theory.
Scientists have taken historic and current data and combined it with mathematical tools to make projections of the climate and have theorized that we are undergoing long term man made climate change. Whether you believe the theory or not largely depends on whether you support the premises that the theory is based on.
We don't really have spare planets to test the theory out on so it can not be claimed that it is proven.
Much like the modding community with Videogames, if you produce an excellent product that is highly 'hackable' you will benefit from higher sales based off of free work others have done for you; at the same time though, if you produce an average or bad product that is highly 'hackable' few people will notice it ever existed.
Basically, make your product good first then worry about whether you want people to modify it or not.
There seems to be this odd belief in certain circles that wealthy people are like Scrooge McDuck and they keep large quantities of physical money in a gigantic Money Bin, and if you could take all of this money out of the money bin and redistribut it all of the worlds economic problems would be solved. The reality is that we do not live in a Disney Cartoon and this is not how wealthy works.
Most of the wealth in the world is not horded in a physical form which prevents it from being used but is invested in the Stock Market, as venture capital, or in Real Estate; regardless of the form of the investment their wealth is typically circulating throughout the ecconomy, producing jobs and creating further wealth for themselves and everyone else.
When the land was taken from white land owners, they took the land away from people who knew how to manage the resource efficiently (who would spend a lot of money locally on equipment, general labour and supplies) and gave it to people who had no idea how to manage a farm; the best result would be the land underperforming and less money being generated to buy equipment, supplies and pay for labour.
I'm not saying that all forms of making the economy more "fair" are wrong, but simply redistributing the wealth is one of the most moronic ideas ever! The correct approach is to take a small ammount of money from people and re-invest it in a way which will lead to people being able to make a greater income and (if invested carefully) build their own wealth; the only investment which matches this criteria is education.
There is a limited amount of wealth in our society. It is not an entirely zero-sum game, but it is true that the more wealth the richest have, the less the rest of us have. If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
Rather than take money away from people who are actively building the ecconomy and producing thousands of jobs why don't you reconsider how well your education system is working?
The fact is that the education system is failing (pretty much) every student who graduates from high school and doesn't go onto college. Many people spend their life in low paying jobs with no future while higher paying postions are unfilled. Most education systems need to start to accept that most of their students are not well suited and have very little desire to have a University Education; I don't mean that they're dumb, but people have varying aptitudes and personalities of which most are not suited towards an academic route.
There needs to be a greater focus on the trades and on teaching people skills which will everyone become successful in whatever path they choose.
Riley also thought the PS3's high price--$499 for the 20GB model, $599 for the 60GB--wasn't as large a factor as many have made it out to be. "I think price plays a role there, but remember during the holiday season people have deep pockets," he said. "Kids know what they want, and if they tell mom to go buy a PS3 and she comes home with a Wii, they won't be happy."
Honestly, when it comes to console sales I don't think price has that much of an impact on early adopters because it is a planned purchase; something which is budgeted for and anticipated months in advance. Where price becomes a factor is that most console purchases are not planned and happen when one or two popular games are sold; when someone watches an advertisement on TV and goes out to buy a PS3 with Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy they will (mostly) be anticipating a price of $300 or $400 for the system and game combined.
At the same time Apple hasn't (so far) hasn't prevented their customers from putting music that has no DRM onto their iPod so I would question whether they really are DRM's biggest backer; they could have easily said that you could only put licenced music on the iPod that was purchased through iTunes in order to protect the 'rights' of artists, but they didn't.
I'm no expert on video compression, but shouldn't it require six times as many bytes to store HD video at the same compression rate? That means you'd need 51 GB just to store the same length movie as a dual-layer DVD.
If you were using the same compression algorithm, yes it would require that much more data...
We're fortunate that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are not limited by the same compression algorithm that DVD is...
DVD uses MPEG 2 compression and (IIRC) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD can use H.264 and H.264 can fit (practically) the same ammount of video data at 1080p on a DVD that MPEG 2 can fit (at 480p) on a DVD.
For most people in the world this is the standard situation:
You have a wife and 3 kids -> you're not buying a $3000 TV You have a wife and 3 kids -> you're not buying a $500/$1000 DVD player
The format war will be over before the average family even knows there has been a format war.
