was one of my favorite games of all time. I had the apple II version and the apple IIgs version (which was buggy). I have great memories of playing the dutch circa 1620 and plunding the cities along the southern coast of the mediterranean.
Another thing I would be really curious to see is a Sid Meier done version of XCom. There's an interesting article from last August where this deal was being discussed. Amongst other things, interesting relevant paragraphs:
GameSpy: Would that include your old stuff? Like Pirates, F-15 Strike Eagle, Gunship... Sid Meier:... Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, Covert Ops. And we're looking at the other games as well. GameSpy: Like Master of Magic and X-Com? Sid Meier: Yes. GameSpy: You realize Usenet is going to go nuts over that answer. Sid Meier: We're not going to announce our next game until October or so. GameSpy: You've been asking fans, yesterday I heard people saying Pirates more often than anything else. Sid Meier: We'd love to do Pirates for the 21st century. People have also asked about Colonization, and a few others.
I can think of at least one or two people who would love to see a MOM sequel...:)
"SAN DIEGO, CA - May 12, 2003 - Sony Online Entertainment Inc. (SOE), a worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online gaming, announced today that it is adding incentives to EverQuest® II, the parallel online universe to the hugely successful gaming phenomenon EverQuest®, to reward current EverQuest players for the time they have invested enjoying the original title. The incentives will include exclusive crossover quest zones in each game that will be accessible only by subscribers of both games, allowing characters in EverQuest and EverQuest II to gain access to hidden treasures, an EverQuest II in-game reward for loyal fans, and additional features to be disclosed over the coming months for ongoing EverQuest and EverQuest II players"
Last game I played that had crossover zones to encourage people to play both was probably Might and Magic IV/V...
The speed-ups to Google's method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual's interests or customized to a particular topic
I did a search on "The Sex Monster", a 1999 movie about a man whose wife becomes bisexual, and now my Google thinks I'm gay!
paying for an online subscription when the game requires persistant servers, as most MMORPGS do. It takes money to buy the servers, and there's a significant cost to maintain them. Not to mention bandwidth costs.
What I find interesting is the recent emerging trend of games charging for online-play that require only minimal hardware company-side. For example, the forthcoming Settlers of Catan PS2 is rumored to use such a pricing scheme (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/391/391005p1.html). In that case, you're basically paying for someone to match you up with another human player, as all the games are transitory, and the PS2's can do all the requisite processing themselves. Somehow, that doesn't seem as compelling a reason for me to be spending $7 a month or more per month to play.
But I suspect we'll see more and more of that -- it's obvious consumers will be more willing to try a game that they can get for free and pay a small monthly fee if they like it as opposed to paying a large up-front cost and then getting the online-time for free. And companies will like it too, as it means potentially wider exposure for a game, and a more steady revenue flow. Not to mention they still get their money when used copies of the game trade hands over eBay or people figure out how to copy it.
It wasn't the technology that was the problem with I, II (and, no-doubt, III), but piss-poor stories
It's not even that the concepts behind the stories were so bad. It's that the screenplay adaptions of the stories were absolutely horrid and the casting was worse (with a couple notable exceptions). Then, to make matters worse, Lucas decided to aim Episode I at youngsters in an attempt to capture the imagination of a new generation (via devices such as Jar Jar and the overly-long video-game-influenced pod racing scenes). However, in reality he not only failed at this, he also managed to upset a fairly large portion of his ever-aging fanbase.
The reason Pixar succeeds so well is simple. It's not because the stories are all that fabulous - because in reality they're pretty simple. It's because they're well written, have a great mix of humor/action/etc, and most of all, they have an awful lot of heart.
The best thing that could happen to this unit is for Lucas not to have any control over it. At this point in his career, he should stick to what he's good at, which is the technical side of film-making.
When virtual reality (fully 3d, immersed environments) start to appear and be used in the home, there'll be a need for this kind of storage. Combined with processor advances to do the massive crunches needed for such an interface/game/devetool/whatever... the average home user will finally have the ability to experience it.
