I don't think you're the only one. I think Microsoft is going to have a LOT of trouble convincing people to the XBox 2 is a significant draw over the XBox 1, I think a nontrivial number of people may react to the next console gen with "do I really need a new box, it seems like I just got this one", and I think this is going to be a much bigger problem for Microsoft than the other couple of console manufacturers. For these reasons:
1. The Nintendo Revolution and Sony PS3 are going to be backward compatible. The XBox 2-- it appears, though this is not certain-- is not. This means the XBox 2 will compete DIRECTLY with the XBox 1, whereas the Revolution and PS3 will be more like an upgrade, and have a sort of synergy with the current gen.
2. The next console gen will likely provide somewhat diminishing returns in terms of graphical prowess. The current gen has a LOT of potential in graphics, and this isn't often even being taken full advantage of. The N5, XB2 and PS3 will have more polygons, but will developers really be able to DO much more with those polygons?
2a. This isn't a huge problem with Nintendo or Sony. With Nintendo, Nintendo's been making noises that they are going to be doing some sort of gimmick that will be a "revolution" in gaming. This may or may not turn out to be something that works, but at least they have something up their sleeves. With Sony meanwhile the PS2 was so graphically anemic that the PS3 is going to be obvious as a huge leap no matter what. The XBox meanwhile has to grow up from an already impressive point, and they have to grow up significantly.
2b. More crucially, pure technological prowess is more of a drawing point for the Xbox2 than other consoles. This means that if the XBox2 can't deliver, and deliver WELL, in terms of improvement in the next console generation, it's in much more serious trouble. People come to Nintendo because they like the tastes-like-the-80s, "it's the games stupid" niche Nintendo's been targetting; people come to Sony because Sony is where the serious developer support is at. In both of these cases, graphics just aren't the drawing factor. With Microsoft, though... well there's definitely a hardcore community that just likes the niche the XBox has been targetting with it's kind of "PC games transcended" idiom, but I think by and large what's been drawing people to the XBox is the tech, the hard drive and XBL and the graphics and all that. If Microsoft can't expand and deliver in that area for the XB2, they don't have a whole lot to fall back on....
Basically: Have you see the Halo 2 screenshots? There's clearly a lot of room for graphics to expand, especially in terms of things like polycounts and dropoff distances, but I'm not sure if you can really get that much more "ooh ahh" than the Halo 2 screenshots already are. We seem to be reaching a sort of plateau of the "ooh shiny" factor in the gaming world.
This is of course just my vague opinion, take with a grain of salt.
Coming out of nowhere to be tied for last place is impressive?
Creating a very technically impressive console by losing a billion dollars a year is impressive?
More to the point, losing a billion dollars a year to be tied for last place is impressive? Hell, give me that much of a budget to piss away, and [i]I'll[/i] tie for last place in the console industry.
MEXICO WILL SOON BE RULED ENTIRELY BY CYBORGS. Is nobody noticing this? I mean, we can finally scratch an entry off the list of "things that we would have expected to happen in the 21st century". We may not have flying cars or meals in pill form yet, but at least Mexico is now living in the plot of a comic book.
[Mexican mecha-attorney general] With this new microchip I have had implanted in me, I have become more powerful than ever imagined. I can track my movements, as well as access a new crime database. [Reporter] But Señor Macedo, aren't you worried about there being ill effects? [Mexican mecha-attourney general] Yes, that's why I have also had an "inhibitor chip" installed, so that I control the RFID chip-- instead of it controlling me.
For awhile that security bugs in non-MS browser just don't happen with the same frequency or degree. Bugs in non-MS browsers *occured*, but they tended to be much more subtle bugs with lesser payloads, as opposed to MS which tends to wind up with seemingly really obvious security holes with serious consequences on a regular basis. For every "untrusted site may gain read access to cookies belonging to another site by a contrived series of steps" in Mozilla there was an "execute arbitrary remote code by clicking a link" in MSIE, it seemed.