From what I have seen, early technology adopters seem to be the young single well employed men or older men with no children living at home who are still empolyed; in either case they are (probably) interested in porography because they have no woman or no woman who is interested in sex. I (used to) know a woman who worked in a video-rental store that had an adult section and one of her comments was that it seemed like men lost their interest in the 'Adult Section' at 30 and regained it at 50.
From my very limited understanding of the situation, it seems like there is serious problem with the patent system because small companies patent everything to protect themselves from larger companies, larger companies patent everything to protect themselves from patent trolls, and patent trolls use the massive overworked system to get patents filed which will never be found by small or large coporations in order to sue for profit.
I don't know whether this is true or not but I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray was less open from a licensing perspective.
I remember reading a few years ago that Apex Digital was the number one brand of DVD players simply because they offered the $99 DVD player when everyone else was pushing $300 DVD players; lots of large companies (like Sony) lost a lot of money because they invested so much money developing technology and most people couldn't tell the difference in quality between a high quality DVD player and Apex Digital's DVD players. Basically, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Blu-Ray players and Discs are produced by a small 'club' of companies who want to make their money back from developing the Blu-Ray format before they allow other manufacturers access to the licence.
Porn is a multi-billion dollar industry so this is a big deal, and speaks volumes about winning the "standard" race. You have millions of Xbox 360 owners who can now watch porn on their Xbox's. That will, most definitely, be a big deal and selling point, between friends. I'm sure the porn industry will use this, tie-in, as a selling point too. Gaming meets porn is a natural IMHO. It's the next step in enterspankment. Yes, I have coined a new a catchy phrase!
I thought I read a statistic somewhere that the Porn Industry's revinues were as large as the Movie, Music and Videogame industries' revinues combined; now I don't know whether this statistic is true or not, but if it was it would imply that if the Porn industry choose HD-DVD and the Movie industry choose Blu-Ray the HD-DVD format would be the winning format in most homes.
The more I have thought about it the more I think that the 'best' (and probably most plausable) outcome to this whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war is that both formats will retain enough support for the first few years that eventually every 'Movie Player' will support both formats; at that point the consumer doesn't care anymore and the each of the 'camps' will be fighting over content providers.
Ultimately, if I see this as the likely outcome next christmas I will probably buy a HD-DVD player because I will have no worries about the content I buy not playing in future devices.
As you can see, it's a lot closer than this article would lead you to believe. The Wii sold in huge numbers its first 2 weeks, and it's now dropped off. The PS3 has held steady. They're almost neck and neck at this point.
Those are actual sales, not "surveys".
These are actual sales numbers in Japan too... They're not nearly neck in neck
Now if you believe this and this the Wii is selling every unit it ships while there are PS3 units on the shelf which means that the Wii could sell more if Nintendo could build more units.
It may not be the case for long but currently the Wii is owning the PS3 in Japan.
Personally, I think the iPhone sounds cool but I will never buy one (or at least in the near future)... There are two reasons why I dislike "do everything" or "convergence" hardware, usually the hardware is average or bad at every task and very expensive, forgetting (or losing) a phone/MP3 Player/PDA is bad but forgetting (or losing) your phone and MP3 Player and PDA is awful.
Something as small as having a touch screen to dial your phone, and display everything, means that you're either going to have to carry around a stylus (which you will probably lose) which will scratch your screen, or your screen will have fingerprints; either way it means images/videos/text will be hard to read.
IIRC there were three main problems with the PS2 to start with, the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer were poorly documented, the tools Sony provided were inadequate, and the system had several bottlenecks. Early in the life of the PS2 developers were blindly programming on the PS2 without a real understanding of the system, and when they were getting awful performance they didn't even have tools which allowed their code to be profiled so they didn't know why their performance was so bad. The result was that middleware developers started providing tool packages with PS2 support (which contained most of the tools and documentation Sony should have had when they released their first dev-kits) and developers who had 'survived' initial development started sharing what they learned with other developers.
