Uh, so you're suggesting they shouldn't have released anything until their own engineers were 100% sure that it couldn't be cracked ever? Is that even possible?
Ormaybe you are suggesting that Apple shouldn't make changes based on what people do, and basically stop developing the product?
You're just being cynical for the heck of it I guess. What's your point?
I generally think of SL as basically two things. First off, it's a graphical chat room. The majority of my time there is spent talking with other people. As far as that goes, it's as good as the people you hang around with in game. There's a lot of weirdos and dumbasses in SL, so it can be difficult at times.
The second thing is as a sandbox. The closest other thing I can think of would be Gerry's Mod for HalfLife, although there are some significant differences. Most of my time online there that isn't spent chatting is spent building whatever random thing comes to mind. While they're far from perfect, the creation tools are very flexible, and I'm often pleasantly surprised by what some of the players manage to come up with.
And now that I think about it, there's a third thing that SL is good for, getting weirded the hell out. Some of the people online are just really damn strange, and despite over 10 years of seeing all sorts of strange crap on the internet, SL impresses me with the depravity and general bizarreness of some of the builds and characters.
Some people have attempted to create games within the SL world, but the game has some pretty endemic lag and frame rate issues, which greatly limits the effectiveness of many game types. But if you want to play chess on a giant board like in the harry potter movie or something, that sort of thing would certainly be possible to create.
More than that, there's some potential quality issues that could be harmful to the Playstation brand. The PS2 plays DVDs, but it's not a great DVD player. It was marketed primarily as a game machine though, so not many people bought it primarily as a DVD player. (And even those who did, DVD's were just so much better than VHS that even a crappy DVD player was a step up. Bluray movies won't be a big enough jump to get that benefit of the doubt).
If the PS3 claims to replace your PS2, your DVD player, your stereo, and whatever else Sony is talking about, it needs to do all of those well, or else the percieved quality of the Playstation brand could suffer. If I pay $400 for one, expecting it to be good for all of those things, it'd better do them all well. And Sony better support all of those features well in the future (not like they've crapped out on games for the PSP. All the UMD movies in the world won't make me happy with one if I've bought it because I wanted a nice portable game player).
Sony is piling all of these features into the PS3, because they're trying to create markets for all sorts of content that they'd like to sell. The problem is that then they need to create all of that content in the future, and if they can't keep the quality levels high for that content, then their brand suffers.
I don't think you're giving the people working on these projects enough credit. Anyone with the skills to contribute meaningfully to this project should be able to get a job that pays well enough that they could buy a laptop on their own. And I'm sure they all know that.
You see, one of the cool things (although sometimes a weakness) with open source development is that the people doing it are very often doing it for fun. It's a hobby for them, and even without the MacBook, if they weren't getting some sort of a feeling of accomplishment or something, they would've stopped doing it. Apple isn't taking advantage of people any more than the habitat for humanity takes advantage of their volunteers. While writing code is different than building homes for impoverished people, there are a lot of parallels.
In both cases, someone willingly donates their labor, for their own reasons. And in both cases, a lot of people benefit. With Habitat for humanity, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, and often gain knowledge about construction. A family without the means to buy their own house gets a decent home and their quality of life significantly improves. And society in general has one less homeless person to try and support (or if you don't believe that others should be forced to help those lazy bums, there's one less homeless person sitting around in your neighborhood).
With open source webkit, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, they've likely gained some new knowledge pertaining to computers and programming, they've potentially gained some name recognition for their effort and talents, and some of them have even gotten new laptop computers. Apple benefits by having a better piece of software included in their operating system. The rest of the world benefits because they have that exact same better piece of software that they're free to use with their own programs. Oh, and coincidentally, the fact that this particular piece of software pertains to web browsing, it stimulates more competition in the browser market, so the world gets even more better browsers.
But yeah, there are two points. The people donating their labor to this project before must have been getting some sort of happiness/satisfaction/reward for it, or they would've stopped. I've yet to hear of any sweatshops in asia where kids are forced to write code for pennies by their cruel taskmasters who keep any free laptops sent in reward. And secondly, Apple is not the only one benefiting from this. They aren't using laptops to pay people to write code for Apple, they're rewarding people who write code available to anyone. That's approaching philanthropy.
I guess a number of years down the line, it could possibly work out that way, but I'm still not convinced. Even if half of the TV makers out there started producing sets with Cell processors inside tomorrow, how often do you buy new TVs.
All we can do is make some assumptions about what might happen in the future, and try to predict the results if those assumptions hold true. Say every 5 years the average household adds a new set or replaces an old one. And we'll even assume that all new TV's have Cell processors in them. It'll be 5 years before you could count on the average person having at least one other Cell available in their house to be used to help the PS3. 5 years from now, we'll be close to ready for the next generation of consoles. The PS4 hype will probably be in full swing. Maybe then the parallelism will be a factor and you can plug your PS3 into your new PS4 to give it a boost. But wait...when was the last time that a five year old processor was worth anything? I imagine that in 2011, the new cell processors will be so much more powerful that adding a PS3 Cell would just be a tiny drop in a big river of number crunching power.
