The Bush administration certainly didn't invent ignoring white collar crime, nor did I say they did. However they are certainly formalizing the current model by which this occurs, I.E. effective taxation, which is why I mentioned them. I would argue you could certainly show the early signs of a shift in general policy towards these things in in the last few years; previous to this white collar crime was largely simply ignored.
But who's to say it isn't still beneficial? Lycos probably caused some problems for spammers with this, or made them feel less secure, in the week this stunt was running. More importantly, look at all the publicity Lycos got out of this; if it wasn't for this spam thing I probably wouldn't have even thought about Lycos's existence once in the second half of this year, and probably you or most of the other people here wouldn't have either. Instead, thanks to makelovenotspam, they've been rescued for at least a moment from obscurity and irrelivance and they've been all over the headlines for a week. Meanwhile, by getting out now Lycos possibly avoids the otherwise-almost-certain legal problems from all of this.
Was makelovenotspam, in its short life, effective? Almost certainly not. Was makelovenotspam a public good? I'd bet not. Was makelovenotspam good for Lycos?... well probably.
Little problem with the decimal point there, I meant $160 million not $1.6 million. This doesn't change anything I've said though, and that's still less than half of €345 million...
Not quite. It's a $250,000 fine (and in some cases some short jail terms) for each of the executives and a $1.6 million fine for the company, and it would be awfully weird for any of this to be appealed as it all appears to be part of plea agreements. Unfortunately, this is still quite probably not enough to realistically undo the gains that either the executives (how much did Ulrich Schumacher make a year?) or the company made off of the price fixing action. In fact as far as I can tell it appears that the company fine may not have even been as large as the litigation costs Infineon spent in the court cases that preceded the fine.
But this just appears to be the model being pioneered for widescale use by the Bush Department of Justice: Corporate crime, defrauding investors and consumers, using a company on which other peoples' livelihoods rest as a device to line your own pockets, antitrust violations, and similar things aren't illegal anymore, exactly; they're just taxed.
Of course, for whatever reason, we call them fines instead of taxes-- and go through the formality of preceding them with a court case-- but this really isn't much of a meaningful difference. Even if you get caught doing such things it is increasingly rare that the penalty for breaking the law really exceeds the benefits of having broken the law; in some cases, such as the Microsoft antitrust actions of the late 90s, breaking the law and then simply paying the fine for having done so appears to have been the best long-term business decision available. In this sort of context the fines really cease to have any punitive nature and criminality just becomes another potential strategy in the playbook of a discerning executive. The risk is there that you will be made an example, Martha Stewart style, and meaningful jail time will occur and families and careers will be ruined; but the risk is acceptable, and it may turn out to be worth it in the long run even in the worst case scenario.
As for the government's point of view, the upshot, it seems, at this point is that the government doesn't object in any form to white collar crime, antitrust violations or executive malfeasance; it just wants a cut of the crime's profits.
Meanwhile, Infineon isn't quite off the hook yet; this fine is just the U.S. response. As far as I know Infineon is facing similar charges in Europe which have not gone through yet...
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
Uh, we're the people who pay google's paychecks?
Who is Google to question what its users want?
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Considering Google bought up all the significant USENET archives in existence, wouldn't that be a bit hard?
If Google had come up with a service and now they were scaling it back, I would consider it silly to complain about this, since we'd all just be where we were before Google Groups was set up. The fact that Google Groups was formed by purchasing DejaNews makes things... a bit different.
To have a one-stop shop for communication is pretty much what it's all about. E-mail, instant messaging, fax, voice, photos, movies, TV, radio, and the blog (considered to be the future of websites) converging in a simple-to-use way. This should be something to look forward to.
The problem is that this all-communication-converges-in-one-product thing was something that was available literally decades ago in the form of, say, Lotus Notes and similar products. What people then decided-- leading to this whole "internet" thing-- was that what they wanted wasn't a "one stop shop", they wanted to be able to communicate with people. Communicating meant giving up the idea of one single product, or one single communication method, and instead going for something more cooperative and inclusive. This meant slowing down the process by which functionality appeared, because a common ground had to be established before things could move forward. But it also meant that once that functionality took hold, it was universal.
