Or he bought it used (like I did) and didn't see a sticker, had no manual to read, and assumed that it wasn't a huge piece of crap and that you could actually move it like you can all other disc reading devices these days.
I got my first console when I was 10 or 11. I did not read the manual. No 10 year old would because they want to play the freaking thing. When you're making gaming consoles you can't design them like you do industrial machinery. You can't have exposed wiring and moving parts that will take off arms with signs next to it saying, "don't touch that."
Exactly. Even my old craptastic CD player boombox that I had in the 90's clamped down the disc so that you could move the thing around while you were playing CDs. I hate my xbox but I love Rock Band (I play with friends on Live) and Netflix. If it weren't for those two things I wouldn't even own one.
Your portable CD players are made to be... portable. The Xbox 360, is not. Also, many early "portable" CD players would cause play back problems if not held flat. I would not be surprised to find out they also caused damage ot the CD too.
I think we can all understand it when an early 90's discman dies... but this is the freaking 21st century. Optical media has been around a while. Microsoft is on it's second version of a console that reads optical media. Consoles are going to be used by kids, kids that don't read manuals.
In addition, I beleive that you are overloockign that fact that the Xbox 360 and a CD/DVD player/drive spin and different rates. That might have something to do with why one is portable, and the other is not.
The speed at which it's spinning has nothing to do with it. It's just a lousy design. They've got crap sitting below the disc's surface that can scratch it and they've got nothing in place to prevent the disc from tilting down and being scratched.
When I was a kid we moved our console around while it was running all the time. We'd decide we wanted to sit farther or away or more people would want to play or whatever. Just because the media has changed doesn't mean people's expectations of usability have. The play & charge cables aren't very long. I could easily see someone having to plug in in the middle of a game. I've had to pull mine forward before so that I could play plugged in... until I heard about this crap I never gave it a second thought.
This all seems nuts when you realize that there are demonstration videos on the net that show A) how easily the discs can be scratched when moving the console from horizontal to vertical and B) how easy it is to just glue some foam down to prevent the discs from being scratched.
I can understand a company choosing not to redesign an entire product to prevent something like damage from movement from happening... but we've got spontaneous scratches happening too. It seems like a couple cents worth of foam and glue would be a pretty cheap fix on a several hundred dollar machine.
I'm not MSFT basher, I just hate that the 360 is a huge piece of crap. I just want to play my games and watch my netflix.:-/
Good point. I think a touchscreen's inability to address deeper "two-dimensional" interfaces is what many have overlooked. They see touchscreens all over and assume that means they can do anything. As a means of ordering fast food a touchscreen could be great. Tap the picture of what you want, choose from a list of customizations (no pickles?), and then pick your drink. I think the line is drawn between content creation and simple content viewing / wizard type uses.
Need to input a number? Put those virtual keyboards away. Click on the control and drag your finger up. The numbers will increment exponentially. Raise your finger and then drag up or down again to increment exponentially from where you first raised your finger. You should be able to reach virtually any number in the real number system in a couple of drags.
Not trying to be a jerk here but I absolutely hate this kind of thing. You see it all the time. Designers take something that allows you to perform a task very quickly but isn't necessarily sexy and try to replace it with something sexy / neat / oooh shiny! I would bet money that someone using a keyboard / 10-key will always be able to beat someone using the touch input system you described.
It's the same reason people hate flash pages. Designers come up with these completely insane navigation / content presentation schemes that drive people crazy. If flash pages followed the standard layout (top level links on top, sub navigation on sidebars, and content in the middle) I think people would find them more usable.
Anyway, sorry if I rained on your parade. I'm just saying that sometimes it seems that the whole idea of "form follows function" appears to have gone away. We've replaced it with "beat these functions into this sleek, sexy new form".
I like my monitor perfectly clean. Using displays all covered in finger grease drives me nuts.
Your hands conceal parts of the screen while you're using it.
You can move a mouse over a greater distance much more quickly than your entire hand. It's also much easier to get to a specific pixel / small area with a mouse than with your fat fingertip.
People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day?
Positioning the screen ergonomically for use as in input device puts it in a position where you're hanging your head looking down all day. The minority report problem obviously applies if you position your screen at the optimal viewing position.