Then last week the shell: bug in Mozilla was reported, and I was humbled. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps Mozilla wasn't really all *that* much better than MSIE, and I was being silly by my stance that MSIE was an unsafe product and Moz was a safe product. Maybe, I thought, trusting any software vendor is just as silly as trusting Microsoft.
Then I see this news today and I don't feel so humble anymore.
One thing I found odd, though. I haven't done a close study or anything, but when the mozilla vulnerability was found last week, it was very widely reported. I saw it at least twice on news.google.com and I believe on cnn.com. But with these new IE vulnerabilities? Well, maybe it's just too soon, but cnn.com has nothing on this-- it does have a story "renewed calls for alternate browsers" which mentions in the second paragraph two IE bugs that MS fixed already-- and news.google.com has nothing. And n.g.c's top tech story?
Microsoft CEO Touts Security Push at Conference Reuters - 55 minutes ago SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is taking a big step toward boosting the security of its flagship Windows product in August with the release of a major software update, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.
[AD 2015, RESEARCHERS FINALLY MANAGE TO MAKE CONTACT WITH ANCIENT MICROBES AT BOTTOM OF LAKE VOSTOK]
[MICROBES] So, what has the media been saying about us? [RESEARCHER] Oh, well, I've got the newspaper articles right here.. [MICROBES] What? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"? Is that all it's got to say? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"! Five words! [RESEARCHER] Well, there's an awful lot happening on earth, and only so much print space in the international media.. and no one knew much about the Lake Vostok of course. [MICROBES] Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit. [RESEARCHER] Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a press release summarizing our research off to Reuters. They had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement. [MICROBES] And what does it say now? [RESEARCHER, SLIGHTLY EMBARRASED] "Lake mostly untouched for 500,000 years"
I am now thinking back to all those times SCO, and persons trying to bank on SCO's nonsense, alleged that open source software is unsafe because "anyone could have contributed" so "you have no way of knowing if any of the contributions contain stolen intellectual property".
You're kidding, right? If I'd been paid more unemployment, I would have spent my time working on personal projects instead of looking for a job. I suspect that would slow down growth, not speed it up.
Well I'm not exactly trained in macroeconomics or anything, but it seems pretty clear to me right now the problem is by far a problem of not enough jobs, not a problem of not enough workers... so if someone wouldn't be finding a job anyway, then having them working on personal projects instead of looking for a job wouldn't exactly be slowing growth, would it now? In fact, since being on unemployment would encourage that person to engage in consumer spending, it might encourage companies to grow, thus maybe eventually encouraging those companies to start hiring more people... no?
Is some figures that would indicate whether there has been a de-emphasizing, either in pure numbers or in percentage of overall pirate traffic, of music piracy corresponding with the rise of pay-to-download music services such as the iTunes Music Store or Napster2...
Well, the last time I checked, that was roughly how much they'd lost over the previous four quarters on the XBox venture... and roughly how much they'd lost onthe XBox venture over the four quarters before that...
In a company where pretty much everything except Windows and Office is the company just tossing money at an unprofitable venture for the privilige of having a product in that area, finding a billion dollars to cut shouldn't be that hard...
Re:Why it wasn't put in already
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am rarely doing fewer than 8 things at once on my mac and have never had a problem even before Expose. The fact that the task switcher has applications rather than windows as its level of granularity, along with the fact every app does window-level tracking and accepts command-tilde for "next window", allow me to reach any window in the system immediately. The only time this becomes a problem is when I can't clearly remember whatall is open, and Expose neatly fills this gap.
I am well familiar with how pagers work. For my purposes however the fact that the mac automatically categorizes windows based on parent application provides a far more useful and natural idiom than the somewhat more manual mechanism provided by virtual desktops.
since the "wikipedia" organization that takes credit for the piece posted above as AC actually plagiarized it themselves. The article in question was actually originally written by the Tooth Fairy, and later had several paragraphs copied into it out of an SCO stockholder report.
Re:Why it wasn't put in already
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I don't really speak for anyone else, but I don't *want* to have to memorize 11 ctrl-keys then carefully arrange everything I open into specific virtual desktops just to manage my apps. This is why I prefer the dock+expose approach of management to something like most Linux WMs offer. The computer may not do a perfect job of managing the windows for me, but at least it's the *computer's* job to manage the windows, not mine.
