I threw my $99 behind the project. Hopefully it turns out to be a fun system. That's a hell of a lot less than I paid for either my phone or my Playstation3. I don't expect to be playing Uncharted on the thing at that price... I just expect to play something comparable to what I have on my phone. My kids play iPod games for hours on end, so this console will see use one way or the other.
Benefits ARE the big fail in your argument. Most people are compensated roughly 70% salary, 30% benefits. You're ignoring a huge chunk of money required to hire that extra person. And it's a chunk set to get significantly larger under Obamacare (assuming employers simply don't dump all their employees into Medicaid and pay the penalty). There's little wonder why employers are waiting to hire.
No need for a new category... the notion itself is ridiculous. Are Sci-Fi geeks really pining so badly for an Oscar for one of "their" films? Do they need that validation? I don't. I'm just happy to see a good film from time to time. Hell - be happy we're going to see Avengers, Dark Knight, and Prometheus this year. I'm a hell of a lot more excited about that than I am the prospect of someone getting a little gold man.
If someone ever creates a Sci-Fi film that deserves an Oscar more than all the other films that year, it'll win one. Win because of quality, not because the suits created a little sub-award to placate you.
PS: Avatar didn't deserve a nomination, much less the award. I think that was a gesture for making a couple billion dollars while hitting all the correct political points.
You don't vote "against" a candidate - you vote FOR a candidate.
By your measure, 51.6% of VOTING Americans voted against Al Gore. I guess neither guy should have been president...
Also, 51.7% voted against Kerry.
Just a stupid measure you're trying to push here. It's also disappointing that you'd classify anyone who voted for Bush as an "abrasive ignorant jerk," as if thinking people cannot have legitimate differences and disagreements.
You've (in)conveniently set up your own straw man, here. I didn't claim all scientists think Gore's movie predicts what's really going to happen. I used it as a reference point for catastrophic global warming - you know - so people had an idea what I meant in comparison to observed global warming. You've knocked down Gore's on claims (bravo) but you didn't address my point.
The only reason to cap carbon emissions is to prevent catastrophic global warming. (well, the only "scientific" reason... I'd prefer not to get into the anti-capitalist, left-wing reasons here...) Several recent experiments have shown that carbon emissions have not and likely will not result in catastrophic global warming, because there is no multiplier effect. The increase that the climate models that alarmists are using did not materialize over the past decade, so those models are demonstrably flawed. Based on these findings, there is no risk of catastrophic warming. Cap-and-trade is neither necessary nor effective. Our time, efforts and resources should be directed towards more meaningful problems.
The disagreement is not over whether temperatures have risen (they have, slightly), but if there will be any sort of multiplier effect from carbon emissions that will result in the catastrophic global warming of the Al Gore films. There is no consensus on that theory. Models that predicted a multiplier have grossly overstated the results when compared to observed data over the last decade. And other experiments have shown no multiplier effect (including the recent cloud cover experiments at CERN). So the danger of catastrophic global warming as predicted in current models is probably either extremely unlikely or entirely non-existent. As such, action to reduce carbon emissions will prove meaningless from an environmental standpoint.
You don't think Fallout or Oblivion can be described as "killing people in new locations over and over?" Actually, you're right... Fallout is more like "killing people in the SAME location over and over." I agree they're great games, but when it comes down to it, they're little more than 245+ hours of killing legions of bad guys interspersed with 5 hours of cut scenes.
Apparently all these moviegoers are in another dimension, as neither Harry Potter nor Captain America will be in theaters in ours this July 4th weekend...
Do you blame that on the college, or the student who didn't fill out his withdrawal forms correctly? The problem with automated processes is that when someone doesn't do their part, the system keeps operating automatically.
I develop mostly internal apps for a very large company, but even for the external ones I'm the one who moves files to production. It's not that way for every department, but for ours it works. Better than waiting half a month to get a type-o fixed.
Yeah, I'm certain that's the way it went. I know a couple guys who applied but didn't make the cut. There are a ton of women who go to Celebrations, though. And Cosplay is a huge part of it. More Slave Leias than you can shake a stick at, and a good number of them respectable. I'd say overall there's about a 20/80 split female to male at Celebrations. For Dragon*Con it's closer to 40/60.
Put away your pom-poms, my friend. How can Microsoft be targeting "Casual gamers" with the Natal when Natal all by itself is going to cost nearly as much as a Wii? Right now you can get a Wii for $180 or a Wii + Sports Resort for $200. You think Microsoft is competing for that market with their $200 360 Arcade + $150 Natal? Casual gamers aren't going to drop $350 for Microsoft's "better product" when they can get an "acceptable product" from Nintendo for half that. The Wii's success to date is all the proof we need.
At $50 or $60, the Natal might have been a fun diversion for Microsoft's current user base, and it probably would have sold well. At $149 it's DOA. It's priced way too high for casuals, and it doesn't have the appeal for current gamers to drop that kind of cash. Unless Microsoft shows off some secret killer app that make flailing around an essential gaming experience, I can't see Natal becoming anything besides a punchline.
