These PS3 commercials are pretty lame but not as bad as those annoying PSP commercials. How hard is it to create a decent commercial for the most powerful game console ever? I'd be most impressed if they took real-time, non FMV, footage actually cranked out from the PS3 so we can really see how good it'll look. They say it's the best so I say for them to prove it in their ads. Make me drool and ache with need.
Overly stylized commercials are just stupid. At most I'd do something like for the Matrix where you never say exactly what the product is but you give little teasers that really hook people and make them want to see more.
As anyone who watches antiques or similar merchandise knows a copy isn't as valuable as the original even if the copy is an exact duplicate or even if it's been improved. It's the history of the original that gives it value. Miami could create an identical copy of the Statue of Liberty but it's still be the statue in New York that people would care about.
Of course not every item needs to be a unique original but for most items, especially in VR, most of the value in an item isn't in it's inherit usefulness. Most of the value is in the 'cool' factor. Having a copy can be fun but it's far less impressive than an original. For copies some people will make copies for free if they can while most people will be happy buying a copy from the original vendor if the copies are reasonably priced (as they usually are in Second Life). Vendors could go so far as to certify copies they've sold as legitimate to add value to those items - keep a history of who you've sold the item to and anyone they pass the items on to. I might suggest trademarking items too as it could be easier to enforce. Put branding symbols on your items and actually register your trademark. I for one will find it amussing when we're seeing knockoff misbranded items on Second Life.
But cranking out duplicates losses it's value in an age where exact copies can be made for free. Right now the information economy is learning this lesson and how long will it be before more and more physical items can be duplicated just as easily using nanotech of related technologies? I sell retail goods (both physical and digital) and even without outright copying it's extremely difficult to make a living doing it because there is always someone that'll sell the same item at an unsustainable low profit margin. You can still sell these items but what you're selling is still a service and not the actual item. People are really paying you for your customer service and not for just the item they've purchased. Essentially it behaves exactly as if you were taking free software and selling it with customer service.
Gates stole from rich and poor alike to give to the poor - taking a nice chunk for himself along the way. That doesn't really qualify him as a Robin Hood in my opinion. Gates behavior towards free software would be like Robin Hood attacking Friar Tuck for giving food to the poor.
I don't think you can play both saint and devil at the same time. I see his charity work as trying to buy himself out of Hell (and into the better graces of the public and politicians). Not that it isn't good but I think he needs to change his business practices before he can earn full kudos for that charity work. You don't get credit for robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Unlike real goods which are never copied? Doh. Anything that can be made can be copied. Anyone with a copied item, bought or stolen, just has a lame bit of crap anyway. The interesting stuff is the original. Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
If the Linden Labs people would give me a free account and land I'd be glad to let people copy my stuff for free.
It's not that hard to give primitive objects options that can vary the objects quite a bit without killing yourself with flexibility. You can define certain types of trees for instance but their exact number of limbs, health, etc can be varied. Then using a system which lays out these objects and configures them so they'll seem natural isn't that difficult either. Likewise with things like street layout or building layout. You have a given number of building types and each have certain types of rooms and props which make sense and the computer can configure everything without a human designer needing to go in and design every building and every room. To make things interesting such systems should allow for occassional weirdness such as rooms that don't make sense in the building or props that are out of place. Again you can do the same things with extra characters by varying their personalities, look, etc.
I wouldn't say that this is zero effort. It does take programmers and artists working together but it's not as hard as you seem to imply. You can't just tell a program to create your entire game for you but you can use a program to create and populate maps in a way that is realistic enough to be interesting for players to explore. And as I said before you can reuse most of this code from title to title so you could start out with some basics and then add to it as you released new titles. To me it seems like it'd be the kind of code that'd be perfect for an opensource project as the investment could be spread out between multiple game makers and it's more in adding depth to games than to creating games so there'd be little need not to share.
The form factor is less portable and the price is higher. For their target market I don't think Nintendo needed more RAM and graphics so much as a lower price tag and some better (or cheaper - pick one) titles. I'd easily shell out $50 for a Gamecube to give as a gift to my children, neices, nephews, etc but there is no way I'm going to spend $200 for a Wii as a gift and I'm going to buy myself the best next gen console so I'll be spending $600+ on a PS3. I'll probably buy a Wii, like I have for past also-ran consoles like Gamecube and Dreamcast, when their price drops to around $100. I'd be a lot more likely to buy a couple DS's to hand out as gifts then I would be to buy a Wii.