Others have already mentioned it, but lack of tactile feedback is a big one. This is particularly important for programs whose UIs aren't that great. You hit the touchscreen button - the button didn't move and there was no sound. You can only guess that your button "press" didn't register because nothing happened... but you don't really know. I see this on ATMs all the time.
How is wasting half of your screen real estate on a keyboard a good idea? Oh, you can bring it up dynamically? Oh great, well then I guess you don't get to use keyboard shortcuts. That sucks.
FYI - We're running on the Source Engine. The 3D skybox isn't really a room... it's just a hollow box covered in Skybox texture that's anywhere in the map outside of the bounds of the regular map area accessible by the players. Everything in the skybox is 1/16th scale to make it cheaper to render. The source engine scales everything up 16 times when it renders it as the Skybox. This is all from memory so I may be off on something slightly... I was going to link to the Wiki but it's down for some reason.
I'm sure the problem is that 90% of the people on consoles aren't computer savvy enough to get that. In my opinion if you have a PC and a console, you're going to get the PC version just because the mouse is so much better for gaming. So the sorts of people on the console or that prefer it won't necessarily be the sorts that "get" what's going on. Particularly if the person "cheating" is just using it to send endless hoards in versus while they're infected and then they turn it off when they're survivor. In my example if someone doesn't know the people he's playing with it just looks like the other team is hacking to send endless zombies at you.
If the console works the same as the PC there's no way to choose between dedicated games and locally hosted games... so you have no way (aside from joining friends) of controlling whether you join a game that allows "cheats" or not. I think this is something valve needs to fix on both platforms. It's pretty easy to host a game locally and then jack around with the people that join your game without them realizing it.
Not only that but it allows other third-party developers (modders, mappers, etc) to actually test and debug their work. You can make a map without the console... but it's going to suck. No cubemaps and no way to tell where you need to optimize your map.
I don't think I've ever bothered to use the console for "cheats" but I've used it countless times while mapping. Of course, I also use it in CS and other games to see my damage stats. Hitting "~" as soon as I die is habit.
Actually recent benchmarks have shown that defragging doesn't make *that* much of a difference - http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference?page=0%2C2 I've never heard of a fragmented drive affecting machine stability. That's like saying having a 5400 RPM drive instead of a 10,000 RPM drive in a server will make it crash... It makes no sense. Fragmentation has nothing to do with data integrity which is the only thing that would affect stability.
Didn't you read the articles from yesterday's slashdot? There's no such thing as free software. That's a harmful lie and it shouldn't be spread. Now hand over that pirated OO.org CD.
Am I the only one that's just given up even bothering to read these new "how the moon was made" theories? It seems like there's a new one every year and none of them are really ever any better than the previous ones. Parent's points regarding the plausibility of this particular theory are a good example.
This sounds like the ultimate excuse for playing your DS during class / at home when you're supposed to be doing homework. Now there just needs to be an alt-tab equivalent so you can flip over to the ebook and pause playing tetris long enough to convince them that you're reading.
Gamers sell games to buy more games, they know you always get a better store credit price than cash price.
I agree with everything else but I've got to disagree with that. I think you can get much more selling it yourself. I've seen gamestop offering $30 trade-in for a brand new game. That's crazy - you could easily sell it for $40 or more on Craigslist.
I only sell my games to gamestop when I just want to dump some crap that I got from people that don't know anything about games. I know that actually trying to sell it on eBay or Craigslist would be more trouble than the games are worth.
I won't even pay that for a good game. $50 is my limit and that's for games that I know will be good - games I've either demo'd from a download or a convention or at a friend's house. Everything else can wait until it's $20. Of course, I'm talking PC games here. I'm not sure how consoles have gotten away with charging $60 (or even 70!?) for games when you still don't see games over $50 on the PC...
Slashdot Mirror
The real question is what is Canada doing with nuclear bunkers? Like anyone's going to bother bombing them. :P
Or he bought it used (like I did) and didn't see a sticker, had no manual to read, and assumed that it wasn't a huge piece of crap and that you could actually move it like you can all other disc reading devices these days.
