~10,000/week isn't completely dire, I suppose, but I don't think the Playstation clobbered the Saturn quite as hard in Japan as the Wii is clobbering the PS3 (due in part to the Saturn's heavy 2D game focus).
Zork's text parsing was far superior to Adventure's, and Infocom's ability to port it (in pieces) from the PDP-10 to the many microcomputers of the time was in itself and innovative achievement.
The age difference doesn't matter, nor does the content. All that matters is that Wal-Mart isn't going to stock Manhunt 2 because of the AO rating. If places like Wal-Mart won't sell it, Rockstar is going to have a difficult time selling enough copies of it to make a profit.
The Virtual Boy is a bigger failure in the sense that nobody bought one and it completely failed to catch on, but its economic impact wasn't as severe due to strong SNES and Gameboy sales.
The PS3's failure in the marketplace isn't as total, but its impact on Sony is greater since the PSP isn't strong enough to pick up the slack. So in that respect, the PS3 is the worse failure for its overall effect on Sony and the Playstation brand.
I had that version. I remember the key to shooting things was to wait until they got near the right side of the screen so that the slow moving bullets would have enough time to reach the target as it jerkily moved from left to right. The game itself was tucked away in a collections disk of pirated software, but I don't think I still have a disk image of it anywhere.
The average family non-gamer isn't going to use a controller with 3 different control sticks, 4 triggers and a pile of face buttons; it has to be simplified to be made "family friendly". But since it's far too late to make that change now without breaking every 360 title out there, Microsoft's quest to capture some of Nintendo's market is in vain for this generation.
The PSP actually outsold the DS until the DS Lite came out. The DS Lite took off and sold like hot cakes
In America the sales were close for a long time, but in Japan and the rest of the world the non-Lite DS outsold the PSP almost 2:1 through the end of 2005.
A middle layer between hardware and software sounds a whole lot like an operating system - the sort of thing that "would allow software to adapt to the hardware it's running on". I can't figure out from the article what makes this thing so special.
Though personally, I'm waiting for the opposite - a way to d/l VC games onto a cartridge for use in DSes.
Why bother with a cartridge? I'd like to use the DS' "Download Play" option to fetch VC titles directly from the Wii. There'd be little risk of piracy since they'd only be playable until the DS is turned off, and no extra hardware is needed. Nintendo would only need to write DS-based emulators and have a channel for sharing them out with.
Batch converting FLAC (or APE) to M4A and keeping non-ASCII metadata intact is easy. I've written tools to do it with the help of flac, faac and the Linux version of mac. It's a no-brainer since all three formats use UTF-8 encoding throughout for text data.
MP3 is a different story because the ID3v2 tag format is such a mess. The standard supports 3 different Unicode encodings, but very few players handle them correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if perfectly valid tags would crash a poorly written player.
If you're having trouble transcoding, I'd wager the problem doesn't lie in the lossless formats themselves.
The metadata looks like it's stored alongside the other metadata atoms (song name, album name, etc.). It should be trivial to strip out with affecting the song data. It's fundamentally no more difficult than changing an ID3 tag and shouldn't require any sort of transcoding.
The Dual Shock is an ergonomic nightmare, full of sharp edges and a lousy d-pad.
The Dreamcast controller *almost* gets it right, but my knuckles tend to hit the VMU "container" on the underside during intense games.
I haven't played the 360 enough to judge, but the X-Box's controller never gave me any problems. It does seem like an evolution of the Dreamcast pad, after all.
Increasing success by lowering expectations. Since whatever they expected is some arbitrary value, all they have to do is lower them enough and the actual sales will have to be much higher.
Perhaps the Cell will result in a more optimized Game Grid so the MCP can better manage programs by putting them through multi-core Light Cycle matches.
A proper password system won't know your password is "aLt256!". It might know the SHA1sum of your password is "edf36c114c91dc1b3f45ac059bc20868618d368b" (or some better hashing routine, with salt), but won't know how close "AlT256!" is to the actual password it has stored and shouldn't be providing much help in getting to it.
For months after release, the DS got little but quick ports, tech demos and mini game collections. It took awhile for the quality titles to roll in, since quality titles take a long time to develop. The Wii is in a similar situation because its success took a lot of developers by surprise - again.
When the Wii becomes the dominant console, developers will put out "hard core" titles for the "hard core" gamers because they'll have so much incentive to do so. But I have little doubt that the casual titles like Sports and Wii Sims are going to be the real system movers.
If they'd bothered to wrap a proper container around mp3 to begin with, adding tags would be a lot easier and junk like the Xing header wouldn't be necessary. It doesn't help that ID3v2 is a prime example of the second-system effect. If a bit more foresight was taken when mp3 was pushed out the door, I expect it'd be a much better format than it is now.
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- Add "TwinView" option to "Device" section in xorg.conf
- Restart X server
- There is no step 3
The nvidia driver makes the whole process trivial, really.XP Home? XP Professional? Vista Home Basic? Vista Home Premium? Vista Business? Vista Enterprise? Vista Ultimate?
