Re:Sniff, sniff ... What's that, is it Common Sens
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Any politician who supports installing this technology will be immediately labelled as "Secretive" and "Likely To Be Supporting A Conspiracy".
In America, probably you're right.
But there are other governments in the world.
I sure bet China wouldn't have minded if they had had some technology that could have allowed them to suddenly disable all the cameras in the general vicinity of Tiannamen Square, Bejing on June 4, 1989. Even if this had only effected the locally made cameras in the hands of local citizens, or even just a proportion of them, that sure might have been nice for certain people.
A gimmick with time-travelling TNG characters is going to save the show?
Wasn't the thing that killed the show in the first place stupid implausible gimmicks and idiotic time travel plots?? I seem to remember they were doing fairly acceptably in public perception and ratings up until they started dragging that shit in.
It's like the people at UPN are going "oh no! the building is on fire, whatever shall we do? wait, i know, we'll ADD MORE FLAMES"
The thing that worries me is I do not see a duopoly as much better than a monopoly. I pretty much trust TakeTwo and approve of their policies and games, but in a long term sense if we just get shaken down to a point where there's just two companies that make sports games* and either you buy from one or the other, that's not good either for the games or the health of the overall video game market. I don't want video games to turn into coke vs. pepsi. I want to be able to maintain real diversity and opportunity.
* Not counting Nintendo's licensed-character offerings. Not to say they aren't good games, but they're "outside" the sports market, so to speak, NBA Street 3 nonwithstanding; it's basically just if the only way you can succeed in a market is to sneak in by keeping your feet firmly planted in some other market, that's not good. If that makes sense?
One thing to consider as significant here is that Nintendo's been rediculously secretive about their not-formally-announced consoles of late. They're almost approaching Steve Jobs-like proportions. Dev kits for the DS were in the hands of some developers since if I'm not mistaken like the November or December before E3, but Nintendo was able to keep the DS totally under wraps until the moment they chose to start giving out information-- heck, it wasn't even that long before E3 before the rumor that Nintendo was even going to announce anything at E3 started to surface in a serious way.
So in this particular case very likely the MSM is not going to report on the N5 because at this point, there's nothing known to report.
Meanwhile enough solid information is known about the XBox 2 to make speculation worth the bother, and Sony's been fairly cheerful about talking about the PS3, or at least the Cell. Whereas with the N5, what are they going to say? "Nintendo's doing... something!" So while Nintendo's getting the shaft from the MSM in a lot of ways, I don't know if we can chalk this particular case up to MSM idiocy unless E3 comes and goes and the MSM is still ignoring the N5.
But then what if the developer wanted to use the option pak at the same time?:)
Anyway, technically yeah, the option pak could serve as somewhere to plug in a cable so long as Nintendo is okay with closing off simultaneous usage of the option pak, and i really hope they give us a substitute GBA->GC cable in that way at some point. But this really is not the way Nintendo would do this. They've said over and over the DS is supposed to be an all-in-one connectivity machine...
Analog Devices did provide the accelerometers for Twist and Tumble, but are you sure about Wario Ware Twisted? It's being widely reported as using gyroscopic technology of some kind, and I've yet to see reports to the contrary. I can't find any hard confirmation that the "gyration" company Nintendo is reported to be working with provided the hardware for Twisted, but they [Gyration] claim they have gyroscopic sensors which are generally more accurate than accelerometers.
This has no bearing on the shit-filled-ness of the article, of course; anyone making up rumors about the Revolution would basically have to put in something about tilt sensing, that's what people are expecting from Revolution rumors at this point...
Think about it for a minute. This is so generic as to not really say anything; meanwhile, you could have made something up and posted it on some message board, and ComputerandVideoGames.com would have printed it, as would have slashdot. This particular rumor as near as I can gather originated from a forum post at n-sider citing a forum post on a nintendo.com forum citing "a source". Well then.
Meanwhile, if we look at what we actually know, this set of rumors has two small details that don't seem that they could be true. So putting aside "sources", here's what we can predict about the stuff in this article based on what Nintendo's actually said and done:
Gyroscopic tilt-sensing control is the most persistent rumor about the Nintendo Revolution (get it? "Revolution"?) and probably the most reasonable. Nintendo's apparently made some decent sized investments in that area, and this probably isn't just for Wario Ware Twisted. However this likely will not be the only unique feature of the Revolution.
