Also, though I'm having trouble finding anything too new, the attachment rate (games sold per console) for the 360 has consistently been the highest of the current gen systems.
That is easily explained.
A lot of people buy a Wii just for the Wii Sports pack-in, and maybe Wii Fit. Result? Low attach rate!
The PS3bots scream "It may be the most expensive, but it's really a great value since you can use it as a BluRay player!", and what happens when people buy it and mostly use it as a BluRay player? (or emulators under Linux) Low attach rate! (but not in the Sony bean-counter thinking, since they're pushing a Sony media format, most of which fail in obscurity.)
The 360 did have an HD-DVD option, but it was an expansion in a separate case, and thus was no substitute for a real player. And there's no one game (not even Halo 3) that sells tons of systems to people who want to do nothing but play that game. So if you buy a 360, you're buying it to play 360 games. Result? High attach rate!
The moral? "versatile" = low attach rate, and "pack-in game so awesome that non-traditional users buy it by the truckload" = low attach rate
Call me a troll too, but I can't help feeling awesome for having waited all this time. But I have almost every TV console system released in North America from the PS2/GC/XBox era all the way back to Channel F, so it's not like I have a lack of things to play. And I even have a Wii but play my PS2 instead.
I'm still leery about a system that nobody has cracked yet (I love my two jukebox XBoxes and will do it to fat PS2s when I have the time), but mostly it's the RROD and disc-eating that I wanted to avoid. Now that the 65nm/65nm units are out, and the new LiteOn drives are supposed to be more reliable, maybe I'll get one later this year. That is, if there's something I want to play badly enough to pull me away from my PS2.
And the replies in this article are the first I've heard of PS3 hardware problems... ah yes, good old drive decay. I hope you "but it's such a great value because it plays BluRay movies!" people finally understand why it's BAD to use a video game system to play movies. Me, I'm still pissed that they took out the PS2 compatibility, and didn't even keep it as an option. Now if I want one someday, I'll have to worry about the drive dying too. The good news is as long as the drive works long enough to install Linux, it's still a good emulator platform, even with the gimped graphics access.
As far as I know, psychic powers aren't a documented feature of the Cell processor.
Are you sure about that? The way Sony was talking just before the PS3 was released, I'm sure I remember them claiming it had psychic powers, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, too!
...except that at least one of the (three?) models of DVD drive they used is total crap. The main value in a used XBox is whether its DVD drive works or not. And their DVD reader design is such that it is not possible to read a genuine XBox disc without a genuine XBox DVD drive. (or installing the official firmware on one of a very few compatible consumer models of drive that haven't been manufactured in years, but they used that funny plug so such a hacked drive will only work on a PC)
Out of the three units I have, the two I got used have one bad and one partially good DVD drive. The only good DVD drive is from the XBox that my brother's then-wife's kids tried to take apart, and ruined the mainboard. I took that in trade for giving them a new one for xmas back in the day. (I was PS2/GC back then.)
Of course the best thing about the original XBox is how they not only completely failed to secure the system (more loopholes than were actually used to crack the system), but actually included holes for a pin header with all but one of the required signals for a mod chip. I'm glad I bought two chips back in the day. Now I can rip discs on my one good drive, then use the crappy FTP server to copy the game to the other one.
The 8100 series was probably the worst case design Apple ever came up with. In order to upgrade the RAM, you had to almost completely disassemble the machine, removing all expansion cards and the motherboard, because the memory slots were between the motherboard and the inner frame.
The next generation was the G3 and G4 towers, which were some of the easiest cases to work with ever.
Except that anyone working on a project which involves the Linux kernel has to deal with this "big old bag of fail". Some bright spark working on the netfilter code decided that it would be a cute idea to abuse case-sensitive filenames, probably as some sort of WTF guerilla advocacy against closed-source operating systems. If you want to try to get Linus to commit a change to remove this, go right ahead, but it's been at least five years now, and it's not likely to happen until Linux 2.7/2.8, which is in itself unlikely to happen.
This stuff is yummy to the rodents, and kills them in a couple of days. Once you've killed off the main permanent population, you've only got the replacement rate of those that wander in from time to time. It's cheap and easy to use. In one case, I had a mouse problem and put out some brick bait. One of the bricks was so delicious that the mouse actually ran off with it.
But your bulidings should already have rat bait boxes placed along the outside walls of buildings. If they don't, your real problem is that someone is slacking in the pest control department.
That was from the incident a few years ago where some alien thingy from outer space was going to crash on Cardiff. There was a strange man who somehow managed to save Cardiff, but only by deflecting it into Liverpool.
e) nobody before had ever hijacked a plane with the suicidal intent to crash it, and the standard response to hijackings had been to land wherever the hijackers said to land.
Once the passengers on Flight 93 heard about what happened on the other planes, they changed their response.
That means no warning when a hurricane smashes into Texas, or tornado sweeps through Oklahoma, or the next Katrina comes along to flood Orleans.