Plot hole: Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock finds Peter with Mary Jane in the cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them. Any normal man would've been killed instantly, and Doc Ock doesn't know that Peter is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would effectively try to kill him.
Doc Ock is insane. His actions do not need to make sense. If he was enough in his right mind to understand the consequences of his actions in a "Parker survived me throwing a car at him, he must be spider-man" sense, then he wouldn't have thrown a car at Parker in the first place, since you don't try to kill people you need to interrogate!
Continuity: When Peter arrives at his aunt's home at the beginning of the movie, it's night. He talks to Harry in the kitchen a few minutes later, and look at the purple balloon by Peter's head, it reflects a window with lots of light coming through it.
Umm... okay, you can have that one, but maybe there could be a car or streetlight outside?
Factual error: In the scene where Peter is saving the children from the burning building, there is no smoke from the fire. Black smoke would be bellowing out the windows. He wouldn't be able to just stand up and walk through the building.
OMFG A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE HAD AN INACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF A FIRE??? WHO WOULD HAVE EVER SEEN THAT COMING!
Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it.
Perhaps the ball is more dense than he is, and thus sinks faster? Fat does float.
Audio problem: It's clear that due to the tentacles' heaviness, they have to made some kind of sound when moving. But yet when Doc Ock takes the tritium from Harry in his house, he leaves without making any sound at all.
OK...
Factual error: Nobody would dare to cut a metal piece with a saw without eye protection, much less in a surgical room, like the surgeon that wanted to remove Doc Ock's tentacles.
OK...
Revealing: In the scene where Doc Ock comes out of the hospital and throws a car onto another one, you can tell the man in there is just a dummy. He has no reaction what so ever. He just sits there as if nothing happened.
You know they do make these dummies you can leave in a car to make it appear as if an unoccupied car is occupied, to prevent it from being stolen... it isn't inconcievable the car's occupant could have been one of those.
Revealing: In the scene at the end where Spider-Man and Mary Jane are in the big web, there is a close-up which shows the webbing behind them. We can blatantly see that it's wire wrapped in plastic of some kind to make it look like web.
Oh what fucking ever.
Factual error: Dr. Octavius says his fusion relies on tritium and that there is only 25 pounds of the substance in the world. In reality, tritium is merely an isotope of hydrogen and is a good deal more common than that. For example, there is a large region of the North Pacific that contains tritium-rich salt water. Submitted by Phoenix
OK, but nuclear power is basically treated as a black box in this movie and there's no limit of things to complain about about this mysterious "fusion" technology... come to think of it, why does this list complain about a fire not looking right but complain about the little mini-sun "fusion" reaction occuring COMPLETELY unshielded in the middle of a room with journalists standing 30 feet away?
Factual error: Considering the brightness of the fusion process, Dr. Octavius has to wear special goggles to be able to see it. Yet no one else in the room is wearing such goggles or seem hurt by watchi
Yes, Slashdot was founded in 1997. What I should have said there was "whenever I first started reading slashdot, but I don't remember exactly when that was".
Apple has created a consumer UNIX satisfactory to both end and power users that is capable of running POSIX and most Linux-targeted software without modification, just compile and it runs. This is a major coup, and it surprises me people don't see this. If someone had come on slashdot 10 years ago and said that in 10 years there would be a consumer-targeted UNIX that could easily run whatever Linux/GNU software you threw at it in millions of homes, what would the reaction have been?
So the whole Sun fear of "embrace and extend" is completely moronic. You can ALREADY extend Java in completely incompatible ways.
I think from Sun's perspective this is not a problem because JNI, or things like Apple's cocoa bridge, are fairly insular. You don't *have* to adopt software with a JNI component, and if you do this you pretty much agree that you're being hardware tied to some extent.
