And that would drive the advertisers away, because nobody wants to pay for those fake clicks.
If you look at it a very specific way, you can frame the discussion so that it looks like it's costing google a billion dollars. But it's not really a meaningful or useful number, except that Google can say to potential advertising clients, "hey look how honest we are, you should use our advertising service."
I wouldn't say that I'm particularly susceptible to being manipulated by advertisements, but even for someone like me who mostly ignores them, I would say that they manage to sometimes make me aware of products that I wouldn't otherwise know about.
But it's all about the venue and the relevance of the ad. The ads on Penny Arcade's website have showed me new games that I ended up spending some money on. The guys that run PA have said that they only accept advertisements for games that they think are of reasonable quality, and I believe them.
Other times, I've seen an ad that refers to something that I've been considering buying, and I've clicked on that ad as part of the product research that you mentioned. I've yet to see a banner ad that made me jump up and pull out my credit card, but an advertisement piquing your interest does not automatically make you a fool or a sheep.
The article is sparse on details, but I can't help but wonder if this guy didn't already have some health problems or at least live a very unhealthy lifestyle.
My first few years of college, I pulled all-nighters all the time (often multiple times per week), and once stayed up for 3 days straight. Many of my classmates followed similar schedules. It certainly wasn't the healthiest way to work, and I'd often feel like crap afterwards, but nobody ever died, or even seemed to get sick because of it. We never just sat back in a chair in front of a computer for all those hours straight through, we'd get up and move around and goof off (all that goofing off is a large reason why we had to work through so many nights to get everything done). I wonder if this guy who died never left his chair to even walk around a little bit.
Basically, not sleeping for a couple nights won't make you any healthier, and you probably won't feel very good towards the end of it, but it shouldn't kill a normal person. There's probably some other causes that combined with the lack of sleep that did this guy in. That being said, a computer game is a silly reason to stay up for 3 days straight.
I've seen 1000 player battles in EvE-online, and it isn't pretty. The setting for EVE is in space, so that helps some, because it spreads everything out more and there's not really any terrain and such to worry about rendering, but it's still bad. My computer has a few good years behind it, so I have frame-rate issues with just a couple hundred ships on grid, but some people with better setups have said that their frame rate usually isn't bad.
The real problem that EVE has is the server. It just chokes on keeping track of all those ships, and then once shooting starts and it has to do calculations for all of that, and people are jumping in and whatnot, things are generally unstable and the whole game is liable to crash.
It's certainly not an easy problem, the servers have to not only keep track of where all those ships are and what they're doing, it also needs to send a bunch of that information to each and every other player in range. The amount of data that needs to move back and forth pretty much scales exponentially, so I'm not sure if the hardware can every really keep up with what we wish was possible.
Are you implying that you have a way to send a payload to the moon that costs less than $10 million per launch?
Granted, a little rover and a delivery system can weigh significantly less than a 3 person capsule and a manned lunar lander, but it still takes a lot of energy to get out of the atmosphere and to a lunar orbit.
If you know how to build a rocket capable of sending something to the moon for less than ten million bucks, then you really should start your own company.
Yeah, but as someone who hasn't been a "hardcore" gamer in like 7 or 8 years (Not enough time), I don't have the same history with many of those titles as I do with the Nintendo stuff. I've had an Xbox for 3+ years, but I haven't gotten "invested" in any of those franchises the way I have with some of the Nintendo stuff over the course of 20 years.I know basically nothing about Bioshock, Mass Effect, Ninja Gaiden 2, or Banjo 3. GOW is a newer franchise, although it was certainly well recieved. Resident Evil is a good point however.
Anyways, MS is going to have a tougher time selling peopleto the tune of around $400 based on their future library. Some gamers are certainly already sold on that library, because they've been able to get more invested in those xbox franchises. Nintendo sold a bunch of us on their franchises decades ago, plus they're only asking for $250.
Price is undoubtedly a big issue, but games are still important. While the Wii library isn't mind-blowing right now, when I bought my Wii close to a year ago, I did so very much in anticipation of the future game library. I couldn't walk out of the store that day with a new Mario game, or Metroid Prime 3, or Mario Kart, or WarioWare, or Smash Bros. (although I did have zelda!), but I knew that they were coming, and was nearly certain that when they do arrive, that I'd have a great time with them. Nintendo has earned a reputation with consistently high quality 1st party games, and even with knowing nothing else, that would've been worth $250 for a console for me. The fact that Wii Sports was a lot of fun, plus the rayman game was a great time, and a few others were great surprises as well.