There's lots of Linux distros for the same reason there's lots of Windows versions - because they are aimed at different users with different needs.
~10,000/week isn't completely dire, I suppose, but I don't think the Playstation clobbered the Saturn quite as hard in Japan as the Wii is clobbering the PS3 (due in part to the Saturn's heavy 2D game focus).
I've compared the PS3 to the Sega Saturn before - two overpriced, over-engineered consoles from companies on the decline.
But the Saturn actually did pretty well in Japan, so perhaps they're not as close as I first thought.
Zork's text parsing was far superior to Adventure's, and Infocom's ability to port it (in pieces) from the PDP-10 to the many microcomputers of the time was in itself and innovative achievement.
The age difference doesn't matter, nor does the content. All that matters is that Wal-Mart isn't going to stock Manhunt 2 because of the AO rating. If places like Wal-Mart won't sell it, Rockstar is going to have a difficult time selling enough copies of it to make a profit.
The Virtual Boy is a bigger failure in the sense that nobody bought one and it completely failed to catch on, but its economic impact wasn't as severe due to strong SNES and Gameboy sales.
The PS3's failure in the marketplace isn't as total, but its impact on Sony is greater since the PSP isn't strong enough to pick up the slack. So in that respect, the PS3 is the worse failure for its overall effect on Sony and the Playstation brand.
I had that version. I remember the key to shooting things was to wait until they got near the right side of the screen so that the slow moving bullets would have enough time to reach the target as it jerkily moved from left to right. The game itself was tucked away in a collections disk of pirated software, but I don't think I still have a disk image of it anywhere.
The average family non-gamer isn't going to use a controller with 3 different control sticks, 4 triggers and a pile of face buttons; it has to be simplified to be made "family friendly". But since it's far too late to make that change now without breaking every 360 title out there, Microsoft's quest to capture some of Nintendo's market is in vain for this generation.
A middle layer between hardware and software sounds a whole lot like an operating system - the sort of thing that "would allow software to adapt to the hardware it's running on". I can't figure out from the article what makes this thing so special.
Batch converting FLAC (or APE) to M4A and keeping non-ASCII metadata intact is easy. I've written tools to do it with the help of flac, faac and the Linux version of mac. It's a no-brainer since all three formats use UTF-8 encoding throughout for text data.
MP3 is a different story because the ID3v2 tag format is such a mess. The standard supports 3 different Unicode encodings, but very few players handle them correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if perfectly valid tags would crash a poorly written player.
If you're having trouble transcoding, I'd wager the problem doesn't lie in the lossless formats themselves.
The metadata looks like it's stored alongside the other metadata atoms (song name, album name, etc.). It should be trivial to strip out with affecting the song data. It's fundamentally no more difficult than changing an ID3 tag and shouldn't require any sort of transcoding.
The Dual Shock is an ergonomic nightmare, full of sharp edges and a lousy d-pad.
The Dreamcast controller *almost* gets it right, but my knuckles tend to hit the VMU "container" on the underside during intense games.
I haven't played the 360 enough to judge, but the X-Box's controller never gave me any problems. It does seem like an evolution of the Dreamcast pad, after all.
Linus has credibility which the average Slashdot poster lacks.
He also has considerably more credibility than Microsoft.
Increasing success by lowering expectations. Since whatever they expected is some arbitrary value, all they have to do is lower them enough and the actual sales will have to be much higher.
It's safe to assume Sony didn't move Ken out of his Playstation boss role because he was performing it too well.
Perhaps the Cell will result in a more optimized Game Grid so the MCP can better manage programs by putting them through multi-core Light Cycle matches.
Dragon was never quite the same once Tramp vanished.
A proper password system won't know your password is "aLt256!". It might know the SHA1sum of your password is "edf36c114c91dc1b3f45ac059bc20868618d368b" (or some better hashing routine, with salt), but won't know how close "AlT256!" is to the actual password it has stored and shouldn't be providing much help in getting to it.
The longest-lived and one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time, despite an abundance of low-quality titles throughout its lifespan.
It overstayed its welcome, certainly, but the Wii can only hope to do as well as the 2600.
Probably not, though. No major system has ever failed for having too many games, even if most aren't "A" quality titles.
For months after release, the DS got little but quick ports, tech demos and mini game collections. It took awhile for the quality titles to roll in, since quality titles take a long time to develop. The Wii is in a similar situation because its success took a lot of developers by surprise - again.
When the Wii becomes the dominant console, developers will put out "hard core" titles for the "hard core" gamers because they'll have so much incentive to do so. But I have little doubt that the casual titles like Sports and Wii Sims are going to be the real system movers.
If they'd bothered to wrap a proper container around mp3 to begin with, adding tags would be a lot easier and junk like the Xing header wouldn't be necessary. It doesn't help that ID3v2 is a prime example of the second-system effect. If a bit more foresight was taken when mp3 was pushed out the door, I expect it'd be a much better format than it is now.