Microsoft, not big on cooperation, is trying to reverse this process. They successfully brought progress in communications methods on the internet to a screeching halt by grabbing a stranglehold on the web browser market; this allowed them to serve as a sort of gatekeeper for which technologies take hold on the WWW. They've used this gatekeeper power to basically seal the gate shut; MSIE has basically not advanced at all, or even really been significantly updated until the popup blocker in SP2, since Netscape died. Since you kind of have to work with MSIE users in order for a web technology to catch on, this means there's been no significant advancement in the web browser since Netscape (not a good software company, but at least a viable commercial threat and so an impetus for Microsoft to continue improving their products) died. Now Microsoft's trying to present a solution to the problem they created by ending the old gradual cooperative model by which web standards were once developed and deployed, by introducing alterations to the normal web communication paradigm. But, of course, you have to use MSN Messenger and MSIE to make that altered paradigm work. It's being claimed elsewhere on this board that Firefox users are shut out from features of these web boards. I assume this means that I, as a mac user, am shut out as well. At the moment this is no problem, since I have no need to use any of these MSN blog sites. But if people begin erecting content in any numbers using Microsoft's blog software, I am wondering how long this will last.
If by making the Internet relevant to the average person they have to make the Internet irrelivant to people who don't use Microsoft products-- or shut out non-MS users from being able to communicate fully with the average person-- then yeah, that's a horrible goal. I don't want the internet to be a one stop shop. I want the internet to be what it promised to be at first: a place where barriers to communication are naturally broken down. If you're going to begin erecting barriers to communication on the internet I don't see what's interesting about it.
As far as I can tell, there is a pretty serious difference between doubt about nuclear energy in the 40s ("there's this natural force that we can directly detect the influence of, but we aren't quite sure how to harness it") and doubt about Cold Fusion today ("there's this process that *might* be resulting in energy production for some reason, or it *might* just be we're not measuring the outcome right").
It's not like we should expect results immediately, and if there's some kind of unexplained effect occurring as regards deuterides we obviously should find out what it is rather than just writing it off. But I do kind of expect after 20 years someone ought to be able to provide a better justification why we should think anything at all is happening here than the ones I've generally seen.
The idea is brilliant; since 90% of the people who find out about hacked sites find out after the compromised site has been fixed, and many don't even bother looking at the hack mirrors, you don't actually need to compromise a site in order for it to be reported as "hacked". Just directly target Slashdot and similar news sites and convince them the site has been hacked, and you get all the effect and infamy of an actual hack with none of the work or legal dangers.
Option 1: Google provides a censored Google News China site; the real Google News site gets chinawalled. People who know how to circumvent the firewall can read normal Google News. Everyone else is left having to read the censored version.
Option 2: Google does not provide a censored Google News China site; the Google News site gets chinawalled. People who know how to circumvent the firewall can read Google News. Everyone else can't.
One could make a case that it's unconditionally unethical to do business with a fascist* regime, and option 1 is inherently unconscionable. I however would argue that from a practical standpoint, there are some instances where refusing to do business with a fascist regime would have a potential positive effect for the regime's subjects, and some instances where it would not.
This is one of the latter cases.
* You're probably going to tell me I should have used some slightly different meaningless label here. I say: Whatever.
The studios will never "win," they'll only be able to manage their losses.
You are working on the assumption that the "win" condition for studios is to prevent piracy. This assumption may not be accurate. Another possibility is that the goals of the studios have nothing to do with preventing piracy or preventing bootleggers, and everything to do with keeping average [mostly middle class american] consumers from being able to make copies of their hdvds when they are scratched, or skip past the on-disc commercials before the movie begins, or take unauthorized framecaptures, or basically just in some way freely exercise their theoretical fair use rights.
