I don't think anyone's claiming that the Neo-Geo was a bad system.
It is "bad" in the sense that SNK lost enough money to go out of business with it.
That's the issue: Very, very few people want to buy a $500 PS3, and even fewer want to buy a $600 one. Very, very few developers want to spend extra money to develop for the PS3's new features. And Sony is losing very, very much money on each console sold.
What's more, these problems all support each other: Very few people wanting to buy the console means fewer developers wanting to develop for it; fewer developers wanting to develop for it means fewer people want to buy the console. Fewer people buying consoles means fewer people buying games, and fewer developers developing games means fewer games for people to buy; the lack of game sales makes the losses Sony takes on each PS3 worse, which extends the length of time Sony has to keep the price high, which keeps this bad situation going for a longer and longer time.
That's why SNK is no longer in business, and why the Neo-Geo was a "bad" machine. SNK died on account of an infection of creepitis featuritis, which is sort of the AIDS of the tech industry, since it attacks the very systems that are supposed to keep you healthy.
You have said perfectly in one sentence what hundreds of bloggers have spent millions of sentences trying to say:
...Sony has priced its product into a range previously occupied over the past 20 years by the Neo Geo, CDi, and 3DO -- none of which were terribly successful commercially....
I mean, there it is. You can't shorten it any more than that without editorializing or removing vital information, and nothing more needs to be added to it to explain the situation. There's the facts of the case, and from them, you can deduce all that remains.
As a semi-professional blogger, I envy your writing skills, sir.
Now it's obvious to a moron in a hurry that this would be the case for a small inventor, and also obvious to a moron in a hurry that this would not be the case for a patent holding company.
That right there is a blindingly obvious and clear distinction between a patent troll and a small inventor. And that's just the first of the four; the distinction gets greater with the next three:
(2) that remedies available at law, such as monetary damages, are inadequate to compensate for that injury;
"Monetary damages? I need more than money -- the barrier to entry to the market is too high!" vs. "What market? I just want money."
(3) that, considering the balance of hardships between the plaintiff and defendant, a remedy in equity is warranted; and
Balance of hardships? Hello? "I'm just Joe in his garage here! How can I compete?" vs. "Hardships? We're suffering no hardships; we doin' just dandy with all the other fees we collected!"
(4) that the public interest would not be dis-served by a permanent injunction.
"I'm trying to produce something here for the public to use!" vs. "Yeah, and if they don't license it from us, then NO ONE can use it, because WE DON'T MAKE IT EITHER!"
You may not be able to tell the difference between a small inventor and a patent troll, but from the perspective of the court system, and in the wake of this Supreme Court ruling, the two could not be more different.
This court decision makes the distinction greater and clearer.
The amount of mass stupidity required to have your posting modded up at all, much less all the way up to +5, astonishes me.
You're right; I was exaggerating. I do know people who enjoy using the Xbox as a media center, for whom the idea of a central media server appeals.
There are two problems that I see.
1) Set top boxes / stereo components typically do up to one thing easily and well. A "media center" is a device that needs to do a lot of things well. This is why, although the Xbox is a vital part of Microsoft's digital home vision, Microsoft sees the PC as being the main media center. Apple is the same way.
2) The market for people who want general-purpose media centers in a set top box, good or bad, is much smaller than Sony needs for the PS3 to succeed. Even the people who buy the PS3 or Xbox as a media center expect it to be able to play games well.
It's not a question of the PS3 being overpriced. it's prices inexpesively for what it is.
What it is? It is a game machine. If you want to talk about teraflops, the SDSC has machines that will run circles around any number of PS3's, but none of them are very good at playing games.
Sony doesn't think of the PS3 as a game machine, either. But their customers do, and will judge it as such. That's so important it's worth putting in bold: People will judge the PS3 as a game machine. They will not judge it as a high-performance computer or as a "digital media hub" or as a Blu-Ray player. Even though it is all those things, no one wants it for that. They want to use it for games.
McAteer said the phone interface that consumers access when downloading games -- which usually lists only game titles -- is one of the biggest reasons behind the slow growth. As a result, the games that tend to sell best are those with instant name recognition among consumers, such as Pac-Man or Tetris.
If you want to get right down to it, a newspaper is ugly, but it has the design it has for a good reason: It presents information in a way that is convenient and easy to process. Slashdot's the same way.
Magazines are ugly, too, but they work for the same reason.
Until they get rid of the idea of the all-in-one set-top-box entirely, and until the companies learn to use open standards to allow this stuff to work together, they're going to keep on having these problems.
Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
Uhm... what OS are you using? OSX, Windows and Linux all let you adjust the size of the font you're viewing based on the DPI of the monitor, and have done so for the better part of a decade.
You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place?
Images don't scale, they impose arbitrary size restrictions, they dramatically increase the bandwidth required to load a page (and the hit on the server), and in most cases, they're ugly, too. So yes, I'm saying they shouldn't have used images in the first place. And I'm right to do so for these reasons.
I'm not saying people don't need higher DPI. I'm saying that if your website design depends on a certain DPI for readability, then you fucked up.
You know that site that forces the font to be 12px instead of 12pt? Or the one that has adorable little GIF/PNG highlights that become miniscule on a high-res monitor? bad bad bad bad bad!
The author of the article is trying to say, "Well, here's how you can support higher DPI." What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
In John Cleese's How To Irritate People, the final sketch (one of pure brilliance) involves two bored airline pilots trying to entertain themselves. It begins with the co-pilot turning on the intercom and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about."
The joke is, of course, that the only time someone feels the need to say, "Don't worry; everything's okay!" is when there really is something to worry about. Or, when someone is trying to pull your leg.
Shortly after Wal-Mart's RFID trials were aborted, scrapped, and otherwise sent to the wastebin, I began receiving RFID e-zine articles all with titles similar to this: "Problem? What problem! Why, RFID is as big as it ever was!" Sure enough, the big RFID revolution is dead before it even got started.
The signs have been there for a while that history is repeating itself. The big studios of gaming are reliving what the big studios of cinema lived in the 1960s: "The people say that they want more from the moviegoing experience? Oh my, we need a bigger budget! Ten times the cast! Bigger sets! And a costume change for Liz Taylor in every scene!" Of course, the people didn't want more sets. They wanted more variety, more stories, new ways of telling stories -- not just the same thing with more baubles. Oh, you had some new ideas like Easy Rider which were nifty, until the studios churned out 10,000 Easy Rider knock-offs. It wasn't until the 1970s when upstarts Lucas, Spielberg, Coppolla and Scorsese came to town and the old guard died off that the studios' fortunes changed.
What's gonna happen? Things are gonna get worse before they get better. Some of the old guard will get so decrepit that they'll have to take risks. And that's where we'll end up with the next Godfather, Jaws or Star Wars for video gaming.
Those games also use both sticks, but in a completely different way.
BattleZone's wasn't completely different. It was limited in that the sticks didn't go left and right (so you couldn't slide, but then, whoever heard of a tank sliding against its tread?).
But if anyone has the right to say the revolution controller isn't necessary, it's the guy who, with Katamari Damacy, managed to make a totally revolutionary and unique control scheme out of the Dual Shock 2.
You've never played Robotron:2084, Smash TV or even BattleZone before, have you?
And when you buy a Dell, it comes with Windows already installed and set up, so you don't need to buy Windows separately and mess around with Boot Camp. And nobody ever got fired for buying Dell, but you can bet your life you'll be looking for another job if you buy Apples and anything goes even slightly wrong.
Why would I have a problem, when I can just call Microsoft and get support from them according to the terms of the Windows licenses I purchased? Remember: This is not an "unsupported" feature by any reasonable definition; you get support from Microsoft for running any licensed copy of Windows.
Business owners are not exactly going out on a limb with a Mac purchase now. Especially considering that while Dell etc. struggle to support Vista, all of these Intel Macs support Vista today. Officially.
Not everyone knows all this yet; however, as they begin to recognize it, what do you think is going to happen?
I can think of reasons for eating at McDonald's over, say, In-n-Out Burger. For one, you can get chicken there. For another, if you're on a road trip with your kid and in some small town you've never even heard of, you know that the restrooms will be clean and there'll be a playground for your kid at the McD's. You also have a certain minimum expectation of quality; it won't be good, but it won't cause health problems.
The hardcore "build it yourself"ers are not producing the bulk of Dell's sales, and Apple has the Mini as an answer to the low-cost small biz buyer.
To those customers, people choose Dell PCs on the reputation of their quality and support, both of which are eclipsed by Apple (according to Consumer Reports May 2006, but also in CR's 2005 and 2004 editions of PC reviews). The only reason people haven't bought Apples en masse has been the fact that they don't run Windows.
The key thing about Apple "not supporting" this is that Microsoft does support it. If you buy Windows and run it on your Boot Camp Mac, if you call Microsoft for support, you get it (according to the terms of the support contract with in-store boxed copies of Windows). The only reason e.g. Dell supports Windows is because Dell is an OEM, and that's how OEM deals with Microsoft work. Apple doesn't support Windows, because they're not a Microsoft OEM. (What's more, they have no desire to be, but that's a whole 'nother rant.)