The point is, even if Cell processors are suddenly available in all your electronics, most people aren't going to rush out and buy all new stuff. The rate of adoption will be varied, but over-all slow. And unless Sony stops development on the Cell and just ships the current chip year after year, the older hardware won't be able to meaningfully contribute enough to be worth hooking up.
There are some good reasons to interconnect all the gadgets in our homes, but sharing process power doesn't seem to be a particularly useful one to me. Now that I think about it, how much processing power will a TV have? How much does it need? Is it comparable to a video game console? Is it enough to really be noticeable, even when stacked up against contemporary hardware? Will they shove extra processing power into their TVs just so it has more to offer the "cell network"? How much extra will that cost? Will anybody find that worth paying for? There's a lot of questions, and I don't think the answers realistically fall in favor of the Cell clustering idea.
You're not sure, so maybe you would like to give those other games the occasional once over again. If Nintendo prices it right(really the biggest question mark in this whole idea, imho), it should only cost a couple bucks, a low enough price to be an impulse buy. So even if you only get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, you're not feeling entirely ripped off. If a hardly-remembered NES game costs me $2 to download, and it takes five of those games to entertain me and my girlfriend for an evening, that's still a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a movie. . These days I sometimes buy Gamecube and Xbox games for significantly higher amounts of money and don't play them all the way through. I might not play Battletoads all the way through after downloading it, but if it's cheap enough, I won't care. Besides, I always wanted to play Kid Icarus, but could never find it in a store when I was a kid. I'm sure if I started browsing through a list of titles, I'd recognize plenty more as games I still want to try.
And since the distribution is all digital, the cost to Nintendo to sell me those five games is negligable, so they're making some profit right from the very beginning.
Oh, and also, there's a huge pile of kids out there who haven't played a lot of that classic stuff. The
True, in theory it sounds kind of neat, but there's two catches. First off, will it really work as advertised, and second, will a PS3 be able to take advantage of it in any meaningful way? I don't know enough to speak intelligently on the first point, but Sony certainly has a reputation of making promises that its hardware can't live up to. As for the second point, I'm willing to guess No, because console games are generally designed to a very specific set of hardware, and I don't anticipate many developers optimizing their games to run best with more power than a stock PS3 gives you. It wouldn't make sense.
From a gaming console perspective, clustering machines doesn't seem particularly useful. I guess further down the line, if Cell processors start showing up in other places, you could plug your PS3 in and have more power for some other task, but if raw processing power is your goal I'd imagine that you'll be able to get a better bang for your buck with a different piece of hardware, one that doesn't have a blu-ray drive, game controllers, and who knows what else included in the price.
Super Mario All-stars and the like are nice, but what they're planning with the Revolution is really a few good leaps beyond that. Re-releasing a couple of games from the most popular franchise in all of video games history is very different from making huge swaths of back catalog from multiple consoles available for download. Digital distribution truly is a whole new step in economics, because it avoids all the expensive things inherent in physical goods, like materials, shipping, shelf-space, etc.. The cost to add another game to this service will be almost negligable, and the amount of space available to store merchandise is a non-issue, so there's no reason not to make available everything Nintendo can get their hands on. That's great for consumers, who can be as picky or as spendy as they want, and it's great for Nintendo, because they've got lots of potential for profit without risking much up front.
Over time, this will happen with most forms of entertainment (music's well on its way), and the world will be a cooler place. Yay. This is a way bigger deal than a Dr. Mario cartridge coming out for the GBA.
Any game that relies on player based content is likely to be distributed digitally, and the ESRB sort of becomes irrelevant. Partially because of the digital distribution (you don't have to meet any retailer guidelines), and partially because the content is so unpredictable. No doubt, if this takes off, there will be attempts to make moderated and more child-friendly "universes" for games(SL has a Teen Grid for example), but they'll be marketed as such, and the ESRB rating would just be redundant.
Yeah, and so what's the problem with that? You may not have noticed, but lots of people out there like to make things. Not everyone who makes furniture does it just to earn a living, some of us do it for fun. A digital world allows us not only to create things that we could never make in the real world, it also allows us to easily share with many others, and work collaboratively with people all over the world.
What makes games so much cooler than TV is the interactivity. This is just taking that to the next level. A good framework for an massive, online sandbox is not a trivial undertaking. A good set of tools to help with content creation is complicated. Balancing the abilities and limits of those tools with security, bandwidth, and performance concerns is a significant task, and I don't doubt that many people would find that worth paying for.
A bunch of kids having a food fight in public while the parents do nothing is indicative of problems beyond crappy cinema. He-man wasn't the most intelligent cartoon around, but I watched plenty of it, and I ended up just fine if I do say so myself. I think for any child to grow up well adjusted and ready for the world takes a lot of careful effort by the parents, and if a kid gets that, then it really won't matter what TV they watched. I didn't get my values and respect for other people by watching GI Joe or by watching the Discovery Channel. I didn't learn it from Snow White, nor did I learn it from Voltron.