It isn't about money with the ??AAs. It's about control...
few think of it as terrorism even today as the victims were so dehumanised
Well, almost ever history book I'd seen previous to September 11, 2001 referred to the WWII bombing campaigns-- both by the nazis and the allies-- as "Terror Bombing".
I haven't seen any history books printed since then. I'd be curious to see whether this phrase remains in use now.
Because bootloaders for import discs were already widely and legally available, and you don't need a modchip, just a bootloader disc, to play GC games in the wrong region.
There isn't one. It's just a MIDI arpeggiator plugged into a drum machine. I was originally going to switch my sig to a different mp3 of randomish noise every few weeks, but then I forgot. I should do that tonight.
It seems the shortages are real, not hype, but it is not really something to worry about. Basically there are serious shortages in some areas but no problem whatsoever in others. It seems that outlets of the big video game chains (EBGames/Gamestop) often had shortages, and sometimes didn't even get enough units to cover their preorders, but more general stores that don't generally do the preordering thing (Best Buy, Target) you can just walk in and buy one.
There are also reports of shortages of a couple of the games, specifically Feel the Magic and Mr. Driller. I don't know how accurate these reports are. It's unfortunate it seems there's been a shortage of the good games but no problems getting the EA stuff:(
Now, whether there will be shortages after Black Friday is another question altogether.
It can do whatever any other device with an 802.11 wireless ethernet repeater can, as long as you can get software that does it.
At this exact moment there is no software available for the DS which uses the wireless to connect to the internet. The only announced software so far which is known to use the wireless to connect to the internet is Nanostray, a shooter by the Iridium 3D people, which uses wifi to connect to an internet high score board.
Nintendo representatives seemed enthusiastic about the idea of a web browser for the DS, so I assume if someone goes to Nintendo asking for a license to make a DS web browser they'll get it.
and can its 802.11b hardware act as a repeater, so wireless games... can be daisy-chained?
This can be done; there's a DS game (I think Japan only right now) called "ping pals" that repeats in such a way that up to 128 people can connect to each other over the wireless, so long as there's an unbroken chain of DSes between them to relay the signal. I think most games require all the players to be in a 10-30 yard radius though.
Nintendo used weird proprietary optical discs in the Gamecube that aren't used for anything at all except the Gamecube. This turned out to work extremely well; although the Gamecube has the weakest copy protection of any console this generation (bootloader discs are sold legally in stores), it is the only console this generation without a significant piracy problem. Nintendo will probably do the same thing with their next console.
However: The Gamecube optical discs and disc drives, developed by Matsushita/Panasonic, were somewhat similar in nature to DVDs, and Panasonic actually sold a device in Japan which used a single laser to play both DVDs and Gamecube games.
It has been widely speculated that Nintendo will once again ask Matsushita to create the optical drives for the next Nintendo console, since they seem to have done a good job with the Gamecube drives and anyway it has been indicated the N5 will be backward-compatible with the Gamecube. Since Matsushita is firmly in the Blu-ray camp, this would make it likely the N5's optical discs will be technologically closer to Blu-ray than HDDVD, and even make it possible (though maybe not likely, as the Panasonic Q was eventually discontinued) that a Bluray/N5 combination device will be at some point available from Matsushita.
Businesses like H1Bs because they're easier to exploit. Just because there's lots of people begging for jobs doesn't mean that these businesses are lying when they say lack of H1Bs is killing their business. It could mean, it isn't that lack of workers is killing their business, it's just that having to pay their workers real salaries with real benefits is killing their business.
If PSP isn't launching in Japan fo another 3 weeks, it looks like the system will completely miss the holiday buying season in the US.
Sony is not even attempting to hit the holiday buying season in the U.S.. The PSP is currently planned for a U.S. launch somewhere around march of next year.
Which system would you develop for if you were EA? The one that will have 5 million units shipped in the US before the end of the year or the system that will have none.