The Nintendo DS WILL have connectivity with the Nintendo Revolution. We know this because Nintendo said so. Shortly before E3, shortly before the "it's a handheld with two screens" thing was announced, Nintendo explicitly said "we will be announcing at E3 a product which is neither a new Gamecube nor a new Game Boy, but will be able to connect wirelessly BOTH to the next gamecube and the next game boy". This is a paraphrase and I don't have a link, sorry; it might be possible to find one by looking through gaming news archives around that date. But this is the main problem with this set of rumors this slashdot story links; Nintendo probably wouldn't go back on a statement like that, and there isn't a clear reason why they would. If they don't, though, there's one obvious side-effect: The Revolution will have 802.11. There's no other way to connect to the DS.
Since if Nintendo keeps their word about the DS, 802.11 will be in the Revolution, well, that's out-of-the-box broadband potential right there. However we can't guess anything about how Nintendo will make use of this, if at all. All we really know about the online in the gamecube is what Reggie Fuls-Aime said in an interview a month or two ago (sorry, no link), where he put forth a very cryptic statement in which he said "online is a failed business model", then a couple sentences later said the next Nintendo console would have "long distance" and "community" gameplay features. So don't get your hopes up on anything, but expect whatever the internet features in the N5 are, they won't look like Xbox Live. What I'd almost suspect is that they're going to pull an online plan out of their ass and then try to insist on0 calling it something other than "online" (cuz, see.. it's wireless.. since there aren't any "lines".. get it).
The bit in the rumor about HD-DVD discs is incredibly unlikely. Nintendo hasn't yet announced who will be making the optical discs for the Revolution, but most likely it will be matsushita/panasonic. Matsushita manufactured the optical drive for the Gamecube, and it seems extremely likely Nintendo would go back to them for the optical drives for the N5; one, the drives worked extremely well, and are the chief reason why the Gamecube is the only console of this generation without a piracy problem; two, they'll probably have to go back to Matsushita if they want the Revolution's drive to be backward compatible with the Gamecube. The reason this is important is that Matsushita is one of the primary driving companies behind Blu-Ray. So most likely, the N5 will use proprietary deformed blu-ray discs, the same way that the Gamecube used little deformed DVD discs.
You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of person, I can tell;)
On the contrary, I am looking at the current situation and saying we can do better than this.
If you don't demand improvement you will never get it.
I can tell you flat out people would be not the tinest bit worse living the last 20 years without MS. I don't need a crystal ball to tell you this. I can speak from my own personal experience over that period as someone who does not buy Microsoft products. Meanwhile I can point to some technologies over the same period which unquestionably would have had at least some beneficial effects on the computing field in general had they not been destroyed by Microsoft interference...
I fail to see how "but Microsoft's profiteering hasn't erased ALL the gains in computing of the last 20 years!" is supposed to be particularly comforting.
Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
It is if, like Microsoft, you possess the ability to erect artificial barriers to entry.
And why expect the prices to go up [after Microsoft owns the market]?
Because that's what happens. Word processors didn't cost this much 10 years ago when the market is still healthy; maybe WordPerfect corporate edition cost something comparable to Word's inflated price, but viable low cost solutions were common. Now Word is hundreds of dollars and the alternatives are anemic, hard-to-find-in-stores things scrabbling for crumbs, half of which are volunteer-maintained open source projects.
One company getting to lock down a market for a trivial piece of software like a word processor or a spreadsheet and set prices arbitrarily is not natural or healthy. People just get used to things like this, and then afterward convince themselves that something worse would have happened if capitalism were still in effect.
What you say MS fears is called WebTV, and it failed
But before it failed, Microsoft bought it, remember? To an extent this brings up the question of whether it would have failed had Microsoft not bought it. I'd say the answer is "probably", because as you note it isn't a good idea; but there's that possibility that if Microsoft hadn't bought it the company could have continued to adapt, grow and change, and maybe held on. A small possibility, but it is there. Either way, the fact Microsoft bought it at all does indicate that whether the WebTV had a future or not, looked at it as something they for whatever reason wanted control of.
What MS really worries about, and what you got at least somewhat right, is the "Media Center" idea. Even that, though, strikes me as a flying car-type idea: one that sounds fascinating and is at least technologically feasible but never happens.
But it did happen; it's called the PSX. It was a failure. And according to Bill Gates, it's going to happen again with the XBox 2. I personally expect this to be a failure as well. But whether the "media center" has a future or not, Microsoft has definitely taken active steps to make sure that if it does, they'll have influence over it.
Not terribly familiar with what "business as usual" means for Microsoft, are you?
People keep dragging in this "lose money on the consoles, make money back on the games" thing. There's two problems.