Furthermore, there's a lot of different levels of quality. The only options are not just four star movies or entirely worthless dreck. Like other commenters have said, it needs to have at least some sort of worthwhile value, or else kids won't be interested in it. But a movie like Monsters Inc, that's a huge production, it requires a ton of highly skilled and creative people to make. So much so that the leading company in that field kicks out less than one film per year. And it doesn't matter how good of a movie it is, people are going to want a few more new things to watch over the course of 12 months. So there's a valid place for lower budget, lower quality stuff.
I've never really had a problem with Disney or other companies running their franchises into the ground. I just accept that Aladdin 4 or whatever is not made for me, it's made for younger kids who don't need quite the same level of quality or sophistication to be entertained. I'm not one to advocate letting the TV babysit your kids all day, but I have no doubt that my parents enjoyed the occasional periods of relaxation when a movie would keep my brother and I occupied for an hour or so. It may not be award winning cinema, but it's probably a bit more predictable than regular TV cartoons, and less likely to contain violent or inappropriate content.
These tend to go straight to video because Disney isn't trying to pass it off as a high-quality feature film. So what's the problem with that? Nobody is forcing you to watch any of it. I guess some people feel that the cheaper commercialization somehow distracts from the quality of the originals, but that's really not the case, and if that sort of thing really bothers you, you need to get some perspective on the world.
I guess the one true complaint, at least in Disney's case, is that they've seemed to be so busy milking old franchises that they haven't bothered to create any new ones. But I really don't see any reason why those two have to be linked. It seems to me that it's tied to the vision and choices of the management. Really, this is a case where they can have their cake and eat it too. Put your best minds on the high-quality stuff, and everyone else on the franchises. Hire more people if you need to. There's definitely money to be made at both ends of the spectrum.
Nobody's bothered by the actual facts of what's going on here, it's just kind of annoying that the headline that was used is not only basically untrue, it also ignores what's really happening. Like you explained, this is a darn cool step in planetary discovery, it's just that past evidence has proved that 90% of the people who glance at that headline are going to walk away with the wrong idea about what was discovered. Why would you exaggerate what happened, especially on a site like/. where so many of the readers are probably going to be interested anyways, even without a sensational headline.
Your poker analogy is ok, but not entirely accurate. It's more like being disappointed when you discover that your buddy only had a full house after he got you to come over to the table by telling you he had a royal flush. A full house is still a pretty good hand, but why'd you say you had a straight flush before?
Re:Too much focus on Jobs
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Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't doubt that Disney had some brilliant creative minds working for them. Sadly, it's quite easy for a management system to pretty much crush and creative productivity, simply because management tends to control the cash flow. Do a little googling, it's not hard to find first hand accounts of artists explaining how miserable Disney made it to work for them.
There are plenty of good ideas out there for movies. There are tons of good stories waiting to be told. There are plenty of people who would love to tell those stories. There aren't many companies out there willing to give those people free reign and fund them.
Lasseter has done some amazing work, for sure, but I'll bet he'll give Steve Jobs plenty of credit, and not because he's worried about keeping his job.
I disagree. Pixar has not had all of their successes just because their movies are animation. They've done well because their movies are good. The wow-factor of computer animation isn't much of a big deal anymore. It's been 10 years since Toy Story, we're not blown away by that anymore.
There are plenty of weeks in a year, time enough for a good number of movies to be released and do well. Unless 100 new animation studios open up this year and they all produce quality movies, pixar won't be crowded out. Pixar produces films at a rate of less than one per year. At that rate, they should not have any problem consistently finding good stories and producing quality movies, as long as their philosophy stays the same. Add in the brand recognition that pixar has made for itself, and they've got nothing to worry about.
Pixar is the only one who can screw things up for themselves. The only thing that can screw up the sort of the value of the Pixar name is them releasing crap. Or a giant meteor hitting the earth and destroying civilization. That would do it too.
I think you're probably right, Nintendo was partially making sure they left a path out as they possibly painted themselves into a corner. But I also think they didn't want to declare the GBA a dead platform, so they positioned the DS as a non-replacement. Then the updated screen and the micro sort of reasserts that Nintendo is still pushing the GBA, and that developers should continue to make games for it. It seems to be working pretty well, they're apparently moving SP's at a good rate.
There are middle ground games that don't opt for realism, but at the same time aren't quite as "artsy" as something like Rez. The important thing is to get something that matches your gameplay. Viewtiful Joe(sp?) is a decent example, although the "art" concept was pushed even a little bit much here.
I'm reluctant to bring up Nintendo and all their Mario games, because people like to pick on them for using their franchise so frequently, but I generally enjoy all the mario games, and they've definitely got a well established style, which is non-realistic, but not all about its look either. It's on a basic level just a cartoony world, but it's flexible and able to improve as technology allows. The Mario in Mario Tennis is basically the same as the Mario from Mario 64, but smoother, and slightly more detailed. Better graphics, but if you subbed in the old Mario 64 mario, the game would still be just as fun. And then if you look at something like Super Mario Strikers(newer soccer game), they've shifted the artwork a bit, tailored towards the more "violent" gameplay. They gave yoshi an attitude.