Well, the actual EA is developing for both. Last I had heard they will release about three games for the DS launch and about two games for the Japanese PSP launch, planning to have about six PSP games available by the PSP's US launch next year. In fact, EA is developing much the same games for both systems. Interesting though is how EA treats the two platforms-- though EA is releasing more or less the same titles (Madden 2005, Tiger Woods) for DS and PSP, the games under these titles are quite different. For example for Madden 2005 for the DS EA basically took the GBA Madden 2005 and souped it up. For Madden 2005 for the PSP EA will be doing pretty much a straight port of the PS2 Madden. It appears EA will be porting many of its PS2 games to the PSP, but the games it releases for the DS will more often be original...
If I remember right they were showing DS games at $50 as well until Nintendo actually announced American prices for them. They'll probably do the same for PSP games until Sony starts announcing American prices. That won't be for a long time.
Does anyone know, does the Japanese site linked here say anything about game prices?
Google Scholar basically seems to be an attempt to replace CiteSeer. It doesn't seem to have quite as many features in terms of displaying information as CiteSeer does, but it does have the important features, and it does lack a couple of the longstanding problems with CiteSeer (for example, that CiteSeer is absurdly slow)...
I am curious which produces better search results. Google seems to produce its results mainly from a handful of sources, but a couple of tests showed it giving more relevant results than CiteSeer, and Google Scholar also immediately returned a copy of this one specific article I was trying to find awhile back that I knew to exist but couldn't find either on CiteSeer or Google normal search... Hmm.
At any rate CiteSeer indexes 716797 articles and Google Scholar... interestingly, doesn't provide an index size number at all.
Look harder. They'll run you about $3, looks like.
I got mine in one of those Mad Catz "kits" or whatnot and I like it because there's no dangling cable, it's a little tiny blue hard plastic box that one end sticks into the GBA and the other end has a 1/8 inch stereo miniplug on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bush administration certainly didn't invent ignoring white collar crime, nor did I say they did. However they are certainly formalizing the current model by which this occurs, I.E. effective taxation, which is why I mentioned them. I would argue you could certainly show the early signs of a shift in general policy towards these things in in the last few years; previous to this white collar crime was largely simply ignored.
But who's to say it isn't still beneficial? Lycos probably caused some problems for spammers with this, or made them feel less secure, in the week this stunt was running. More importantly, look at all the publicity Lycos got out of this; if it wasn't for this spam thing I probably wouldn't have even thought about Lycos's existence once in the second half of this year, and probably you or most of the other people here wouldn't have either. Instead, thanks to makelovenotspam, they've been rescued for at least a moment from obscurity and irrelivance and they've been all over the headlines for a week. Meanwhile, by getting out now Lycos possibly avoids the otherwise-almost-certain legal problems from all of this.
... well probably.
Was makelovenotspam, in its short life, effective? Almost certainly not. Was makelovenotspam a public good? I'd bet not. Was makelovenotspam good for Lycos?
Little problem with the decimal point there, I meant $160 million not $1.6 million. This doesn't change anything I've said though, and that's still less than half of €345 million...
Not quite. It's a $250,000 fine (and in some cases some short jail terms) for each of the executives and a $1.6 million fine for the company, and it would be awfully weird for any of this to be appealed as it all appears to be part of plea agreements. Unfortunately, this is still quite probably not enough to realistically undo the gains that either the executives (how much did Ulrich Schumacher make a year?) or the company made off of the price fixing action. In fact as far as I can tell it appears that the company fine may not have even been as large as the litigation costs Infineon spent in the court cases that preceded the fine.
But this just appears to be the model being pioneered for widescale use by the Bush Department of Justice: Corporate crime, defrauding investors and consumers, using a company on which other peoples' livelihoods rest as a device to line your own pockets, antitrust violations, and similar things aren't illegal anymore, exactly; they're just taxed.