First, this isn't something that's particularly followed by anyone successful in the videogame market. As far as I know the playstations weren't sold at a loss except very early in their respective lifespans, before production could be completely ramped up. The Gamecube is known to have been sold at a profit right up until the price drop to $99, and even then the loss was described by Nintendo reps as insignificant.
Second, this isn't the strategy that Microsoft follows. The strategy they follow is more like "you give the camera away and don't make it back on the film". The price of the XBox has gone down? Well, the division's still losing money like a sieve. Halo 2's sold a lot of copies but so did Halo 1; holding publishing rights to two successful games isn't going to hold back billions of dollars in losses, and Halo 2 isn't terribly likely to have much effect on H&E's bottom line except over this one quarter comprising its release.
They'll continue to lose money because they're going to do the same thing with the XBox 2 they did with the XBox 1. There's signs they're looking into cheaper production with the XBox 2-- the whole PowerPC thing, and the rumors about leaving out the hard drive-- but they've given all public indication that they still intend to have the most powerful console again next time, and that they also wish to beat their competitors to market. I seriously doubt they can do this without continuing to lose money, and why not? It isn't like the parent company's going to mind if they do continue to lose money indefinitely.
I've had for a very long time the suspicion that the XBox was basically just a big blindside at Sony. The XBox loses a huge amount of money, and looks as if it will continue to lose a huge amount of money right into the XBox 2 line; Microsoft must be doing this for some reason. My personal theory for awhile has been that at least one of Microsoft's motivations in spending all this money is because they see the Playstation as a potential future threat; i.e., they feared and fear that at some point the Playstation 2 or 3 or 4 will become so close in power and functionality to a PC that it will begin to supplant the PC for common tasks. This would be disastrous for Microsoft; their lockdown on the PC market is complete, but this doesn't protect them from the PC market itself being slowly eaten away at from the bottom by consumer electronics like the ones Sony makes. So to stave off this threat, Microsoft begins to instead grow the PC market it monopolizes downward, so that the PC (as it becomes the "Windows Media Center") begins to slowly suck up the consumer electronics market, competing directly with the Playstation, bringing the fight to Sony's door instead of Microsoft's. Since consumers wouldn't on their own be interested in a PC that supplants consumer electronics, Microsoft instead basically bribes them into being interested with subsidized hardware; they make a big money blackhole out of the XBox to undercut Sony's ability to maneuver with the Playstation, the way the money blackhole that was MSIE undercut Netscape's ability to maneuver.
This is, of course, all just conjecture.
But when I begin to see people seriously talking about the chip from the Playstation 3 eventually potentially being used in PC hardware, I begin to wonder if it's maybe reasonable conjecture...
Well, for the chip in a video game machine, that isn't really such a terribly unreasonable demand. The PS2 already requires some pretty specific knowledge of the hardware to program effectively for it.
That's kind of going to become a problem though if they're seriously expecting the Cell to be used outside the EVERYTHING-MUST-BE-OPTIMIZED world of video games. I mean, it seems like one of the big contributing factors in the death of the Itanium was that the hardware was so batshit bizarre that compilers couldn't effectively optimize for it...
Seriously, unless these bots have 360 degree vision, some sort of self destruct mode you are going to quickly see these bots, and their guns being put into the other sides hands.... How soon till we have robowarrior-takedowns.
I'm not even sure they need to do takedowns. How long until we see these things in the hands of other countries' militaries because the U.S. sold them to them?
I mean, just one example-- Iraq. Think about it. In eight days Iraq has elections. Last any solid news got out, indications were that the elections would be held in about 50% of the country, and indications were that the elections are quite likely to be won by a group more or less indistinguishable from someone like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but it's possible that by luck or U.S. interference we'll wind up-- either in eight days or within the year-- with a stable government that is amenable to U.S. interests. If this happens we're going to want to make this government self-sufficient as soon as possible. We're probably going to try to pull our soldiers out as quickly as we can (except for some strategic bases) and declare the war over. But if we're going to stop providing direct military support to whatever random government Iraq has at the end of this year, we're going to need to give them support of certain other kinds. You know. Money. Weapons. Because the war against the "insurgents" won't be over.
Similarly, in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was our Ally, and he was fighting a war against Iran, so we sold him lots of military technology and weapons-- including technology used to create and deliver chemical and biological weapons-- and brokered the sale of lots more. We didn't think in the slightest about what might be done with those weapons in the future; he was our Ally.