These are just the opinions of a mario sports games fanboy though, so feel free to ignore.
You may have just been being silly, hard to tell with just text, but just to comment:
During an actual hurricane, there's not much of anything going on in terms of official rescue. The rescue crews know they can't do much in the middle of all that chaos. Once the wind gets going, you're pretty much on your own until the storm passes.
Or in the case of New Orleans, your on your own until about four days after the storm passes.
No one repeatedly takes down the SL grid. That's the kind of thing that gets you outright banned, as soon as they discover that it was you. They don't let you do it a handful of times and then decide to maybe send you to a cornfield.
Just a bit to add, in the stores here in the US, there's often a big PSP section with a lot of games and movies, but no demo unit to try out. Even in stores that exclusively sell games. I don't frequent those stores, but I stop a couple of them maybe once a month or so (usually to pick up a DS game), and I've never actually seen a PSP sitting out somewhere where I can try it.
Even if I've got the money, I'm not about to drop $250 on a handheld that I haven't, you know, held in my hand before. There are little DS kiosks in every store, and while some of them have been scratched up and smashed and whatnot, they still tell me more about what I might by then the little PSP pamphlets tacked up on the wall.
Put out some demo units Sony. Put an extra piece of plexiglass over the screen on the kiosk or something if you must, but show us your wares if you want us to buy them.
I'd imagine Intel had a few other options besides either requiring Apple to include the sticker or dropping a marketing scheme built up over many years.
The way I understand it, Intel has generally contributed funds for advertising to computer manufacturers in return for them including the stickers and the little logo w/intel sound in all their commercials. Maybe the payoff from making those sorts of deals is no longer beneficial to Intel. Factor in the impending release of a new logo, and you've got yourself a whole rebranding adventure. They're probably paying a big bunch of marketing folks, might as well use em.
In some sense they're not "virtual" in that there are definite forces that act upon them, and people can have a real influence on them.
But in another sense, they are virtual, in that they're artificially created, because the digital nature in which they exist pretty much precludes any true scarcity, which is a real foundation of all the economies the world has seen so far. I guess you can make the argument that this is just a new type of economy, and it'd be an interesting experiment, but that's not what any of these virtual worlds are trying to do in any serious way. instead, their creators are generally introducing any number of policies that create levels of artificial scarcity, in order to make their virtual economies function more like a real world economy.
Sort of like how in the real world, groups like the RIAA are trying to force the economics of information transfer into an older economic system based on physicality and scarcity. They're trying to create a "virtual economy" in a sense as well.
I've long thought that the DS, along with pictochat, should've had a few basic games built in. It's got the perfect input system for many of those little games, and it would make the system even more appealing. There's tons of little games they could've chosen from: Minesweeper, Solitaire, Majhong(however it's spelled, match the tiles game), checkers/chess(show off that online stuff), etc.
Those are timeless games, they're simple, and so the development time/costs would've been minor. I think it's a shame something like that wasn't included.
Yeah, but the question remains, what is the real average perceived value for songs? 99 cents might be the highest that they can reasonably get away with, but is it really the best solution? At 50 cents per song, it'll take two purchases for them to make as much as they do at.99, but will consumers buy more songs at that lower price to make up for it?
There's definitely an argument to be made in perceived value there. The object in sales isn't necessarily to sell an object for the highest amount possible. It's often better to find the right balance between a price and the volume you'll move at a reduced price. Walmart has become a retail powerhouse by selling at razor thin margins, and making up for it with just a ridiculously high number of sales.
Now, this is just my personal take on it, but I'm much more likely to spend $10 for twenty songs than I am to spend $10 for ten songs. With digital distribution, I'd think the economic realities would naturally push towards lower margins and higher volume, because the cost of getting 20 songs to me is negligibly higher than getting 10 songs to me. Buy one, get one free is pretty damn compelling when you see it in a store somewhere, and digital distribution allows a seller to do that at no extra cost. Sure, they'd lose a little money on people who are only going to buy one or two songs either way, but it could really open the floodgates on the hardcore music listeners.
Yeah, but the worst thing is when you get someone something that they already have. It's awkward because they're supposed to pretend like they like it and you just filled a big empty hole in their lives, and it sucks for them because they either need to take it back to a store or re-gift it or something.
I would almost never buy a gift card for a close friend/family member( one exception, I got my girlfriend an iTunes music store giftcard, along side a bunch of other presents). But there are other people that I'd like to show appreciation to, but don't know well enough to know what they want/need.
I don't think a giftcard says I don't care. If I don't care about someone, then I'd get them nothing. Giftcards say more to me, I do care, but unfortunately I also care dozens of other people, and I just plain don't have the time to carefully pick out gifts for all of them. Having finished school and spent a couple of years working for a living, I fully understand not having time for things.