The fact that the problem was mostly about information and tools (rather than it being a serious architecture problem) meant that developers could rapidly adapt to the system when provided the proper tools and documentation; look at some Madden Screenshots to see how much improvement there was
Now, I could be wrong, but from my understanding Carmack is implying that the PS3 has architecture problem which will not (easily) be fixed by middleware or developer experience; what this (could) mean is that the majority of developers will not be able to get decent performance out of the PS3.
It just pains me to see possible innovation being killed because it's difficult!!! Is the PS2 tough to develop for, heck yes...PS3...even harder...remember when this was a good thing? The 360 is great, easy, straight forward and BORING!!!!!! Don't get me wrong, I like writing code for the thing, because it makes my job darn easy and I pretty much know what I am going to get on the back end.
You're an idiot!!!
I developed games for years before I 'burnt out' on the deadlines and schedule...
The fact is no one wants to program for hardware that is 'interesting and challenging' they want to produce software which is 'interesting and challenging'. It is very difficult to produce an advanced 3d engine on a piece of hardware when you're fighting for adequate performance and as you add complexity you're constantly fighting with the hardware to get stable performance.
Essentially, an architecture which is 'difficult' to program for make creating high performance applications like building a sand castle in the rain.
When I took my niece to Lilo and Stitch in the theaters several years ago I thought that there was an opportunity for someone to make an interesting MMO based on something similar to this. My thought was that being able to 'create' a character from scratch and their choices would impact gameplay (say having 4 arms alows you to quad wield but you waste so many 'creation points' you can't have massive strength), in a science fiction setting with many (Vastly different) planets.
The problem is most companies are looking for a cash grab based on IP.
Market researcher David Cole, who runs the firm DFC Intelligence, says his best estimate is that 40 percent of U.S. households own a working video-game console.
The facts are that there are approximately 100 Million households in the us, of which 40% own a working console...
Now the PS2 has sold about 42 Million systems, the Gamecube has sold about 12 Million systems and the XBox sold about 16 Million systems in North America of which the bulk was in the United states. As a rough guestimate, I would expect 1/3 to 1/2 of all household which have consoles to have multiple systems; being that this represents a userbase approximately equal to the Gamecube or the XBox I would assume that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would try to ensure that their platform was the dominant choice for these gamers.
Actually, its probably far worse than you imagine...
( I'm using approximate numbers because I haven't worked on a PS3 or XBox 360 game )
To create a 3D asset for a XBox 360 game you will likely produce an initial 3D model at 4 times the resolution of an XBox game, you will produce a model that is 4 times the resolution of this model in order to produce normal maps, you will produce as many coloured textures as you did for the XBox game but each will be about 4 times the resolution, you will have another texture map which handles 'material' data (for lighting), and possibly other textures for shaders to increase the realism.
Now the far more detailed assets would add a lot of expense to developing a game but it gets worse from here. One of the biggest problems is that you have to add more assets as the detail of the assets increases to maintain 'realism'; to make an office look realistic (as an example) you need to have more than a desk, chair, file cabinet, and garbage can (and you can re-use these assets far less because people will notice the repetition).
PS3 can run GNU/Linux and all the Free games developed for GNU/Linux by devoted amateurs. Wii requires each developer to be a company with office space detached from the home.
So... In other words, the PS3 will have Tux Racer and glTron?
Not to be blunt, but it might be interesting to see Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony encourage SNES/N64 level development from indie and amature developers but beyond the 'interest' factor amature game developers do not bring that much to the table.
I remember reading a quote on a blog which essentially said "The PS3 and XBox 360 can coexist with the Wii but not with eachother" which I believe is somewhat true; if the Wii sells remarkably well it will impact sales of the XBox 360 and PS3, but its impact will be far smaller than if either of the other systems becomes remarkably popular. Now I suspect that by dismissing the PS3 Microsoft aims to ensure that the populatity of the Wii60 is greater than the popularity of the PSWii.
wow it costs half as much and sells twice as many. so what?
you won't see this article headline in two years when the Wii is tired and the PS3 is wired.
That's not how this works though...
