I've put up with a lot of peoples' crazy beliefs, mostly because they involve things that can't currently be explained, but this is ridiculous. Your beliefs cannot include denial of facts! Those "beliefs" are invalid and ignorant, and not in the way that one religion declares the beliefs of another invalid and ignorant. These actually are, beyond any doubt I don't have any religion, my "belief" is that they're all full of crap, but I'm usually content to let people have their faith. When people start pushing "beliefs" that contradict knowable facts, that pisses me off. The only unfortunate part is that facts aren't really worth suffering for in the way beliefs are, the return on investment just isn't as good.
In America I would call new lawyers to sue my lawyers for not notifying me of my ability to sue for this, and then I would sue for this. I guess I should probably sue the OP too for causing me stress by informing me of a problem I had not yet perceived. O O, and slashdot for posting it, and all of their advertisers for supporting a site that would post such things, and every maker of every component, hardware and software, that allowed me to view this website, thus interfering with my inner peace. If it weren't for the internet, I might go outside more and get exercise and live longer, I think I need to sue the internet.
The dithering is done entirely by the LCD itself. It is not done by the graphics chip and it is certainly not done by the OS. Any disparity in the appearance of different OS on the same LCD cannot, by reality, be a result of this issue.
Steam is pretty awesome, it allows you to buy games without going to the store, download them, play them, and get updates easily. You don't need to go digging for discs for a game you haven't played in a while, in fact, you never need to dig for discs since you don't need to have any. I hope more and more games are released on steam. If that was the only way to get games I'd be cool with it. Also, what's your problem with copy protection? You have no reason to copy a game you bought on steam since you can always re-download it. As far as reselling or returning the software, you license software, you don't buy it. You don't own the game, you own the right to play it. You can't return opened software anywhere that I know of, and you certainly can't "return" downloaded software. You could sell your steam account to someone I guess.
That's all well and good, I've given thousands to the Alzheimer's foundation as well as donating part of my tax return to them every year. The fact that you can do one good thing doesn't mean you shouldn't do another. People can run their PS3's and help without having to think about it (which is really what most people want, not to have to think about bad/hard things). You're not going to get millions of people to write checks and consciously donate money, but you just might get them to leave their game console on. Also, electricity doesn't need to pollute the atmosphere, that's a whole different argument but it all comes down to ignorance on the part of the average citizen and greed on the part of coal/oil companies. Wind, Water, Solar, and Nuclear power can all give us electricity without pollution, it's only humanity that keeps that from becoming a reality. My electricity comes from water, I live within sight of the dam where it is produced, and I signed up for it specifically with my provider.
First off, Sony's replacement system is so fast you'll never notice your PS3 was missing (my first one died too, and the entire replacement time from "phone call" to "new PS3 all hooked up and playing" was less than 36 hours).
Second, $15-$25 a month is nothing (especially considering you were able to afford a PS3, and probably some games for it, and maybe even an HDTV and some Blu-ray discs...). Plenty of things cost $15 a month, MMO's, credit protection scams, insurance....and none of those things are curing Alzheimer's (although I am a bit biased as Alzheimer's runs in my family and I've watched it destroy my relatives' brains for most of my life).
O the irony. Go back to the days of the P4 and you could make the same post replacing "AMD" with "Intel". Intel has only been efficient on the desktop and server since the Core series. Until the Core came out, AMD had the energy efficiency crown quite solidly on the desktop and server with the K8. Mobile is a different story, the Pentium-M ruled that land with an iron fist, and the Core is the hereditary successor to that. (Although, the Pentium 4m is yet another different story...) The K8 architecture is now old, but it still holds its own quite solidly against Intel's much more recent designs on the server side. I pick my processor based on what's available when I buy a computer. Two years ago I bought a dual Opteron system, because it was the best available. Last year I bought an Athlon64 X2 because it was, quite literally, the best available. This year I bought a Core 2 Duo because it was the best available. I'm hoping for something really interesting for next year's machine, a minimum of 8 cores in a maximum of two sockets is what I'm thinking. In any case, there's really no point in supporting AMD or Intel, just buy whatever is best when you buy a computer. Of course, if one or the other were to fail...that would well and truly suck for everyone.