Is there any technical reason Nintendo couldn't have added the Wii controllers to the GameCube? IMO those are the only interesting feature of the Wii and they don't justify the price increase.
Yes, but how many people plug their PC into their tv? Maybe they just don't like the slow load times, hassles of navigating a system not designed to be used as a gaming platform, messing with constant security problems, or having the whole system crash in the middle of a game. Although the biggest strike against the PC gaming platform in my experience is that it's hard for gamers to know, without trying to install and run the program, if a game will run on their hardware.
PC's suck for the most part and because for most PC games Windows is required you can never expect to have a smooth experience. Windows never works really well but I'm thinking Windows doesn't like my Core 2 Duo CPU. Everything works fine in Linux even under heavy usage, all components have passed a stress test with no problems found, but Windows crashes frequently and especially during games or when running the Folding @ Home client.
I don't think people like dealing with PC issues during their relaxation time.
Most games are crap anyway so I'd never think that most games will take full advantage of the system they are on. The really impressive ones though are the ones that push the system to the limits. A bunch of FMV isn't a very useful way to use disc capacity given the quality of graphics on next gen consoles but you have a lot of other possible uses for disc space.
I won't quite agree that more people are required to produce larger and more detailed enviroments. You only have to carefully craft the parts that are important to gameplay. Even that isn't that important given the open nature of many of today's games. Most of the expanded maps and certain ranges of objects can be produced algorithmicly. A lot of things such as textures, sounds, and object primitives can be copied from title to title. A little work on world-generation and source materials such as textures and developers can let game worlds largely create themselves if they have the processing power and disc capacity needed. The fun thing about such worlds is that you can end up with unexpected twists that developers may not expect and which gives players that explore the worlds chances for a lot of alternative ways to play the game.
It's harder and more expensive to develop in a limited system than it is when you can just throw more work at the processing power of the system and not worry about storage capacity.
Maps and a wide range of objects DOES take up disc capacity. If you want massive worlds you can spend hundreds or thousands of hours exploring you need the disc space to store all the information. Maybe you're happy with repetitive textures and a limited number of different objects but I love to see huge and diverse worlds. You can have diverse and flexible AI by using that disc space to put many different personalities (or whatever you want to call different AI) in the game. The bare executables may not take that much space but you need all kinds of information to make those executables do something interesting. Making executables do something interesting is what makes gameplay interesting.
I want to see games so large and interactive that I can spend years just wandering around discovering new things. I'm thinking of games like GTA except where every building is accessible and you can explore every room and play with objects and meet people and everything is unique. When you reach city limits you should be able to get in a car and drive to the enxt town over and explore it too. They need to be able to cram a full world on a disc.
The Wii doesn't have the processing power for impressive physics or AI let alone enough disc space to really make full-sized worlds. If anything the PS3 is still underpowered and doesn't have enough disc capacity and it leads the pack.
Anyone who buys a first version of a product has to expect bugs. If they don't then they obviously don't understand technology and consumer products. It sounds like they plan to offer free fixes as they discover and fix these little bugs so what's the big deal? If you don't want to help debug the product you're buying then wait until the third major release. It'd be different if they weren't going to offer free fixes for the problems.
I bought Paper Mario a while back and I just have to say that I loath that game despite all the rav reviews I saw for it. It's boring with lame puzzles that require mostly trial and error or repetitive tasks than actual thought or skill and the dialog is so lame as to be a crime. I love the Mario family of games and RPG style games but Paper Mario is just a mockery of both.
I do like the Skies of Arcadia remake for Gamecube (a bit better than the Dreamcast version) and the Gamecube I think is the choice platform for party games. I think Nintendo is making a mistake by choosing a design for the Wii that looks more like the PlayStation instead of keeping the easily portable little cube design of the Gamecube.
I'd like to see Nintendo shrink the form factor of the Gamecube further and bring it's price down to around $50 as I think they could really hit the market for younger kids and party players if they did. Maybe add some Wii-like controllers while their at it. I think a smaller, cheaper, and improved Gamecube could sell better than the Wii. The Gameboy isn't all bells and whistles like the PSP but it consistantly sells better than the PSP and similar expensive rivals. I think the Wii price is to high for the market it's going after.
