The fellow could be referring to the books, and, whatever his failings in terms of writing (I enjoyed most of his books but his last few have been very weak), Tom Clancy has always done his best to get the tech right.
I love it! Basically, you're complaining that people who download "abandonware" are getting screwed because they can't feel morally justified when the old games are actually available for purchase and usable on current hardware. That's friggin' brilliant, and I think that you should sue Atari for the emotional pain they're inflicting.
Things don't scale linearly in size. Nothing does. Are you weaker than an ant because an ant can lift 50 times its weight and you can't even lift double yours?
No, but if I get bitten by a radioactive ant I'm going to kick some serious ass.
Except that it appears they can't patch the game itself. If they could, it would be one patch goodbye where they would simply remove the fatigue factor before the snap or, as you suggest, add in offensive fatigue penalties for repeated shifts. As it stands, they're taking the only action they can (short of replacing everyone's discs) which is to simply take the fatigue option out of online play by modifying the servers' game options. Better than nothing, but still bad.
I do have one concern about his description of his news footage, and that's with the sound. Are the camera setups they're using recording multiple channels with multiple different microphones? If not - and I tend to doubt it since that would be incredibly difficult on a battlefield - then they must be adding in positional audio effects after the fact, which seems like yet another blurring of the line between news and entertainment. Instead of saying "My God, look at what that tank did to those people," it's "Wow! Check out the cool surround effect!" Not a good change to my mind.
The management team never even had the decency to tell them they were no longer employed.
There can be legal issues involved with letting a bankruptcy cat out of the bag at the wrong time, especially with a publicly traded company. It's certainly a shame for the employees but they've known for a long time that Acclaim was operating hand to mouth at best.
You're absolutely right, except for your closing statement. It's not copyright law, it's trademark law. The boys behind MST3k probably wouldn't even be suing if it weren't for the fact that if they let it go, especially knowing all about the group, they could eventually lose their trademark (unlike copyright which requires no active defense to maintain).
If the Austin group was called, say, "Front Row Players" or "Commentastic" this suit wouldn't exist. Instead, the group currently calls themselves "Mr. Sinus" which was gleaned from their first name which was "Mr. Sinus Theater 3000." In other words, they were, and are, trading on the familiar name in order to promote their product which is itself more than similar to the original product.
Best Brains isn't claiming to own the rights to making funny comments over movies. They aren't even claiming to own the rights to silhouetted heads in front of a movie screen making funny comments about movies. They're claiming to own their trademark (which is still active) and object to someone diluting same. That's what you do if you want to retain a trademark - they have to be AGGRESSIVELY defended or they can be lost.
I once again forgot to use the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox when I said I was going to (bad habit). The parent is unequestionably deserving of a 1, and maybe a 0 - this post probably deserves a -1, though that seems like a waste of mod points.:)
I recommend, respectfully, that you take your head out of your ass. Word of mouth comes after marketing, particularly in this case. People didn't avoid Nomad Jukeboxes (for example) because of their interface, and they didn't avoid them because people said they sucked. They didn't avoid them at all, but also never bought them, because THEY NEVER HEARD OF THEM.
I don't have to assume that Apple has a marketing edge - they did and they do. I certainly don't deny - nor have I ever denied - that the iPod is overall a superior product. But that doesn't come close to explaining the iPod's popularity and market share. If it were about being a superior product, Macs would probably outsell PCs, everyone would use Linux instead of Microsoft on their servers, the Soundblaster line would have been killed off years ago, and Enter The Matrix would have been left on the shelf instead of making millions.
((One point removed for the trollish nature of this post))
This whole fear of looking ridiculous when using a headset, talking to an N-Gage, playing Gameboy, etc. is just pathetic.
Let's take the N-Gage first, since it's a/. favorite. The biggest reason talking into an N-Gage looks ridiculous has nothing to do with how the phone is held (the "taco" side-talking deal). It's because the N-Gage is a crappy device. Bad gaming (controls and content), mediocre phone (there are so damn many better options) and boring old memory card MP3 (there are memory card MP3 players barely bigger than the card itself). Anyone "in the know" (like visitors to/.) would be aware of what a piece of shit the N-Gage is and it therefore magnifies how stupid it looks talking into the classic model. Then again, those thinking that much about it should see below.
Portable gaming: People who think portable gaming looks ridiculous are either a) people who are insecure about their hobby (pathetic) or b) people who think gaming is for little kids (their loss). Me, I'll enjoy a nice game of Sonic Pinball Party or FFTA and feel quite good that I'm enjoying myself, while any person ridiculing my playing of same can go hang.