And if we're lucky, the porn industry will STILL be the ones pushing the envelope in figuring out how to make new technology marketable.:)
These things are GREAT for jogging, or taking to the gym. Sure, you can jog with a discman or walkman style player, but odds are you're gonna end up carrying it in your hand, and risk dropping it. Some of these kinds of devices come with neck-ties, so you can wear them around your neck while you work out. Or stick em in your pocket. They're light enough they won't bounce when you jog. There's nothing worse than having your shorts fall down in public due to jogging with overly-heavy electronics in your pocket. No, I don't speak from experience.
The reason they're expensive is because they're compact. The reason they only come with 128 MB ram is because they're compact, and to keep the price down. Yeah, 128 MB isn't that much room, but how often do you find yourself jogging for more than 2 hours?
Personally, I'm looking at the IRiver IFP-180T (http://www.iriver.com/product/detail.asp?idx=10&p roduct_name=iFP-180T). As far as I can tell, it has an FM tuner, can record your voice, and will potentially support.ogg in the future if they can get the codec small enough.
The problem is that all of the other easy-to-reach outlets for finding non-mainstream music are being closed. Let's consider a few:
mp3.com -- used to be a great place for finding obscure artists, now it's mainly used to promote mainstream artists. Fortunately a decent number of independent artists went over to ampcast.com
p2p trading -- another great way to check out stuff you don't hear on the radio, but the RIAA is actively shutting these down.
Internet radio -- we all know what happened to this.
CDs -- with CDs costing up to $20 a pop, most consumers don't feel it's affordable to "take a chance" on an album, especially since most albums... well... suck.
So while you can sit there and say "it's really the consumer's fault, they're the ones requesting what they hear on the radio in my store", when the companies that control the music control ALL of the distribution channels, customers really don't have much choice at all.
normally the games come with one month of free service to get you started.
After that, they generally try and lock you into 1 month, 3 month, or 6 month contracts (giving you discounts for the longer terms).
Need recommendations re: encoding software
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
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· Score: 1
I just recently encoded my entire CD collection (about 300 CDs) into 192kbit.mp3. I'm now interested in converting over to.ogg. What I'm looking for is a decent Windows-98 compatible front end that will allow me to put in the CD and press "go", have it grab all the track names from CDDB, DAE the tracks, and create filenames to my liking. Audiocatalyst did a wonderful job of this for.mp3s, but it won't do.ogg. Oh, and of course I'd like to be able to plug in the latest version of the.ogg encoder.
It'll be really interesting when they manage to bundle the paper thin speakers, the paper thin monitor, embedded solar cells, and wireless networking all together into a single paper-thin sheet. Then you basically have a multimedia device that you can take and hang just about anywhere. And you thought telephone poles in the major cities were bad now... Just wait till they all play slide shows and video footage of someone's missing animal while playing sad music to tug on your heartstrings, beamed from said person's house nearby...
The general sentiment regarding FM radio these days seems to be: it sucks.
With radio stations having to pay an increasingly large fee for each song on the playlist, it's no wonder that they play a much smaller selection of songs than they used to (say, back in the 80s).
Clear Channel claims (paraphrasing) "We're just playing what people want to hear". However, there are several really interesting side-results of these shrinking playlists.
First, we have to lay down some facts. The first is that fewer people are listening to the radio, period. The second is that for those who do listen to the radio, they are listening for shorter and shorter periods.
Now let's assume you're a casual radio listener as most people are. What kinds of songs are you going to request most? Probably the ones you've been hearing recently that you like. No diversity in songplay equals everybody requesting the same thing, and everybody requesting the same thing means radio stations play the same crap over and over again (which is fine by them, since they don't have to pay out extra cash for more songs on their playlist). In a sense, it's cyclic: people request what they know, and stations play what they request.