So the PS3 has enough room to provide massive content in it's games.. and XBox and Wii don't. To me that's all I need to know. What's the point of a next gen console that can't even provide more detailed and massive enviroments to game in? A graphics boost is nice as is improved controllers but I want better gameplay and that means more data available to the games, better physics, better AI, etc.
I'll get a PS3 but I have no plan at all to upgrade my movie buying to HD-DVD or Blue-Ray or to use my next gen console for playing movies. The biggest deciding factor for me as to when I will switch to a HD movie format is when the format is cracked so that the security measures no longer work. I won't buy movies I can't copy and modify (removing menus, etc).
Giving native Americans blankets would have been a good thing. Giving them blankets that infect them with small pox was a bad thing. That's the difference between giving away Linux and giving away Windows.
However, I think major good would come out of a totally open Windows - patent and copyright free - if it was released because it'd let Linux code merge into Windows, Windows code merge into Linux, and of course code merging with other free software. If Microsoft could open all it's file formats and protocols and ask hardware developers to release full specs to their devices it'd be a huge thing that I think would earn Bill an equal status as a hero.
I think everyone that makes an effort to do things for the good of others, or especially for the good of the public at large, is a hero. Maybe a need to help others is just as selfish as any other need on some deep subconscience level but at least you leave the world a little bettr for having been there.
Demand is demand. If you own a business you do whatever you can to create demand for your products and services. If you don't then you won't be in business long. I don't see the point at bitching at Sony for being better at creating frenzy for their products than their competition. Do you remember when the original Matrix movie came out? They understood what Sony is doing. There was little hard evidence as to what the movie was about before it's release and they teased you with rumors of awesome tech, kung fu training for the cast, etc without ever giving away details that would give away the movie. People were going nuts wanting to see that movie. That's exactly what Sony does and it's a good reason why Sony will continue to beat their competition. Naive people think that making the units harder to get and more expensive will make them sell fewer units while people who actually have experience in markting know that usually the reverse is true. It's not cheating - it's smart business.
People buy a Ford Focus but what they really want is a something fast, expensive, and harder to get. It's true in any market really. I've sold hot tubs and it's that way. The first time people often buy they go for the $2000 crap-o-spa from Costco but next time they buy the $10000 wonder spa that does more, works better, and lasts longer and they're much happier. Given that people will easily hand over $10000 for a glorified bath tub I have no trouble seeing people shelling out $600 for a PS3. The high cost and limited supply will make them sell more units.
If you're such a poor geek as to not have taught yourself a good history of computers and related fields then yes, please, go to college. Please, go to a decent college too because the average college gives you little background in where computers, electronics, etc have came from. They crank out dimwitted graduates that don't know crap and water down the value of the entire market. At least fewer people that aren't even interested in computers are doing computers now as a get rich quick plan - those people suck.
Seems like a raw deal for this dolphin. Try to be a bit different and you're singled out, locked up, experimented on, and eventually killed, stuffed, and mounted in some sushi bar.
They didn't say what happened to the poor guy. Should I assume they killed this unique dolphin or will we be seeing a new freak show at Sea World?
Unfortunately, if you're a very good geek, you probably already know more after high-school than you'd learn for a BS CS degree. Getting a degree is mostly just something to do to get past the HR jerks. I'd suggest going to college but majoring in something other than computers. You'll have better paying and more interesting job openings later if you are good with computers and have a degree in science or engineering.
In the meantime I suggest starting your own business that shows off your tech skills and that will let you develop those people skills. Geeks that have good people skills are very valuable and if you have a good foundation in business you'll have a lot better chance of not being a cubicle monkey later.
If anything tweaking Windows sucks way more than Linux because the system goes out of it's way to hide such details from you and when stuff breaks it breaks in such a way that it's extremely difficult to fix. Just this week I had Windows crash and refuse to reboot because of an NTFS issue - to fix it I had to go into Linux and use some NTFS repair tools to get things sorted out. There was literally no way a novice could have fixed their system in the same condition. I've often had drivers that had conflicts with either other drivers or even certain applications and in these cases Windows becomes flakey or decends into crash mode again. Usually users don't have to deal with these issues because OEMs pre-test the systems they send out and so long as the users stick with the original hardware and software things are okay. I could just as easily offer a pre-configured Linux system for sell that would be just as easy and reliable. Linux OEMs have dried up a bit but there are more big name OEMs offering pre-configured Linux systems.