Headsets: If you think a headset looks ridiculous then you're just beyond dumb. Modern headsets tend to be one-piece, microphone barely coming out of the ear, with a cord. They can be as unobtrusive as one wants. MAYBE if someone is carring around a classic headset the size of old on-ear Walkman headphones, there's a case to be made. Otherwise, when I see someone using a headset my only potential thought (if I give it a thought) is "That's somebody who knows how to use a phone comfortably" - certainly far more comfortably than wandering around with one's arm bent as if in a half-hearted "hear no evil" maneuver.
If you're walking around thinking people with their electronic devices look ridiculous, you're being an over-critical jackass. I recommend going into the entertainment review field - they seem to love giving jobs to your kind of idiots.
If you're walking around being self-conscious about your own gadgetry, get over it. The over-critical jackasses are probably just jealous that they can't afford what you have and are missing out on gadget fun themselves.
I'd argue that the MARKETING is the distinguishing feature. People who had never even CONSIDERED buying an MP3 player suddenly starting seeing commercials about the magical iPod, it looked cool, people started talking about it, and voila - it becomes huge.
The UI is fine, but the learning curve on my Nomad is only marginally longer than that of the iPod and I personally prefer the placement of the controls on the sides.
If ANY of the other already existing MP3 players had received the kind of marketing push the iPod got, they could have easily become the "gold standard." Instead, the other companies, either because of a lack of funding or an in-house decision to marginalize their own products as being niche, didn't take the risk.
But you're over-simplifying the issue as well. There are shows that look near-perfect on digital satellite (at least on my Dish Network - anecdotally, DirecTV has looked worse over the years) while others can have some difficulties - this also varies per channel, where the pay-extra channels (like HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc.) always look better than the other channels. Further, analog signals are far more vulnerable to certain kinds of interference. There are areas of my town (Portland, Oregon) where reception of some VHF channels, even with a roof-mounted antenna, is just awful. And this isn't due to distance, but because of reflections and the like causing horrible ghosting.
The worst part is, nobody else seems to notice them.
Yeah, that's awful. It's a damn shame when people are able to enjoy what they buy, especially if YOU think the quality is too shabby for your discerning tastes.
In the area of digital satellite/cable, unless you're willing to pay through the nose in terms of money and space for a big dish, NTSC MPEG-2 is the best you can get (I consider HDTV a very separate category, especially since it's still not even nearly the majority of available programming). If a few artifacts are the price to be paid for having a couple hundred channels, that's just the way it goes.
Further, it's not a matter of the "average American" - and, wow, you sure make that seem like an insult - not being able to tell the difference. On a decent TV. I expect most CAN tell the difference between a good DVD and the same content on digital cable/satellite. It's a matter of WHAT IS AVAILABLE and WHAT IS COST-EFFECTIVE. It would be great to have the original, pure NTSC analog signal coming through with no interference, but that's just not practical for the vast majority of TV viewers.
As a side note, I would mention that part of the artifacting problem is indeed increased MPEG-2 compression, but another part is the fact that the signals are being encoded in real-time. DirecTV, Comcast, Dish Network, etc. don't get all the programming a couple weeks in advance, encode it and then broadcast it on the appropriate days. The signals arrive in their native form from the content providers and are encoded on the fly for distribution (or, for analog cable/VHF/UHF, just retransmitted) within seconds - this is the biggest reason for the very artifacts you describe in busy CG video and jump cuts (Homicide: Life on the Street was very difficult for me to watch on two different Dish Network stations - Lifetime and CourtTV - due to their very liberal use of handheld cameras). The quality of these signals is inevitably going to be lower than DVD quality, and this is magnified when dealing with an NTSC tape source as opposed to the HD masters from which most movie DVDs are derived.
Of course, if the FCC has their way, eventually there will be no such thing as live TV anywhere and they can put every channel on a five- to ten-minute delay. It would be a shame in free speech terms (I consider all FCC forays into this area direct violations of the 1st amendment, myself) but it would probably allow for better MPEG encoding.
Really? Then the base station is powered by a battery, too? That's traditionally the weakness in a cordless system when a power outage occurs since most base stations require AC to work, making it irrelevant that the handset still has juice.
a) Faulty logic: Unless hard drive space is unlimited, faster internet connection speeds mean more data downloaded, more data needing to be archived, making increased backup/archive capacity a must. Add in the fact that DVDs are cheaper per gig than hard drives ($0.20-0.30/GB versus $0.80-1.00/GB on average), and there will be a market for optical disc writers for years to come.