"Hang on, Sony missed Christmas, gave us hobbled backwards compatibility and priced the thing so you can't get a console and a game for less than $900 here. Stores are full of people queueing for the Wii and ignoring stacks of unsold PS3s."
Yes...and despite that, they still sold more in the first two days than the Wii or the 360 did in their respective first months. Despite all that was wrong with the launch, they still sold more. That is far more successful than I think they had any right to even hope for. "Selling more" is a far more meaningful success than "perceived internet public opinion." As demonstrated by Snakes on a Plane, all the talk on the internet can mean next to nothing in reality.
Buys into videogame hype? Not quite. My entire life is games. I am a game programmer, I'm married to a game artist, I work at a game company, and I go home at night and play games (that is, when I get to go home at night...). It has nothing to do with hype, I would buy the stuff anyway. The fact that you played it and enjoyed it simply means you have low standards. The fact that it was on an athlon 2200 with a radeon 9800 and you still enjoyed it means you have very low standards. Everyone is entitled to their opinions to some degree, but the fact that you think NWN2 is superior to the original inclines me to suspect you've never played one or the other. I could be wrong. Insofar as I have dedicated my entire life to games, maybe I am a tool, if so, I am content to be just that.
Obsidian has a well deserved reputation for taking good Bioware games and making crappy sequels that look and feel rushed. NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap. It's like what they did to KoTOR (ie KoTOR2), but on a grander scale. I was very excited about NWN2, I pre-ordered the collectors edition as soon as it was available for pre-order, I convinced my friends to get it, we got all setup to have a lan party on it's release...and it was a no-go. I, as well as every one of the people involved have awesome computers. They are specifically designed for gaming with all of the best parts available at any given time...and the engine ran like crap, and crashed often. It uses a ton more resources than Oblivion in order to not look 1/10th as good. We had to give up on our lan party because the game was simply unplayable on a few of the machines (and we're talking brand new dual core athlon FX's, dual 7950GX2's, 4GB ram, machines that should have no trouble running this game (and have no trouble running other games)). Despite this, I soldiered on and played through the entire game within a week, hoping against hope to find some redeeming quality...and there simply weren't any. Upon finishing the game, and experiencing the extremely lame ending, I fired up the editor...and crap. The editor is not as good as the original NWN editor. I had to find plugins just to get the same functionality I had in the original, and still it wasn't as good. I tried so hard to like this game, mostly because I loved the first one, but as with KoTOR, Obsidian severely dropped the ball. I'm surprised they're even bothering with an expansion... I'll probably end up getting it because I'm insane and still holding out hope for a good NWN sequel, but this time I will not make the mistake of recommending it to anyone else.
Every employee at my company has at least two 20+ inch LCDs. I seriously can't imagine work with only one monitor. Even the interns get at least two 17" LCDs. (To be fair, we're game developers, but still). It would take forever to get anything done with one screen.
I'm aware. I also own a 360 (since Jan 2006), and have had no problems with it aside from games crashing (particularly oblivion). Speaking of which, I got Oblivion on the PS3 last night and it is MUCH smoother than the 360 version. One major example is the fact that you can actually ride a horse. (Sure, you can get on a horse in the 360 version, and you can move it around, but you can't call the results "riding", it's more like "horse slide-show".)
Also worth noting, Sony's warranty service on the PS3 appears to be frighteningly fast. My PS3 died a month and a half after I got it. I called Sony, and within 10 minutes a box was on it's way to my house to send it back. The box came early the next morning, including a return shipping label, packing materials, instructions for packing, and even the packing tape to close the box. UPS came and took the box that afternoon, and extremely early the next morning a brand new PS3 was at my house. Their replacement facility is in Texas, I live in upstate New York...It almost seems like they must have shipped out the replacement the second UPS accepted the package from me. The turnaround time from failure to replacement was less than 48 hours and cost me less than 30 minutes of time and no cash. Online forums are filled with rumors about Sony taking six weeks or more to get a replacement out. They themselves told me it would be 7 to 10 business days. So either they're really efficient, or not many consoles are actually breaking. Also, the (1 year, as opposed to the 360's initial 90 day) warranty restarts the day you get your replacement, and it comes with papers saying as much.