People that think Windows is easier either are in denial or haven't been using it professionally for long enough. It has different problems at different times but it has just as many problems as Linux. People are just desensitized to Windows problems although I have seen it make a number of people cry. I can't remember Linux ever making people cry.
I do have a grudge against Thunderbird this week though. After years of using it, and complaining about the storage layer, it had a major brain fart when moving some mail to it, out of GMail, that wiped out years of email stored in a ~3GB folder. Maybe they should stop worrying about the stupid UI and work on the storage layer. Flat files is a horrible way to store mail and not storing attachments as files is just a pain and wastes space. Obviously it maks it easy to wipe out lots of mail with a single error too. Thunderbird also has POP issues as it chokes with certain mail servers when trying to download gigs of mail at once and it seems to offer no way to limit the number of messages that are downloaded in a pass. I'll be switching to a new mail client it looks like.
I did this as a project a few years ago when I was building something similar to, the yet unheard of, Flickr. Except I didn't limit myself to 15 tags. I just went through thousands of pics and tagged them with keywords I thought of as I did them and used that information to train a system that'd then go through and tag other pics. It wasn't perfect but did work pretty well and I think it could have been awesome. I tried pitching it to Google as a mashup of Google Images and Slashdot with powerful indexing and search features but I never got any response to any of my emails. Guess you have to have a PhD to get them to care about your ideas.
Anyway - it's not to hard to train a program to pull out things such as colors, shading, patterns, and shapes from pics and then from those it can learn what combinations are good indicators of certain keywords. For example, it's pretty easy to recognize most nudity as you'll get skin tones and usually get certain shapes (breasts are usually pretty similar in shape) so that with enough training it becomes pretty easy to pick those out of random images. Likewise it's pretty easy to pick out the shape of an airplane in a photo.
You can really do a lot with neural nets if you feel like bothering. The trick is to feed them the right information so that they can do something useful.
I'll probably pick it up for my next batch of servers and home machines both. I just recently upgraded to Core 2 Duo CPUs and I can see and feel a major difference. Maybe for the kids who use one app at a time and mostly stick to Windows it doesn't matter. I run dozens of apps at a time under both Windows and Linux and I do some heavy server work in Linux that can use every bit of power it can get. I love these new CPUs. I no longer have to shell out major bucks for a mobo that can handle four CPUs - now I can just throw in a quad core processor and get similar results.
Sadly, I'd probably still buy a SMP mobo that could handle four of these processors because I could use the processing power. It'd better come with support for a lot of RAM though.:)
I'd rather have standard based alternatives than proprietary poorly designed crap we can't fix. e.g. There never should have been a need for Flash to become a pseudo-standard as standards bodies should have seen the need and created something similar, but much better, at the proper time. Ajax isn't so much hype as it is a buzzword. It is an important combination of standards to do useful things - it's just become a buzzword since several well known sites have used that methodology. The problems with AJAX aren't because of the hype though - they're because it's all tied on outdated technology that is being monkey wrenched to do things that it can't do as well as we'd like.
I for one care mostly about being able to work on my own schedule from my choice of locations. It's easy to create my own successful web-based businesses, even if they aren't multi-million dollar companies, so I need some reason to want to work for someone else. Decent pay is important but having freedom is more important. Access to resources I wouldn't have without the backing of a major company could be an incentive too - I'd probably take a job from Google if they offered.
That and it's to much of a hassle to apply for and itnerview for a job at a major company. They think they're so hot and make a lot of demands and give off attitude at every step. Why would I even bother applying with them? Often they're not really looking for superstar programmers - they are looking for programmers that will do exactly what they're told without offering any differing insights on things that could be better.
I'd rather work for an interesting start-up that'd respect me than for most established companies. Better yet I'd be more interested in entertaining partnership offers for anyone that wanted to form a start-up with me. That's the only real way to control your own life and career.