Of course, for whatever reason, we call them fines instead of taxes-- and go through the formality of preceding them with a court case-- but this really isn't much of a meaningful difference. Even if you get caught doing such things it is increasingly rare that the penalty for breaking the law really exceeds the benefits of having broken the law; in some cases, such as the Microsoft antitrust actions of the late 90s, breaking the law and then simply paying the fine for having done so appears to have been the best long-term business decision available. In this sort of context the fines really cease to have any punitive nature and criminality just becomes another potential strategy in the playbook of a discerning executive. The risk is there that you will be made an example, Martha Stewart style, and meaningful jail time will occur and families and careers will be ruined; but the risk is acceptable, and it may turn out to be worth it in the long run even in the worst case scenario.
As for the government's point of view, the upshot, it seems, at this point is that the government doesn't object in any form to white collar crime, antitrust violations or executive malfeasance; it just wants a cut of the crime's profits.
Meanwhile, Infineon isn't quite off the hook yet; this fine is just the U.S. response. As far as I know Infineon is facing similar charges in Europe which have not gone through yet...
Advice to the Indians: You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
If only all murder cases were handled this way. My life sure would be a lot easier.
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
Uh, we're the people who pay google's paychecks?
Who is Google to question what its users want?
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Considering Google bought up all the significant USENET archives in existence, wouldn't that be a bit hard?
If Google had come up with a service and now they were scaling it back, I would consider it silly to complain about this, since we'd all just be where we were before Google Groups was set up. The fact that Google Groups was formed by purchasing DejaNews makes things... a bit different.
To have a one-stop shop for communication is pretty much what it's all about. E-mail, instant messaging, fax, voice, photos, movies, TV, radio, and the blog (considered to be the future of websites) converging in a simple-to-use way. This should be something to look forward to.
The problem is that this all-communication-converges-in-one-product thing was something that was available literally decades ago in the form of, say, Lotus Notes and similar products. What people then decided-- leading to this whole "internet" thing-- was that what they wanted wasn't a "one stop shop", they wanted to be able to communicate with people. Communicating meant giving up the idea of one single product, or one single communication method, and instead going for something more cooperative and inclusive. This meant slowing down the process by which functionality appeared, because a common ground had to be established before things could move forward. But it also meant that once that functionality took hold, it was universal.
Microsoft, not big on cooperation, is trying to reverse this process. They successfully brought progress in communications methods on the internet to a screeching halt by grabbing a stranglehold on the web browser market; this allowed them to serve as a sort of gatekeeper for which technologies take hold on the WWW. They've used this gatekeeper power to basically seal the gate shut; MSIE has basically not advanced at all, or even really been significantly updated until the popup blocker in SP2, since Netscape died. Since you kind of have to work with MSIE users in order for a web technology to catch on, this means there's been no significant advancement in the web browser since Netscape (not a good software company, but at least a viable commercial threat and so an impetus for Microsoft to continue improving their products) died. Now Microsoft's trying to present a solution to the problem they created by ending the old gradual cooperative model by which web standards were once developed and deployed, by introducing alterations to the normal web communication paradigm. But, of course, you have to use MSN Messenger and MSIE to make that altered paradigm work. It's being claimed elsewhere on this board that Firefox users are shut out from features of these web boards. I assume this means that I, as a mac user, am shut out as well. At the moment this is no problem, since I have no need to use any of these MSN blog sites. But if people begin erecting content in any numbers using Microsoft's blog software, I am wondering how long this will last.
If by making the Internet relevant to the average person they have to make the Internet irrelivant to people who don't use Microsoft products-- or shut out non-MS users from being able to communicate fully with the average person-- then yeah, that's a horrible goal. I don't want the internet to be a one stop shop. I want the internet to be what it promised to be at first: a place where barriers to communication are naturally broken down. If you're going to begin erecting barriers to communication on the internet I don't see what's interesting about it.
As far as I can tell, there is a pretty serious difference between doubt about nuclear energy in the 40s ("there's this natural force that we can directly detect the influence of, but we aren't quite sure how to harness it") and doubt about Cold Fusion today ("there's this process that *might* be resulting in energy production for some reason, or it *might* just be we're not measuring the outcome right").
It's not like we should expect results immediately, and if there's some kind of unexplained effect occurring as regards deuterides we obviously should find out what it is rather than just writing it off. But I do kind of expect after 20 years someone ought to be able to provide a better justification why we should think anything at all is happening here than the ones I've generally seen.