If only we had some way to give these people a warning without pictures, then we could save millions of lives! We could maybe even have the government give us money to put it in every vehicle ever manufactured, then people could even hear the warnings while they're evacuating!
There is exactly one good reason why the mandatory cutoff date for digital (without requiring existing stations to delay any plans to switch next month) should be moved foward a few months. In the Rocky Mountain areas, it's winter time, and some transmitters are essentially inaccessible during February because they are snowed in. It's rather tricky to switch over a transmitter when you can't even roll a truck to it.
Of course we know that the main reason is still the Clearwire guy in the Obama cabinet.
I've been watching only digital for what, five years now? During the first year of that, I even stopped watching the Fox station because they only had an 800 watt (as in eight light bulbs) transmitter at that time, my HD tuner box didn't have an analog tuner and I didn't want to keep switching back and forth. Also, in the past few months, I haven't had to go up and precisely re-align my antenna after winds blow it around, so some of the stations must have improved their signal relatively recently.
Huh? You can play FFXI on a PS2 without any keyboard at all, though you will find it hard to chat with people. FFXI is quite good about scaling from using typical JRPG menus all the way up to a command line and macros. (I usually cast common spells with macros via a joypad, and uncommon spells by typing into the CLI, which is usually faster than the spells take to cast, thanks to me knowing how to touch-type.)
FFXI is harder than WoW simply because it doesn't just throw XP at players. You have to work to get to level 75, and you can't just solo it with your brain disconnected. It's a bit less harsh than it used to be, but it's still very much "WoW in Hard Mode".
Slashdot Mirror
By plugging the text of #66 and #67 into Goggle using quotes to get phrase matches:
1-75 plus some bogus ones
370 questsions of another version
1-75 plus 1-130 of the 370 version
(PDF) contains a sampling of about 100 randomly ordered questions
1-75
1-566 as VB .asp program source (!) and possibly with "preferred" answers
Enjoy your Streisand Effect!
Also, though I'm having trouble finding anything too new, the attachment rate (games sold per console) for the 360 has consistently been the highest of the current gen systems.
That is easily explained.
A lot of people buy a Wii just for the Wii Sports pack-in, and maybe Wii Fit. Result? Low attach rate!
The PS3bots scream "It may be the most expensive, but it's really a great value since you can use it as a BluRay player!", and what happens when people buy it and mostly use it as a BluRay player? (or emulators under Linux) Low attach rate! (but not in the Sony bean-counter thinking, since they're pushing a Sony media format, most of which fail in obscurity.)
The 360 did have an HD-DVD option, but it was an expansion in a separate case, and thus was no substitute for a real player. And there's no one game (not even Halo 3) that sells tons of systems to people who want to do nothing but play that game. So if you buy a 360, you're buying it to play 360 games. Result? High attach rate!
The moral? "versatile" = low attach rate, and "pack-in game so awesome that non-traditional users buy it by the truckload" = low attach rate
Call me a troll too, but I can't help feeling awesome for having waited all this time. But I have almost every TV console system released in North America from the PS2/GC/XBox era all the way back to Channel F, so it's not like I have a lack of things to play. And I even have a Wii but play my PS2 instead.
I'm still leery about a system that nobody has cracked yet (I love my two jukebox XBoxes and will do it to fat PS2s when I have the time), but mostly it's the RROD and disc-eating that I wanted to avoid. Now that the 65nm/65nm units are out, and the new LiteOn drives are supposed to be more reliable, maybe I'll get one later this year. That is, if there's something I want to play badly enough to pull me away from my PS2.
And the replies in this article are the first I've heard of PS3 hardware problems... ah yes, good old drive decay. I hope you "but it's such a great value because it plays BluRay movies!" people finally understand why it's BAD to use a video game system to play movies. Me, I'm still pissed that they took out the PS2 compatibility, and didn't even keep it as an option. Now if I want one someday, I'll have to worry about the drive dying too. The good news is as long as the drive works long enough to install Linux, it's still a good emulator platform, even with the gimped graphics access.
As far as I know, psychic powers aren't a documented feature of the Cell processor.
Are you sure about that? The way Sony was talking just before the PS3 was released, I'm sure I remember them claiming it had psychic powers, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, too!
...except that at least one of the (three?) models of DVD drive they used is total crap. The main value in a used XBox is whether its DVD drive works or not. And their DVD reader design is such that it is not possible to read a genuine XBox disc without a genuine XBox DVD drive. (or installing the official firmware on one of a very few compatible consumer models of drive that haven't been manufactured in years, but they used that funny plug so such a hacked drive will only work on a PC)
Out of the three units I have, the two I got used have one bad and one partially good DVD drive. The only good DVD drive is from the XBox that my brother's then-wife's kids tried to take apart, and ruined the mainboard. I took that in trade for giving them a new one for xmas back in the day. (I was PS2/GC back then.)