Re:Are they better, or just different?
on
eSATA Connectors
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's your cables, and not necessarily because they're cheap. As the IT person for a 100% SATA shop I've had plenty of experience with this. Some SATA cables will fall off, sometimes without any provocation, others won't come off without significant provocation. Some SATA cables even have locking mechanisms to hold them to your drives. Asus for example ships motherboards with one of two different types of SATA cables. In my experience the red ones suck and the gray ones are excellent, but which you get seems to be luck of the draw (like when I order 40 motherboards, I get some with red and some with gray). Areca RAID controllers seem to come with great cables as well, I've got about 20 of them and they all came with the same cables.
The mailing lists available in Google Apps are currently lacking in features, they have enough for our purposes, but there are many things they don't do (appending headers to subjects, reply to list, automatic subscriptions, mass user add, mass user delete, to name but a few). That said, emails to and from the lists happen near instantly and we have had zero problems with delays in either message forwarding or user adding.
We use Google Apps for our company email. We were using an internal service until we switched in February. Apart from IMAP support, using Gmail for company email has been a great improvement over our previous system. The majority of our employees prefer Gmail's web interface to a standalone mail client. That said, we obviously allow webmail use on our network.
It is probably assumed that FC drives are more reliable because they are expensive and only really used in relatively expensive servers. It's the whole "professional vs consumer grade" issue. It is generally assumed that "professional grade" drives should be more reliable than "consumer grade" drives. In my experience this is true, the 10000RPM scsi drives in my 10 year old Sun Ultra2s (which see continuous round the clock use) still work great, while I've never had a regular desktop drive from any manufacturer last more than 5 years. Not that my experience counts for much, I've only dealt with several hundred harddrives vs. the several hundred thousand in these studies. (Just for reference, the ratio I've seen between FC/SCSI and SATA/ATA drives failing is about 15:1 in favor of FC/SCSI, and I've never had a SCSI drive last less than 3 years, while I've had plenty of SATA and ATA drives last less than a couple months).
I can't believe nobody mentioned Diablo 2 yet. There are way too many people who still play that game for it to not do awesome on the DS. Battlenet via Nintendo WiFi would pretty much seal the deal. Sure it would need a few UI tweaks, but otherwise it's pretty much a straight port.
If there were a bandwidth shortage, ISPs would probably raise their rates. I would cancel my service and steal internet access from somewhere. Not only will I not live without broadband, I WILL NOT pay more money for less bandwidth. Progress or death, I refuse to take a step back.
It's not at all idiotic. When the signs in Best Buy (or Walmart, or on tv) tell Joe Sixpack that "Blu-ray is the winner of the Hi-Def format war" (Assuming Mr. Sixpack is there spending his tax return on a new Hi-Def setup) What do you think Joe is going to buy? He's not stupid, he's not going to buy the "loser".
Sure, assuming you encounter a previously unknown major hardware issue late into development. Doesn't happen very often on consoles. More likely, you know about the issue well ahead of time, you plan a fix and implement it. Even better if you've already made the same fix for another product, you just rinse and repeat. No need to spin it any which way, just keep your mouth shut and make it work. Now, if you're trying to sell more copies of a (nearly) year old game, then maybe you leak something about how it was old and busted on the xbox and the PS3 is the new hotness, maybe. As for the actual issue (ie compensating for the speed of an optical drive), it's not new. Many games have done it in the past and many will do it in the future, it's not unique to the PS3 (or the 360 for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
I've put up with a lot of peoples' crazy beliefs, mostly because they involve things that can't currently be explained, but this is ridiculous. Your beliefs cannot include denial of facts! Those "beliefs" are invalid and ignorant, and not in the way that one religion declares the beliefs of another invalid and ignorant. These actually are, beyond any doubt I don't have any religion, my "belief" is that they're all full of crap, but I'm usually content to let people have their faith. When people start pushing "beliefs" that contradict knowable facts, that pisses me off. The only unfortunate part is that facts aren't really worth suffering for in the way beliefs are, the return on investment just isn't as good.