Well, right now America's being run by the exact same people that sold Saddam Hussein the means to use chemical and biological weapons in the 80s, and they haven't shown any indication of learning from their past. So once post-election Iraq becomes our Ally (assuming of course it doesn't just plunge back into anarchy once Feb. 1 comes), we'll probably sell them whatever weapons they need, whatever they ask for. If these RC robot soldiers turn out to work well, and we can increase production, we might well wind up selling some of these robots to the new Iraq. I mean, why not? They seem like just the thing to quickly put down "insurgencies".
I wonder where those weapons will be and what they'll be used for in 20 years?
Even if we had the technology and budget to replace ALL the soldiers with robots-- which we don't, this system is going to be put in place only in specific places and only for certain very specific purposes-- we wouldn't.
We have to keep a certain amount of meat on the ground. If we don't, the right wing won't have its "but if you don't unquestioningly support the arbitrary conditions under and tactics by which we send our armed forces to die, you aren't Supporting Our Troops!" fallacy to hide behind. That would be bad; then they'd actually have to answer for why they're spending so much of our money on driving into anarchy and then sloppily trying to rebuild a country of no particular geopolitical importance except that it used to be run by a man who is easy to demonize. After all, "Support Our Robots" doesn't have the same vicious ring to it, does it?
Believe it or not, the world still existed before 1900. Ever hear of Francis Cabot Lowell? In the early 1800s Britain's industry had some of the best industrial technology in the world, and they viciously protected their trade secrets, trying to make sure that no one else could get hold of their stuff. Francis Cabot Lowell around 1810 wanted to start some modern textile mills in New England, so he went over to England, got a job in a textile mill, examined the machines until he understood them, reverse-engineered the schematics and then memorized them, and came back to New England knowing how to build them himself. This is how the powered loom came to North America, It was the first example of industrial espionage in history that I'm aware of.
If you look at the period during which the U.S. began its rise as an international economic power-- not the post-Reconstruction period during which it had already completed that rise, which is where Edison existed-- you see LOTS of examples of stuff like this, over multiple areas of intellectual property. Witness Charles Dickens' desperate attempts to get America's book publishers to actually respect his copyrights...
On the one hand, people complain about the FCC slapping fines on large corporations for broadcasting media that they deem "inappropriate". Then in the very same breath, they complain about the FCC supporting large corporations. If the FCC was truly all about supporting large networks, they would allow them to appeal to the ever-increasing moral decadence of our society completely unharrassed.
Well, this is only the case if you view the Christian Coalitian as something other than a large corporation, right?
^_^
Anyway, what you seem to be gesturing at is that the FCC is currently in favor of "moral decency" standards on television, and also currently in favor of corporate-owned consolidation in the media market. Whereas the consensus viewpoint on Slashdot seems currently to be that we should have diversity of ownership and diversity of content (i.e., low regulation of 'obscenity') in the media market.
If you oversimplify the viewpoint commonly seen on slashdot to "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL", then perhaps it doesn't really make sense. The trick here is that "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL" is not the viewpoint actually being particularly expressed by anyone; it's just a straw man. Back in reality, meanwhile, it's reasonable to be opposed to policies that turn the FCC into a moneymaking scheme for an increasingly small number of corporate players at the detriment of both the citizen and the citizen's good derived from the public airwaves; and it is reasonable to be opposed to policies which allow a small vocal minority of self-appointed morality police to determine how the citizenry as a whole makes use of the public airwaves; and these two things are not in any way incompatible.
can they actually create something great enough to lure back all of the fans who are still aching with the memory of how unadulteratedly AWFUL the X Files became in the last few seasons once Fox wrested control of the show away from Carter and everybody who made the show good or interesting had quit...
Once the reputation for mediocrity sets in... Slashdot is on the cutting edge of this here, the public hasn't seen it, but they will... they'll go into a death spiral.
Mainstream music has a reputation of mediocrity but that doesn't hurt its sales one bit. People don't care about the mediocrity because their expectations have been adjusted down until they assume mediocrity is the normal state of things; more than that, they assume that mediocrity is unavoidable, and not only is there no reason they should expect more, but they should be grateful that they are able to get this music and grateful that the RIAA has the grace to drop the few breadcrumbs they allow to the few elect artists they can be bothered to allow into the major label umbrella.
All that EA has to do is create that same adjusting of expectations in the video game industry. This isn't hard, and all they have to do is buy enough things. They probably don't even need to try to control the distribution (music stores) and publicization (radio) channels the way the recording industry cartel does. All they have to do is buy up publishers (like ubi soft), so that the capital and publishing rights available by getting a game published from an alternate publisher come down to a small minority of table scraps that cannot possibly sustain any notable number of serious developers making anything except niche and budget titles; and buy up licenses(like the NFL and most major movies of late) so that if a non-EA developer wants to make a game containing characters people have heard of, they better be either Nintendo or Blizzard.