Of course the best thing about the original XBox is how they not only completely failed to secure the system (more loopholes than were actually used to crack the system), but actually included holes for a pin header with all but one of the required signals for a mod chip. I'm glad I bought two chips back in the day. Now I can rip discs on my one good drive, then use the crappy FTP server to copy the game to the other one.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020722h.gif
"In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-")
Then I guess we should call them "Futher Muckers".
Er. I mean "nouns ending in Y". Or something like that. So much for pre-caffiene morning slashdot posts.
Besides, Firefly or not, Serenity fits with the naming scheme they already have, that being "adjectives ending in Y", Harmony, Unity.
What we really need is a poll to rename Harmony to Harmonity.
The 8100 series was probably the worst case design Apple ever came up with. In order to upgrade the RAM, you had to almost completely disassemble the machine, removing all expansion cards and the motherboard, because the memory slots were between the motherboard and the inner frame.
The next generation was the G3 and G4 towers, which were some of the easiest cases to work with ever.
Except that anyone working on a project which involves the Linux kernel has to deal with this "big old bag of fail". Some bright spark working on the netfilter code decided that it would be a cute idea to abuse case-sensitive filenames, probably as some sort of WTF guerilla advocacy against closed-source operating systems. If you want to try to get Linus to commit a change to remove this, go right ahead, but it's been at least five years now, and it's not likely to happen until Linux 2.7/2.8, which is in itself unlikely to happen.
Apparently they'd heard about object-orientation and thought it would take over the world, so they started designing a chip for pure OO languages.
That would be the IAPX 432. One of the most quiche-eating architectures ever.
The G5, same (plus the most expensive macs EVAR.)
Wrong. The Mac II era was much more expensive, even if you don't count inflation.
The high end of the Powerbook line during the 90's also makes today's Macbook Pros look cheap.
This stuff is yummy to the rodents, and kills them in a couple of days. Once you've killed off the main permanent population, you've only got the replacement rate of those that wander in from time to time. It's cheap and easy to use. In one case, I had a mouse problem and put out some brick bait. One of the bricks was so delicious that the mouse actually ran off with it.
But your bulidings should already have rat bait boxes placed along the outside walls of buildings. If they don't, your real problem is that someone is slacking in the pest control department.
Well, they do have a vacuum cleaner that features a big ball. All we need is an enormous Mega Maid to push around the Dyson Sphere vacuum cleaner.
That was from the incident a few years ago where some alien thingy from outer space was going to crash on Cardiff. There was a strange man who somehow managed to save Cardiff, but only by deflecting it into Liverpool.
The root cause was that this slashdotting was invented by Shampoo.
Someone turned on Spamming Tree Protocol when they meant to turn on Spanning Tree Protocol.
I for one welcome our new Boron Boride overlords.
e) nobody before had ever hijacked a plane with the suicidal intent to crash it, and the standard response to hijackings had been to land wherever the hijackers said to land.
Once the passengers on Flight 93 heard about what happened on the other planes, they changed their response.
Clearwire is "involved" because their competition is going to use the DTV frequencies, and they could have a four month jump on the competition.
That means no warning when a hurricane smashes into Texas, or tornado sweeps through Oklahoma, or the next Katrina comes along to flood Orleans.
If only we had some way to give these people a warning without pictures, then we could save millions of lives! We could maybe even have the government give us money to put it in every vehicle ever manufactured, then people could even hear the warnings while they're evacuating!
There is exactly one good reason why the mandatory cutoff date for digital (without requiring existing stations to delay any plans to switch next month) should be moved foward a few months. In the Rocky Mountain areas, it's winter time, and some transmitters are essentially inaccessible during February because they are snowed in. It's rather tricky to switch over a transmitter when you can't even roll a truck to it.
Of course we know that the main reason is still the Clearwire guy in the Obama cabinet.
I've been watching only digital for what, five years now? During the first year of that, I even stopped watching the Fox station because they only had an 800 watt (as in eight light bulbs) transmitter at that time, my HD tuner box didn't have an analog tuner and I didn't want to keep switching back and forth. Also, in the past few months, I haven't had to go up and precisely re-align my antenna after winds blow it around, so some of the stations must have improved their signal relatively recently.
Looks like Chicago politics has gone national. B-)
Hey, it's change you can believe in!
Huh? You can play FFXI on a PS2 without any keyboard at all, though you will find it hard to chat with people. FFXI is quite good about scaling from using typical JRPG menus all the way up to a command line and macros. (I usually cast common spells with macros via a joypad, and uncommon spells by typing into the CLI, which is usually faster than the spells take to cast, thanks to me knowing how to touch-type.)
FFXI is harder than WoW simply because it doesn't just throw XP at players. You have to work to get to level 75, and you can't just solo it with your brain disconnected. It's a bit less harsh than it used to be, but it's still very much "WoW in Hard Mode".