The idea is brilliant; since 90% of the people who find out about hacked sites find out after the compromised site has been fixed, and many don't even bother looking at the hack mirrors, you don't actually need to compromise a site in order for it to be reported as "hacked". Just directly target Slashdot and similar news sites and convince them the site has been hacked, and you get all the effect and infamy of an actual hack with none of the work or legal dangers.
It's meta-hacking, or something. I love it.
Option 1: Google provides a censored Google News China site; the real Google News site gets chinawalled. People who know how to circumvent the firewall can read normal Google News. Everyone else is left having to read the censored version.
Option 2: Google does not provide a censored Google News China site; the Google News site gets chinawalled. People who know how to circumvent the firewall can read Google News. Everyone else can't.
One could make a case that it's unconditionally unethical to do business with a fascist* regime, and option 1 is inherently unconscionable. I however would argue that from a practical standpoint, there are some instances where refusing to do business with a fascist regime would have a potential positive effect for the regime's subjects, and some instances where it would not.
This is one of the latter cases.
* You're probably going to tell me I should have used some slightly different meaningless label here. I say: Whatever.
The studios will never "win," they'll only be able to manage their losses.
You are working on the assumption that the "win" condition for studios is to prevent piracy. This assumption may not be accurate. Another possibility is that the goals of the studios have nothing to do with preventing piracy or preventing bootleggers, and everything to do with keeping average [mostly middle class american] consumers from being able to make copies of their hdvds when they are scratched, or skip past the on-disc commercials before the movie begins, or take unauthorized framecaptures, or basically just in some way freely exercise their theoretical fair use rights.
It isn't about money with the ??AAs. It's about control...
few think of it as terrorism even today as the victims were so dehumanised
Well, almost ever history book I'd seen previous to September 11, 2001 referred to the WWII bombing campaigns-- both by the nazis and the allies-- as "Terror Bombing".
I haven't seen any history books printed since then. I'd be curious to see whether this phrase remains in use now.
Because bootloaders for import discs were already widely and legally available, and you don't need a modchip, just a bootloader disc, to play GC games in the wrong region.
what's the story on the .mp3 in your sig?
There isn't one. It's just a MIDI arpeggiator plugged into a drum machine. I was originally going to switch my sig to a different mp3 of randomish noise every few weeks, but then I forgot. I should do that tonight.
Thanks for caring? ^_^
From what I've heard so far:
:(
It seems the shortages are real, not hype, but it is not really something to worry about. Basically there are serious shortages in some areas but no problem whatsoever in others. It seems that outlets of the big video game chains (EBGames/Gamestop) often had shortages, and sometimes didn't even get enough units to cover their preorders, but more general stores that don't generally do the preordering thing (Best Buy, Target) you can just walk in and buy one.
There are also reports of shortages of a couple of the games, specifically Feel the Magic and Mr. Driller. I don't know how accurate these reports are. It's unfortunate it seems there's been a shortage of the good games but no problems getting the EA stuff
Now, whether there will be shortages after Black Friday is another question altogether.
It can do whatever any other device with an 802.11 wireless ethernet repeater can, as long as you can get software that does it.
... can be daisy-chained?
At this exact moment there is no software available for the DS which uses the wireless to connect to the internet. The only announced software so far which is known to use the wireless to connect to the internet is Nanostray, a shooter by the Iridium 3D people, which uses wifi to connect to an internet high score board.
Nintendo representatives seemed enthusiastic about the idea of a web browser for the DS, so I assume if someone goes to Nintendo asking for a license to make a DS web browser they'll get it.
and can its 802.11b hardware act as a repeater, so wireless games
This can be done; there's a DS game (I think Japan only right now) called "ping pals" that repeats in such a way that up to 128 people can connect to each other over the wireless, so long as there's an unbroken chain of DSes between them to relay the signal. I think most games require all the players to be in a 10-30 yard radius though.