The expectations are already going down. Many video game purchasers already believe mediocrity to simply be the normal state of things. A sizable portion of the video game market buys Madden every year just because it's Madden, without thinking of whether there might be alternatives. Many video game reviewers already ignore the difference between mediocrity and quality and review their games based on what they think the readers want to hear about the game, not on how they think their readers would react to playing the game. Halo 2 was declared by many sources game of the year sight unseen, just because those sources thought that was what they were expected to do.
Quality is, of course, still the best recipe for success, so we haven't reached any point of true danger yet. But once consumers begin to see mediocre products as what to expect, that point where it dawns on them they're paying for mediocrity ceases to have any meaning. They'll realize they're paying for tripe, then shrug, go "eh, but what can you do", and buy more.
and that they'd spoken often with Ubi representatives
And that's why the Ubi Soft CEO was going to the media and going "this came out of the blue without warning, and this is an industry where such investments are usually communicated about to the company ahead of time, which is why we don't know how to interpret this except as hostile"?
I just kind of assumed from the name that this was the point... since after you overclock the machine, you're likely to have faulty components you didn't before...
Slashdot Mirror
Any politician who supports installing this technology will be immediately labelled as "Secretive" and "Likely To Be Supporting A Conspiracy".
In America, probably you're right.
But there are other governments in the world.
I sure bet China wouldn't have minded if they had had some technology that could have allowed them to suddenly disable all the cameras in the general vicinity of Tiannamen Square, Bejing on June 4, 1989. Even if this had only effected the locally made cameras in the hands of local citizens, or even just a proportion of them, that sure might have been nice for certain people.
A gimmick with time-travelling TNG characters is going to save the show?
Wasn't the thing that killed the show in the first place stupid implausible gimmicks and idiotic time travel plots?? I seem to remember they were doing fairly acceptably in public perception and ratings up until they started dragging that shit in.
It's like the people at UPN are going "oh no! the building is on fire, whatever shall we do? wait, i know, we'll ADD MORE FLAMES"
The thing that worries me is I do not see a duopoly as much better than a monopoly. I pretty much trust TakeTwo and approve of their policies and games, but in a long term sense if we just get shaken down to a point where there's just two companies that make sports games* and either you buy from one or the other, that's not good either for the games or the health of the overall video game market. I don't want video games to turn into coke vs. pepsi. I want to be able to maintain real diversity and opportunity.
* Not counting Nintendo's licensed-character offerings. Not to say they aren't good games, but they're "outside" the sports market, so to speak, NBA Street 3 nonwithstanding; it's basically just if the only way you can succeed in a market is to sneak in by keeping your feet firmly planted in some other market, that's not good. If that makes sense?
One thing to consider as significant here is that Nintendo's been rediculously secretive about their not-formally-announced consoles of late. They're almost approaching Steve Jobs-like proportions. Dev kits for the DS were in the hands of some developers since if I'm not mistaken like the November or December before E3, but Nintendo was able to keep the DS totally under wraps until the moment they chose to start giving out information-- heck, it wasn't even that long before E3 before the rumor that Nintendo was even going to announce anything at E3 started to surface in a serious way.
So in this particular case very likely the MSM is not going to report on the N5 because at this point, there's nothing known to report.
Meanwhile enough solid information is known about the XBox 2 to make speculation worth the bother, and Sony's been fairly cheerful about talking about the PS3, or at least the Cell. Whereas with the N5, what are they going to say? "Nintendo's doing... something!" So while Nintendo's getting the shaft from the MSM in a lot of ways, I don't know if we can chalk this particular case up to MSM idiocy unless E3 comes and goes and the MSM is still ignoring the N5.
But then what if the developer wanted to use the option pak at the same time? :)
Anyway, technically yeah, the option pak could serve as somewhere to plug in a cable so long as Nintendo is okay with closing off simultaneous usage of the option pak, and i really hope they give us a substitute GBA->GC cable in that way at some point. But this really is not the way Nintendo would do this. They've said over and over the DS is supposed to be an all-in-one connectivity machine...
Analog Devices did provide the accelerometers for Twist and Tumble, but are you sure about Wario Ware Twisted? It's being widely reported as using gyroscopic technology of some kind, and I've yet to see reports to the contrary. I can't find any hard confirmation that the "gyration" company Nintendo is reported to be working with provided the hardware for Twisted, but they [Gyration] claim they have gyroscopic sensors which are generally more accurate than accelerometers.