With the Xbox 360, the only big given for me was Halo 3. There have been a lot of good games released in the meantime, but at least in my mind, the 360 is not only competing with the Wii-library as it stands, but also a very impressive future library that has plenty of legitimacy based on Nintendo's history.
There's pluses and minuses to both methods. Multiple servers allow you to test in the ways that you mentioned, but having just one game universe makes it more "real" in some ways. Basically the players are stuck with that one model, much like the real world is stuck with the one global economy. Plus you'll get some long term growth data that you wouldn't get otherwise. If another 20k people join, instead of putting them all off on their own server with its own economy, you see the effects they have on an already existing economy, and how it grows and adapts. And also how new players find their way into a well established economy where many players are already far ahead of them.
There's plenty to be learned from both setups, no doubt.
So what's your problem with the ESRB then? Do you not see a value in their service? Do you think that because it's self-regulation at an industry level that it's certainly too biased to be of any value?
While a major goal of the ESRB is most certainly to avoid government regulation of the industry, I happen to think that even without that governmental threat, a rating system along those lines is still a good idea.
Theoretically, yes, you could have the client only handle information that wouldn't allow a player to cheat through client modification, but in reality it requires a pretty complicated balancing act and some compromise. The bandwidth/latency issue is a big one, and it gets pretty complicated when you really think about all the ways you can cheat. Sure, make the server the one who decides whether or not the other guy's bullets hit you. But what about things like wall hacks and such? If the client knows where the other players are, then a cheater can find that information out. The solution would be for the server to only provide the client locations of entities that should be visible to the player. In a FPS this would require the server to be constantly aware of each player's view. Keeping all of that updated and running smoothly would require constant exchanges between the client and server, and hiccups from lag or latency would be very apparent.
Although we here in the music industry consist of a collection of the world's greatest and most creative geniuses, we cannot with any certainty predict how many music-playing devices will be invented over the course of your lifetime, so we regret that we are unable to give you an exact answer to your question.
We can tell you, however, that due to the exciting pace of technology in this century, you can look forward to rewarding your favorite musicians over and over again by sending us money each time you purchase a new electronic device. It's thanks to your efforts that we are able to give songwriters and musicians a small portion of the profit that their hard work results in.
Thanks for submitting your question via our website, we will keep your ip address on file so that we can compare it to those found on file sharing networks, for your convenience and for the safety of your music.
That's basically the deterministic view of the universe, where given all the rules and the initial state of the universe, you'd theoretically be able to run a simulation and predict the entire future of the whole universe (of course, to simulate the entire universe, you'd need a computer the size of the universe).
Of course, then quantum mechanics and all that jazz has come along, and one of the things it fundamentally says is that some things are entirely based on probability, and as such are not deterministic. At the scale of things like elementary particles, you just plain cannot predict where some things are going to be at a given point in time. Hence we have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's not an intuitive or easy concept, but one way of describing it is that some of those tiny particles don't actually have a location until they need to.
I can't think of a better way to basically stop all software development than to hold developers criminally responsible for bugs in their programming. You're not going to economically create much software if you need to guarantee that it's bug-free, and exploit-proof.
The solution here is for consumers/businesses/governments/etc. to realize that having so much of our computing infrastructure running on the same OS leaves us very vulnerable to just a few bugs/exploits. It makes writing worms and such easier because the authors can focus on just one target and still affect a huge number of machines.
Not to mention that having just one company dominating the computing market so heavily means that they're under much less competitive pressure to improve their product.
The lesson there is... Many people will always complain. Mostly because it's an easy thing to do, and it works occasionally enough that it's worthwhile for many. In that way, it's a lot like email spam. The majority of the complaining is ignored because it's worthless, but every now and then someone relents and gives in to you. It doesn't happen often, but the complaining doesn't take much resources, so even the few scarce responses put you ahead of where you were before.
That plus people like to feel sorry for themselves.
Honestly, I'm surprised by how many people feel like the whole world owes them something. And when someone out there in that world offers them something, they bitch about it.
Steve Jobs didn't do this purely out of the kindess of his heart. He knows full-well that Apple will get some good PR out of this. But the best deals in life are the ones where both sides benefit. I fail to see how any iphone owner can feel like they're worse off by being offered this deal.