The whole brilliance behind Boot Camp comes down to this:
The reason Apple didn't become yet another Beige-Box Windows PC manufacturer was because then they'd have the same margins and Windows OEM hassles of everyone else.
Boot Camp allows them to have their cake and eat it, too. You can run Windows, and you can run OSX, and you'll soon have the full support of Apple while doing so. There are ways to run OSX on beige box PCs and there are ways to run Windows without using Boot Camp on a Mac, but the fact that Boot Camp and the Windows drivers are sanctioned changes the landscape completely.
Why would anyone bother buying a Dell now?
This realization is going to hit people eventually. It may take months or years, but the ball is rolling and it won't stop.
OSX is Apple's competitive advantage, and what's more, no one wants to run Windows. They only have to run Windows. The people buying Macs and dual booting are going to spend as much time in OSX as they can get away with.
Dvorak doesn't get it. Cringely sure as hell doesn't get it. And judging from the stock's performance, no one else seems to, either.
Apple has positioned themselves to become the #1 PC manufacturer in the world, and at this point it's just a matter of time. OSX will become more popular, not less, which will actually increase the desirability of Macs (and their market advantage).
I mean, holy shit folks, they just triggered an avalanche that's going to bury the rest of the PC industry and no one else seems to realize it!
Right now Microsoft is more than happy to work with Apple to get XP and Vista working on Apple's hardware, because Microsoft sees a whole new market segment opening up on the short term.
My God, they don't have a clue what's about to hit them, and seeing articles like this just makes me want to scream: "It's about the hardware sales, stupid!"
She's making that comment in reference to Novell using their counterclaims to bait SCO into something that would then trigger the arbitrarian clause in the UnitedLinux contract.
By forcing arbitration, this ensures that the suit will be settled, one way or another, in six months. Period. No discovery period, no trial, no judge, no legal delays. Come October, this issue is settled.
That prevents SCO from dragging it out any further with Novell, and it was a great move.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone's claiming that the Neo-Geo was a bad system.
It is "bad" in the sense that SNK lost enough money to go out of business with it.
That's the issue: Very, very few people want to buy a $500 PS3, and even fewer want to buy a $600 one. Very, very few developers want to spend extra money to develop for the PS3's new features. And Sony is losing very, very much money on each console sold.
What's more, these problems all support each other: Very few people wanting to buy the console means fewer developers wanting to develop for it; fewer developers wanting to develop for it means fewer people want to buy the console. Fewer people buying consoles means fewer people buying games, and fewer developers developing games means fewer games for people to buy; the lack of game sales makes the losses Sony takes on each PS3 worse, which extends the length of time Sony has to keep the price high, which keeps this bad situation going for a longer and longer time.
That's why SNK is no longer in business, and why the Neo-Geo was a "bad" machine. SNK died on account of an infection of creepitis featuritis, which is sort of the AIDS of the tech industry, since it attacks the very systems that are supposed to keep you healthy.
I mean, there it is. You can't shorten it any more than that without editorializing or removing vital information, and nothing more needs to be added to it to explain the situation. There's the facts of the case, and from them, you can deduce all that remains.
As a semi-professional blogger, I envy your writing skills, sir.
What the USSC ruled was that the 4 tests for granting an injunction apply to patents.
The first test of the four is:
Now it's obvious to a moron in a hurry that this would be the case for a small inventor, and also obvious to a moron in a hurry that this would not be the case for a patent holding company.
That right there is a blindingly obvious and clear distinction between a patent troll and a small inventor. And that's just the first of the four; the distinction gets greater with the next three:
"Monetary damages? I need more than money -- the barrier to entry to the market is too high!" vs. "What market? I just want money."
Balance of hardships? Hello? "I'm just Joe in his garage here! How can I compete?" vs. "Hardships? We're suffering no hardships; we doin' just dandy with all the other fees we collected!"
"I'm trying to produce something here for the public to use!" vs. "Yeah, and if they don't license it from us, then NO ONE can use it, because WE DON'T MAKE IT EITHER!"
You may not be able to tell the difference between a small inventor and a patent troll, but from the perspective of the court system, and in the wake of this Supreme Court ruling, the two could not be more different.
This court decision makes the distinction greater and clearer.
The amount of mass stupidity required to have your posting modded up at all, much less all the way up to +5, astonishes me.
You're right; I was exaggerating. I do know people who enjoy using the Xbox as a media center, for whom the idea of a central media server appeals.
