Imagine a mix of World of Warcraft and YouTube. You can't really pirate World of Warcraft (although you may be able to steal an account) You may be able to hack WoW to run in Linux, but still will require a server login.
As for latency, if you have a connection thats fast enough to stream Netflix video, it should be also good enough to play the game.
My true doubt is them being able to setup a backend powerful enough to render unique game streams for hundreads or thousands of players. The system will have to be strong enough to render at least 1080i video for a lot of users, this means they either will need hardware capable of running about any game at that resolution without frame rate issues and then have a single machine with that config for every single subscriber, or have a fantastic system that can do that for at least 100 simultaneous users.
I love articles that proclaim the impending death of $TECHNOLOGY just because you can now use some other device as a half-assed supplement.
This.
But hey, its the NYTimes. You know they are just meant to be there for entertainment, not news. I find The Onion to be more reliable source of news than the NYTimes. I been waiting for ages for them to color their page background yellow.
Xbox 360 consoles were dying in store demo kiosks months before the console went on sale.
PS3 consoles where dying in store dome kiosks months AFTER the console went on sale.
I think there is a big reason XBox consoles fail more: more people have them and people that have them play them WAY more than people that have PS3s.
Stress anything enough and the quality won't matter, it WILL break.
I feel like this is too minor of a feature and too late to do any good. Windows 7 is apparently making huge strides toward reducing boot time, and I never hear anyone complain about boot time anyway. Including people who don't use the computer that much. Most of the people I know that aren't "computer people" leave their computer on or in standby/hibernate, so boot time is hardly an issue.
Completely agree. I have ran my Win XP laptop for a full month before I restart it, and then only because I installed updates. My house PC is set to automatically install these and reboot at 3AM when I dont care about boot times.
I want speed while running, not booting up. If a few extra seconds or minutes booting up will give me higher performance while running, great, go for it! As they say back home: Take your time dressing up because we are in a hurry!
Although I do not agree with most the stuff the quoted Mr. Anonymous Coward posted, I do have to say: Visual Studio's IDE is the most solid thing I have used to write code.
Thats about it. Wish I was able to use it to write code in other platforms. Some Eclipse lovers may disagree, but after working with it, I still prefer Visual Studio.
Actually, they are already working on the PS4. There was an article on/. a couple weeks ago regarding Sony getting together with nvidia or ati (can't remember which) about designing it.
Good to know they plan to ditch their mentality about making their own graphic processor again. So many millions wasted on develop their own thing only to have the X360 match their performance with an off-the-shelf chip... that was a huge waste.
BTW, MS is not behind, they have confirmed that they are working on the X720 (community given name) with small tidbits like saying the x360 achievements will not be lost in the next machine, they will transfer over.
Since when has adult gaming been a "niche market" or one that "Playstations have traditionally been strong in"? I am an adult, most of my gaming is done on PC. I know a lot of adult gamers, most of their gaming is done on PC. The ones that don't, own an Xbox (1 or 360 depending on what year you want to go back to)... before the Xbox, it was all PC.
During the full life of the PS1 and the early life of the bulk of the PS2 life, Sony was competing with Nintendo. Nintendo's machine was considered by many a kiddy machine with childish games. Adults that wanted their gore went to the PS1/PS2 and stayed away from the N64/GC.
Although the Xbox had some bloody games, the original one was not that successful, heck, I heard it being labeled as a Halo TV Adapter!
The PC market may be your thing, but there is a huge amount of adults out there that play games and hate computers. I myself only play MMOs on the PC, I prefer my fun on the couch... all of it:P
Its not only how much they sell, but the architecture itself is so expensive the machine keeps being sold at a loss in expectation that the royalties they get from licensing to publish games will bring in profits.
That works fine for Nintendo since the machine is not pumped up, it used average tech that was already cheap so the machine itself was always profitable.
The XBox had losses, but have been profitable for a long time now, being based on existing tech made production prices go down quite fast.
On top of the PS3 being non-profitable hardware wise, there is the point you noted: the machine is not selling that well so they are not bringing in the license fees they hoped. They got to still be profitable somewhere, those numbers may be just a combined profit of hardware sale (that include PS3, PSPs and PS2s, witch are still being sold.)
License revenue is unlikely to be included there, or they would had quit on the thing already. Investors would only take so many quarters of loss before they started screaming.
Not only that, but most companies seem to ask for experience. Crazy thing, eh? But, wait... how can you have experience without ever being on the industry?!
Easy: MODS
Many studios see mods as actual experience. If you manage to design, develop, and successfully put out a full mod under engine and art restrictions (it's easy to write things that are not possible,) you have shown you have what it takes to do the same under hire.
Grab yourself a game like Oblivion or Fallout 3, pick their mod suite (Fallout 3 coming soon) and come up with something!