It's a gift, maybe not given 100% out of kindness, maybe not exactly what you wanted, but it's still a gift.
Wow, it's impressive to see environmentalism, anti-capitalist sentiment, anit-americanism, and OS flame wars all crammed into one paragraph. Well done.
I didn't see any source for that quote in the linked article, so it sounds to me like the slashdot submitter might be the moron (not that I have much faith in "industry analysts"). The Wii does, however, appear to have the lead in terms of sales of 'Next-Gen' consoles, which is still significant and there aren't many people who would've imagined that to be likely a couple of years ago.
I think it's less about economics and more about technically inclined people enjoying one of their hobbies, messing around with technology. There's just a lot more news bits about this because of the hype that Apple and the iPhone have been through.
Just about every mobile phone ever made has probably had at least a few geeks pull it apart to tinker on the insides, you just didn't hear about it unless you went looking for the information. But in the case of the iPhone, Apple (and others) have already done the advertising for the iphone hacks, it tagged along with the advertising for the iphone itself.
While I have no doubt that you can find anecdotal evidence of people who would not have purchased an iPhone under AT&T now considering one, I would be very surprised if those people constitute a number that would make up a noticeable percentage of the iPhones out on the street.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. Whether you're conservative or liberal, whatever your view of the world, some things are just plain bullshit, and some things are the plain truth.
Much of what the media does to pretend that it's being fair is talk to people from both sides of the issue, and pretend like that's their job, to have a platform for a republican to talk about an issue, and then a democrat talk about that issue. But that's only a small part of their job. Their job is not just to allow each side to give their take on it, the media needs to verify all that stuff, challenge it, and call out what's true and what's not.
So CNN has a republican tell me that we're making progress in Iraq, followed by a democrat telling me that there's no real progress and things aren't getting better; that doesn't help me make an informed decision. The media needs to quantify and qualify what they're being told. And if it turns out that one side is spewing nonsense, then the media needs to call them out on it, or at least stop giving them a stage to spread that incorrect information.
Of course, a lot of that is a moot point as far as a couple of shows on comedy central are concerned, because, you know, they're comedy shows.
Well, having lived and worked in New Orleans for the past few years, I'll be glad to finally see Michael Chertoff no longer in charge of any sort of federal disaster response. Although I'd have preferred(and expected) that he be fired and kicked to the street rather than be recommended to become attorney general of the USA.
I guess I just don't understand how the world works.
All that extra non-gaming stuff shoved into a game console should just be the syrup, no doubt. The problem is that in regards to the core-function, gaming, the PS3 has had a pretty sad showing compared to its competitors so far. Running with the food analogy because food is awesome, all the syrup is nice, but it's not that great without the pancakes. It's just a cup of syrup.
And you mentioned the price as being appealing, but I think it's actually the problem. Nobody wants to pay extra for their syrup. You don't buy pancakes and then get charged extra for the syrup. Sony is charging some extra for the syrup, that's why their console is significantly more expensive than the others. So you're paying for your syrup, and the pancakes underneath aren't even that good.
I bought my PS2 for $250 after GTA3 came out. Those were some excellent pancakes. The PS2 also happened to play DVD's. That was an excellent bonus, but I would've bought the PS3 without that, because $250 was not an unreasonable price for a game console in my mind.
Food analogies are better than car analogies, although they're both pretty dumb.
You're spot on about the immediate costs vs. long term costs, but I'd add that the main system that civilization has developed to deal with this type of issue is the government. Governments can muster the resources to do long term research without an immediate or even certain payoff. 20 billion dollars worth of research over five years is a heck of a risk for most any organization out there, but the US government can throw that kind of cash around easily enough.
You really only need to convince a handful of people to make this a priority, and the money will flow, and things will get done. The problem is that you're competing with a bunch of other priorities for the attention of these few people. It's a shame that more of those people haven't gotten behind this yet. It's an opportunity to build a whole new, huge industry. People love to complain about how making our energy and industry more environmentally friendly is going to slow our economy. It will likely slow some existing industries, but at the same time, developing all of this stuff is going to require a ton of industry and commerce. There's billions and billions of dollars to be made. We just need a few strong leaders who are willing to take a stand and put in some work.