And the Tony Hawk Ride was spectacularly successful! Accessories FTW!!
The Wii Fit is $99, includes the full "game" it was designed for, and has a very specific target audience. Are fitness buffs who the Natal is aimed at? I haven't seen the jumping jacks app, yet. Comparisons seem to fall apart.
Reports are out that Natal is going to be introduced by Cirque du Soleil at E3. Perhaps Microsoft intends to corner the contortionist market. We all know 360 gamers to be tremendously fit, athletic, flexible individuals. Yeah, this Natal thing is guaranteed to hit that sweet spot with the 360's target audience.
Clearly its safe to assume you've never seen it -- or read anything about it.
Clearly you're dead wrong. I've been following the project since it was first announced. "A system that can track skeletal positions of four people at 30hz, with almost zero latency, while grabbing images of all four people, positioning them accurately in 3D and using a matrix microphone setup to track who is talking at any given moment" sounds fantastic in theory, but everything I read of the execution indicates that it's lacking. Impressions from their GDC demo were particularly damning. Here's one write-up: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/107/1077003p1.html
Has Natal been reprogrammed to address all these problems since March? Are developers no longer calling it a "big, buggy mess"?
Is Natal intended to be used with a secondary controller or not? So far I've seen no indication it is. If that's how it's designed, why have all press materials I've seen shown people with no controllers or accessories? If we're going to get a "gun" accessory to go with Natal so we have a trigger to pull, any idea on the cost?
What sort of "outside the box" games are they developing? I guess we'll get some idea at E3...
I've yet to see a demo of Natal that included a player holding a controller. It's all been people standing up pretending to catch a ball, or sitting down pretending to be holding a steering wheel. The point seems to be that you don't need a controller. But I certainly haven't watched every Natal video.
If you have to hold a controller to play a shooter, then what's the point of Natal? To track when you lean to the side to avoid incoming fire? That's not worth $149.
Microsoft took the worst "motion controller" concept and priced it outrageously. This thing is going to bomb. I don't know a single gamer who's excited about it. How can you play shooters without triggers?
The Webcam isn't the only detection device. The Move also has some sort of SixAxis motion sensing, otherwise the rotation seen in the LittleBigPlanet demo wouldn't be possible.
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I threw my $99 behind the project. Hopefully it turns out to be a fun system. That's a hell of a lot less than I paid for either my phone or my Playstation3. I don't expect to be playing Uncharted on the thing at that price... I just expect to play something comparable to what I have on my phone. My kids play iPod games for hours on end, so this console will see use one way or the other.
An article from January 2009? Seriously? Would you like to cite some articles on Phrenology while you're at it?
Don't go confusing the guy with math, now.
Clearly you should switch to Timeline format for all content.
Benefits ARE the big fail in your argument. Most people are compensated roughly 70% salary, 30% benefits. You're ignoring a huge chunk of money required to hire that extra person. And it's a chunk set to get significantly larger under Obamacare (assuming employers simply don't dump all their employees into Medicaid and pay the penalty). There's little wonder why employers are waiting to hire.
Having been to China on a business venture, I think the very last thing we Americans need to worry about is their efficiency. Bottled water FTW!!
No need for a new category... the notion itself is ridiculous. Are Sci-Fi geeks really pining so badly for an Oscar for one of "their" films? Do they need that validation? I don't. I'm just happy to see a good film from time to time. Hell - be happy we're going to see Avengers, Dark Knight, and Prometheus this year. I'm a hell of a lot more excited about that than I am the prospect of someone getting a little gold man.
If someone ever creates a Sci-Fi film that deserves an Oscar more than all the other films that year, it'll win one. Win because of quality, not because the suits created a little sub-award to placate you.
PS: Avatar didn't deserve a nomination, much less the award. I think that was a gesture for making a couple billion dollars while hitting all the correct political points.
Of course there's a good reason - Ronald O. Perelman is a big-time political donor!
You don't vote "against" a candidate - you vote FOR a candidate.
By your measure, 51.6% of VOTING Americans voted against Al Gore. I guess neither guy should have been president...
Also, 51.7% voted against Kerry.
Just a stupid measure you're trying to push here. It's also disappointing that you'd classify anyone who voted for Bush as an "abrasive ignorant jerk," as if thinking people cannot have legitimate differences and disagreements.
You've (in)conveniently set up your own straw man, here. I didn't claim all scientists think Gore's movie predicts what's really going to happen. I used it as a reference point for catastrophic global warming - you know - so people had an idea what I meant in comparison to observed global warming. You've knocked down Gore's on claims (bravo) but you didn't address my point. The only reason to cap carbon emissions is to prevent catastrophic global warming. (well, the only "scientific" reason... I'd prefer not to get into the anti-capitalist, left-wing reasons here...) Several recent experiments have shown that carbon emissions have not and likely will not result in catastrophic global warming, because there is no multiplier effect. The increase that the climate models that alarmists are using did not materialize over the past decade, so those models are demonstrably flawed. Based on these findings, there is no risk of catastrophic warming. Cap-and-trade is neither necessary nor effective. Our time, efforts and resources should be directed towards more meaningful problems.