It was not just publicity but the type of publicity it got.
I got this game expecting an exciting alien warfare scifi reminiscent of Starship Troopers, that was what the ads sold me.
Once I started playing, though, what I found was that I landed in a planet filled with fantasy-like tribal race, with a "religous" thing about some magic like technology that I had the power to use... it was nothing but a fantasy game sold as a sci-fi one. THAT was the biggest issue with the game, that was what made me cancel the subscription just after 1 week. I even gave it a second chance and despite the few technological structures and mechs that were around, the entire thing still felt like a fantasy game. Heck, I'd go as far as granting the game 90% Fantasy/10%Sci-Fi on a box that spelled 100% neo-apocalyptic, human-alien warfare.
In short, it was like ordering a Burger and getting a Hotdog, may be a good hotdog, but I wanted a frigging burger.
The bottom line--men cheat a little bit more often than women...but both men and women THINK that men cheat a LOT more than women.
Odd... I recall other statistical studies that showed women cheated more than men.
Additionally women were less willing to admit it unless the study assured them complete anonymous (also meaning they would rarely if ever say it outside of closed doors.)
Men would just usually say it as long as no one they knew was around.
As for differences I read this interesting email recently:
Difference between men and women:
A woman does not arrive home until the next day and tells her spouse she stayed at a friend's house. Spouse proceeds to call all her friends and none had seen her all night long.
A man does not arrive home until the next day and tells his spouse he stayed at a friend's house. Spouse proceeds to call all his friends, 5 say he stayed over and 3 say he is still there!
If I was target of so many accusations I'd simply would somehow block my students from being able to host files somehow, even if its by simply blocking upload torrent traffic (or whatever other tool is accused of being used) from reaching the outside world at least for uploading.
My first IT job as an SQL developer was actually acquired via a practice test (no silly questionnaire, i hate those.)
To this day I still prefer true test than an actual interview. Let me show them that I know what I preach. If I ever find myself in a position to hire some one I'll sit them in front of a computer with a database and tell them to do some small queries and data entry application.
I have seen plenty of people being hired because of their pretty, mostly fake or over-glorified resumes. If I was able to test a lawyer's sill in any meaningful way before hiring him, i would do the same with them too.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitively April's Fool. Out of curiosity I went to the site to download it and the link said that I already had it... I'm running Safari! :P
Imagine a mix of World of Warcraft and YouTube. You can't really pirate World of Warcraft (although you may be able to steal an account) You may be able to hack WoW to run in Linux, but still will require a server login.
As for latency, if you have a connection thats fast enough to stream Netflix video, it should be also good enough to play the game.
My true doubt is them being able to setup a backend powerful enough to render unique game streams for hundreads or thousands of players. The system will have to be strong enough to render at least 1080i video for a lot of users, this means they either will need hardware capable of running about any game at that resolution without frame rate issues and then have a single machine with that config for every single subscriber, or have a fantastic system that can do that for at least 100 simultaneous users.
I love articles that proclaim the impending death of $TECHNOLOGY just because you can now use some other device as a half-assed supplement.
This.
But hey, its the NYTimes. You know they are just meant to be there for entertainment, not news. I find The Onion to be more reliable source of news than the NYTimes. I been waiting for ages for them to color their page background yellow.
Xbox 360 consoles were dying in store demo kiosks months before the console went on sale.
PS3 consoles where dying in store dome kiosks months AFTER the console went on sale. I think there is a big reason XBox consoles fail more: more people have them and people that have them play them WAY more than people that have PS3s. Stress anything enough and the quality won't matter, it WILL break.
I feel like this is too minor of a feature and too late to do any good. Windows 7 is apparently making huge strides toward reducing boot time, and I never hear anyone complain about boot time anyway. Including people who don't use the computer that much. Most of the people I know that aren't "computer people" leave their computer on or in standby/hibernate, so boot time is hardly an issue.
Completely agree. I have ran my Win XP laptop for a full month before I restart it, and then only because I installed updates. My house PC is set to automatically install these and reboot at 3AM when I dont care about boot times.
I want speed while running, not booting up. If a few extra seconds or minutes booting up will give me higher performance while running, great, go for it! As they say back home: Take your time dressing up because we are in a hurry!
Thats about it. Wish I was able to use it to write code in other platforms. Some Eclipse lovers may disagree, but after working with it, I still prefer Visual Studio.
Why is their death sad?
After they stole money from me I smile and laugh like a maniac every time I hear about them boing out of business. Serves the company right.
I'm not sorry for the employes because they too were responsible for the annoyance I went through in their stores.
Actually, they are already working on the PS4. There was an article on /. a couple weeks ago regarding Sony getting together with nvidia or ati (can't remember which) about designing it.