Just having an original product doesn't guarantee success -- you need finances, marketing, customer support and repair facilities. It is a combination of all these things that will bring you success, with the R&D stage merely a blip. Who comes up with an idea first may be lacking all the other needs for a profitable product. That's all true, and one of the reasons why IP does have a valid place. In your imagined world, where there is zero IP protection, then the only people creating mass market products will be large organizations. If anyone smaller tried, their ideas would quickly be stolen outright, and mass produced by someone with the resources to develop and manufacture more of them faster. You could make an argument that that is better for the consumer, who gets new stuff more quickly, but it ignores the long term trends that that would lead to. Namely that the barrier to entry for entering just about any market will become so high that nobody will be able to start a business anymore. Then the big names start buying each other up, and we end up with a handful of huge companies that we're reliant on for everything.
That's not to say that IP laws are perfect, the system is definitely being abused, doesn't always work well, and couldn't be approved. But the suggestion that the only two options are the system we've got now or no sort of IP at all is not only silly, but very short-sighted.
I don't know. If they had called this thing something else, would more people really have bought it for bluray? Anyone who's interested in Bluray can easily do a minimal amount of research and discover that the PS3 plays them, and is one of the cheapest players out there. And in addition to a bluray player, you get this game console that does a bunch of other stuff. If I was in the market for a Bluray player, I'd have probably purchased a PS3 already. People aren't getting scared away from this bluray player because it's called a playstation, they're not buying it as a bluray player because they don't care about bluray.
The mass market doesn't seem to want the media center that Sony has set out to create. There are a bunch of people out there that want a playstation to play games on. They're not sure that they want to pay $500+ for it though. Bluray hasn't been hurt by being bundled in the PS3 (although it hasn't been helped nearly as much as sony hoped so far), but the Playstation name has suffered because of it. Playstation used to mean a game console with bazillions of games, many of which were excellent. Now it still means that to some degree (PS2's are still moving off the shelves pretty heavily), but it also means a $600 video game console.
Bluray doesn't even enter into the equation for most of the potential customers, except in the form of a couple hundred bucks added onto the price. When I bought my PS2, it was $250 which seemed normal for a game console to me. It also included a DVD player(the first I ever had), which was completely a bonus to me, because in my eyes it wasn't causing me to pay more for a video game console than I expected.
A multi-platform game might be a corner-stone when you don't have that many other games coming out, and the game in question is a huge name like GTA. I bought my PS2 because I wanted GTA3. When GTA IV comes out, I will want it, and my Wii won't run it. So I'll likely end up buying either a 360 or a PS3. I'm not sure which one I'm going to get right now, but Sony's chance of selling me a PS3 will go from approximately 0% right now to somewhere around 50%.
Sony needs more excellent games for the PS3. Exclusives are best, but multi-platform doesn't hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
And that would drive the advertisers away, because nobody wants to pay for those fake clicks.
If you look at it a very specific way, you can frame the discussion so that it looks like it's costing google a billion dollars. But it's not really a meaningful or useful number, except that Google can say to potential advertising clients, "hey look how honest we are, you should use our advertising service."
I wouldn't say that I'm particularly susceptible to being manipulated by advertisements, but even for someone like me who mostly ignores them, I would say that they manage to sometimes make me aware of products that I wouldn't otherwise know about.
But it's all about the venue and the relevance of the ad. The ads on Penny Arcade's website have showed me new games that I ended up spending some money on. The guys that run PA have said that they only accept advertisements for games that they think are of reasonable quality, and I believe them.
Other times, I've seen an ad that refers to something that I've been considering buying, and I've clicked on that ad as part of the product research that you mentioned. I've yet to see a banner ad that made me jump up and pull out my credit card, but an advertisement piquing your interest does not automatically make you a fool or a sheep.
The article is sparse on details, but I can't help but wonder if this guy didn't already have some health problems or at least live a very unhealthy lifestyle.
My first few years of college, I pulled all-nighters all the time (often multiple times per week), and once stayed up for 3 days straight. Many of my classmates followed similar schedules. It certainly wasn't the healthiest way to work, and I'd often feel like crap afterwards, but nobody ever died, or even seemed to get sick because of it. We never just sat back in a chair in front of a computer for all those hours straight through, we'd get up and move around and goof off (all that goofing off is a large reason why we had to work through so many nights to get everything done). I wonder if this guy who died never left his chair to even walk around a little bit.
Basically, not sleeping for a couple nights won't make you any healthier, and you probably won't feel very good towards the end of it, but it shouldn't kill a normal person. There's probably some other causes that combined with the lack of sleep that did this guy in. That being said, a computer game is a silly reason to stay up for 3 days straight.