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Uh, so you're suggesting they shouldn't have released anything until their own engineers were 100% sure that it couldn't be cracked ever? Is that even possible?
Ormaybe you are suggesting that Apple shouldn't make changes based on what people do, and basically stop developing the product?
You're just being cynical for the heck of it I guess. What's your point?
I generally think of SL as basically two things. First off, it's a graphical chat room. The majority of my time there is spent talking with other people. As far as that goes, it's as good as the people you hang around with in game. There's a lot of weirdos and dumbasses in SL, so it can be difficult at times.
The second thing is as a sandbox. The closest other thing I can think of would be Gerry's Mod for HalfLife, although there are some significant differences. Most of my time online there that isn't spent chatting is spent building whatever random thing comes to mind. While they're far from perfect, the creation tools are very flexible, and I'm often pleasantly surprised by what some of the players manage to come up with.
And now that I think about it, there's a third thing that SL is good for, getting weirded the hell out. Some of the people online are just really damn strange, and despite over 10 years of seeing all sorts of strange crap on the internet, SL impresses me with the depravity and general bizarreness of some of the builds and characters.
Some people have attempted to create games within the SL world, but the game has some pretty endemic lag and frame rate issues, which greatly limits the effectiveness of many game types. But if you want to play chess on a giant board like in the harry potter movie or something, that sort of thing would certainly be possible to create.
More than that, there's some potential quality issues that could be harmful to the Playstation brand. The PS2 plays DVDs, but it's not a great DVD player. It was marketed primarily as a game machine though, so not many people bought it primarily as a DVD player. (And even those who did, DVD's were just so much better than VHS that even a crappy DVD player was a step up. Bluray movies won't be a big enough jump to get that benefit of the doubt).
If the PS3 claims to replace your PS2, your DVD player, your stereo, and whatever else Sony is talking about, it needs to do all of those well, or else the percieved quality of the Playstation brand could suffer. If I pay $400 for one, expecting it to be good for all of those things, it'd better do them all well. And Sony better support all of those features well in the future (not like they've crapped out on games for the PSP. All the UMD movies in the world won't make me happy with one if I've bought it because I wanted a nice portable game player).
Sony is piling all of these features into the PS3, because they're trying to create markets for all sorts of content that they'd like to sell. The problem is that then they need to create all of that content in the future, and if they can't keep the quality levels high for that content, then their brand suffers.
I don't think you're giving the people working on these projects enough credit. Anyone with the skills to contribute meaningfully to this project should be able to get a job that pays well enough that they could buy a laptop on their own. And I'm sure they all know that.
You see, one of the cool things (although sometimes a weakness) with open source development is that the people doing it are very often doing it for fun. It's a hobby for them, and even without the MacBook, if they weren't getting some sort of a feeling of accomplishment or something, they would've stopped doing it. Apple isn't taking advantage of people any more than the habitat for humanity takes advantage of their volunteers. While writing code is different than building homes for impoverished people, there are a lot of parallels.
In both cases, someone willingly donates their labor, for their own reasons. And in both cases, a lot of people benefit. With Habitat for humanity, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, and often gain knowledge about construction. A family without the means to buy their own house gets a decent home and their quality of life significantly improves. And society in general has one less homeless person to try and support (or if you don't believe that others should be forced to help those lazy bums, there's one less homeless person sitting around in your neighborhood).
With open source webkit, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, they've likely gained some new knowledge pertaining to computers and programming, they've potentially gained some name recognition for their effort and talents, and some of them have even gotten new laptop computers. Apple benefits by having a better piece of software included in their operating system. The rest of the world benefits because they have that exact same better piece of software that they're free to use with their own programs. Oh, and coincidentally, the fact that this particular piece of software pertains to web browsing, it stimulates more competition in the browser market, so the world gets even more better browsers.
But yeah, there are two points. The people donating their labor to this project before must have been getting some sort of happiness/satisfaction/reward for it, or they would've stopped. I've yet to hear of any sweatshops in asia where kids are forced to write code for pennies by their cruel taskmasters who keep any free laptops sent in reward. And secondly, Apple is not the only one benefiting from this. They aren't using laptops to pay people to write code for Apple, they're rewarding people who write code available to anyone. That's approaching philanthropy.
I guess a number of years down the line, it could possibly work out that way, but I'm still not convinced. Even if half of the TV makers out there started producing sets with Cell processors inside tomorrow, how often do you buy new TVs.
All we can do is make some assumptions about what might happen in the future, and try to predict the results if those assumptions hold true. Say every 5 years the average household adds a new set or replaces an old one. And we'll even assume that all new TV's have Cell processors in them. It'll be 5 years before you could count on the average person having at least one other Cell available in their house to be used to help the PS3. 5 years from now, we'll be close to ready for the next generation of consoles. The PS4 hype will probably be in full swing. Maybe then the parallelism will be a factor and you can plug your PS3 into your new PS4 to give it a boost. But wait...when was the last time that a five year old processor was worth anything? I imagine that in 2011, the new cell processors will be so much more powerful that adding a PS3 Cell would just be a tiny drop in a big river of number crunching power.