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These PS3 commercials are pretty lame but not as bad as those annoying PSP commercials. How hard is it to create a decent commercial for the most powerful game console ever? I'd be most impressed if they took real-time, non FMV, footage actually cranked out from the PS3 so we can really see how good it'll look. They say it's the best so I say for them to prove it in their ads. Make me drool and ache with need.
Overly stylized commercials are just stupid. At most I'd do something like for the Matrix where you never say exactly what the product is but you give little teasers that really hook people and make them want to see more.
People keep certified histories of such items.
As anyone who watches antiques or similar merchandise knows a copy isn't as valuable as the original even if the copy is an exact duplicate or even if it's been improved. It's the history of the original that gives it value. Miami could create an identical copy of the Statue of Liberty but it's still be the statue in New York that people would care about.
Of course not every item needs to be a unique original but for most items, especially in VR, most of the value in an item isn't in it's inherit usefulness. Most of the value is in the 'cool' factor. Having a copy can be fun but it's far less impressive than an original. For copies some people will make copies for free if they can while most people will be happy buying a copy from the original vendor if the copies are reasonably priced (as they usually are in Second Life). Vendors could go so far as to certify copies they've sold as legitimate to add value to those items - keep a history of who you've sold the item to and anyone they pass the items on to. I might suggest trademarking items too as it could be easier to enforce. Put branding symbols on your items and actually register your trademark. I for one will find it amussing when we're seeing knockoff misbranded items on Second Life.
But cranking out duplicates losses it's value in an age where exact copies can be made for free. Right now the information economy is learning this lesson and how long will it be before more and more physical items can be duplicated just as easily using nanotech of related technologies? I sell retail goods (both physical and digital) and even without outright copying it's extremely difficult to make a living doing it because there is always someone that'll sell the same item at an unsustainable low profit margin. You can still sell these items but what you're selling is still a service and not the actual item. People are really paying you for your customer service and not for just the item they've purchased. Essentially it behaves exactly as if you were taking free software and selling it with customer service.
Gates stole from rich and poor alike to give to the poor - taking a nice chunk for himself along the way. That doesn't really qualify him as a Robin Hood in my opinion. Gates behavior towards free software would be like Robin Hood attacking Friar Tuck for giving food to the poor.
I don't think you can play both saint and devil at the same time. I see his charity work as trying to buy himself out of Hell (and into the better graces of the public and politicians). Not that it isn't good but I think he needs to change his business practices before he can earn full kudos for that charity work. You don't get credit for robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Unlike real goods which are never copied? Doh. Anything that can be made can be copied. Anyone with a copied item, bought or stolen, just has a lame bit of crap anyway. The interesting stuff is the original. Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
If the Linden Labs people would give me a free account and land I'd be glad to let people copy my stuff for free.
It's not that hard to give primitive objects options that can vary the objects quite a bit without killing yourself with flexibility. You can define certain types of trees for instance but their exact number of limbs, health, etc can be varied. Then using a system which lays out these objects and configures them so they'll seem natural isn't that difficult either. Likewise with things like street layout or building layout. You have a given number of building types and each have certain types of rooms and props which make sense and the computer can configure everything without a human designer needing to go in and design every building and every room. To make things interesting such systems should allow for occassional weirdness such as rooms that don't make sense in the building or props that are out of place. Again you can do the same things with extra characters by varying their personalities, look, etc.
I wouldn't say that this is zero effort. It does take programmers and artists working together but it's not as hard as you seem to imply. You can't just tell a program to create your entire game for you but you can use a program to create and populate maps in a way that is realistic enough to be interesting for players to explore. And as I said before you can reuse most of this code from title to title so you could start out with some basics and then add to it as you released new titles. To me it seems like it'd be the kind of code that'd be perfect for an opensource project as the investment could be spread out between multiple game makers and it's more in adding depth to games than to creating games so there'd be little need not to share.
The form factor is less portable and the price is higher. For their target market I don't think Nintendo needed more RAM and graphics so much as a lower price tag and some better (or cheaper - pick one) titles. I'd easily shell out $50 for a Gamecube to give as a gift to my children, neices, nephews, etc but there is no way I'm going to spend $200 for a Wii as a gift and I'm going to buy myself the best next gen console so I'll be spending $600+ on a PS3. I'll probably buy a Wii, like I have for past also-ran consoles like Gamecube and Dreamcast, when their price drops to around $100. I'd be a lot more likely to buy a couple DS's to hand out as gifts then I would be to buy a Wii.