Developers and Consumers tend towards the most popular system because it has the largest userbase and the most development for it. In many ways both the Playstation and PS2 were eclipsed by more powerful systems and remained the market leaders because the large userbase attracted third party devlopers who developed games which attracted a large userbase. If the Wii sells (consistently) at 2 or 4 times the rate of the PS3 for a year (or more) the sales of the PS3 will drop off and the sales of the Wii will accelerate.
In theory the PS3/XBox 360 and Wii could all handle a 2160p TV, but with the extra processing power required to do generate the pixels the quality of the 3D images they could produce would be greatly reduced. Think of it this way, if you increase the number of pixels by 4 times you reduce the ammount of pixel processing per pixel to 1/4 the original ammount; so the PS3 could produce images at this resolution but they would look far worse.
The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, if I remember correctly. The melting of the polar ice caps of Mars and the melting of the polar ice caps of Earth are unrelated.
You missed the point the Anonymous Coward was making...
The fact is that no one knows what is causing Global Warming on Mars but we know for sure that it is not caused by Martians driving around their SUVs. There are several theories and some speculate that recent solar activity (the high levels of sun-spot and solar-flares) are having an impact on Mars even though there has been no increase in irradiance; being that Mars is further away from the Sun than Earh is it would be foolish not to assume that any impact from Solar activity on Mars would impact Earth.
The fact that you didn't even look into this before you dismissed it as "unrelated" demonstrates a blind faith which should never be associated with science.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless, I don't think global warming can be lab-tested and "proven" in a sense that you can prove most other theories. The real question here, though: Can we really afford to ignore the possability it may be right?
Well I agree on both points, and I don't think many people will disagree; where most people end up having a problem is to what extent we should be impacting our economy and way of life when all we have is an unproven theory.
Technically speaking they're 100% correct.
Scientists have taken historic and current data and combined it with mathematical tools to make projections of the climate and have theorized that we are undergoing long term man made climate change. Whether you believe the theory or not largely depends on whether you support the premises that the theory is based on.
We don't really have spare planets to test the theory out on so it can not be claimed that it is proven.
Much like the modding community with Videogames, if you produce an excellent product that is highly 'hackable' you will benefit from higher sales based off of free work others have done for you; at the same time though, if you produce an average or bad product that is highly 'hackable' few people will notice it ever existed.
Basically, make your product good first then worry about whether you want people to modify it or not.
There seems to be this odd belief in certain circles that wealthy people are like Scrooge McDuck and they keep large quantities of physical money in a gigantic Money Bin, and if you could take all of this money out of the money bin and redistribut it all of the worlds economic problems would be solved. The reality is that we do not live in a Disney Cartoon and this is not how wealthy works.
Most of the wealth in the world is not horded in a physical form which prevents it from being used but is invested in the Stock Market, as venture capital, or in Real Estate; regardless of the form of the investment their wealth is typically circulating throughout the ecconomy, producing jobs and creating further wealth for themselves and everyone else.
When the land was taken from white land owners, they took the land away from people who knew how to manage the resource efficiently (who would spend a lot of money locally on equipment, general labour and supplies) and gave it to people who had no idea how to manage a farm; the best result would be the land underperforming and less money being generated to buy equipment, supplies and pay for labour.
I'm not saying that all forms of making the economy more "fair" are wrong, but simply redistributing the wealth is one of the most moronic ideas ever! The correct approach is to take a small ammount of money from people and re-invest it in a way which will lead to people being able to make a greater income and (if invested carefully) build their own wealth; the only investment which matches this criteria is education.
There is a limited amount of wealth in our society. It is not an entirely zero-sum game, but it is true that the more wealth the richest have, the less the rest of us have. If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
Rather than take money away from people who are actively building the ecconomy and producing thousands of jobs why don't you reconsider how well your education system is working?
The fact is that the education system is failing (pretty much) every student who graduates from high school and doesn't go onto college. Many people spend their life in low paying jobs with no future while higher paying postions are unfilled. Most education systems need to start to accept that most of their students are not well suited and have very little desire to have a University Education; I don't mean that they're dumb, but people have varying aptitudes and personalities of which most are not suited towards an academic route.