I think Sun's worry about "incompatibilities" have mostly come from worries over silent, endemic incompatibilities. Things like that early Microsoft java VM where the API implementation randomly switched the call order for H and V values. That's a much more insidious problem because rather than hardware tying it introduces hardware incompatibility. If someone tries to run a Java program with a JNI component on the wrong platform, they get a "can't run" error and they know to contact their vendor. If someone tries to run a java program on a platform with a VM incompatibility, and it sort of works... well what do you do there? First off that's far more embarrassing to the Java platform, because instead of "your program was hardware-tied", it's "your program didn't work right".
Second off it's far harder to fix; with an incompatibility issue with JNI or some other method of "escaping" the Java world, the incompatibility issue is modular and quarantined at least to some extent. The fix there would be to switch out the native module with a compatible one, which may not be easy but is at least doable. An incompatibility where different VMs may behave differently with respect to a single piece of java code though... how do you deal with that? That's not something you can fix by swapping out the incompatible portion, it infects the entire problem. THIS is what Sun is worried about-- limiting the areas where you break WORA to quarantined modular components, not enforcing WORA under all circumstances-- and it's something that has *has been a problem with Java in the past*, with some of Microsoft's "extentions" to Java.
Of course there are ways around this, and I'm not saying Sun is being totally reasonable, but this is basically what Sun's problem here is I think. Note that they're being very tight-fisted about this compatibility thing not just at the source level, but also in terms of who's allowed to be certified as adopting to the Java standard. From what I have heard it is very hard even to get the Java certification suites if you are trying to create a compatible implementation of Java, because they're trying to make sure all Java implementors conform to the standard.
Silicon Knights is not connected with Geist, Geist is being done by N-space. Too Human has been little more than a rumor for years.
In any case the question I am wondering is this: Once they were done with Twin Snakes, what did they start on next? They're no longer exclusive to Nintendo but that doesn't mean they're dumping the gamecube either.
is that you, probably qualifying as a "hardcore" gamer, are not the concern. The concern is the casual gamer, the people who won't just keep playing video games no matter now bad they get, the people who wno't go to the bother of tracking down abandonware games from eras where the games were actually fun.
These people are a rather huge segment and if video games do not do a good job as presenting themselves as something interesting, creative, rewarding, and worth the money, these people may well go spend their disposable income on something else.
I believe that the adoption figures for XBox Live are something like five to ten percent of all XBox users at the absolute most optimistic. And that's probably about as good as a console online system could possibly get, something that the XBox developer community has poured a huge amount of effort into.
Online is certainly a feature some people want in a console, but that may not necessarily mean that it's the best thing to put effort into at this exact point in time...
That said, the Nintendo DS does indeed have wireless ethernet, it has has the potential to have its online features made real, good use of, and Nintendo has made very vague comments indicating that they will be releasing online-capable titles themselves. So I'm looking forward to this, and I think the chances the next Nintendo console will have internet or at least wireless ethernet built in from the start are VERY good.
I find this part interesting. The one area in which Microsoft has been REALLY successful with the XBox is in winning the hearts and minds of western developers. I've found it worrying that Sony and Nintendo might not realize this is happening because they're concentrating on Japanese customers and developers and the XBox is bombing horribly in Japan. I'd be glad to see if Nintendo made actual moves to woo U.S. developers, it would be very easy to just neglect U.S. developers in the console market but this is certainly a foolish thing to do in the long run...
Of course then my question becomes, WHAT IS SILICON KNIGHTS UP TO?
MS has more money than they have use for anyway. What matters is whether or not they're going to have to disist the forced exclusive bundling of Windows Media Player with Microsoft Windows.
Look up sometime how much money Microsoft is throwing away on the XBox with no apparent hope of recouping a cent of it anytime in the forseeable future. Next to that 500 million euros doesn't seem significant.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're the only one. I think Microsoft is going to have a LOT of trouble convincing people to the XBox 2 is a significant draw over the XBox 1, I think a nontrivial number of people may react to the next console gen with "do I really need a new box, it seems like I just got this one", and I think this is going to be a much bigger problem for Microsoft than the other couple of console manufacturers. For these reasons:
1. The Nintendo Revolution and Sony PS3 are going to be backward compatible. The XBox 2-- it appears, though this is not certain-- is not. This means the XBox 2 will compete DIRECTLY with the XBox 1, whereas the Revolution and PS3 will be more like an upgrade, and have a sort of synergy with the current gen.