I've seen 1000 player battles in EvE-online, and it isn't pretty. The setting for EVE is in space, so that helps some, because it spreads everything out more and there's not really any terrain and such to worry about rendering, but it's still bad. My computer has a few good years behind it, so I have frame-rate issues with just a couple hundred ships on grid, but some people with better setups have said that their frame rate usually isn't bad.
The real problem that EVE has is the server. It just chokes on keeping track of all those ships, and then once shooting starts and it has to do calculations for all of that, and people are jumping in and whatnot, things are generally unstable and the whole game is liable to crash.
It's certainly not an easy problem, the servers have to not only keep track of where all those ships are and what they're doing, it also needs to send a bunch of that information to each and every other player in range. The amount of data that needs to move back and forth pretty much scales exponentially, so I'm not sure if the hardware can every really keep up with what we wish was possible.
Are you implying that you have a way to send a payload to the moon that costs less than $10 million per launch?
Granted, a little rover and a delivery system can weigh significantly less than a 3 person capsule and a manned lunar lander, but it still takes a lot of energy to get out of the atmosphere and to a lunar orbit.
If you know how to build a rocket capable of sending something to the moon for less than ten million bucks, then you really should start your own company.
Yeah, but as someone who hasn't been a "hardcore" gamer in like 7 or 8 years (Not enough time), I don't have the same history with many of those titles as I do with the Nintendo stuff. I've had an Xbox for 3+ years, but I haven't gotten "invested" in any of those franchises the way I have with some of the Nintendo stuff over the course of 20 years.I know basically nothing about Bioshock, Mass Effect, Ninja Gaiden 2, or Banjo 3. GOW is a newer franchise, although it was certainly well recieved. Resident Evil is a good point however.
Anyways, MS is going to have a tougher time selling peopleto the tune of around $400 based on their future library. Some gamers are certainly already sold on that library, because they've been able to get more invested in those xbox franchises. Nintendo sold a bunch of us on their franchises decades ago, plus they're only asking for $250.
Price is undoubtedly a big issue, but games are still important. While the Wii library isn't mind-blowing right now, when I bought my Wii close to a year ago, I did so very much in anticipation of the future game library. I couldn't walk out of the store that day with a new Mario game, or Metroid Prime 3, or Mario Kart, or WarioWare, or Smash Bros. (although I did have zelda!), but I knew that they were coming, and was nearly certain that when they do arrive, that I'd have a great time with them. Nintendo has earned a reputation with consistently high quality 1st party games, and even with knowing nothing else, that would've been worth $250 for a console for me. The fact that Wii Sports was a lot of fun, plus the rayman game was a great time, and a few others were great surprises as well.
With the Xbox 360, the only big given for me was Halo 3. There have been a lot of good games released in the meantime, but at least in my mind, the 360 is not only competing with the Wii-library as it stands, but also a very impressive future library that has plenty of legitimacy based on Nintendo's history.
There's pluses and minuses to both methods. Multiple servers allow you to test in the ways that you mentioned, but having just one game universe makes it more "real" in some ways. Basically the players are stuck with that one model, much like the real world is stuck with the one global economy. Plus you'll get some long term growth data that you wouldn't get otherwise. If another 20k people join, instead of putting them all off on their own server with its own economy, you see the effects they have on an already existing economy, and how it grows and adapts. And also how new players find their way into a well established economy where many players are already far ahead of them.
There's plenty to be learned from both setups, no doubt.
So what's your problem with the ESRB then? Do you not see a value in their service? Do you think that because it's self-regulation at an industry level that it's certainly too biased to be of any value?
While a major goal of the ESRB is most certainly to avoid government regulation of the industry, I happen to think that even without that governmental threat, a rating system along those lines is still a good idea.
Theoretically, yes, you could have the client only handle information that wouldn't allow a player to cheat through client modification, but in reality it requires a pretty complicated balancing act and some compromise. The bandwidth/latency issue is a big one, and it gets pretty complicated when you really think about all the ways you can cheat. Sure, make the server the one who decides whether or not the other guy's bullets hit you. But what about things like wall hacks and such? If the client knows where the other players are, then a cheater can find that information out. The solution would be for the server to only provide the client locations of entities that should be visible to the player. In a FPS this would require the server to be constantly aware of each player's view. Keeping all of that updated and running smoothly would require constant exchanges between the client and server, and hiccups from lag or latency would be very apparent.