Is there any technical reason Nintendo couldn't have added the Wii controllers to the GameCube? IMO those are the only interesting feature of the Wii and they don't justify the price increase.
Yes, but how many people plug their PC into their tv? Maybe they just don't like the slow load times, hassles of navigating a system not designed to be used as a gaming platform, messing with constant security problems, or having the whole system crash in the middle of a game. Although the biggest strike against the PC gaming platform in my experience is that it's hard for gamers to know, without trying to install and run the program, if a game will run on their hardware.
PC's suck for the most part and because for most PC games Windows is required you can never expect to have a smooth experience. Windows never works really well but I'm thinking Windows doesn't like my Core 2 Duo CPU. Everything works fine in Linux even under heavy usage, all components have passed a stress test with no problems found, but Windows crashes frequently and especially during games or when running the Folding @ Home client.
I don't think people like dealing with PC issues during their relaxation time.
Most games are crap anyway so I'd never think that most games will take full advantage of the system they are on. The really impressive ones though are the ones that push the system to the limits. A bunch of FMV isn't a very useful way to use disc capacity given the quality of graphics on next gen consoles but you have a lot of other possible uses for disc space.
I won't quite agree that more people are required to produce larger and more detailed enviroments. You only have to carefully craft the parts that are important to gameplay. Even that isn't that important given the open nature of many of today's games. Most of the expanded maps and certain ranges of objects can be produced algorithmicly. A lot of things such as textures, sounds, and object primitives can be copied from title to title. A little work on world-generation and source materials such as textures and developers can let game worlds largely create themselves if they have the processing power and disc capacity needed. The fun thing about such worlds is that you can end up with unexpected twists that developers may not expect and which gives players that explore the worlds chances for a lot of alternative ways to play the game.
It's harder and more expensive to develop in a limited system than it is when you can just throw more work at the processing power of the system and not worry about storage capacity.
Maps and a wide range of objects DOES take up disc capacity. If you want massive worlds you can spend hundreds or thousands of hours exploring you need the disc space to store all the information. Maybe you're happy with repetitive textures and a limited number of different objects but I love to see huge and diverse worlds. You can have diverse and flexible AI by using that disc space to put many different personalities (or whatever you want to call different AI) in the game. The bare executables may not take that much space but you need all kinds of information to make those executables do something interesting. Making executables do something interesting is what makes gameplay interesting.
I want to see games so large and interactive that I can spend years just wandering around discovering new things. I'm thinking of games like GTA except where every building is accessible and you can explore every room and play with objects and meet people and everything is unique. When you reach city limits you should be able to get in a car and drive to the enxt town over and explore it too. They need to be able to cram a full world on a disc.
The Wii doesn't have the processing power for impressive physics or AI let alone enough disc space to really make full-sized worlds. If anything the PS3 is still underpowered and doesn't have enough disc capacity and it leads the pack.
Anyone who buys a first version of a product has to expect bugs. If they don't then they obviously don't understand technology and consumer products. It sounds like they plan to offer free fixes as they discover and fix these little bugs so what's the big deal? If you don't want to help debug the product you're buying then wait until the third major release. It'd be different if they weren't going to offer free fixes for the problems.
I bought Paper Mario a while back and I just have to say that I loath that game despite all the rav reviews I saw for it. It's boring with lame puzzles that require mostly trial and error or repetitive tasks than actual thought or skill and the dialog is so lame as to be a crime. I love the Mario family of games and RPG style games but Paper Mario is just a mockery of both.
I do like the Skies of Arcadia remake for Gamecube (a bit better than the Dreamcast version) and the Gamecube I think is the choice platform for party games. I think Nintendo is making a mistake by choosing a design for the Wii that looks more like the PlayStation instead of keeping the easily portable little cube design of the Gamecube.
I'd like to see Nintendo shrink the form factor of the Gamecube further and bring it's price down to around $50 as I think they could really hit the market for younger kids and party players if they did. Maybe add some Wii-like controllers while their at it. I think a smaller, cheaper, and improved Gamecube could sell better than the Wii. The Gameboy isn't all bells and whistles like the PSP but it consistantly sells better than the PSP and similar expensive rivals. I think the Wii price is to high for the market it's going after.