In America I would call new lawyers to sue my lawyers for not notifying me of my ability to sue for this, and then I would sue for this. I guess I should probably sue the OP too for causing me stress by informing me of a problem I had not yet perceived. O O, and slashdot for posting it, and all of their advertisers for supporting a site that would post such things, and every maker of every component, hardware and software, that allowed me to view this website, thus interfering with my inner peace. If it weren't for the internet, I might go outside more and get exercise and live longer, I think I need to sue the internet.
The dithering is done entirely by the LCD itself. It is not done by the graphics chip and it is certainly not done by the OS. Any disparity in the appearance of different OS on the same LCD cannot, by reality, be a result of this issue.
...I can't tell the difference between the two pictures =(
Is this a dirty trick, are my eyes bad, or is it just my brand new Dell LCD is somehow incapable of displaying the better image correctly?
While I'm happy for all you StarCraft fans out there, I was really hoping they were going to announce Diablo 3 instead of StarCraft 2 today...
Steam is pretty awesome, it allows you to buy games without going to the store, download them, play them, and get updates easily. You don't need to go digging for discs for a game you haven't played in a while, in fact, you never need to dig for discs since you don't need to have any. I hope more and more games are released on steam. If that was the only way to get games I'd be cool with it. Also, what's your problem with copy protection? You have no reason to copy a game you bought on steam since you can always re-download it. As far as reselling or returning the software, you license software, you don't buy it. You don't own the game, you own the right to play it. You can't return opened software anywhere that I know of, and you certainly can't "return" downloaded software. You could sell your steam account to someone I guess.
That's all well and good, I've given thousands to the Alzheimer's foundation as well as donating part of my tax return to them every year. The fact that you can do one good thing doesn't mean you shouldn't do another. People can run their PS3's and help without having to think about it (which is really what most people want, not to have to think about bad/hard things). You're not going to get millions of people to write checks and consciously donate money, but you just might get them to leave their game console on. Also, electricity doesn't need to pollute the atmosphere, that's a whole different argument but it all comes down to ignorance on the part of the average citizen and greed on the part of coal/oil companies. Wind, Water, Solar, and Nuclear power can all give us electricity without pollution, it's only humanity that keeps that from becoming a reality. My electricity comes from water, I live within sight of the dam where it is produced, and I signed up for it specifically with my provider.
First off, Sony's replacement system is so fast you'll never notice your PS3 was missing (my first one died too, and the entire replacement time from "phone call" to "new PS3 all hooked up and playing" was less than 36 hours).
Second, $15-$25 a month is nothing (especially considering you were able to afford a PS3, and probably some games for it, and maybe even an HDTV and some Blu-ray discs...). Plenty of things cost $15 a month, MMO's, credit protection scams, insurance....and none of those things are curing Alzheimer's (although I am a bit biased as Alzheimer's runs in my family and I've watched it destroy my relatives' brains for most of my life).
O the irony. Go back to the days of the P4 and you could make the same post replacing "AMD" with "Intel". Intel has only been efficient on the desktop and server since the Core series. Until the Core came out, AMD had the energy efficiency crown quite solidly on the desktop and server with the K8. Mobile is a different story, the Pentium-M ruled that land with an iron fist, and the Core is the hereditary successor to that. (Although, the Pentium 4m is yet another different story...) The K8 architecture is now old, but it still holds its own quite solidly against Intel's much more recent designs on the server side. I pick my processor based on what's available when I buy a computer. Two years ago I bought a dual Opteron system, because it was the best available. Last year I bought an Athlon64 X2 because it was, quite literally, the best available. This year I bought a Core 2 Duo because it was the best available. I'm hoping for something really interesting for next year's machine, a minimum of 8 cores in a maximum of two sockets is what I'm thinking. In any case, there's really no point in supporting AMD or Intel, just buy whatever is best when you buy a computer. Of course, if one or the other were to fail...that would well and truly suck for everyone.