From one perspective, Clear Channel is correct when they say they are playing what people want to hear. But that's taking a small picture view, because when taken in a larger context the statistics really are supporting the fact that people don't want to hear the radio at all! Ask any radio listener what the biggest problem with radio today and he'll tell you lack of variety. Thus, the sucking. And the more sucking there is, the fewer people will listen.
Here's another interesting thing that I haven't seen discussed: How this affects CD sales. Let's consider 2 scenarios. In scenario A, the radio station is playing 60 tunes in regular rotation and a few classics, and replace songs in rotation at the rate of 10 per week. In scenario B, the radio station is playing 30 tunes in regular rotation, plus a few classics and replace songs in the rotation at the rate of 2 per week. Which station is going to generate more CD sales?
Let's assume (for the sake of simplicity) that each station has exactly 1000 listeners. Each listener has a 1/10 chance of liking a song enough to buy a CD. Each listener is also going to listen for 120 songs in week 1, and 120 songs in week 2.
The people listening to station B hear each song 4 times during each week. They are exposed to 32 songs (30 from week 1, plus the extra 2 rotated in during week 2), and buy an average of 3.2 CDs due to this. 3.2 * 1000 = 3200 CDs sold.
The people listening to station A hear each song twice during each week. They are exposed to 70 songs, and buy an average of 7 CDs due to this. 7 * 1000 = 7000 CDs sold.
This, of course, is a very simplified case, as it doesn't take into account disposable income, but neither does it take into account song burnout (when you like a song but are so sick of it you never want to hear it again), but I think it makes it's point. Oh, and in case you didn't get it, radio stations today are like station B.
As a result the music labels complain that people aren't buying music and point their fingers at Napster, I don't buy it as the sole reason. I point my finger at station B and say "people are listening to the radio less than ever and being exposed to less music than ever. What did you expect!?"
I see a lot of comments here saying "Buy an Xbox and cost Microsoft $150! This is great! We get a cool machine and hurt Microsoft!". Let's do a little math here. Now that you have a cool machine, you're probably going to buy a few games for it (and maybe a 2nd controller), cutting Microsoft's losses a little.
Since Microsoft has sold between 3.5 and 4 million XBoxes to date, let's assume that we get 4 million evil Slashdotters to buy Xboxes. Lets also say that all of your slashdotters are SO evil that you're not even going to buy any games for your XBoxes. 4 Million consoles * $150 loss/console = $600 million loss for Microsoft. While this seems like a lot in pure monetary terms, this is a drop in the bucket for a company with $42 billion in cash reserves.
Continuing our scenario, game companies are going to see the number of consoles sold increase. They're also going to see that each console buyer is purchasing many fewer games on average, but since some of you are going to end up buying a few games for your new XBoxes the overall raw volume of games sold is going to increase. That means they're going to have more incentive to produce games for the Xbox, which is going to fuel legitimate sales.
If you really want to see Microsoft out of the console-space, buy a PS2 or Gamecube instead. Give game developers incentive to develop for the other machines instead of the Xbox and the Xbox will wilt.
One of the BEST moves Sony made is the re-releasing of older games that sold well. If I remember the fact correctly, if a game has been out for 9 months and has sold at least 400,000 copies, they'll re-release it under the "greatest hits" title for $19.99.
That way you can pick up tons of older but still great games new at bargain bin prices... That's gotta be highly appealing for those who realize how in the long run the software costs tend to dominate the hardware costs of the console...
Keep in mind that Sony recently shrunk the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer into a single chip (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/06/13372 50&mode=thread). This should reduce their costs by quite a bit as it means they'll need less chips per machine and less supporting hardware. My guess is that Sony is busting butt to get a PsTwo out using the new chip, at which time they'll lower the price to $199 to compete with the Xbox and Gamecube -- yeah profit margins will suffer a little bit, but not near as bad as with the two chip versions. I would expect to see an announcement around E3 time (in late May). Until then, they might very well just use the momentum they've accumulated to glide by.