There are two problems that I see.
1) Set top boxes / stereo components typically do up to one thing easily and well. A "media center" is a device that needs to do a lot of things well. This is why, although the Xbox is a vital part of Microsoft's digital home vision, Microsoft sees the PC as being the main media center. Apple is the same way.
2) The market for people who want general-purpose media centers in a set top box, good or bad, is much smaller than Sony needs for the PS3 to succeed. Even the people who buy the PS3 or Xbox as a media center expect it to be able to play games well.
It's not a question of the PS3 being overpriced. it's prices inexpesively for what it is.
What it is? It is a game machine. If you want to talk about teraflops, the SDSC has machines that will run circles around any number of PS3's, but none of them are very good at playing games.
Sony doesn't think of the PS3 as a game machine, either. But their customers do, and will judge it as such. That's so important it's worth putting in bold: People will judge the PS3 as a game machine. They will not judge it as a high-performance computer or as a "digital media hub" or as a Blu-Ray player. Even though it is all those things, no one wants it for that. They want to use it for games.
short for "abated"
Dude, I said the exact same thing three months ago.
If you want to get right down to it, a newspaper is ugly, but it has the design it has for a good reason: It presents information in a way that is convenient and easy to process. Slashdot's the same way.
Magazines are ugly, too, but they work for the same reason.
Holy crap. I just verified that, except I got a 25.7% chance of being authentic.
Wow!
I think that part of the problem is what they're trying to transform the living room into.
Each company wants you to do everything their way. What they don't recognize is that it's about allowing people to do things their own way.
What's more, the whole all-in-one set-top-box idea falls flat because a consumer device will do at most one thing easily and well.
Until they get rid of the idea of the all-in-one set-top-box entirely, and until the companies learn to use open standards to allow this stuff to work together, they're going to keep on having these problems.
Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
Uhm... what OS are you using? OSX, Windows and Linux all let you adjust the size of the font you're viewing based on the DPI of the monitor, and have done so for the better part of a decade.
You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place?
Images don't scale, they impose arbitrary size restrictions, they dramatically increase the bandwidth required to load a page (and the hit on the server), and in most cases, they're ugly, too. So yes, I'm saying they shouldn't have used images in the first place. And I'm right to do so for these reasons.
I'm not saying people don't need higher DPI. I'm saying that if your website design depends on a certain DPI for readability, then you fucked up.
You know that site that forces the font to be 12px instead of 12pt? Or the one that has adorable little GIF/PNG highlights that become miniscule on a high-res monitor? bad bad bad bad bad!
The author of the article is trying to say, "Well, here's how you can support higher DPI." What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
...you fucked up.
So I can't believe this is even an issue.
The bad news is that Miyamoto, Wright and Meiers work in relatively small markets -- PC and Nintendo.
Which leaves Kojima. But I'm not sure I want to buy another game that makes me watch a 2-minute cutscene for every 20 seconds of gameplay.
In John Cleese's How To Irritate People, the final sketch (one of pure brilliance) involves two bored airline pilots trying to entertain themselves. It begins with the co-pilot turning on the intercom and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about."
The joke is, of course, that the only time someone feels the need to say, "Don't worry; everything's okay!" is when there really is something to worry about. Or, when someone is trying to pull your leg.
Shortly after Wal-Mart's RFID trials were aborted, scrapped, and otherwise sent to the wastebin, I began receiving RFID e-zine articles all with titles similar to this: "Problem? What problem! Why, RFID is as big as it ever was!" Sure enough, the big RFID revolution is dead before it even got started.
The signs have been there for a while that history is repeating itself. The big studios of gaming are reliving what the big studios of cinema lived in the 1960s: "The people say that they want more from the moviegoing experience? Oh my, we need a bigger budget! Ten times the cast! Bigger sets! And a costume change for Liz Taylor in every scene!" Of course, the people didn't want more sets. They wanted more variety, more stories, new ways of telling stories -- not just the same thing with more baubles. Oh, you had some new ideas like Easy Rider which were nifty, until the studios churned out 10,000 Easy Rider knock-offs. It wasn't until the 1970s when upstarts Lucas, Spielberg, Coppolla and Scorsese came to town and the old guard died off that the studios' fortunes changed.
What's gonna happen? Things are gonna get worse before they get better. Some of the old guard will get so decrepit that they'll have to take risks. And that's where we'll end up with the next Godfather, Jaws or Star Wars for video gaming.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
Those games also use both sticks, but in a completely different way.
BattleZone's wasn't completely different. It was limited in that the sticks didn't go left and right (so you couldn't slide, but then, whoever heard of a tank sliding against its tread?).