Personally, I'd rather be a "power saver"
"Hang on, Sony missed Christmas, gave us hobbled backwards compatibility and priced the thing so you can't get a console and a game for less than $900 here. Stores are full of people queueing for the Wii and ignoring stacks of unsold PS3s."
Yes...and despite that, they still sold more in the first two days than the Wii or the 360 did in their respective first months. Despite all that was wrong with the launch, they still sold more. That is far more successful than I think they had any right to even hope for. "Selling more" is a far more meaningful success than "perceived internet public opinion." As demonstrated by Snakes on a Plane, all the talk on the internet can mean next to nothing in reality.
Buys into videogame hype? Not quite. My entire life is games. I am a game programmer, I'm married to a game artist, I work at a game company, and I go home at night and play games (that is, when I get to go home at night...). It has nothing to do with hype, I would buy the stuff anyway. The fact that you played it and enjoyed it simply means you have low standards. The fact that it was on an athlon 2200 with a radeon 9800 and you still enjoyed it means you have very low standards. Everyone is entitled to their opinions to some degree, but the fact that you think NWN2 is superior to the original inclines me to suspect you've never played one or the other. I could be wrong. Insofar as I have dedicated my entire life to games, maybe I am a tool, if so, I am content to be just that.
Obsidian has a well deserved reputation for taking good Bioware games and making crappy sequels that look and feel rushed. NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap. It's like what they did to KoTOR (ie KoTOR2), but on a grander scale. I was very excited about NWN2, I pre-ordered the collectors edition as soon as it was available for pre-order, I convinced my friends to get it, we got all setup to have a lan party on it's release...and it was a no-go. I, as well as every one of the people involved have awesome computers. They are specifically designed for gaming with all of the best parts available at any given time...and the engine ran like crap, and crashed often. It uses a ton more resources than Oblivion in order to not look 1/10th as good. We had to give up on our lan party because the game was simply unplayable on a few of the machines (and we're talking brand new dual core athlon FX's, dual 7950GX2's, 4GB ram, machines that should have no trouble running this game (and have no trouble running other games)). Despite this, I soldiered on and played through the entire game within a week, hoping against hope to find some redeeming quality...and there simply weren't any. Upon finishing the game, and experiencing the extremely lame ending, I fired up the editor...and crap. The editor is not as good as the original NWN editor. I had to find plugins just to get the same functionality I had in the original, and still it wasn't as good. I tried so hard to like this game, mostly because I loved the first one, but as with KoTOR, Obsidian severely dropped the ball. I'm surprised they're even bothering with an expansion... I'll probably end up getting it because I'm insane and still holding out hope for a good NWN sequel, but this time I will not make the mistake of recommending it to anyone else.
Every employee at my company has at least two 20+ inch LCDs. I seriously can't imagine work with only one monitor. Even the interns get at least two 17" LCDs. (To be fair, we're game developers, but still). It would take forever to get anything done with one screen.
I'm aware. I also own a 360 (since Jan 2006), and have had no problems with it aside from games crashing (particularly oblivion). Speaking of which, I got Oblivion on the PS3 last night and it is MUCH smoother than the 360 version. One major example is the fact that you can actually ride a horse. (Sure, you can get on a horse in the 360 version, and you can move it around, but you can't call the results "riding", it's more like "horse slide-show".)