The point is, even if Cell processors are suddenly available in all your electronics, most people aren't going to rush out and buy all new stuff. The rate of adoption will be varied, but over-all slow. And unless Sony stops development on the Cell and just ships the current chip year after year, the older hardware won't be able to meaningfully contribute enough to be worth hooking up.
There are some good reasons to interconnect all the gadgets in our homes, but sharing process power doesn't seem to be a particularly useful one to me. Now that I think about it, how much processing power will a TV have? How much does it need? Is it comparable to a video game console? Is it enough to really be noticeable, even when stacked up against contemporary hardware? Will they shove extra processing power into their TVs just so it has more to offer the "cell network"? How much extra will that cost? Will anybody find that worth paying for? There's a lot of questions, and I don't think the answers realistically fall in favor of the Cell clustering idea.
You're not sure, so maybe you would like to give those other games the occasional once over again. If Nintendo prices it right(really the biggest question mark in this whole idea, imho), it should only cost a couple bucks, a low enough price to be an impulse buy. So even if you only get an hour or two of entertainment out of it, you're not feeling entirely ripped off. If a hardly-remembered NES game costs me $2 to download, and it takes five of those games to entertain me and my girlfriend for an evening, that's still a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a movie. . These days I sometimes buy Gamecube and Xbox games for significantly higher amounts of money and don't play them all the way through. I might not play Battletoads all the way through after downloading it, but if it's cheap enough, I won't care. Besides, I always wanted to play Kid Icarus, but could never find it in a store when I was a kid. I'm sure if I started browsing through a list of titles, I'd recognize plenty more as games I still want to try.
And since the distribution is all digital, the cost to Nintendo to sell me those five games is negligable, so they're making some profit right from the very beginning.
Oh, and also, there's a huge pile of kids out there who haven't played a lot of that classic stuff. The
True, in theory it sounds kind of neat, but there's two catches. First off, will it really work as advertised, and second, will a PS3 be able to take advantage of it in any meaningful way? I don't know enough to speak intelligently on the first point, but Sony certainly has a reputation of making promises that its hardware can't live up to. As for the second point, I'm willing to guess No, because console games are generally designed to a very specific set of hardware, and I don't anticipate many developers optimizing their games to run best with more power than a stock PS3 gives you. It wouldn't make sense.
From a gaming console perspective, clustering machines doesn't seem particularly useful. I guess further down the line, if Cell processors start showing up in other places, you could plug your PS3 in and have more power for some other task, but if raw processing power is your goal I'd imagine that you'll be able to get a better bang for your buck with a different piece of hardware, one that doesn't have a blu-ray drive, game controllers, and who knows what else included in the price.
Super Mario All-stars and the like are nice, but what they're planning with the Revolution is really a few good leaps beyond that. Re-releasing a couple of games from the most popular franchise in all of video games history is very different from making huge swaths of back catalog from multiple consoles available for download. Digital distribution truly is a whole new step in economics, because it avoids all the expensive things inherent in physical goods, like materials, shipping, shelf-space, etc.. The cost to add another game to this service will be almost negligable, and the amount of space available to store merchandise is a non-issue, so there's no reason not to make available everything Nintendo can get their hands on. That's great for consumers, who can be as picky or as spendy as they want, and it's great for Nintendo, because they've got lots of potential for profit without risking much up front.
Over time, this will happen with most forms of entertainment (music's well on its way), and the world will be a cooler place. Yay. This is a way bigger deal than a Dr. Mario cartridge coming out for the GBA.
Any game that relies on player based content is likely to be distributed digitally, and the ESRB sort of becomes irrelevant. Partially because of the digital distribution (you don't have to meet any retailer guidelines), and partially because the content is so unpredictable. No doubt, if this takes off, there will be attempts to make moderated and more child-friendly "universes" for games(SL has a Teen Grid for example), but they'll be marketed as such, and the ESRB rating would just be redundant.
Yeah, and so what's the problem with that? You may not have noticed, but lots of people out there like to make things. Not everyone who makes furniture does it just to earn a living, some of us do it for fun. A digital world allows us not only to create things that we could never make in the real world, it also allows us to easily share with many others, and work collaboratively with people all over the world.
What makes games so much cooler than TV is the interactivity. This is just taking that to the next level. A good framework for an massive, online sandbox is not a trivial undertaking. A good set of tools to help with content creation is complicated. Balancing the abilities and limits of those tools with security, bandwidth, and performance concerns is a significant task, and I don't doubt that many people would find that worth paying for.
A bunch of kids having a food fight in public while the parents do nothing is indicative of problems beyond crappy cinema. He-man wasn't the most intelligent cartoon around, but I watched plenty of it, and I ended up just fine if I do say so myself. I think for any child to grow up well adjusted and ready for the world takes a lot of careful effort by the parents, and if a kid gets that, then it really won't matter what TV they watched. I didn't get my values and respect for other people by watching GI Joe or by watching the Discovery Channel. I didn't learn it from Snow White, nor did I learn it from Voltron.