The disagreement is not over whether temperatures have risen (they have, slightly), but if there will be any sort of multiplier effect from carbon emissions that will result in the catastrophic global warming of the Al Gore films. There is no consensus on that theory. Models that predicted a multiplier have grossly overstated the results when compared to observed data over the last decade. And other experiments have shown no multiplier effect (including the recent cloud cover experiments at CERN). So the danger of catastrophic global warming as predicted in current models is probably either extremely unlikely or entirely non-existent. As such, action to reduce carbon emissions will prove meaningless from an environmental standpoint.
You don't think Fallout or Oblivion can be described as "killing people in new locations over and over?" Actually, you're right... Fallout is more like "killing people in the SAME location over and over." I agree they're great games, but when it comes down to it, they're little more than 245+ hours of killing legions of bad guys interspersed with 5 hours of cut scenes.
Apparently all these moviegoers are in another dimension, as neither Harry Potter nor Captain America will be in theaters in ours this July 4th weekend...
Do you blame that on the college, or the student who didn't fill out his withdrawal forms correctly? The problem with automated processes is that when someone doesn't do their part, the system keeps operating automatically.
Hands down my favorite long-take... at the House of Blue Leaves. Just brilliant.
I develop mostly internal apps for a very large company, but even for the external ones I'm the one who moves files to production. It's not that way for every department, but for ours it works. Better than waiting half a month to get a type-o fixed.
Yeah, I'm certain that's the way it went. I know a couple guys who applied but didn't make the cut. There are a ton of women who go to Celebrations, though. And Cosplay is a huge part of it. More Slave Leias than you can shake a stick at, and a good number of them respectable. I'd say overall there's about a 20/80 split female to male at Celebrations. For Dragon*Con it's closer to 40/60.
Put away your pom-poms, my friend. How can Microsoft be targeting "Casual gamers" with the Natal when Natal all by itself is going to cost nearly as much as a Wii? Right now you can get a Wii for $180 or a Wii + Sports Resort for $200. You think Microsoft is competing for that market with their $200 360 Arcade + $150 Natal? Casual gamers aren't going to drop $350 for Microsoft's "better product" when they can get an "acceptable product" from Nintendo for half that. The Wii's success to date is all the proof we need.
At $50 or $60, the Natal might have been a fun diversion for Microsoft's current user base, and it probably would have sold well. At $149 it's DOA. It's priced way too high for casuals, and it doesn't have the appeal for current gamers to drop that kind of cash. Unless Microsoft shows off some secret killer app that make flailing around an essential gaming experience, I can't see Natal becoming anything besides a punchline.
And the Tony Hawk Ride was spectacularly successful! Accessories FTW!!
The Wii Fit is $99, includes the full "game" it was designed for, and has a very specific target audience. Are fitness buffs who the Natal is aimed at? I haven't seen the jumping jacks app, yet. Comparisons seem to fall apart.
Reports are out that Natal is going to be introduced by Cirque du Soleil at E3. Perhaps Microsoft intends to corner the contortionist market. We all know 360 gamers to be tremendously fit, athletic, flexible individuals. Yeah, this Natal thing is guaranteed to hit that sweet spot with the 360's target audience.
Clearly its safe to assume you've never seen it -- or read anything about it.
Clearly you're dead wrong. I've been following the project since it was first announced. "A system that can track skeletal positions of four people at 30hz, with almost zero latency, while grabbing images of all four people, positioning them accurately in 3D and using a matrix microphone setup to track who is talking at any given moment" sounds fantastic in theory, but everything I read of the execution indicates that it's lacking. Impressions from their GDC demo were particularly damning. Here's one write-up: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/107/1077003p1.html
Has Natal been reprogrammed to address all these problems since March? Are developers no longer calling it a "big, buggy mess"?
Is Natal intended to be used with a secondary controller or not? So far I've seen no indication it is. If that's how it's designed, why have all press materials I've seen shown people with no controllers or accessories? If we're going to get a "gun" accessory to go with Natal so we have a trigger to pull, any idea on the cost?
What sort of "outside the box" games are they developing? I guess we'll get some idea at E3...
I've yet to see a demo of Natal that included a player holding a controller. It's all been people standing up pretending to catch a ball, or sitting down pretending to be holding a steering wheel. The point seems to be that you don't need a controller. But I certainly haven't watched every Natal video.
If you have to hold a controller to play a shooter, then what's the point of Natal? To track when you lean to the side to avoid incoming fire? That's not worth $149.
So Natal is aimed at all those 360 gamers who enjoy Tug-of-War over Halo? Gotcha. You're right... this thing will be a blistering success!
Microsoft took the worst "motion controller" concept and priced it outrageously. This thing is going to bomb. I don't know a single gamer who's excited about it. How can you play shooters without triggers?
Clearly Obama wants a disconnected, uninformed, ignorant populace. All the better to force through socialism...
The Webcam isn't the only detection device. The Move also has some sort of SixAxis motion sensing, otherwise the rotation seen in the LittleBigPlanet demo wouldn't be possible.