But if anyone has the right to say the revolution controller isn't necessary, it's the guy who, with Katamari Damacy, managed to make a totally revolutionary and unique control scheme out of the Dual Shock 2.
You've never played Robotron:2084, Smash TV or even BattleZone before, have you?
Where is this $300 Dell of which you speak?
Because it's cheaper.
For identical equipment, by how much?
And when you buy a Dell, it comes with Windows already installed and set up, so you don't need to buy Windows separately and mess around with Boot Camp. And nobody ever got fired for buying Dell, but you can bet your life you'll be looking for another job if you buy Apples and anything goes even slightly wrong.
Why would I have a problem, when I can just call Microsoft and get support from them according to the terms of the Windows licenses I purchased? Remember: This is not an "unsupported" feature by any reasonable definition; you get support from Microsoft for running any licensed copy of Windows.
Business owners are not exactly going out on a limb with a Mac purchase now. Especially considering that while Dell etc. struggle to support Vista, all of these Intel Macs support Vista today. Officially.
Not everyone knows all this yet; however, as they begin to recognize it, what do you think is going to happen?
I can think of reasons for eating at McDonald's over, say, In-n-Out Burger. For one, you can get chicken there. For another, if you're on a road trip with your kid and in some small town you've never even heard of, you know that the restrooms will be clean and there'll be a playground for your kid at the McD's. You also have a certain minimum expectation of quality; it won't be good, but it won't cause health problems.
The hardcore "build it yourself"ers are not producing the bulk of Dell's sales, and Apple has the Mini as an answer to the low-cost small biz buyer.
To those customers, people choose Dell PCs on the reputation of their quality and support, both of which are eclipsed by Apple (according to Consumer Reports May 2006, but also in CR's 2005 and 2004 editions of PC reviews). The only reason people haven't bought Apples en masse has been the fact that they don't run Windows.
The key thing about Apple "not supporting" this is that Microsoft does support it. If you buy Windows and run it on your Boot Camp Mac, if you call Microsoft for support, you get it (according to the terms of the support contract with in-store boxed copies of Windows). The only reason e.g. Dell supports Windows is because Dell is an OEM, and that's how OEM deals with Microsoft work. Apple doesn't support Windows, because they're not a Microsoft OEM. (What's more, they have no desire to be, but that's a whole 'nother rant.)
The whole brilliance behind Boot Camp comes down to this:
The reason Apple didn't become yet another Beige-Box Windows PC manufacturer was because then they'd have the same margins and Windows OEM hassles of everyone else.
Boot Camp allows them to have their cake and eat it, too. You can run Windows, and you can run OSX, and you'll soon have the full support of Apple while doing so. There are ways to run OSX on beige box PCs and there are ways to run Windows without using Boot Camp on a Mac, but the fact that Boot Camp and the Windows drivers are sanctioned changes the landscape completely.
Why would anyone bother buying a Dell now?
This realization is going to hit people eventually. It may take months or years, but the ball is rolling and it won't stop.
OSX is Apple's competitive advantage, and what's more, no one wants to run Windows. They only have to run Windows. The people buying Macs and dual booting are going to spend as much time in OSX as they can get away with.
Dvorak doesn't get it. Cringely sure as hell doesn't get it. And judging from the stock's performance, no one else seems to, either.
Apple has positioned themselves to become the #1 PC manufacturer in the world, and at this point it's just a matter of time. OSX will become more popular, not less, which will actually increase the desirability of Macs (and their market advantage).
I mean, holy shit folks, they just triggered an avalanche that's going to bury the rest of the PC industry and no one else seems to realize it!
Right now Microsoft is more than happy to work with Apple to get XP and Vista working on Apple's hardware, because Microsoft sees a whole new market segment opening up on the short term.
My God, they don't have a clue what's about to hit them, and seeing articles like this just makes me want to scream: "It's about the hardware sales, stupid!"
"Wow. You are so wrong, it's not even funny. Allow me to speak from experience."
You mean, your experience as a woman?
Because then the WTO would call us on, say, the steel tariff, the sugar tariff, pressuring EU governments to drop the suit against Microsoft...
She's making that comment in reference to Novell using their counterclaims to bait SCO into something that would then trigger the arbitrarian clause in the UnitedLinux contract.
By forcing arbitration, this ensures that the suit will be settled, one way or another, in six months. Period. No discovery period, no trial, no judge, no legal delays. Come October, this issue is settled.
That prevents SCO from dragging it out any further with Novell, and it was a great move.