Furthermore, there's a lot of different levels of quality. The only options are not just four star movies or entirely worthless dreck. Like other commenters have said, it needs to have at least some sort of worthwhile value, or else kids won't be interested in it. But a movie like Monsters Inc, that's a huge production, it requires a ton of highly skilled and creative people to make. So much so that the leading company in that field kicks out less than one film per year. And it doesn't matter how good of a movie it is, people are going to want a few more new things to watch over the course of 12 months. So there's a valid place for lower budget, lower quality stuff.
I've never really had a problem with Disney or other companies running their franchises into the ground. I just accept that Aladdin 4 or whatever is not made for me, it's made for younger kids who don't need quite the same level of quality or sophistication to be entertained. I'm not one to advocate letting the TV babysit your kids all day, but I have no doubt that my parents enjoyed the occasional periods of relaxation when a movie would keep my brother and I occupied for an hour or so. It may not be award winning cinema, but it's probably a bit more predictable than regular TV cartoons, and less likely to contain violent or inappropriate content.
These tend to go straight to video because Disney isn't trying to pass it off as a high-quality feature film. So what's the problem with that? Nobody is forcing you to watch any of it. I guess some people feel that the cheaper commercialization somehow distracts from the quality of the originals, but that's really not the case, and if that sort of thing really bothers you, you need to get some perspective on the world.
I guess the one true complaint, at least in Disney's case, is that they've seemed to be so busy milking old franchises that they haven't bothered to create any new ones. But I really don't see any reason why those two have to be linked. It seems to me that it's tied to the vision and choices of the management. Really, this is a case where they can have their cake and eat it too. Put your best minds on the high-quality stuff, and everyone else on the franchises. Hire more people if you need to. There's definitely money to be made at both ends of the spectrum.
Nobody's bothered by the actual facts of what's going on here, it's just kind of annoying that the headline that was used is not only basically untrue, it also ignores what's really happening. Like you explained, this is a darn cool step in planetary discovery, it's just that past evidence has proved that 90% of the people who glance at that headline are going to walk away with the wrong idea about what was discovered. Why would you exaggerate what happened, especially on a site like /. where so many of the readers are probably going to be interested anyways, even without a sensational headline.
Your poker analogy is ok, but not entirely accurate. It's more like being disappointed when you discover that your buddy only had a full house after he got you to come over to the table by telling you he had a royal flush. A full house is still a pretty good hand, but why'd you say you had a straight flush before?
I don't doubt that Disney had some brilliant creative minds working for them. Sadly, it's quite easy for a management system to pretty much crush and creative productivity, simply because management tends to control the cash flow. Do a little googling, it's not hard to find first hand accounts of artists explaining how miserable Disney made it to work for them.
There are plenty of good ideas out there for movies. There are tons of good stories waiting to be told. There are plenty of people who would love to tell those stories. There aren't many companies out there willing to give those people free reign and fund them.
Lasseter has done some amazing work, for sure, but I'll bet he'll give Steve Jobs plenty of credit, and not because he's worried about keeping his job.
I disagree. Pixar has not had all of their successes just because their movies are animation. They've done well because their movies are good. The wow-factor of computer animation isn't much of a big deal anymore. It's been 10 years since Toy Story, we're not blown away by that anymore.
There are plenty of weeks in a year, time enough for a good number of movies to be released and do well. Unless 100 new animation studios open up this year and they all produce quality movies, pixar won't be crowded out. Pixar produces films at a rate of less than one per year. At that rate, they should not have any problem consistently finding good stories and producing quality movies, as long as their philosophy stays the same. Add in the brand recognition that pixar has made for itself, and they've got nothing to worry about.
Pixar is the only one who can screw things up for themselves. The only thing that can screw up the sort of the value of the Pixar name is them releasing crap. Or a giant meteor hitting the earth and destroying civilization. That would do it too.
I think you're probably right, Nintendo was partially making sure they left a path out as they possibly painted themselves into a corner. But I also think they didn't want to declare the GBA a dead platform, so they positioned the DS as a non-replacement. Then the updated screen and the micro sort of reasserts that Nintendo is still pushing the GBA, and that developers should continue to make games for it. It seems to be working pretty well, they're apparently moving SP's at a good rate.
There are middle ground games that don't opt for realism, but at the same time aren't quite as "artsy" as something like Rez. The important thing is to get something that matches your gameplay. Viewtiful Joe(sp?) is a decent example, although the "art" concept was pushed even a little bit much here.
I'm reluctant to bring up Nintendo and all their Mario games, because people like to pick on them for using their franchise so frequently, but I generally enjoy all the mario games, and they've definitely got a well established style, which is non-realistic, but not all about its look either. It's on a basic level just a cartoony world, but it's flexible and able to improve as technology allows. The Mario in Mario Tennis is basically the same as the Mario from Mario 64, but smoother, and slightly more detailed. Better graphics, but if you subbed in the old Mario 64 mario, the game would still be just as fun. And then if you look at something like Super Mario Strikers(newer soccer game), they've shifted the artwork a bit, tailored towards the more "violent" gameplay. They gave yoshi an attitude.