So the PS3 has enough room to provide massive content in it's games.. and XBox and Wii don't. To me that's all I need to know. What's the point of a next gen console that can't even provide more detailed and massive enviroments to game in? A graphics boost is nice as is improved controllers but I want better gameplay and that means more data available to the games, better physics, better AI, etc.
I'll get a PS3 but I have no plan at all to upgrade my movie buying to HD-DVD or Blue-Ray or to use my next gen console for playing movies. The biggest deciding factor for me as to when I will switch to a HD movie format is when the format is cracked so that the security measures no longer work. I won't buy movies I can't copy and modify (removing menus, etc).
Giving native Americans blankets would have been a good thing. Giving them blankets that infect them with small pox was a bad thing. That's the difference between giving away Linux and giving away Windows.
However, I think major good would come out of a totally open Windows - patent and copyright free - if it was released because it'd let Linux code merge into Windows, Windows code merge into Linux, and of course code merging with other free software. If Microsoft could open all it's file formats and protocols and ask hardware developers to release full specs to their devices it'd be a huge thing that I think would earn Bill an equal status as a hero.
I think everyone that makes an effort to do things for the good of others, or especially for the good of the public at large, is a hero. Maybe a need to help others is just as selfish as any other need on some deep subconscience level but at least you leave the world a little bettr for having been there.
Demand is demand. If you own a business you do whatever you can to create demand for your products and services. If you don't then you won't be in business long. I don't see the point at bitching at Sony for being better at creating frenzy for their products than their competition. Do you remember when the original Matrix movie came out? They understood what Sony is doing. There was little hard evidence as to what the movie was about before it's release and they teased you with rumors of awesome tech, kung fu training for the cast, etc without ever giving away details that would give away the movie. People were going nuts wanting to see that movie. That's exactly what Sony does and it's a good reason why Sony will continue to beat their competition. Naive people think that making the units harder to get and more expensive will make them sell fewer units while people who actually have experience in markting know that usually the reverse is true. It's not cheating - it's smart business.
People buy a Ford Focus but what they really want is a something fast, expensive, and harder to get. It's true in any market really. I've sold hot tubs and it's that way. The first time people often buy they go for the $2000 crap-o-spa from Costco but next time they buy the $10000 wonder spa that does more, works better, and lasts longer and they're much happier. Given that people will easily hand over $10000 for a glorified bath tub I have no trouble seeing people shelling out $600 for a PS3. The high cost and limited supply will make them sell more units.
If you're such a poor geek as to not have taught yourself a good history of computers and related fields then yes, please, go to college. Please, go to a decent college too because the average college gives you little background in where computers, electronics, etc have came from. They crank out dimwitted graduates that don't know crap and water down the value of the entire market. At least fewer people that aren't even interested in computers are doing computers now as a get rich quick plan - those people suck.
Seems like a raw deal for this dolphin. Try to be a bit different and you're singled out, locked up, experimented on, and eventually killed, stuffed, and mounted in some sushi bar.
They didn't say what happened to the poor guy. Should I assume they killed this unique dolphin or will we be seeing a new freak show at Sea World?
Unfortunately, if you're a very good geek, you probably already know more after high-school than you'd learn for a BS CS degree. Getting a degree is mostly just something to do to get past the HR jerks. I'd suggest going to college but majoring in something other than computers. You'll have better paying and more interesting job openings later if you are good with computers and have a degree in science or engineering.
In the meantime I suggest starting your own business that shows off your tech skills and that will let you develop those people skills. Geeks that have good people skills are very valuable and if you have a good foundation in business you'll have a lot better chance of not being a cubicle monkey later.
If anything tweaking Windows sucks way more than Linux because the system goes out of it's way to hide such details from you and when stuff breaks it breaks in such a way that it's extremely difficult to fix. Just this week I had Windows crash and refuse to reboot because of an NTFS issue - to fix it I had to go into Linux and use some NTFS repair tools to get things sorted out. There was literally no way a novice could have fixed their system in the same condition. I've often had drivers that had conflicts with either other drivers or even certain applications and in these cases Windows becomes flakey or decends into crash mode again. Usually users don't have to deal with these issues because OEMs pre-test the systems they send out and so long as the users stick with the original hardware and software things are okay. I could just as easily offer a pre-configured Linux system for sell that would be just as easy and reliable. Linux OEMs have dried up a bit but there are more big name OEMs offering pre-configured Linux systems.