This has no bearing on the shit-filled-ness of the article, of course; anyone making up rumors about the Revolution would basically have to put in something about tilt sensing, that's what people are expecting from Revolution rumors at this point...
Judging by Mario Tennis and Mario Golf, I'm pretty sure Mario Baseball would be a lot more fun than real baseball.
Well I guess you'll find out for sure soon enough.
Meanwhile, if we look at what we actually know, this set of rumors has two small details that don't seem that they could be true. So putting aside "sources", here's what we can predict about the stuff in this article based on what Nintendo's actually said and done:
You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of person, I can tell ;)
On the contrary, I am looking at the current situation and saying we can do better than this.
If you don't demand improvement you will never get it.
I can tell you flat out people would be not the tinest bit worse living the last 20 years without MS. I don't need a crystal ball to tell you this. I can speak from my own personal experience over that period as someone who does not buy Microsoft products. Meanwhile I can point to some technologies over the same period which unquestionably would have had at least some beneficial effects on the computing field in general had they not been destroyed by Microsoft interference...
I fail to see how "but Microsoft's profiteering hasn't erased ALL the gains in computing of the last 20 years!" is supposed to be particularly comforting.
Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
It is if, like Microsoft, you possess the ability to erect artificial barriers to entry.
And why expect the prices to go up [after Microsoft owns the market]?
Because that's what happens. Word processors didn't cost this much 10 years ago when the market is still healthy; maybe WordPerfect corporate edition cost something comparable to Word's inflated price, but viable low cost solutions were common. Now Word is hundreds of dollars and the alternatives are anemic, hard-to-find-in-stores things scrabbling for crumbs, half of which are volunteer-maintained open source projects.
One company getting to lock down a market for a trivial piece of software like a word processor or a spreadsheet and set prices arbitrarily is not natural or healthy. People just get used to things like this, and then afterward convince themselves that something worse would have happened if capitalism were still in effect.
Hello and welcome to 1995.
What you say MS fears is called WebTV, and it failed
But before it failed, Microsoft bought it, remember? To an extent this brings up the question of whether it would have failed had Microsoft not bought it. I'd say the answer is "probably", because as you note it isn't a good idea; but there's that possibility that if Microsoft hadn't bought it the company could have continued to adapt, grow and change, and maybe held on. A small possibility, but it is there. Either way, the fact Microsoft bought it at all does indicate that whether the WebTV had a future or not, looked at it as something they for whatever reason wanted control of.
What MS really worries about, and what you got at least somewhat right, is the "Media Center" idea. Even that, though, strikes me as a flying car-type idea: one that sounds fascinating and is at least technologically feasible but never happens.
But it did happen; it's called the PSX. It was a failure. And according to Bill Gates, it's going to happen again with the XBox 2. I personally expect this to be a failure as well. But whether the "media center" has a future or not, Microsoft has definitely taken active steps to make sure that if it does, they'll have influence over it.
It's just business as usual.
Not terribly familiar with what "business as usual" means for Microsoft, are you?
People keep dragging in this "lose money on the consoles, make money back on the games" thing. There's two problems.
First, this isn't something that's particularly followed by anyone successful in the videogame market. As far as I know the playstations weren't sold at a loss except very early in their respective lifespans, before production could be completely ramped up. The Gamecube is known to have been sold at a profit right up until the price drop to $99, and even then the loss was described by Nintendo reps as insignificant.
Second, this isn't the strategy that Microsoft follows. The strategy they follow is more like "you give the camera away and don't make it back on the film". The price of the XBox has gone down? Well, the division's still losing money like a sieve. Halo 2's sold a lot of copies but so did Halo 1; holding publishing rights to two successful games isn't going to hold back billions of dollars in losses, and Halo 2 isn't terribly likely to have much effect on H&E's bottom line except over this one quarter comprising its release.
They'll continue to lose money because they're going to do the same thing with the XBox 2 they did with the XBox 1. There's signs they're looking into cheaper production with the XBox 2-- the whole PowerPC thing, and the rumors about leaving out the hard drive-- but they've given all public indication that they still intend to have the most powerful console again next time, and that they also wish to beat their competitors to market. I seriously doubt they can do this without continuing to lose money, and why not? It isn't like the parent company's going to mind if they do continue to lose money indefinitely.
