While I was on unemployment benefit, one of the official (read: do it, or have your benefits reduced) ways to try and get work was to cold call every business in your field. I refused, however I got a job before it became an issue.
You're absolutely right. My next PC will be a dual-dual core, with a pair of video cards. Whichever OS supports it best (drivers vs licensing) will be the one I use.
If you use an iPod, you're wasting it if you have it mounted as a drive all the time. I have an iPod I take to work each day, but it spends most of its time playing music. I connect it in the evening to grab an off-site overnight backup and load anything too large for the main device I use to shuffle stuff back and forth -- a 128MB USB device that looks like a pen. Push comes to shove (ie; I've got too much stuff on the iPod) I might also use a CD-RW for a one-off transfer.
If you're bringing a lot personal of stuff to work every day, you're better off just getting a bus-powered USB2 2.5" hard drive enclosure. Or finding a way to shift your stuff onto a server that's accessible from work. For example, I have all of my emails on Gmail, so I don't need to think about humping them 'round on a drive.
As a casual/lapsed gamer, the last thing I'm going to do is commit to $X per month when there's a good chance I won't play a single game in that time. So, what's their market again?
I would love to know what your standards are for an inspired
"Sonic and Knuckles" is high on the list. A console game that not only stands on it's own, but lets you replay two previous games with a new character. Another example would be "Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand", where a light sensor means that the game plays differently if you're out in the sun rather than inside. Mostly, my view of innovative surrounds hardware integrated with software. The games that were released for the Mega Drive and SNES with extra processors in the cartridge (Virtua Racer, Doom, Starfox), while typically ports, were very impressive when it came to what they could do on such a lowly base console.
I used to buy games and never play them. It was due to being a reasonably well paid sys admin, with geek friends, no girlfriend and an interest in gaming.
Jeez, for a moment there I thought my memory was going. Half of my PS2 game collection hasn't been played for more than 30 minutes. At least half of my secondhand gaming purchases haven't been played at all. At the moment I've got more TV episodes of stuff than I know what to do with. Friends I've been lending books, vidoes and DVDs to have started returning them unread/unwatched. Frankly, I need to stop buying entertainment product for the next year just so I stand some hope of catching up.
I'm sorry, but all the games you mention, and all the games listed on the Renderware site would fall into my category of uninspired cookie-cutter games. To be fair, as would 90% of the titles on offer at the moment. Britney Spears' music sells particularly well too, doesn't mean it's not pap. Slick advertising and well managed licenses does not an innovative game make.
We should also remember that no-one cares about battery life.
Actually, the/. article itself indicates that Sony cares about battery life. Also, the history of the Gameboy vs the Lynx vs the GameGear shows that battery life is a make or break issue.
It's just DVD technology,
I thought it was this new blue laser technology or something. Even if it is DVD, 8cm CDs went away because of the overhead required to keep two sizes going in the factories, so the cost is obviously more significant than you make out.
But before we say anything else, we should remember that Japan owes its economy to optical disks,
Which is why the Nintendo used carts for three generations of consoles (and all their portables), the PC Engine used cards and the Neo Geo was effectively a daughterboard in a plasic case. And why Sega Japan's demands to fast-track the Saturn as the expence of the 32X and the planned Jupiter were so successful.
Sure 700MB was a nice lot of room, but everyone seems to forget the voices complaining about those loading times. I distinctly recall someone describing the PSX as "The platform for RPGs with massive Loading... times." I've got a pinball game for my PSX where the urge to play it has gone away by the time a table has loaded.
Everything is a compromise. If you want to go disc, you're sacrificing battery life and loading speed. If you want to go cart you're sacrificing a cheap production process and capacity. If you forget this you risk making a significant mis-step in the marketplace.
The people that build ground-breaking titles on limited platforms are people that are both artistic and damn good programmers with a real feel for the hardware. Sure there are plenty of programmers out there pumping out cookie-cutter titles with high-level tools, but you're going to have a hard time standing out of the pack if you're using the same drag 'n drop editor that any idiot can buy.
Nope, it was just before the time where everyone decided they sucked.
Sure, FMV games were big when FMV was new, but the gameplay was so limited that FMV was quickly religated to skippable cut-scenes. Now those cutscenes are mostly rendered with the game engine.
even large SD cards are only about 512MB, GT4 uses in the GB of space
And Sony's UMDs have the volume of at least half a dozen SD cards, so there's penty of space to play with physically. Price is an issue, but GBA games are already routinely 32MB and I doubt that A$32 of the retail price is the media. A 32MB ROM probably only costs a few dollars to produce. Sony's new UMDs probably cost them significantly to develop and to setup the factory to produce. If battery life is such an issue, then they would probably have done better to simply invest in ROM technology.