Good to know they plan to ditch their mentality about making their own graphic processor again. So many millions wasted on develop their own thing only to have the X360 match their performance with an off-the-shelf chip... that was a huge waste.
BTW, MS is not behind, they have confirmed that they are working on the X720 (community given name) with small tidbits like saying the x360 achievements will not be lost in the next machine, they will transfer over.
Since when has adult gaming been a "niche market" or one that "Playstations have traditionally been strong in"? I am an adult, most of my gaming is done on PC. I know a lot of adult gamers, most of their gaming is done on PC. The ones that don't, own an Xbox (1 or 360 depending on what year you want to go back to)... before the Xbox, it was all PC.
During the full life of the PS1 and the early life of the bulk of the PS2 life, Sony was competing with Nintendo. Nintendo's machine was considered by many a kiddy machine with childish games. Adults that wanted their gore went to the PS1/PS2 and stayed away from the N64/GC.
Although the Xbox had some bloody games, the original one was not that successful, heck, I heard it being labeled as a Halo TV Adapter!
The PC market may be your thing, but there is a huge amount of adults out there that play games and hate computers. I myself only play MMOs on the PC, I prefer my fun on the couch... all of it :P
That works fine for Nintendo since the machine is not pumped up, it used average tech that was already cheap so the machine itself was always profitable.
The XBox had losses, but have been profitable for a long time now, being based on existing tech made production prices go down quite fast.
On top of the PS3 being non-profitable hardware wise, there is the point you noted: the machine is not selling that well so they are not bringing in the license fees they hoped. They got to still be profitable somewhere, those numbers may be just a combined profit of hardware sale (that include PS3, PSPs and PS2s, witch are still being sold.)
License revenue is unlikely to be included there, or they would had quit on the thing already. Investors would only take so many quarters of loss before they started screaming.
They should know that people may be frustrated with certain puzzle games, and should make the machine durable enough!
Not only that, but most companies seem to ask for experience. Crazy thing, eh? But, wait... how can you have experience without ever being on the industry?!
Easy: MODS
Many studios see mods as actual experience. If you manage to design, develop, and successfully put out a full mod under engine and art restrictions (it's easy to write things that are not possible,) you have shown you have what it takes to do the same under hire.
Grab yourself a game like Oblivion or Fallout 3, pick their mod suite (Fallout 3 coming soon) and come up with something!
I got this game expecting an exciting alien warfare scifi reminiscent of Starship Troopers, that was what the ads sold me.
Once I started playing, though, what I found was that I landed in a planet filled with fantasy-like tribal race, with a "religous" thing about some magic like technology that I had the power to use... it was nothing but a fantasy game sold as a sci-fi one. THAT was the biggest issue with the game, that was what made me cancel the subscription just after 1 week. I even gave it a second chance and despite the few technological structures and mechs that were around, the entire thing still felt like a fantasy game. Heck, I'd go as far as granting the game 90% Fantasy/10%Sci-Fi on a box that spelled 100% neo-apocalyptic, human-alien warfare.
In short, it was like ordering a Burger and getting a Hotdog, may be a good hotdog, but I wanted a frigging burger.
Open Source will cure cancer and feed starving children, dude!
>>They are just a bit similar in that one person owns something that is dead, and wants his money back.
I just have my new laptop, Vista is now dead. I want my money back. Where is the joke?
The joke is on you.
The bottom line--men cheat a little bit more often than women...but both men and women THINK that men cheat a LOT more than women.
Odd... I recall other statistical studies that showed women cheated more than men.
Additionally women were less willing to admit it unless the study assured them complete anonymous (also meaning they would rarely if ever say it outside of closed doors.)
Men would just usually say it as long as no one they knew was around.
As for differences I read this interesting email recently:
Difference between men and women:
A woman does not arrive home until the next day and tells her spouse she stayed at a friend's house. Spouse proceeds to call all her friends and none had seen her all night long.
A man does not arrive home until the next day and tells his spouse he stayed at a friend's house. Spouse proceeds to call all his friends, 5 say he stayed over and 3 say he is still there!
If I was target of so many accusations I'd simply would somehow block my students from being able to host files somehow, even if its by simply blocking upload torrent traffic (or whatever other tool is accused of being used) from reaching the outside world at least for uploading.
My first IT job as an SQL developer was actually acquired via a practice test (no silly questionnaire, i hate those.) To this day I still prefer true test than an actual interview. Let me show them that I know what I preach. If I ever find myself in a position to hire some one I'll sit them in front of a computer with a database and tell them to do some small queries and data entry application. I have seen plenty of people being hired because of their pretty, mostly fake or over-glorified resumes. If I was able to test a lawyer's sill in any meaningful way before hiring him, i would do the same with them too.