I got my first console when I was 10 or 11. I did not read the manual. No 10 year old would because they want to play the freaking thing. When you're making gaming consoles you can't design them like you do industrial machinery. You can't have exposed wiring and moving parts that will take off arms with signs next to it saying, "don't touch that."
Exactly. Even my old craptastic CD player boombox that I had in the 90's clamped down the disc so that you could move the thing around while you were playing CDs. I hate my xbox but I love Rock Band (I play with friends on Live) and Netflix. If it weren't for those two things I wouldn't even own one.
Your portable CD players are made to be... portable. The Xbox 360, is not. Also, many early "portable" CD players would cause play back problems if not held flat. I would not be surprised to find out they also caused damage ot the CD too.
I think we can all understand it when an early 90's discman dies... but this is the freaking 21st century. Optical media has been around a while. Microsoft is on it's second version of a console that reads optical media. Consoles are going to be used by kids, kids that don't read manuals.
In addition, I beleive that you are overloockign that fact that the Xbox 360 and a CD/DVD player/drive spin and different rates. That might have something to do with why one is portable, and the other is not.
The speed at which it's spinning has nothing to do with it. It's just a lousy design. They've got crap sitting below the disc's surface that can scratch it and they've got nothing in place to prevent the disc from tilting down and being scratched.
When I was a kid we moved our console around while it was running all the time. We'd decide we wanted to sit farther or away or more people would want to play or whatever. Just because the media has changed doesn't mean people's expectations of usability have. The play & charge cables aren't very long. I could easily see someone having to plug in in the middle of a game. I've had to pull mine forward before so that I could play plugged in... until I heard about this crap I never gave it a second thought.
This all seems nuts when you realize that there are demonstration videos on the net that show A) how easily the discs can be scratched when moving the console from horizontal to vertical and B) how easy it is to just glue some foam down to prevent the discs from being scratched.
:-/
I can understand a company choosing not to redesign an entire product to prevent something like damage from movement from happening... but we've got spontaneous scratches happening too. It seems like a couple cents worth of foam and glue would be a pretty cheap fix on a several hundred dollar machine.
I'm not MSFT basher, I just hate that the 360 is a huge piece of crap. I just want to play my games and watch my netflix.
You don't need a blanket. Your wireless internet browsing device will keep you warm.
Good point. I think a touchscreen's inability to address deeper "two-dimensional" interfaces is what many have overlooked. They see touchscreens all over and assume that means they can do anything. As a means of ordering fast food a touchscreen could be great. Tap the picture of what you want, choose from a list of customizations (no pickles?), and then pick your drink. I think the line is drawn between content creation and simple content viewing / wizard type uses.
Need to input a number? Put those virtual keyboards away. Click on the control and drag your finger up. The numbers will increment exponentially. Raise your finger and then drag up or down again to increment exponentially from where you first raised your finger. You should be able to reach virtually any number in the real number system in a couple of drags.
Not trying to be a jerk here but I absolutely hate this kind of thing. You see it all the time. Designers take something that allows you to perform a task very quickly but isn't necessarily sexy and try to replace it with something sexy / neat / oooh shiny! I would bet money that someone using a keyboard / 10-key will always be able to beat someone using the touch input system you described.
It's the same reason people hate flash pages. Designers come up with these completely insane navigation / content presentation schemes that drive people crazy. If flash pages followed the standard layout (top level links on top, sub navigation on sidebars, and content in the middle) I think people would find them more usable.
Anyway, sorry if I rained on your parade. I'm just saying that sometimes it seems that the whole idea of "form follows function" appears to have gone away. We've replaced it with "beat these functions into this sleek, sexy new form".
In CS I regularly shoot at 5x5 pixel areas. That's definitely not happening with a fingertip.
Touch computing fails in every way possible.
I like my monitor perfectly clean. Using displays all covered in finger grease drives me nuts.
Your hands conceal parts of the screen while you're using it.
You can move a mouse over a greater distance much more quickly than your entire hand. It's also much easier to get to a specific pixel / small area with a mouse than with your fat fingertip.
People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day?
Positioning the screen ergonomically for use as in input device puts it in a position where you're hanging your head looking down all day. The minority report problem obviously applies if you position your screen at the optimal viewing position.