If you're working off the theory that eventually everything we once downloaded and kept on our own computers will be available on-demand at speeds that make such access as quick as a DVD/CD, I think that's highly unlikely unless bandwidth magically becomes free - even then, someone has to maintain and host said data and they're gonna want some cash, too.
b) If a hard drive containing, say, 250GB of data fails catastrophically then you lose all 250GB. If that same 250GB is stored on multiple optical discs, the data loss per failure (like a big scratch) goes way down. Long-term storage on a hard drive alone is foolish.
c) RAID arrays are not meant to replace backups. Relying on them for that purpose is a road to disaster. Further, the common consumer RAID solutions are 0/1 and located right in the main PC, making them even worse for data security (we won't even get into substandard RAID controllers and the fact that many have had trouble recovering data properly even in a mirrored situation). Folks aren't going to blow a grand or more on an extra PC or an outboard RAID array when they could spend $100 on a DVD burner and discs to do their backups.
There's a reason that CD-R/RW drives have become a default option in virtually all PCs (even a goodly number of NOTEBOOKS have them), and there's nothing on the horizon that says DVD recorders won't follow suit...More and bigger files mean bigger backup/archive requirements, and the optical option is by far the most cost-effective way to get the job done, especially at the home-user level.
Hacking's great and all, but the fact that this product works in software seems a disincentive to folks who don't want to set up a dedicated PC for HDTV/home theater use. Even if the decoding were working well (according to the review it's not, with dropped frames, jerky picture, etc.), you'd still be stuck using the bulk of your processor cycles decoding HD.
Even if one WAS going to set up a dedicated HDTV PC, the extra $100 for a hardware-based solution could easily be made up by the ability to use a much cheaper processor and motherboard. The specs for MyHD, for example, specify a minimum processor speed of 400 MHz and a minimum 64MB (!!) of RAM, with the attendant potential decrease in size (use the smallest case you can find since you won't need a lot of cooling) and noise. Even being forced to buy a Windows OS doesn't add to the price as much as buying state-of-the-art hardware would.
Based on this review, this seems to be of interest only to hobbyists. The quality sounds sketchy at best and the price doesn't make up (in my mind, at least) for the disadvantages of using a software-based solution.
It sounds to me like you just prefer FPS games to non-twitch RPG games. That's cool, but they're apples and oranges for a reason.
I think your main point is invalid on its face. Specifically, you seem to denigrate the fact that to get to high levels in an MMORPG requires many, many hours of work while playing down the fact that in order to get "mad skillz" at Quake it takes many, many hours of practice. I could turn it around and complain that when I tried to play Quake 3 multiplayer I got my ass handed to me over and over again because other people had so much more time to dedicate to playing the game - since I don't have that kind of time, I can't enjoy Quake 3 online.
Believe me, if the revolution is to turn MMORPGs into games more like first-person shooters, it's not going to expand the audience. It will simply eliminate the current audience and force the development of a new one.
I'm aware that a lot of people put little stock in game reviews, but given its current 91.7% rating (before added content/camera change) on Game Rankings, I don't think Ninja Gaiden can be categorized as "a broken game."
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My ass they are. Thunderbolt Ross and his Hulkbusters are hunting for the big green guy.
The fellow could be referring to the books, and, whatever his failings in terms of writing (I enjoyed most of his books but his last few have been very weak), Tom Clancy has always done his best to get the tech right.
I'm sure you'll be able to buy the Phantom cases cheap once the company has its debts called in after the console's spectacular failure.
I love it! Basically, you're complaining that people who download "abandonware" are getting screwed because they can't feel morally justified when the old games are actually available for purchase and usable on current hardware. That's friggin' brilliant, and I think that you should sue Atari for the emotional pain they're inflicting.
No, but if I get bitten by a radioactive ant I'm going to kick some serious ass.
Except that it appears they can't patch the game itself. If they could, it would be one patch goodbye where they would simply remove the fatigue factor before the snap or, as you suggest, add in offensive fatigue penalties for repeated shifts. As it stands, they're taking the only action they can (short of replacing everyone's discs) which is to simply take the fatigue option out of online play by modifying the servers' game options. Better than nothing, but still bad.
I do have one concern about his description of his news footage, and that's with the sound. Are the camera setups they're using recording multiple channels with multiple different microphones? If not - and I tend to doubt it since that would be incredibly difficult on a battlefield - then they must be adding in positional audio effects after the fact, which seems like yet another blurring of the line between news and entertainment. Instead of saying "My God, look at what that tank did to those people," it's "Wow! Check out the cool surround effect!" Not a good change to my mind.