Dear Concerned yet still Valued Customer,
Although we here in the music industry consist of a collection of the world's greatest and most creative geniuses, we cannot with any certainty predict how many music-playing devices will be invented over the course of your lifetime, so we regret that we are unable to give you an exact answer to your question.
We can tell you, however, that due to the exciting pace of technology in this century, you can look forward to rewarding your favorite musicians over and over again by sending us money each time you purchase a new electronic device. It's thanks to your efforts that we are able to give songwriters and musicians a small portion of the profit that their hard work results in.
Thanks for submitting your question via our website, we will keep your ip address on file so that we can compare it to those found on file sharing networks, for your convenience and for the safety of your music.
Sincerely,
The music industry.
That's basically the deterministic view of the universe, where given all the rules and the initial state of the universe, you'd theoretically be able to run a simulation and predict the entire future of the whole universe (of course, to simulate the entire universe, you'd need a computer the size of the universe).
Of course, then quantum mechanics and all that jazz has come along, and one of the things it fundamentally says is that some things are entirely based on probability, and as such are not deterministic. At the scale of things like elementary particles, you just plain cannot predict where some things are going to be at a given point in time. Hence we have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's not an intuitive or easy concept, but one way of describing it is that some of those tiny particles don't actually have a location until they need to.
I can't think of a better way to basically stop all software development than to hold developers criminally responsible for bugs in their programming. You're not going to economically create much software if you need to guarantee that it's bug-free, and exploit-proof.
The solution here is for consumers/businesses/governments/etc. to realize that having so much of our computing infrastructure running on the same OS leaves us very vulnerable to just a few bugs/exploits. It makes writing worms and such easier because the authors can focus on just one target and still affect a huge number of machines.
Not to mention that having just one company dominating the computing market so heavily means that they're under much less competitive pressure to improve their product.
The lesson there is... Many people will always complain. Mostly because it's an easy thing to do, and it works occasionally enough that it's worthwhile for many. In that way, it's a lot like email spam. The majority of the complaining is ignored because it's worthless, but every now and then someone relents and gives in to you. It doesn't happen often, but the complaining doesn't take much resources, so even the few scarce responses put you ahead of where you were before.
That plus people like to feel sorry for themselves.
Honestly, I'm surprised by how many people feel like the whole world owes them something. And when someone out there in that world offers them something, they bitch about it.
Steve Jobs didn't do this purely out of the kindess of his heart. He knows full-well that Apple will get some good PR out of this. But the best deals in life are the ones where both sides benefit. I fail to see how any iphone owner can feel like they're worse off by being offered this deal.
It's a gift, maybe not given 100% out of kindness, maybe not exactly what you wanted, but it's still a gift.
Wow, it's impressive to see environmentalism, anti-capitalist sentiment, anit-americanism, and OS flame wars all crammed into one paragraph. Well done.
I didn't see any source for that quote in the linked article, so it sounds to me like the slashdot submitter might be the moron (not that I have much faith in "industry analysts"). The Wii does, however, appear to have the lead in terms of sales of 'Next-Gen' consoles, which is still significant and there aren't many people who would've imagined that to be likely a couple of years ago.
I think it's less about economics and more about technically inclined people enjoying one of their hobbies, messing around with technology. There's just a lot more news bits about this because of the hype that Apple and the iPhone have been through.
Just about every mobile phone ever made has probably had at least a few geeks pull it apart to tinker on the insides, you just didn't hear about it unless you went looking for the information. But in the case of the iPhone, Apple (and others) have already done the advertising for the iphone hacks, it tagged along with the advertising for the iphone itself.
While I have no doubt that you can find anecdotal evidence of people who would not have purchased an iPhone under AT&T now considering one, I would be very surprised if those people constitute a number that would make up a noticeable percentage of the iPhones out on the street.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. Whether you're conservative or liberal, whatever your view of the world, some things are just plain bullshit, and some things are the plain truth.
Much of what the media does to pretend that it's being fair is talk to people from both sides of the issue, and pretend like that's their job, to have a platform for a republican to talk about an issue, and then a democrat talk about that issue. But that's only a small part of their job. Their job is not just to allow each side to give their take on it, the media needs to verify all that stuff, challenge it, and call out what's true and what's not.