These are just the opinions of a mario sports games fanboy though, so feel free to ignore.
You may have just been being silly, hard to tell with just text, but just to comment:
During an actual hurricane, there's not much of anything going on in terms of official rescue. The rescue crews know they can't do much in the middle of all that chaos. Once the wind gets going, you're pretty much on your own until the storm passes.
Or in the case of New Orleans, your on your own until about four days after the storm passes.
No one repeatedly takes down the SL grid. That's the kind of thing that gets you outright banned, as soon as they discover that it was you. They don't let you do it a handful of times and then decide to maybe send you to a cornfield.
Just a bit to add, in the stores here in the US, there's often a big PSP section with a lot of games and movies, but no demo unit to try out. Even in stores that exclusively sell games. I don't frequent those stores, but I stop a couple of them maybe once a month or so (usually to pick up a DS game), and I've never actually seen a PSP sitting out somewhere where I can try it.
Even if I've got the money, I'm not about to drop $250 on a handheld that I haven't, you know, held in my hand before. There are little DS kiosks in every store, and while some of them have been scratched up and smashed and whatnot, they still tell me more about what I might by then the little PSP pamphlets tacked up on the wall.
Put out some demo units Sony. Put an extra piece of plexiglass over the screen on the kiosk or something if you must, but show us your wares if you want us to buy them.
I don't think so.
I'd imagine Intel had a few other options besides either requiring Apple to include the sticker or dropping a marketing scheme built up over many years.
The way I understand it, Intel has generally contributed funds for advertising to computer manufacturers in return for them including the stickers and the little logo w/intel sound in all their commercials. Maybe the payoff from making those sorts of deals is no longer beneficial to Intel. Factor in the impending release of a new logo, and you've got yourself a whole rebranding adventure. They're probably paying a big bunch of marketing folks, might as well use em.
In some sense they're not "virtual" in that there are definite forces that act upon them, and people can have a real influence on them.
But in another sense, they are virtual, in that they're artificially created, because the digital nature in which they exist pretty much precludes any true scarcity, which is a real foundation of all the economies the world has seen so far. I guess you can make the argument that this is just a new type of economy, and it'd be an interesting experiment, but that's not what any of these virtual worlds are trying to do in any serious way. instead, their creators are generally introducing any number of policies that create levels of artificial scarcity, in order to make their virtual economies function more like a real world economy.
Sort of like how in the real world, groups like the RIAA are trying to force the economics of information transfer into an older economic system based on physicality and scarcity. They're trying to create a "virtual economy" in a sense as well.
I've long thought that the DS, along with pictochat, should've had a few basic games built in. It's got the perfect input system for many of those little games, and it would make the system even more appealing. There's tons of little games they could've chosen from: Minesweeper, Solitaire, Majhong(however it's spelled, match the tiles game), checkers/chess(show off that online stuff), etc.
Those are timeless games, they're simple, and so the development time/costs would've been minor. I think it's a shame something like that wasn't included.
Yeah, but the question remains, what is the real average perceived value for songs? 99 cents might be the highest that they can reasonably get away with, but is it really the best solution? At 50 cents per song, it'll take two purchases for them to make as much as they do at .99, but will consumers buy more songs at that lower price to make up for it?
There's definitely an argument to be made in perceived value there. The object in sales isn't necessarily to sell an object for the highest amount possible. It's often better to find the right balance between a price and the volume you'll move at a reduced price. Walmart has become a retail powerhouse by selling at razor thin margins, and making up for it with just a ridiculously high number of sales.
Now, this is just my personal take on it, but I'm much more likely to spend $10 for twenty songs than I am to spend $10 for ten songs. With digital distribution, I'd think the economic realities would naturally push towards lower margins and higher volume, because the cost of getting 20 songs to me is negligibly higher than getting 10 songs to me. Buy one, get one free is pretty damn compelling when you see it in a store somewhere, and digital distribution allows a seller to do that at no extra cost. Sure, they'd lose a little money on people who are only going to buy one or two songs either way, but it could really open the floodgates on the hardcore music listeners.
Yeah, but the worst thing is when you get someone something that they already have. It's awkward because they're supposed to pretend like they like it and you just filled a big empty hole in their lives, and it sucks for them because they either need to take it back to a store or re-gift it or something.
I would almost never buy a gift card for a close friend/family member( one exception, I got my girlfriend an iTunes music store giftcard, along side a bunch of other presents). But there are other people that I'd like to show appreciation to, but don't know well enough to know what they want/need.
I don't think a giftcard says I don't care. If I don't care about someone, then I'd get them nothing. Giftcards say more to me, I do care, but unfortunately I also care dozens of other people, and I just plain don't have the time to carefully pick out gifts for all of them. Having finished school and spent a couple of years working for a living, I fully understand not having time for things.