There can be legal issues involved with letting a bankruptcy cat out of the bag at the wrong time, especially with a publicly traded company. It's certainly a shame for the employees but they've known for a long time that Acclaim was operating hand to mouth at best.
You're absolutely right, except for your closing statement. It's not copyright law, it's trademark law. The boys behind MST3k probably wouldn't even be suing if it weren't for the fact that if they let it go, especially knowing all about the group, they could eventually lose their trademark (unlike copyright which requires no active defense to maintain).
Best Brains isn't claiming to own the rights to making funny comments over movies. They aren't even claiming to own the rights to silhouetted heads in front of a movie screen making funny comments about movies. They're claiming to own their trademark (which is still active) and object to someone diluting same. That's what you do if you want to retain a trademark - they have to be AGGRESSIVELY defended or they can be lost.
I once again forgot to use the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox when I said I was going to (bad habit). The parent is unequestionably deserving of a 1, and maybe a 0 - this post probably deserves a -1, though that seems like a waste of mod points. :)
I don't have to assume that Apple has a marketing edge - they did and they do. I certainly don't deny - nor have I ever denied - that the iPod is overall a superior product. But that doesn't come close to explaining the iPod's popularity and market share. If it were about being a superior product, Macs would probably outsell PCs, everyone would use Linux instead of Microsoft on their servers, the Soundblaster line would have been killed off years ago, and Enter The Matrix would have been left on the shelf instead of making millions.
((One point removed for the trollish nature of this post))
Let's take the N-Gage first, since it's a /. favorite. The biggest reason talking into an N-Gage looks ridiculous has nothing to do with how the phone is held (the "taco" side-talking deal). It's because the N-Gage is a crappy device. Bad gaming (controls and content), mediocre phone (there are so damn many better options) and boring old memory card MP3 (there are memory card MP3 players barely bigger than the card itself). Anyone "in the know" (like visitors to /.) would be aware of what a piece of shit the N-Gage is and it therefore magnifies how stupid it looks talking into the classic model. Then again, those thinking that much about it should see below.
Portable gaming: People who think portable gaming looks ridiculous are either a) people who are insecure about their hobby (pathetic) or b) people who think gaming is for little kids (their loss). Me, I'll enjoy a nice game of Sonic Pinball Party or FFTA and feel quite good that I'm enjoying myself, while any person ridiculing my playing of same can go hang.
Headsets: If you think a headset looks ridiculous then you're just beyond dumb. Modern headsets tend to be one-piece, microphone barely coming out of the ear, with a cord. They can be as unobtrusive as one wants. MAYBE if someone is carring around a classic headset the size of old on-ear Walkman headphones, there's a case to be made. Otherwise, when I see someone using a headset my only potential thought (if I give it a thought) is "That's somebody who knows how to use a phone comfortably" - certainly far more comfortably than wandering around with one's arm bent as if in a half-hearted "hear no evil" maneuver.
If you're walking around thinking people with their electronic devices look ridiculous, you're being an over-critical jackass. I recommend going into the entertainment review field - they seem to love giving jobs to your kind of idiots.
If you're walking around being self-conscious about your own gadgetry, get over it. The over-critical jackasses are probably just jealous that they can't afford what you have and are missing out on gadget fun themselves.
The UI is fine, but the learning curve on my Nomad is only marginally longer than that of the iPod and I personally prefer the placement of the controls on the sides.
If ANY of the other already existing MP3 players had received the kind of marketing push the iPod got, they could have easily become the "gold standard." Instead, the other companies, either because of a lack of funding or an in-house decision to marginalize their own products as being niche, didn't take the risk.
But you're over-simplifying the issue as well. There are shows that look near-perfect on digital satellite (at least on my Dish Network - anecdotally, DirecTV has looked worse over the years) while others can have some difficulties - this also varies per channel, where the pay-extra channels (like HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc.) always look better than the other channels. Further, analog signals are far more vulnerable to certain kinds of interference. There are areas of my town (Portland, Oregon) where reception of some VHF channels, even with a roof-mounted antenna, is just awful. And this isn't due to distance, but because of reflections and the like causing horrible ghosting.
Yeah, that's awful. It's a damn shame when people are able to enjoy what they buy, especially if YOU think the quality is too shabby for your discerning tastes.
In the area of digital satellite/cable, unless you're willing to pay through the nose in terms of money and space for a big dish, NTSC MPEG-2 is the best you can get (I consider HDTV a very separate category, especially since it's still not even nearly the majority of available programming). If a few artifacts are the price to be paid for having a couple hundred channels, that's just the way it goes.