2. The next console gen will likely provide somewhat diminishing returns in terms of graphical prowess. The current gen has a LOT of potential in graphics, and this isn't often even being taken full advantage of. The N5, XB2 and PS3 will have more polygons, but will developers really be able to DO much more with those polygons?
2a. This isn't a huge problem with Nintendo or Sony. With Nintendo, Nintendo's been making noises that they are going to be doing some sort of gimmick that will be a "revolution" in gaming. This may or may not turn out to be something that works, but at least they have something up their sleeves. With Sony meanwhile the PS2 was so graphically anemic that the PS3 is going to be obvious as a huge leap no matter what. The XBox meanwhile has to grow up from an already impressive point, and they have to grow up significantly.
2b. More crucially, pure technological prowess is more of a drawing point for the Xbox2 than other consoles. This means that if the XBox2 can't deliver, and deliver WELL, in terms of improvement in the next console generation, it's in much more serious trouble. People come to Nintendo because they like the tastes-like-the-80s, "it's the games stupid" niche Nintendo's been targetting; people come to Sony because Sony is where the serious developer support is at. In both of these cases, graphics just aren't the drawing factor. With Microsoft, though... well there's definitely a hardcore community that just likes the niche the XBox has been targetting with it's kind of "PC games transcended" idiom, but I think by and large what's been drawing people to the XBox is the tech, the hard drive and XBL and the graphics and all that. If Microsoft can't expand and deliver in that area for the XB2, they don't have a whole lot to fall back on....
Basically: Have you see the Halo 2 screenshots? There's clearly a lot of room for graphics to expand, especially in terms of things like polycounts and dropoff distances, but I'm not sure if you can really get that much more "ooh ahh" than the Halo 2 screenshots already are. We seem to be reaching a sort of plateau of the "ooh shiny" factor in the gaming world.
This is of course just my vague opinion, take with a grain of salt.
Coming out of nowhere to be tied for last place is impressive?
Creating a very technically impressive console by losing a billion dollars a year is impressive?
More to the point, losing a billion dollars a year to be tied for last place is impressive? Hell, give me that much of a budget to piss away, and [i]I'll[/i] tie for last place in the console industry.
MEXICO WILL SOON BE RULED ENTIRELY BY CYBORGS. Is nobody noticing this? I mean, we can finally scratch an entry off the list of "things that we would have expected to happen in the 21st century". We may not have flying cars or meals in pill form yet, but at least Mexico is now living in the plot of a comic book.
[Mexican mecha-attorney general] With this new microchip I have had implanted in me, I have become more powerful than ever imagined. I can track my movements, as well as access a new crime database.
[Reporter] But Señor Macedo, aren't you worried about there being ill effects?
[Mexican mecha-attourney general] Yes, that's why I have also had an "inhibitor chip" installed, so that I control the RFID chip-- instead of it controlling me.
For awhile that security bugs in non-MS browser just don't happen with the same frequency or degree. Bugs in non-MS browsers *occured*, but they tended to be much more subtle bugs with lesser payloads, as opposed to MS which tends to wind up with seemingly really obvious security holes with serious consequences on a regular basis. For every "untrusted site may gain read access to cookies belonging to another site by a contrived series of steps" in Mozilla there was an "execute arbitrary remote code by clicking a link" in MSIE, it seemed.
Then last week the shell: bug in Mozilla was reported, and I was humbled. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps Mozilla wasn't really all *that* much better than MSIE, and I was being silly by my stance that MSIE was an unsafe product and Moz was a safe product. Maybe, I thought, trusting any software vendor is just as silly as trusting Microsoft.
Then I see this news today and I don't feel so humble anymore.