Nintendo used weird proprietary optical discs in the Gamecube that aren't used for anything at all except the Gamecube. This turned out to work extremely well; although the Gamecube has the weakest copy protection of any console this generation (bootloader discs are sold legally in stores), it is the only console this generation without a significant piracy problem. Nintendo will probably do the same thing with their next console.
However: The Gamecube optical discs and disc drives, developed by Matsushita/Panasonic, were somewhat similar in nature to DVDs, and Panasonic actually sold a device in Japan which used a single laser to play both DVDs and Gamecube games.
It has been widely speculated that Nintendo will once again ask Matsushita to create the optical drives for the next Nintendo console, since they seem to have done a good job with the Gamecube drives and anyway it has been indicated the N5 will be backward-compatible with the Gamecube. Since Matsushita is firmly in the Blu-ray camp, this would make it likely the N5's optical discs will be technologically closer to Blu-ray than HDDVD, and even make it possible (though maybe not likely, as the Panasonic Q was eventually discontinued) that a Bluray/N5 combination device will be at some point available from Matsushita.
That is very interesting. Most of the reports I have heard from H1B people have been less complimentary toward the process.
Is there any particularly good way to tell which experience is the more common one?
Businesses like H1Bs because they're easier to exploit. Just because there's lots of people begging for jobs doesn't mean that these businesses are lying when they say lack of H1Bs is killing their business. It could mean, it isn't that lack of workers is killing their business, it's just that having to pay their workers real salaries with real benefits is killing their business.
If PSP isn't launching in Japan fo another 3 weeks, it looks like the system will completely miss the holiday buying season in the US.
Sony is not even attempting to hit the holiday buying season in the U.S.. The PSP is currently planned for a U.S. launch somewhere around march of next year.
Which system would you develop for if you were EA? The one that will have 5 million units shipped in the US before the end of the year or the system that will have none.
Well, the actual EA is developing for both. Last I had heard they will release about three games for the DS launch and about two games for the Japanese PSP launch, planning to have about six PSP games available by the PSP's US launch next year. In fact, EA is developing much the same games for both systems. Interesting though is how EA treats the two platforms-- though EA is releasing more or less the same titles (Madden 2005, Tiger Woods) for DS and PSP, the games under these titles are quite different. For example for Madden 2005 for the DS EA basically took the GBA Madden 2005 and souped it up. For Madden 2005 for the PSP EA will be doing pretty much a straight port of the PS2 Madden. It appears EA will be porting many of its PS2 games to the PSP, but the games it releases for the DS will more often be original...
If I remember right they were showing DS games at $50 as well until Nintendo actually announced American prices for them. They'll probably do the same for PSP games until Sony starts announcing American prices. That won't be for a long time.
Does anyone know, does the Japanese site linked here say anything about game prices?
Google Scholar basically seems to be an attempt to replace CiteSeer. It doesn't seem to have quite as many features in terms of displaying information as CiteSeer does, but it does have the important features, and it does lack a couple of the longstanding problems with CiteSeer (for example, that CiteSeer is absurdly slow)...
I am curious which produces better search results. Google seems to produce its results mainly from a handful of sources, but a couple of tests showed it giving more relevant results than CiteSeer, and Google Scholar also immediately returned a copy of this one specific article I was trying to find awhile back that I knew to exist but couldn't find either on CiteSeer or Google normal search... Hmm.
At any rate CiteSeer indexes 716797 articles and Google Scholar... interestingly, doesn't provide an index size number at all.
I actually think CSI is relatively good compared to most of the stuff on television, but I do think VGCats' commentary has a bit of a point...
It wan't until later that I thought of googling for "adapters."
You could also just call wal-mart. I think they carry the mad catz kit.
I haven't seen any of those anywhere.
Look harder. They'll run you about $3, looks like.
I got mine in one of those Mad Catz "kits" or whatnot and I like it because there's no dangling cable, it's a little tiny blue hard plastic box that one end sticks into the GBA and the other end has a 1/8 inch stereo miniplug on it.