So CNN has a republican tell me that we're making progress in Iraq, followed by a democrat telling me that there's no real progress and things aren't getting better; that doesn't help me make an informed decision. The media needs to quantify and qualify what they're being told. And if it turns out that one side is spewing nonsense, then the media needs to call them out on it, or at least stop giving them a stage to spread that incorrect information.
Of course, a lot of that is a moot point as far as a couple of shows on comedy central are concerned, because, you know, they're comedy shows.
Well, having lived and worked in New Orleans for the past few years, I'll be glad to finally see Michael Chertoff no longer in charge of any sort of federal disaster response. Although I'd have preferred(and expected) that he be fired and kicked to the street rather than be recommended to become attorney general of the USA.
I guess I just don't understand how the world works.
All that extra non-gaming stuff shoved into a game console should just be the syrup, no doubt. The problem is that in regards to the core-function, gaming, the PS3 has had a pretty sad showing compared to its competitors so far. Running with the food analogy because food is awesome, all the syrup is nice, but it's not that great without the pancakes. It's just a cup of syrup.
And you mentioned the price as being appealing, but I think it's actually the problem. Nobody wants to pay extra for their syrup. You don't buy pancakes and then get charged extra for the syrup. Sony is charging some extra for the syrup, that's why their console is significantly more expensive than the others. So you're paying for your syrup, and the pancakes underneath aren't even that good.
I bought my PS2 for $250 after GTA3 came out. Those were some excellent pancakes. The PS2 also happened to play DVD's. That was an excellent bonus, but I would've bought the PS3 without that, because $250 was not an unreasonable price for a game console in my mind.
Food analogies are better than car analogies, although they're both pretty dumb.
You're spot on about the immediate costs vs. long term costs, but I'd add that the main system that civilization has developed to deal with this type of issue is the government. Governments can muster the resources to do long term research without an immediate or even certain payoff. 20 billion dollars worth of research over five years is a heck of a risk for most any organization out there, but the US government can throw that kind of cash around easily enough.
You really only need to convince a handful of people to make this a priority, and the money will flow, and things will get done. The problem is that you're competing with a bunch of other priorities for the attention of these few people. It's a shame that more of those people haven't gotten behind this yet. It's an opportunity to build a whole new, huge industry. People love to complain about how making our energy and industry more environmentally friendly is going to slow our economy. It will likely slow some existing industries, but at the same time, developing all of this stuff is going to require a ton of industry and commerce. There's billions and billions of dollars to be made. We just need a few strong leaders who are willing to take a stand and put in some work.
That's not to say that IP laws are perfect, the system is definitely being abused, doesn't always work well, and couldn't be approved. But the suggestion that the only two options are the system we've got now or no sort of IP at all is not only silly, but very short-sighted.
I don't know. If they had called this thing something else, would more people really have bought it for bluray? Anyone who's interested in Bluray can easily do a minimal amount of research and discover that the PS3 plays them, and is one of the cheapest players out there. And in addition to a bluray player, you get this game console that does a bunch of other stuff. If I was in the market for a Bluray player, I'd have probably purchased a PS3 already. People aren't getting scared away from this bluray player because it's called a playstation, they're not buying it as a bluray player because they don't care about bluray.
The mass market doesn't seem to want the media center that Sony has set out to create. There are a bunch of people out there that want a playstation to play games on. They're not sure that they want to pay $500+ for it though. Bluray hasn't been hurt by being bundled in the PS3 (although it hasn't been helped nearly as much as sony hoped so far), but the Playstation name has suffered because of it. Playstation used to mean a game console with bazillions of games, many of which were excellent. Now it still means that to some degree (PS2's are still moving off the shelves pretty heavily), but it also means a $600 video game console.
Bluray doesn't even enter into the equation for most of the potential customers, except in the form of a couple hundred bucks added onto the price. When I bought my PS2, it was $250 which seemed normal for a game console to me. It also included a DVD player(the first I ever had), which was completely a bonus to me, because in my eyes it wasn't causing me to pay more for a video game console than I expected.
A multi-platform game might be a corner-stone when you don't have that many other games coming out, and the game in question is a huge name like GTA. I bought my PS2 because I wanted GTA3. When GTA IV comes out, I will want it, and my Wii won't run it. So I'll likely end up buying either a 360 or a PS3. I'm not sure which one I'm going to get right now, but Sony's chance of selling me a PS3 will go from approximately 0% right now to somewhere around 50%.
Sony needs more excellent games for the PS3. Exclusives are best, but multi-platform doesn't hurt.