There needs to be a greater focus on the trades and on teaching people skills which will everyone become successful in whatever path they choose.
Riley also thought the PS3's high price--$499 for the 20GB model, $599 for the 60GB--wasn't as large a factor as many have made it out to be. "I think price plays a role there, but remember during the holiday season people have deep pockets," he said. "Kids know what they want, and if they tell mom to go buy a PS3 and she comes home with a Wii, they won't be happy."
Honestly, when it comes to console sales I don't think price has that much of an impact on early adopters because it is a planned purchase; something which is budgeted for and anticipated months in advance. Where price becomes a factor is that most console purchases are not planned and happen when one or two popular games are sold; when someone watches an advertisement on TV and goes out to buy a PS3 with Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy they will (mostly) be anticipating a price of $300 or $400 for the system and game combined.
At the same time Apple hasn't (so far) hasn't prevented their customers from putting music that has no DRM onto their iPod so I would question whether they really are DRM's biggest backer; they could have easily said that you could only put licenced music on the iPod that was purchased through iTunes in order to protect the 'rights' of artists, but they didn't.
I'm no expert on video compression, but shouldn't it require six times as many bytes to store HD video at the same compression rate? That means you'd need 51 GB just to store the same length movie as a dual-layer DVD.
...
...
If you were using the same compression algorithm, yes it would require that much more data
We're fortunate that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are not limited by the same compression algorithm that DVD is
DVD uses MPEG 2 compression and (IIRC) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD can use H.264 and H.264 can fit (practically) the same ammount of video data at 1080p on a DVD that MPEG 2 can fit (at 480p) on a DVD.
For most people in the world this is the standard situation:
You have a wife and 3 kids -> you're not buying a $3000 TV
You have a wife and 3 kids -> you're not buying a $500/$1000 DVD player
The format war will be over before the average family even knows there has been a format war.
From what I have seen, early technology adopters seem to be the young single well employed men or older men with no children living at home who are still empolyed; in either case they are (probably) interested in porography because they have no woman or no woman who is interested in sex. I (used to) know a woman who worked in a video-rental store that had an adult section and one of her comments was that it seemed like men lost their interest in the 'Adult Section' at 30 and regained it at 50.
From my very limited understanding of the situation, it seems like there is serious problem with the patent system because small companies patent everything to protect themselves from larger companies, larger companies patent everything to protect themselves from patent trolls, and patent trolls use the massive overworked system to get patents filed which will never be found by small or large coporations in order to sue for profit.
I don't know whether this is true or not but I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray was less open from a licensing perspective.
...
I remember reading a few years ago that Apex Digital was the number one brand of DVD players simply because they offered the $99 DVD player when everyone else was pushing $300 DVD players; lots of large companies (like Sony) lost a lot of money because they invested so much money developing technology and most people couldn't tell the difference in quality between a high quality DVD player and Apex Digital's DVD players. Basically, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Blu-Ray players and Discs are produced by a small 'club' of companies who want to make their money back from developing the Blu-Ray format before they allow other manufacturers access to the licence.
I could be wrong though
Porn is a multi-billion dollar industry so this is a big deal, and speaks volumes about winning the "standard" race.
You have millions of Xbox 360 owners who can now watch porn on their Xbox's. That will, most definitely, be a big deal and selling point, between friends. I'm sure the porn industry will use this, tie-in, as a selling point too. Gaming meets porn is a natural IMHO. It's the next step in enterspankment. Yes, I have coined a new a catchy phrase!
I thought I read a statistic somewhere that the Porn Industry's revinues were as large as the Movie, Music and Videogame industries' revinues combined; now I don't know whether this statistic is true or not, but if it was it would imply that if the Porn industry choose HD-DVD and the Movie industry choose Blu-Ray the HD-DVD format would be the winning format in most homes.
The more I have thought about it the more I think that the 'best' (and probably most plausable) outcome to this whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war is that both formats will retain enough support for the first few years that eventually every 'Movie Player' will support both formats; at that point the consumer doesn't care anymore and the each of the 'camps' will be fighting over content providers.