Further, it's not a matter of the "average American" - and, wow, you sure make that seem like an insult - not being able to tell the difference. On a decent TV. I expect most CAN tell the difference between a good DVD and the same content on digital cable/satellite. It's a matter of WHAT IS AVAILABLE and WHAT IS COST-EFFECTIVE. It would be great to have the original, pure NTSC analog signal coming through with no interference, but that's just not practical for the vast majority of TV viewers.
As a side note, I would mention that part of the artifacting problem is indeed increased MPEG-2 compression, but another part is the fact that the signals are being encoded in real-time. DirecTV, Comcast, Dish Network, etc. don't get all the programming a couple weeks in advance, encode it and then broadcast it on the appropriate days. The signals arrive in their native form from the content providers and are encoded on the fly for distribution (or, for analog cable/VHF/UHF, just retransmitted) within seconds - this is the biggest reason for the very artifacts you describe in busy CG video and jump cuts (Homicide: Life on the Street was very difficult for me to watch on two different Dish Network stations - Lifetime and CourtTV - due to their very liberal use of handheld cameras). The quality of these signals is inevitably going to be lower than DVD quality, and this is magnified when dealing with an NTSC tape source as opposed to the HD masters from which most movie DVDs are derived.
Of course, if the FCC has their way, eventually there will be no such thing as live TV anywhere and they can put every channel on a five- to ten-minute delay. It would be a shame in free speech terms (I consider all FCC forays into this area direct violations of the 1st amendment, myself) but it would probably allow for better MPEG encoding.
Nice. I might have to scare up something like that for me own home. I'm a cord-hater. :)
Really? Then the base station is powered by a battery, too? That's traditionally the weakness in a cordless system when a power outage occurs since most base stations require AC to work, making it irrelevant that the handset still has juice.
If you're working off the theory that eventually everything we once downloaded and kept on our own computers will be available on-demand at speeds that make such access as quick as a DVD/CD, I think that's highly unlikely unless bandwidth magically becomes free - even then, someone has to maintain and host said data and they're gonna want some cash, too.
b) If a hard drive containing, say, 250GB of data fails catastrophically then you lose all 250GB. If that same 250GB is stored on multiple optical discs, the data loss per failure (like a big scratch) goes way down. Long-term storage on a hard drive alone is foolish.
c) RAID arrays are not meant to replace backups. Relying on them for that purpose is a road to disaster. Further, the common consumer RAID solutions are 0/1 and located right in the main PC, making them even worse for data security (we won't even get into substandard RAID controllers and the fact that many have had trouble recovering data properly even in a mirrored situation). Folks aren't going to blow a grand or more on an extra PC or an outboard RAID array when they could spend $100 on a DVD burner and discs to do their backups.
There's a reason that CD-R/RW drives have become a default option in virtually all PCs (even a goodly number of NOTEBOOKS have them), and there's nothing on the horizon that says DVD recorders won't follow suit...More and bigger files mean bigger backup/archive requirements, and the optical option is by far the most cost-effective way to get the job done, especially at the home-user level.
(If the company comes through with the rebate)
Even if one WAS going to set up a dedicated HDTV PC, the extra $100 for a hardware-based solution could easily be made up by the ability to use a much cheaper processor and motherboard. The specs for MyHD, for example, specify a minimum processor speed of 400 MHz and a minimum 64MB (!!) of RAM, with the attendant potential decrease in size (use the smallest case you can find since you won't need a lot of cooling) and noise. Even being forced to buy a Windows OS doesn't add to the price as much as buying state-of-the-art hardware would.
Based on this review, this seems to be of interest only to hobbyists. The quality sounds sketchy at best and the price doesn't make up (in my mind, at least) for the disadvantages of using a software-based solution.
I think your main point is invalid on its face. Specifically, you seem to denigrate the fact that to get to high levels in an MMORPG requires many, many hours of work while playing down the fact that in order to get "mad skillz" at Quake it takes many, many hours of practice. I could turn it around and complain that when I tried to play Quake 3 multiplayer I got my ass handed to me over and over again because other people had so much more time to dedicate to playing the game - since I don't have that kind of time, I can't enjoy Quake 3 online.
Believe me, if the revolution is to turn MMORPGs into games more like first-person shooters, it's not going to expand the audience. It will simply eliminate the current audience and force the development of a new one.
Could a Linux box be used to look at my receipt as I exit? I'd rather a computer imply I'm a thief rather than some snot-nosed 16-year-old.
The sarge is unappreciated in his own time.
I'm aware that a lot of people put little stock in game reviews, but given its current 91.7% rating (before added content/camera change) on Game Rankings, I don't think Ninja Gaiden can be categorized as "a broken game."