For starters, much "EverQuest" activity centers on online chat, something that won't be possible on the PS2 without an add-on keyboard or voice capability.
So is "Sow Plz kthx" going to be a menu option?
2 comments, one serious, one funny
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Look at the picture on the front page of "http://www.segway.com/consumer/home_flash.html". Seems fairly normal, yes? Well it is, until you consider that the Segway weighs 65 pounds. That leaves me wondering not only how the woman on the top of the stairs got hers up there, but how she plans on getting it back down. She must be pretty muscular.
Also, if I get drunk and ride my Segway around the town, I wonder if a cop would issue me a SUI. Do you think foot-patrol police in Los Angeles and London will ride these around? The ability to ride handless seems ideal for travelling forward while shooting at someone with a gun or beating them silly with a baton.
Personally I think it's really lame that a few "professional" bands (like the Offspring and Linkin Park) are putting their stuff on MP3 and getting paid per listen. For those who don't know, MP3.Com gives a million dollars away per month to artists based on the number of plays those artists have. When artists who are already signed to big record labels collect from this pool, it takes away from the amount of money that amateur artists can obtain. For many amateur artists, being on mp3.com provides the only national exposure they get. Professional bands get stuff like radio airplay and advertising that amateurs simply can't afford or don't have the connections to set up.
Fortunately, most professional artists have the decency not to collect from this pool. Just a few need to get a clue.
The community didn't MAKE the company restrict it's drivers. The company decided to restrict it's drivers because it made business sense -- in other words, they were worried enough about people boycotting them that it might affect their bottom line. Subtle but important difference.
Bravo to the community for making it's preferences heard!
You're right -- games should be for fun. Most of us don't find it fun when our opponents cheat. Companies who encourage cheating to fatten their accounts... well, that just defeats the whole spirit of competitive gaming.
Some of the more bothersome things about this demo are pointed out on anandtech: mainly the fact that they only ran a simple benchmarking demo, nothing else and that the chip didn't appear to be very stable.
There's a lot of talk about the fact that the CPU runs the ALU at 2x speed, thus a 1.5ghz cpu would be running the ALUs at 3ghz. That's fast!
BUT, isn't the following feasible?
What if the non-ALU CPU was running at 750mhz, and the ALU's were running at 1.5ghz? Given that, we can assume:
1) The reason Intel didn't show any real-world benchmarks is because this CPU wouldn't perform very well. Sure it would do 1.5ghz worth of speed on integer instructions, but it would only be 750mhz on floating point. This thing (in general) would get it's butt kicked by the 1.1ghz Athlon.
2) The reason the CPU can run at room temperature is because most of it is running at 750mhz. Sure the overclocked ALUs would add some heat, but probably not enough to unstabilize a demo chip when we know Intel can do 1ghz chips at room temp.
3) I remember in the "good ol' days" running Norton-ish benchmarks on my 386 and 486. The things would give you a pretty good indication of how fast your CPU was running, but they would tend to waver a bit -- my 386/dx33 would tend to jump between 33.1 and 33.3. Could that account for the instability we saw? If the benchmark was benching 1.5ghz worth of integer instructions, it seems to me that it might waver a bit, as it did (barely reaching a measured 1.5ghz).
4) The general lack of information on the speed of discrete components in the chip (eg. cache timings, etc...)
Of course, this is a lot of supposition. But assuming this, a lot of things suddenly make sense (and I'm sure you can think of more).
Seems like Intel is trying to become the next Cyrix. First Tinma (think Media/GL) and now an overclocked ALU with horrible floating point (think 5x86). And we all know what happened to Cyrix.
I'd love to hear your comments. I'm not putting forth any of the above as being true -- I'm just putting it out on the table to be thought about.
Slashdot Mirror
was one of my favorite games of all time. I had the apple II version and the apple IIgs version (which was buggy). I have great memories of playing the dutch circa 1620 and plunding the cities along the southern coast of the mediterranean.
... Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, Covert Ops. And we're looking at the other games as well.
:)
Another thing I would be really curious to see is a Sid Meier done version of XCom. There's an interesting article from last August where this deal was being discussed. Amongst other things, interesting relevant paragraphs:
GameSpy: Would that include your old stuff? Like Pirates, F-15 Strike Eagle, Gunship...
Sid Meier:
GameSpy: Like Master of Magic and X-Com?
Sid Meier: Yes.
GameSpy: You realize Usenet is going to go nuts over that answer.
Sid Meier: We're not going to announce our next game until October or so.
GameSpy: You've been asking fans, yesterday I heard people saying Pirates more often than anything else.
Sid Meier: We'd love to do Pirates for the 21st century. People have also asked about Colonization, and a few others.
I can think of at least one or two people who would love to see a MOM sequel...
In case you missed it, there's another article on the site (http://www.sonyonline.com/corp/press_releases/EQ2 _incentives_051303.html) that shows Sony is trying to provide additional incentives to those who play both EQ1 and EQ2. The most relevant paragraph follows:
"SAN DIEGO, CA - May 12, 2003 - Sony Online Entertainment Inc. (SOE), a worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online gaming, announced today that it is adding incentives to EverQuest® II, the parallel online universe to the hugely successful gaming phenomenon EverQuest®, to reward current EverQuest players for the time they have invested enjoying the original title. The incentives will include exclusive crossover quest zones in each game that will be accessible only by subscribers of both games, allowing characters in EverQuest and EverQuest II to gain access to hidden treasures, an EverQuest II in-game reward for loyal fans, and additional features to be disclosed over the coming months for ongoing EverQuest and EverQuest II players"
Last game I played that had crossover zones to encourage people to play both was probably Might and Magic IV/V...
I did a search on "The Sex Monster", a 1999 movie about a man whose wife becomes bisexual, and now my Google thinks I'm gay!
(joke reference: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
paying for an online subscription when the game requires persistant servers, as most MMORPGS do. It takes money to buy the servers, and there's a significant cost to maintain them. Not to mention bandwidth costs.
What I find interesting is the recent emerging trend of games charging for online-play that require only minimal hardware company-side. For example, the forthcoming Settlers of Catan PS2 is rumored to use such a pricing scheme (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/391/391005p1.html). In that case, you're basically paying for someone to match you up with another human player, as all the games are transitory, and the PS2's can do all the requisite processing themselves. Somehow, that doesn't seem as compelling a reason for me to be spending $7 a month or more per month to play.
But I suspect we'll see more and more of that -- it's obvious consumers will be more willing to try a game that they can get for free and pay a small monthly fee if they like it as opposed to paying a large up-front cost and then getting the online-time for free. And companies will like it too, as it means potentially wider exposure for a game, and a more steady revenue flow. Not to mention they still get their money when used copies of the game trade hands over eBay or people figure out how to copy it.
It's not even that the concepts behind the stories were so bad. It's that the screenplay adaptions of the stories were absolutely horrid and the casting was worse (with a couple notable exceptions). Then, to make matters worse, Lucas decided to aim Episode I at youngsters in an attempt to capture the imagination of a new generation (via devices such as Jar Jar and the overly-long video-game-influenced pod racing scenes). However, in reality he not only failed at this, he also managed to upset a fairly large portion of his ever-aging fanbase.
The reason Pixar succeeds so well is simple. It's not because the stories are all that fabulous - because in reality they're pretty simple. It's because they're well written, have a great mix of humor/action/etc, and most of all, they have an awful lot of heart.
The best thing that could happen to this unit is for Lucas not to have any control over it. At this point in his career, he should stick to what he's good at, which is the technical side of film-making.
And if we're lucky, the porn industry will STILL be the ones pushing the envelope in figuring out how to make new technology marketable.