Ultimately, if I see this as the likely outcome next christmas I will probably buy a HD-DVD player because I will have no worries about the content I buy not playing in future devices.
As you can see, it's a lot closer than this article would lead you to believe. The Wii sold in huge numbers its first 2 weeks, and it's now dropped off. The PS3 has held steady. They're almost neck and neck at this point.
... They're not nearly neck in neck
Those are actual sales, not "surveys".
These are actual sales numbers in Japan too
Wii ( 158,750 ) vs. PS3 ( 68,500 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 07th January 2007
Wii ( 135,250 ) vs. PS3 ( 61,250 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 31st December 2006
Wii ( 286,500 ) vs. PS3 ( 76,500 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 24th December 2006
Wii ( 100,500 ) vs. PS3 ( 72,500 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 17th December 2006
Wii ( 103,500 ) vs. PS3 ( 49,000 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 10th December 2006
Wii ( 368,500 ) vs. PS3 ( 31,500 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 03rd December 2006
PS3 ( 35,750 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 26th November 2006
PS3 ( 43,500 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 19th November 2006
PS3 ( 86,750 ) Japanese Chart for Week Ending 12th November 2006
Total: Wii ( 1,153,000 ) vs. PS3 ( 525,250 )
Wii Hardware vs PS3 Hardware
Wii Software vs PS3 Software
Now if you believe this and this the Wii is selling every unit it ships while there are PS3 units on the shelf which means that the Wii could sell more if Nintendo could build more units.
It may not be the case for long but currently the Wii is owning the PS3 in Japan.
Personally, I think the iPhone sounds cool but I will never buy one (or at least in the near future) ... There are two reasons why I dislike "do everything" or "convergence" hardware, usually the hardware is average or bad at every task and very expensive, forgetting (or losing) a phone/MP3 Player/PDA is bad but forgetting (or losing) your phone and MP3 Player and PDA is awful.
Something as small as having a touch screen to dial your phone, and display everything, means that you're either going to have to carry around a stylus (which you will probably lose) which will scratch your screen, or your screen will have fingerprints; either way it means images/videos/text will be hard to read.
IIRC there were three main problems with the PS2 to start with, the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer were poorly documented, the tools Sony provided were inadequate, and the system had several bottlenecks. Early in the life of the PS2 developers were blindly programming on the PS2 without a real understanding of the system, and when they were getting awful performance they didn't even have tools which allowed their code to be profiled so they didn't know why their performance was so bad. The result was that middleware developers started providing tool packages with PS2 support (which contained most of the tools and documentation Sony should have had when they released their first dev-kits) and developers who had 'survived' initial development started sharing what they learned with other developers.
The fact that the problem was mostly about information and tools (rather than it being a serious architecture problem) meant that developers could rapidly adapt to the system when provided the proper tools and documentation; look at some Madden Screenshots to see how much improvement there was
Madden 2001
Madden 2002
Madden 2003
Now, I could be wrong, but from my understanding Carmack is implying that the PS3 has architecture problem which will not (easily) be fixed by middleware or developer experience; what this (could) mean is that the majority of developers will not be able to get decent performance out of the PS3.
It just pains me to see possible innovation being killed because it's difficult!!! Is the PS2 tough to develop for, heck yes...PS3...even harder...remember when this was a good thing? The 360 is great, easy, straight forward and BORING!!!!!! Don't get me wrong, I like writing code for the thing, because it makes my job darn easy and I pretty much know what I am going to get on the back end.
...
You're an idiot!!!
I developed games for years before I 'burnt out' on the deadlines and schedule
The fact is no one wants to program for hardware that is 'interesting and challenging' they want to produce software which is 'interesting and challenging'. It is very difficult to produce an advanced 3d engine on a piece of hardware when you're fighting for adequate performance and as you add complexity you're constantly fighting with the hardware to get stable performance.
Essentially, an architecture which is 'difficult' to program for make creating high performance applications like building a sand castle in the rain.
When I took my niece to Lilo and Stitch in the theaters several years ago I thought that there was an opportunity for someone to make an interesting MMO based on something similar to this. My thought was that being able to 'create' a character from scratch and their choices would impact gameplay (say having 4 arms alows you to quad wield but you waste so many 'creation points' you can't have massive strength), in a science fiction setting with many (Vastly different) planets.