I dispute that. FMV sequences are not only stupid, but increasingly pointless given the quality of realtime rendered animation. Given the relatively small amount of RAM available, I would be seriously suprised if a game with no heavy use of FMV and speech had trouble fitting on a cartridge given that re-writable flash RAM in a profile as cramped as SD is roughly A$1 a MB.
This might have been an issue when the N64 came out, it isn't anymore.
"...those putting games together for the system say Sony has urged them to avoid streaming game levels from the Universal Media Disk, to lengthen the system's battery life."
Any half decent developer will have worked this out without needing any prompting by Sony. In fact, I doubt the quote is true. Instead, I'm sure that developers are busily determining how best to trade off the disc against RAM against CPU time. If CPU time is "cheaper" than reading from disc, then files will be compressed on the disc and decompressed into RAM -- unless RAM is so tight that data has to remain compressed in RAM until needed (or the SPU is so slow that decompressing data slows disc access, since power drain is related much more to the disc spinning than data actually being read). But if running the CPU at 100% impacts battery life (or the overhead affects game performance) too much, developers will still stream data off the disc. This is where real programmers shine and development houses that rely on high level development tools suffer.
Of course, if they'd gone with cartridges, the power draw and loading times would be significantly less.
I was going to make a snide remark about the GR, then I decided to just check and sure enough there's an Athens, GA (Georgia). Next up, Medieval England, Iowa.
Slashdot Mirror
I also submitted this story to /., with a comment that the PM's own email address is not nearly as available as many other sitting politicians.
While I was on unemployment benefit, one of the official (read: do it, or have your benefits reduced) ways to try and get work was to cold call every business in your field. I refused, however I got a job before it became an issue.
You're absolutely right. My next PC will be a dual-dual core, with a pair of video cards. Whichever OS supports it best (drivers vs licensing) will be the one I use.
Beat you by three minutes ;)
I think it's a garage door opener.
If you're bringing a lot personal of stuff to work every day, you're better off just getting a bus-powered USB2 2.5" hard drive enclosure. Or finding a way to shift your stuff onto a server that's accessible from work. For example, I have all of my emails on Gmail, so I don't need to think about humping them 'round on a drive.
Not only does my Sony DL DVD burner happily burn the only DL media I've been able to source, my mother's Samsung DVD/VCR combo player happily plays XVID, MPG and MP4 straight off the discs, no transcoding or special formats needed.
My pet hate: DVD's.
O. M. G. I was just playing Nethack on the Pocket PC I'm posting this message with.
Prove first that these new technologies will in fact increase security and then I'll argue the privacy case.
As a casual/lapsed gamer, the last thing I'm going to do is commit to $X per month when there's a good chance I won't play a single game in that time. So, what's their market again?
Someone mod the parent as funny. It may not know it, but it is.
A red and white checkered ball next to a Roman arch with a background of stormclouds. It's going to kick arse.
I'm sorry, but all the games you mention, and all the games listed on the Renderware site would fall into my category of uninspired cookie-cutter games. To be fair, as would 90% of the titles on offer at the moment. Britney Spears' music sells particularly well too, doesn't mean it's not pap. Slick advertising and well managed licenses does not an innovative game make.
Sure 700MB was a nice lot of room, but everyone seems to forget the voices complaining about those loading times. I distinctly recall someone describing the PSX as "The platform for RPGs with massive Loading... times." I've got a pinball game for my PSX where the urge to play it has gone away by the time a table has loaded.
Everything is a compromise. If you want to go disc, you're sacrificing battery life and loading speed. If you want to go cart you're sacrificing a cheap production process and capacity. If you forget this you risk making a significant mis-step in the marketplace.
The people that build ground-breaking titles on limited platforms are people that are both artistic and damn good programmers with a real feel for the hardware. Sure there are plenty of programmers out there pumping out cookie-cutter titles with high-level tools, but you're going to have a hard time standing out of the pack if you're using the same drag 'n drop editor that any idiot can buy.
Sure, FMV games were big when FMV was new, but the gameplay was so limited that FMV was quickly religated to skippable cut-scenes. Now those cutscenes are mostly rendered with the game engine.
This might have been an issue when the N64 came out, it isn't anymore.
Of course, if they'd gone with cartridges, the power draw and loading times would be significantly less.