I've had for a very long time the suspicion that the XBox was basically just a big blindside at Sony. The XBox loses a huge amount of money, and looks as if it will continue to lose a huge amount of money right into the XBox 2 line; Microsoft must be doing this for some reason. My personal theory for awhile has been that at least one of Microsoft's motivations in spending all this money is because they see the Playstation as a potential future threat; i.e., they feared and fear that at some point the Playstation 2 or 3 or 4 will become so close in power and functionality to a PC that it will begin to supplant the PC for common tasks. This would be disastrous for Microsoft; their lockdown on the PC market is complete, but this doesn't protect them from the PC market itself being slowly eaten away at from the bottom by consumer electronics like the ones Sony makes. So to stave off this threat, Microsoft begins to instead grow the PC market it monopolizes downward, so that the PC (as it becomes the "Windows Media Center") begins to slowly suck up the consumer electronics market, competing directly with the Playstation, bringing the fight to Sony's door instead of Microsoft's. Since consumers wouldn't on their own be interested in a PC that supplants consumer electronics, Microsoft instead basically bribes them into being interested with subsidized hardware; they make a big money blackhole out of the XBox to undercut Sony's ability to maneuver with the Playstation, the way the money blackhole that was MSIE undercut Netscape's ability to maneuver.
This is, of course, all just conjecture.
But when I begin to see people seriously talking about the chip from the Playstation 3 eventually potentially being used in PC hardware, I begin to wonder if it's maybe reasonable conjecture...
Well, for the chip in a video game machine, that isn't really such a terribly unreasonable demand. The PS2 already requires some pretty specific knowledge of the hardware to program effectively for it.
That's kind of going to become a problem though if they're seriously expecting the Cell to be used outside the EVERYTHING-MUST-BE-OPTIMIZED world of video games. I mean, it seems like one of the big contributing factors in the death of the Itanium was that the hardware was so batshit bizarre that compilers couldn't effectively optimize for it...
Seriously, unless these bots have 360 degree vision, some sort of self destruct mode you are going to quickly see these bots, and their guns being put into the other sides hands. ... How soon till we have robowarrior-takedowns.
I'm not even sure they need to do takedowns. How long until we see these things in the hands of other countries' militaries because the U.S. sold them to them?
I mean, just one example-- Iraq. Think about it. In eight days Iraq has elections. Last any solid news got out, indications were that the elections would be held in about 50% of the country, and indications were that the elections are quite likely to be won by a group more or less indistinguishable from someone like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but it's possible that by luck or U.S. interference we'll wind up-- either in eight days or within the year-- with a stable government that is amenable to U.S. interests. If this happens we're going to want to make this government self-sufficient as soon as possible. We're probably going to try to pull our soldiers out as quickly as we can (except for some strategic bases) and declare the war over. But if we're going to stop providing direct military support to whatever random government Iraq has at the end of this year, we're going to need to give them support of certain other kinds. You know. Money. Weapons. Because the war against the "insurgents" won't be over.
Similarly, in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was our Ally, and he was fighting a war against Iran, so we sold him lots of military technology and weapons-- including technology used to create and deliver chemical and biological weapons-- and brokered the sale of lots more. We didn't think in the slightest about what might be done with those weapons in the future; he was our Ally.
Well, right now America's being run by the exact same people that sold Saddam Hussein the means to use chemical and biological weapons in the 80s, and they haven't shown any indication of learning from their past. So once post-election Iraq becomes our Ally (assuming of course it doesn't just plunge back into anarchy once Feb. 1 comes), we'll probably sell them whatever weapons they need, whatever they ask for. If these RC robot soldiers turn out to work well, and we can increase production, we might well wind up selling some of these robots to the new Iraq. I mean, why not? They seem like just the thing to quickly put down "insurgencies".
I wonder where those weapons will be and what they'll be used for in 20 years?
Even if we had the technology and budget to replace ALL the soldiers with robots-- which we don't, this system is going to be put in place only in specific places and only for certain very specific purposes-- we wouldn't.
We have to keep a certain amount of meat on the ground. If we don't, the right wing won't have its "but if you don't unquestioningly support the arbitrary conditions under and tactics by which we send our armed forces to die, you aren't Supporting Our Troops!" fallacy to hide behind. That would be bad; then they'd actually have to answer for why they're spending so much of our money on driving into anarchy and then sloppily trying to rebuild a country of no particular geopolitical importance except that it used to be run by a man who is easy to demonize. After all, "Support Our Robots" doesn't have the same vicious ring to it, does it?
Believe it or not, the world still existed before 1900. Ever hear of Francis Cabot Lowell? In the early 1800s Britain's industry had some of the best industrial technology in the world, and they viciously protected their trade secrets, trying to make sure that no one else could get hold of their stuff. Francis Cabot Lowell around 1810 wanted to start some modern textile mills in New England, so he went over to England, got a job in a textile mill, examined the machines until he understood them, reverse-engineered the schematics and then memorized them, and came back to New England knowing how to build them himself. This is how the powered loom came to North America, It was the first example of industrial espionage in history that I'm aware of.