These things are GREAT for jogging, or taking to the gym. Sure, you can jog with a discman or walkman style player, but odds are you're gonna end up carrying it in your hand, and risk dropping it. Some of these kinds of devices come with neck-ties, so you can wear them around your neck while you work out. Or stick em in your pocket. They're light enough they won't bounce when you jog. There's nothing worse than having your shorts fall down in public due to jogging with overly-heavy electronics in your pocket. No, I don't speak from experience.
p roduct_name=iFP-180T). As far as I can tell, it has an FM tuner, can record your voice, and will potentially support .ogg in the future if they can get the codec small enough.
The reason they're expensive is because they're compact. The reason they only come with 128 MB ram is because they're compact, and to keep the price down. Yeah, 128 MB isn't that much room, but how often do you find yourself jogging for more than 2 hours?
Personally, I'm looking at the IRiver IFP-180T (http://www.iriver.com/product/detail.asp?idx=10&
The problem is that all of the other easy-to-reach outlets for finding non-mainstream music are being closed. Let's consider a few:
mp3.com -- used to be a great place for finding obscure artists, now it's mainly used to promote mainstream artists. Fortunately a decent number of independent artists went over to ampcast.com
p2p trading -- another great way to check out stuff you don't hear on the radio, but the RIAA is actively shutting these down.
Internet radio -- we all know what happened to this.
CDs -- with CDs costing up to $20 a pop, most consumers don't feel it's affordable to "take a chance" on an album, especially since most albums... well... suck.
So while you can sit there and say "it's really the consumer's fault, they're the ones requesting what they hear on the radio in my store", when the companies that control the music control ALL of the distribution channels, customers really don't have much choice at all.
normally the games come with one month of free service to get you started.
After that, they generally try and lock you into 1 month, 3 month, or 6 month contracts (giving you discounts for the longer terms).
I just recently encoded my entire CD collection (about 300 CDs) into 192kbit .mp3. I'm now interested in converting over to .ogg. What I'm looking for is a decent Windows-98 compatible front end that will allow me to put in the CD and press "go", have it grab all the track names from CDDB, DAE the tracks, and create filenames to my liking. Audiocatalyst did a wonderful job of this for .mp3s, but it won't do .ogg. Oh, and of course I'd like to be able to plug in the latest version of the .ogg encoder.
Any recommendations? TIA.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/f lat_speakers010418.html
They've been working on them for a while now.
It'll be really interesting when they manage to bundle the paper thin speakers, the paper thin monitor, embedded solar cells, and wireless networking all together into a single paper-thin sheet. Then you basically have a multimedia device that you can take and hang just about anywhere. And you thought telephone poles in the major cities were bad now... Just wait till they all play slide shows and video footage of someone's missing animal while playing sad music to tug on your heartstrings, beamed from said person's house nearby...
Yup, so I did. Whoops.
In any case, I think the insightful stuff still stands up on it's own, as the part I got backwards was more window-dressing for the rest of the logic.
The general sentiment regarding FM radio these days seems to be: it sucks.
With radio stations having to pay an increasingly large fee for each song on the playlist, it's no wonder that they play a much smaller selection of songs than they used to (say, back in the 80s).
Clear Channel claims (paraphrasing) "We're just playing what people want to hear". However, there are several really interesting side-results of these shrinking playlists.
First, we have to lay down some facts. The first is that fewer people are listening to the radio, period. The second is that for those who do listen to the radio, they are listening for shorter and shorter periods.
Now let's assume you're a casual radio listener as most people are. What kinds of songs are you going to request most? Probably the ones you've been hearing recently that you like. No diversity in songplay equals everybody requesting the same thing, and everybody requesting the same thing means radio stations play the same crap over and over again (which is fine by them, since they don't have to pay out extra cash for more songs on their playlist). In a sense, it's cyclic: people request what they know, and stations play what they request.