Also worth noting, Sony's warranty service on the PS3 appears to be frighteningly fast. My PS3 died a month and a half after I got it. I called Sony, and within 10 minutes a box was on it's way to my house to send it back. The box came early the next morning, including a return shipping label, packing materials, instructions for packing, and even the packing tape to close the box. UPS came and took the box that afternoon, and extremely early the next morning a brand new PS3 was at my house. Their replacement facility is in Texas, I live in upstate New York...It almost seems like they must have shipped out the replacement the second UPS accepted the package from me. The turnaround time from failure to replacement was less than 48 hours and cost me less than 30 minutes of time and no cash. Online forums are filled with rumors about Sony taking six weeks or more to get a replacement out. They themselves told me it would be 7 to 10 business days. So either they're really efficient, or not many consoles are actually breaking. Also, the (1 year, as opposed to the 360's initial 90 day) warranty restarts the day you get your replacement, and it comes with papers saying as much.
It's your cables, and not necessarily because they're cheap. As the IT person for a 100% SATA shop I've had plenty of experience with this. Some SATA cables will fall off, sometimes without any provocation, others won't come off without significant provocation. Some SATA cables even have locking mechanisms to hold them to your drives. Asus for example ships motherboards with one of two different types of SATA cables. In my experience the red ones suck and the gray ones are excellent, but which you get seems to be luck of the draw (like when I order 40 motherboards, I get some with red and some with gray). Areca RAID controllers seem to come with great cables as well, I've got about 20 of them and they all came with the same cables.
The mailing lists available in Google Apps are currently lacking in features, they have enough for our purposes, but there are many things they don't do (appending headers to subjects, reply to list, automatic subscriptions, mass user add, mass user delete, to name but a few). That said, emails to and from the lists happen near instantly and we have had zero problems with delays in either message forwarding or user adding.
We use Google Apps for our company email. We were using an internal service until we switched in February. Apart from IMAP support, using Gmail for company email has been a great improvement over our previous system. The majority of our employees prefer Gmail's web interface to a standalone mail client. That said, we obviously allow webmail use on our network.
It is probably assumed that FC drives are more reliable because they are expensive and only really used in relatively expensive servers. It's the whole "professional vs consumer grade" issue. It is generally assumed that "professional grade" drives should be more reliable than "consumer grade" drives. In my experience this is true, the 10000RPM scsi drives in my 10 year old Sun Ultra2s (which see continuous round the clock use) still work great, while I've never had a regular desktop drive from any manufacturer last more than 5 years. Not that my experience counts for much, I've only dealt with several hundred harddrives vs. the several hundred thousand in these studies. (Just for reference, the ratio I've seen between FC/SCSI and SATA/ATA drives failing is about 15:1 in favor of FC/SCSI, and I've never had a SCSI drive last less than 3 years, while I've had plenty of SATA and ATA drives last less than a couple months).
I can't believe nobody mentioned Diablo 2 yet. There are way too many people who still play that game for it to not do awesome on the DS. Battlenet via Nintendo WiFi would pretty much seal the deal. Sure it would need a few UI tweaks, but otherwise it's pretty much a straight port.
If there were a bandwidth shortage, ISPs would probably raise their rates. I would cancel my service and steal internet access from somewhere. Not only will I not live without broadband, I WILL NOT pay more money for less bandwidth. Progress or death, I refuse to take a step back.
My point is only moot if you assume that the general concensus on slashdot is correct...
It's not at all idiotic. When the signs in Best Buy (or Walmart, or on tv) tell Joe Sixpack that "Blu-ray is the winner of the Hi-Def format war" (Assuming Mr. Sixpack is there spending his tax return on a new Hi-Def setup) What do you think Joe is going to buy? He's not stupid, he's not going to buy the "loser".
Sure, assuming you encounter a previously unknown major hardware issue late into development. Doesn't happen very often on consoles. More likely, you know about the issue well ahead of time, you plan a fix and implement it. Even better if you've already made the same fix for another product, you just rinse and repeat. No need to spin it any which way, just keep your mouth shut and make it work. Now, if you're trying to sell more copies of a (nearly) year old game, then maybe you leak something about how it was old and busted on the xbox and the PS3 is the new hotness, maybe. As for the actual issue (ie compensating for the speed of an optical drive), it's not new. Many games have done it in the past and many will do it in the future, it's not unique to the PS3 (or the 360 for that matter).