The problem is most companies are looking for a cash grab based on IP.
Market researcher David Cole, who runs the firm DFC Intelligence, says his best estimate is that 40 percent of U.S. households own a working video-game console.
...
link
Census Info
The facts are that there are approximately 100 Million households in the us, of which 40% own a working console
Now the PS2 has sold about 42 Million systems, the Gamecube has sold about 12 Million systems and the XBox sold about 16 Million systems in North America of which the bulk was in the United states. As a rough guestimate, I would expect 1/3 to 1/2 of all household which have consoles to have multiple systems; being that this represents a userbase approximately equal to the Gamecube or the XBox I would assume that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would try to ensure that their platform was the dominant choice for these gamers.
Actually, its probably far worse than you imagine ...
( I'm using approximate numbers because I haven't worked on a PS3 or XBox 360 game )
To create a 3D asset for a XBox 360 game you will likely produce an initial 3D model at 4 times the resolution of an XBox game, you will produce a model that is 4 times the resolution of this model in order to produce normal maps, you will produce as many coloured textures as you did for the XBox game but each will be about 4 times the resolution, you will have another texture map which handles 'material' data (for lighting), and possibly other textures for shaders to increase the realism.
Now the far more detailed assets would add a lot of expense to developing a game but it gets worse from here. One of the biggest problems is that you have to add more assets as the detail of the assets increases to maintain 'realism'; to make an office look realistic (as an example) you need to have more than a desk, chair, file cabinet, and garbage can (and you can re-use these assets far less because people will notice the repetition).
PS3 can run GNU/Linux and all the Free games developed for GNU/Linux by devoted amateurs. Wii requires each developer to be a company with office space detached from the home.
... In other words, the PS3 will have Tux Racer and glTron?
So
Not to be blunt, but it might be interesting to see Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony encourage SNES/N64 level development from indie and amature developers but beyond the 'interest' factor amature game developers do not bring that much to the table.
I remember reading a quote on a blog which essentially said "The PS3 and XBox 360 can coexist with the Wii but not with eachother" which I believe is somewhat true; if the Wii sells remarkably well it will impact sales of the XBox 360 and PS3, but its impact will be far smaller than if either of the other systems becomes remarkably popular. Now I suspect that by dismissing the PS3 Microsoft aims to ensure that the populatity of the Wii60 is greater than the popularity of the PSWii.
wow it costs half as much and sells twice as many. so what?
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you won't see this article headline in two years when the Wii is tired and the PS3 is wired.
That's not how this works though
Developers and Consumers tend towards the most popular system because it has the largest userbase and the most development for it. In many ways both the Playstation and PS2 were eclipsed by more powerful systems and remained the market leaders because the large userbase attracted third party devlopers who developed games which attracted a large userbase. If the Wii sells (consistently) at 2 or 4 times the rate of the PS3 for a year (or more) the sales of the PS3 will drop off and the sales of the Wii will accelerate.
Well ...
In theory the PS3/XBox 360 and Wii could all handle a 2160p TV, but with the extra processing power required to do generate the pixels the quality of the 3D images they could produce would be greatly reduced. Think of it this way, if you increase the number of pixels by 4 times you reduce the ammount of pixel processing per pixel to 1/4 the original ammount; so the PS3 could produce images at this resolution but they would look far worse.
The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, if I remember correctly. The melting of the polar ice caps of Mars and the melting of the polar ice caps of Earth are unrelated.
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You missed the point the Anonymous Coward was making
The fact is that no one knows what is causing Global Warming on Mars but we know for sure that it is not caused by Martians driving around their SUVs. There are several theories and some speculate that recent solar activity (the high levels of sun-spot and solar-flares) are having an impact on Mars even though there has been no increase in irradiance; being that Mars is further away from the Sun than Earh is it would be foolish not to assume that any impact from Solar activity on Mars would impact Earth.
The fact that you didn't even look into this before you dismissed it as "unrelated" demonstrates a blind faith which should never be associated with science.