From one perspective, Clear Channel is correct when they say they are playing what people want to hear. But that's taking a small picture view, because when taken in a larger context the statistics really are supporting the fact that people don't want to hear the radio at all! Ask any radio listener what the biggest problem with radio today and he'll tell you lack of variety. Thus, the sucking. And the more sucking there is, the fewer people will listen.
Here's another interesting thing that I haven't seen discussed: How this affects CD sales. Let's consider 2 scenarios. In scenario A, the radio station is playing 60 tunes in regular rotation and a few classics, and replace songs in rotation at the rate of 10 per week. In scenario B, the radio station is playing 30 tunes in regular rotation, plus a few classics and replace songs in the rotation at the rate of 2 per week. Which station is going to generate more CD sales?
Let's assume (for the sake of simplicity) that each station has exactly 1000 listeners. Each listener has a 1/10 chance of liking a song enough to buy a CD. Each listener is also going to listen for 120 songs in week 1, and 120 songs in week 2.
The people listening to station B hear each song 4 times during each week. They are exposed to 32 songs (30 from week 1, plus the extra 2 rotated in during week 2), and buy an average of 3.2 CDs due to this. 3.2 * 1000 = 3200 CDs sold.
The people listening to station A hear each song twice during each week. They are exposed to 70 songs, and buy an average of 7 CDs due to this. 7 * 1000 = 7000 CDs sold.
This, of course, is a very simplified case, as it doesn't take into account disposable income, but neither does it take into account song burnout (when you like a song but are so sick of it you never want to hear it again), but I think it makes it's point. Oh, and in case you didn't get it, radio stations today are like station B.
As a result the music labels complain that people aren't buying music and point their fingers at Napster, I don't buy it as the sole reason. I point my finger at station B and say "people are listening to the radio less than ever and being exposed to less music than ever. What did you expect!?"
I see a lot of comments here saying "Buy an Xbox and cost Microsoft $150! This is great! We get a cool machine and hurt Microsoft!". Let's do a little math here. Now that you have a cool machine, you're probably going to buy a few games for it (and maybe a 2nd controller), cutting Microsoft's losses a little.
Since Microsoft has sold between 3.5 and 4 million XBoxes to date, let's assume that we get 4 million evil Slashdotters to buy Xboxes. Lets also say that all of your slashdotters are SO evil that you're not even going to buy any games for your XBoxes. 4 Million consoles * $150 loss/console = $600 million loss for Microsoft. While this seems like a lot in pure monetary terms, this is a drop in the bucket for a company with $42 billion in cash reserves.
Continuing our scenario, game companies are going to see the number of consoles sold increase. They're also going to see that each console buyer is purchasing many fewer games on average, but since some of you are going to end up buying a few games for your new XBoxes the overall raw volume of games sold is going to increase. That means they're going to have more incentive to produce games for the Xbox, which is going to fuel legitimate sales.
If you really want to see Microsoft out of the console-space, buy a PS2 or Gamecube instead. Give game developers incentive to develop for the other machines instead of the Xbox and the Xbox will wilt.
isn't even going to be enough to pay for all the digital watermarking cop-chips they're going to need on the A->D converters needed to get there...
3 7&mode=thread&tid=97)
(re: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/23/23552
One of the BEST moves Sony made is the re-releasing of older games that sold well. If I remember the fact correctly, if a game has been out for 9 months and has sold at least 400,000 copies, they'll re-release it under the "greatest hits" title for $19.99.
That way you can pick up tons of older but still great games new at bargain bin prices... That's gotta be highly appealing for those who realize how in the long run the software costs tend to dominate the hardware costs of the console...
Keep in mind that Sony recently shrunk the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer into a single chip (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/06/13372 50&mode=thread). This should reduce their costs by quite a bit as it means they'll need less chips per machine and less supporting hardware. My guess is that Sony is busting butt to get a PsTwo out using the new chip, at which time they'll lower the price to $199 to compete with the Xbox and Gamecube -- yeah profit margins will suffer a little bit, but not near as bad as with the two chip versions. I would expect to see an announcement around E3 time (in late May). Until then, they might very well just use the momentum they've accumulated to glide by.