Others have already mentioned it, but lack of tactile feedback is a big one. This is particularly important for programs whose UIs aren't that great. You hit the touchscreen button - the button didn't move and there was no sound. You can only guess that your button "press" didn't register because nothing happened... but you don't really know. I see this on ATMs all the time.
How is wasting half of your screen real estate on a keyboard a good idea? Oh, you can bring it up dynamically? Oh great, well then I guess you don't get to use keyboard shortcuts. That sucks.
Almost a diamond in the rough you might say.
FYI - We're running on the Source Engine. The 3D skybox isn't really a room... it's just a hollow box covered in Skybox texture that's anywhere in the map outside of the bounds of the regular map area accessible by the players. Everything in the skybox is 1/16th scale to make it cheaper to render. The source engine scales everything up 16 times when it renders it as the Skybox. This is all from memory so I may be off on something slightly... I was going to link to the Wiki but it's down for some reason.
I'm sure the problem is that 90% of the people on consoles aren't computer savvy enough to get that. In my opinion if you have a PC and a console, you're going to get the PC version just because the mouse is so much better for gaming. So the sorts of people on the console or that prefer it won't necessarily be the sorts that "get" what's going on. Particularly if the person "cheating" is just using it to send endless hoards in versus while they're infected and then they turn it off when they're survivor. In my example if someone doesn't know the people he's playing with it just looks like the other team is hacking to send endless zombies at you.
If the console works the same as the PC there's no way to choose between dedicated games and locally hosted games... so you have no way (aside from joining friends) of controlling whether you join a game that allows "cheats" or not. I think this is something valve needs to fix on both platforms. It's pretty easy to host a game locally and then jack around with the people that join your game without them realizing it.
Not only that but it allows other third-party developers (modders, mappers, etc) to actually test and debug their work. You can make a map without the console... but it's going to suck. No cubemaps and no way to tell where you need to optimize your map.
I don't think I've ever bothered to use the console for "cheats" but I've used it countless times while mapping. Of course, I also use it in CS and other games to see my damage stats. Hitting "~" as soon as I die is habit.
Maybe you should try reading the entire summary. Ok, now you know.
Rather than read the article I figured I'd skip straight to the comments to see if anyone really thought this one was any better than previous ones. :)
Actually recent benchmarks have shown that defragging doesn't make *that* much of a difference - http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference?page=0%2C2 I've never heard of a fragmented drive affecting machine stability. That's like saying having a 5400 RPM drive instead of a 10,000 RPM drive in a server will make it crash... It makes no sense. Fragmentation has nothing to do with data integrity which is the only thing that would affect stability.
Also, it's "its" not "it's".
No it's not. 403 forbidden.
Didn't you read the articles from yesterday's slashdot? There's no such thing as free software. That's a harmful lie and it shouldn't be spread. Now hand over that pirated OO.org CD.
Am I the only one that's just given up even bothering to read these new "how the moon was made" theories? It seems like there's a new one every year and none of them are really ever any better than the previous ones. Parent's points regarding the plausibility of this particular theory are a good example.
This sounds like the ultimate excuse for playing your DS during class / at home when you're supposed to be doing homework. Now there just needs to be an alt-tab equivalent so you can flip over to the ebook and pause playing tetris long enough to convince them that you're reading.
Gamers sell games to buy more games, they know you always get a better store credit price than cash price.
I agree with everything else but I've got to disagree with that. I think you can get much more selling it yourself. I've seen gamestop offering $30 trade-in for a brand new game. That's crazy - you could easily sell it for $40 or more on Craigslist.
I only sell my games to gamestop when I just want to dump some crap that I got from people that don't know anything about games. I know that actually trying to sell it on eBay or Craigslist would be more trouble than the games are worth.
I won't even pay that for a good game. $50 is my limit and that's for games that I know will be good - games I've either demo'd from a download or a convention or at a friend's house. Everything else can wait until it's $20. Of course, I'm talking PC games here. I'm not sure how consoles have gotten away with charging $60 (or even 70!?) for games when you still don't see games over $50 on the PC...
Yeah but he's also ruined the meme forever. Now we're going to need a new one... proposals in this thread please!