If you look at the period during which the U.S. began its rise as an international economic power-- not the post-Reconstruction period during which it had already completed that rise, which is where Edison existed-- you see LOTS of examples of stuff like this, over multiple areas of intellectual property. Witness Charles Dickens' desperate attempts to get America's book publishers to actually respect his copyrights...
On the one hand, people complain about the FCC slapping fines on large corporations for broadcasting media that they deem "inappropriate". Then in the very same breath, they complain about the FCC supporting large corporations. If the FCC was truly all about supporting large networks, they would allow them to appeal to the ever-increasing moral decadence of our society completely unharrassed.
Well, this is only the case if you view the Christian Coalitian as something other than a large corporation, right?
^_^
Anyway, what you seem to be gesturing at is that the FCC is currently in favor of "moral decency" standards on television, and also currently in favor of corporate-owned consolidation in the media market. Whereas the consensus viewpoint on Slashdot seems currently to be that we should have diversity of ownership and diversity of content (i.e., low regulation of 'obscenity') in the media market.
If you oversimplify the viewpoint commonly seen on slashdot to "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL", then perhaps it doesn't really make sense. The trick here is that "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL" is not the viewpoint actually being particularly expressed by anyone; it's just a straw man. Back in reality, meanwhile, it's reasonable to be opposed to policies that turn the FCC into a moneymaking scheme for an increasingly small number of corporate players at the detriment of both the citizen and the citizen's good derived from the public airwaves; and it is reasonable to be opposed to policies which allow a small vocal minority of self-appointed morality police to determine how the citizenry as a whole makes use of the public airwaves; and these two things are not in any way incompatible.
To IBM's summary judgment requests from a month or two ago?
Still being processed? Delayed pending SCO's response to its new discovery?
can they actually create something great enough to lure back all of the fans who are still aching with the memory of how unadulteratedly AWFUL the X Files became in the last few seasons once Fox wrested control of the show away from Carter and everybody who made the show good or interesting had quit...
Once the reputation for mediocrity sets in... Slashdot is on the cutting edge of this here, the public hasn't seen it, but they will... they'll go into a death spiral.
Mainstream music has a reputation of mediocrity but that doesn't hurt its sales one bit. People don't care about the mediocrity because their expectations have been adjusted down until they assume mediocrity is the normal state of things; more than that, they assume that mediocrity is unavoidable, and not only is there no reason they should expect more, but they should be grateful that they are able to get this music and grateful that the RIAA has the grace to drop the few breadcrumbs they allow to the few elect artists they can be bothered to allow into the major label umbrella.
All that EA has to do is create that same adjusting of expectations in the video game industry. This isn't hard, and all they have to do is buy enough things. They probably don't even need to try to control the distribution (music stores) and publicization (radio) channels the way the recording industry cartel does. All they have to do is buy up publishers (like ubi soft), so that the capital and publishing rights available by getting a game published from an alternate publisher come down to a small minority of table scraps that cannot possibly sustain any notable number of serious developers making anything except niche and budget titles; and buy up licenses(like the NFL and most major movies of late) so that if a non-EA developer wants to make a game containing characters people have heard of, they better be either Nintendo or Blizzard.
The expectations are already going down. Many video game purchasers already believe mediocrity to simply be the normal state of things. A sizable portion of the video game market buys Madden every year just because it's Madden, without thinking of whether there might be alternatives. Many video game reviewers already ignore the difference between mediocrity and quality and review their games based on what they think the readers want to hear about the game, not on how they think their readers would react to playing the game. Halo 2 was declared by many sources game of the year sight unseen, just because those sources thought that was what they were expected to do.
Quality is, of course, still the best recipe for success, so we haven't reached any point of true danger yet. But once consumers begin to see mediocre products as what to expect, that point where it dawns on them they're paying for mediocrity ceases to have any meaning. They'll realize they're paying for tripe, then shrug, go "eh, but what can you do", and buy more.
and that they'd spoken often with Ubi representatives
And that's why the Ubi Soft CEO was going to the media and going "this came out of the blue without warning, and this is an industry where such investments are usually communicated about to the company ahead of time, which is why we don't know how to interpret this except as hostile"?
Hmm.
However, burning-in can show a faulty components.
I just kind of assumed from the name that this was the point... since after you overclock the machine, you're likely to have faulty components you didn't before...