People that think Windows is easier either are in denial or haven't been using it professionally for long enough. It has different problems at different times but it has just as many problems as Linux. People are just desensitized to Windows problems although I have seen it make a number of people cry. I can't remember Linux ever making people cry.
I do have a grudge against Thunderbird this week though. After years of using it, and complaining about the storage layer, it had a major brain fart when moving some mail to it, out of GMail, that wiped out years of email stored in a ~3GB folder. Maybe they should stop worrying about the stupid UI and work on the storage layer. Flat files is a horrible way to store mail and not storing attachments as files is just a pain and wastes space. Obviously it maks it easy to wipe out lots of mail with a single error too. Thunderbird also has POP issues as it chokes with certain mail servers when trying to download gigs of mail at once and it seems to offer no way to limit the number of messages that are downloaded in a pass. I'll be switching to a new mail client it looks like.
I did this as a project a few years ago when I was building something similar to, the yet unheard of, Flickr. Except I didn't limit myself to 15 tags. I just went through thousands of pics and tagged them with keywords I thought of as I did them and used that information to train a system that'd then go through and tag other pics. It wasn't perfect but did work pretty well and I think it could have been awesome. I tried pitching it to Google as a mashup of Google Images and Slashdot with powerful indexing and search features but I never got any response to any of my emails. Guess you have to have a PhD to get them to care about your ideas.
Anyway - it's not to hard to train a program to pull out things such as colors, shading, patterns, and shapes from pics and then from those it can learn what combinations are good indicators of certain keywords. For example, it's pretty easy to recognize most nudity as you'll get skin tones and usually get certain shapes (breasts are usually pretty similar in shape) so that with enough training it becomes pretty easy to pick those out of random images. Likewise it's pretty easy to pick out the shape of an airplane in a photo.
You can really do a lot with neural nets if you feel like bothering. The trick is to feed them the right information so that they can do something useful.
I'll probably pick it up for my next batch of servers and home machines both. I just recently upgraded to Core 2 Duo CPUs and I can see and feel a major difference. Maybe for the kids who use one app at a time and mostly stick to Windows it doesn't matter. I run dozens of apps at a time under both Windows and Linux and I do some heavy server work in Linux that can use every bit of power it can get. I love these new CPUs. I no longer have to shell out major bucks for a mobo that can handle four CPUs - now I can just throw in a quad core processor and get similar results.
:)
Sadly, I'd probably still buy a SMP mobo that could handle four of these processors because I could use the processing power. It'd better come with support for a lot of RAM though.
I'd rather have standard based alternatives than proprietary poorly designed crap we can't fix. e.g. There never should have been a need for Flash to become a pseudo-standard as standards bodies should have seen the need and created something similar, but much better, at the proper time. Ajax isn't so much hype as it is a buzzword. It is an important combination of standards to do useful things - it's just become a buzzword since several well known sites have used that methodology. The problems with AJAX aren't because of the hype though - they're because it's all tied on outdated technology that is being monkey wrenched to do things that it can't do as well as we'd like.
I for one care mostly about being able to work on my own schedule from my choice of locations. It's easy to create my own successful web-based businesses, even if they aren't multi-million dollar companies, so I need some reason to want to work for someone else. Decent pay is important but having freedom is more important. Access to resources I wouldn't have without the backing of a major company could be an incentive too - I'd probably take a job from Google if they offered.
That and it's to much of a hassle to apply for and itnerview for a job at a major company. They think they're so hot and make a lot of demands and give off attitude at every step. Why would I even bother applying with them? Often they're not really looking for superstar programmers - they are looking for programmers that will do exactly what they're told without offering any differing insights on things that could be better.
I'd rather work for an interesting start-up that'd respect me than for most established companies. Better yet I'd be more interested in entertaining partnership offers for anyone that wanted to form a start-up with me. That's the only real way to control your own life and career.