Sorry, I'm a retard, wrong section. =) How do you delete a post?
Say Menu -> Beg Dr00d -> "Sow plz kthx"
So is "Sow Plz kthx" going to be a menu option?
Look at the picture on the front page of "http://www.segway.com/consumer/home_flash.html". Seems fairly normal, yes? Well it is, until you consider that the Segway weighs 65 pounds. That leaves me wondering not only how the woman on the top of the stairs got hers up there, but how she plans on getting it back down. She must be pretty muscular.
Also, if I get drunk and ride my Segway around the town, I wonder if a cop would issue me a SUI. Do you think foot-patrol police in Los Angeles and London will ride these around? The ability to ride handless seems ideal for travelling forward while shooting at someone with a gun or beating them silly with a baton.
> The Offspring has made over $40k! Freaky.
Personally I think it's really lame that a few "professional" bands (like the Offspring and Linkin Park) are putting their stuff on MP3 and getting paid per listen. For those who don't know, MP3.Com gives a million dollars away per month to artists based on the number of plays those artists have. When artists who are already signed to big record labels collect from this pool, it takes away from the amount of money that amateur artists can obtain. For many amateur artists, being on mp3.com provides the only national exposure they get. Professional bands get stuff like radio airplay and advertising that amateurs simply can't afford or don't have the connections to set up.
Fortunately, most professional artists have the decency not to collect from this pool. Just a few need to get a clue.
The community didn't MAKE the company restrict it's drivers. The company decided to restrict it's drivers because it made business sense -- in other words, they were worried enough about people boycotting them that it might affect their bottom line. Subtle but important difference. Bravo to the community for making it's preferences heard! You're right -- games should be for fun. Most of us don't find it fun when our opponents cheat. Companies who encourage cheating to fatten their accounts... well, that just defeats the whole spirit of competitive gaming.
Some of the more bothersome things about this demo are pointed out on anandtech: mainly the fact that they only ran a simple benchmarking demo, nothing else and that the chip didn't appear to be very stable.
There's a lot of talk about the fact that the CPU runs the ALU at 2x speed, thus a 1.5ghz cpu would be running the ALUs at 3ghz. That's fast!
BUT, isn't the following feasible?
What if the non-ALU CPU was running at 750mhz, and the ALU's were running at 1.5ghz? Given that, we can assume:
1) The reason Intel didn't show any real-world benchmarks is because this CPU wouldn't perform very well. Sure it would do 1.5ghz worth of speed on integer instructions, but it would only be 750mhz on floating point. This thing (in general) would get it's butt kicked by the 1.1ghz Athlon.
2) The reason the CPU can run at room temperature is because most of it is running at 750mhz. Sure the overclocked ALUs would add some heat, but probably not enough to unstabilize a demo chip when we know Intel can do 1ghz chips at room temp.
3) I remember in the "good ol' days" running Norton-ish benchmarks on my 386 and 486. The things would give you a pretty good indication of how fast your CPU was running, but they would tend to waver a bit -- my 386/dx33 would tend to jump between 33.1 and 33.3. Could that account for the instability we saw? If the benchmark was benching 1.5ghz worth of integer instructions, it seems to me that it might waver a bit, as it did (barely reaching a measured 1.5ghz).4) The general lack of information on the speed of discrete components in the chip (eg. cache timings, etc...)
Of course, this is a lot of supposition. But assuming this, a lot of things suddenly make sense (and I'm sure you can think of more).
Seems like Intel is trying to become the next Cyrix. First Tinma (think Media/GL) and now an overclocked ALU with horrible floating point (think 5x86). And we all know what happened to Cyrix.
I'd love to hear your comments. I'm not putting forth any of the above as being true -- I'm just putting it out on the table to be thought about.
Tarindel