One thing I found odd, though. I haven't done a close study or anything, but when the mozilla vulnerability was found last week, it was very widely reported. I saw it at least twice on news.google.com and I believe on cnn.com. But with these new IE vulnerabilities? Well, maybe it's just too soon, but cnn.com has nothing on this-- it does have a story "renewed calls for alternate browsers" which mentions in the second paragraph two IE bugs that MS fixed already-- and news.google.com has nothing. And n.g.c's top tech story?
Microsoft CEO Touts Security Push at Conference
Reuters - 55 minutes ago
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is taking a big step toward boosting the security of its flagship Windows product in August with the release of a major software update, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.
[AD 2015, RESEARCHERS FINALLY MANAGE TO MAKE CONTACT WITH ANCIENT MICROBES AT BOTTOM OF LAKE VOSTOK]
[MICROBES] So, what has the media been saying about us?
[RESEARCHER] Oh, well, I've got the newspaper articles right here..
[MICROBES] What? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"? Is that all it's got to say? "Lake untouched for 500,000 years"! Five words!
[RESEARCHER] Well, there's an awful lot happening on earth, and only so much print space in the international media.. and no one knew much about the Lake Vostok of course.
[MICROBES] Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.
[RESEARCHER] Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a press release summarizing our research off to Reuters. They had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement.
[MICROBES] And what does it say now?
[RESEARCHER, SLIGHTLY EMBARRASED] "Lake mostly untouched for 500,000 years"
I am now thinking back to all those times SCO, and persons trying to bank on SCO's nonsense, alleged that open source software is unsafe because "anyone could have contributed" so "you have no way of knowing if any of the contributions contain stolen intellectual property".
And laughing.
And laughing.
As we all know, NO ONE on Slashdot reads the articles...
You're kidding, right? If I'd been paid more unemployment, I would have spent my time working on personal projects instead of looking for a job. I suspect that would slow down growth, not speed it up.
Well I'm not exactly trained in macroeconomics or anything, but it seems pretty clear to me right now the problem is by far a problem of not enough jobs, not a problem of not enough workers... so if someone wouldn't be finding a job anyway, then having them working on personal projects instead of looking for a job wouldn't exactly be slowing growth, would it now? In fact, since being on unemployment would encourage that person to engage in consumer spending, it might encourage companies to grow, thus maybe eventually encouraging those companies to start hiring more people... no?
Is some figures that would indicate whether there has been a de-emphasizing, either in pure numbers or in percentage of overall pirate traffic, of music piracy corresponding with the rise of pay-to-download music services such as the iTunes Music Store or Napster2...
Well, the last time I checked, that was roughly how much they'd lost over the previous four quarters on the XBox venture... and roughly how much they'd lost onthe XBox venture over the four quarters before that...
In a company where pretty much everything except Windows and Office is the company just tossing money at an unprofitable venture for the privilige of having a product in that area, finding a billion dollars to cut shouldn't be that hard...
I am rarely doing fewer than 8 things at once on my mac and have never had a problem even before Expose. The fact that the task switcher has applications rather than windows as its level of granularity, along with the fact every app does window-level tracking and accepts command-tilde for "next window", allow me to reach any window in the system immediately. The only time this becomes a problem is when I can't clearly remember whatall is open, and Expose neatly fills this gap.
I am well familiar with how pagers work. For my purposes however the fact that the mac automatically categorizes windows based on parent application provides a far more useful and natural idiom than the somewhat more manual mechanism provided by virtual desktops.
since the "wikipedia" organization that takes credit for the piece posted above as AC actually plagiarized it themselves. The article in question was actually originally written by the Tooth Fairy, and later had several paragraphs copied into it out of an SCO stockholder report.
Well, I don't really speak for anyone else, but I don't *want* to have to memorize 11 ctrl-keys then carefully arrange everything I open into specific virtual desktops just to manage my apps. This is why I prefer the dock+expose approach of management to something like most Linux WMs offer. The computer may not do a perfect job of managing the windows for me, but at least it's the *computer's* job to manage the windows, not mine.
I deleted anything I considered a clothing error.
Plot hole: Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock finds Peter with Mary Jane in the cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them. Any normal man would've been killed instantly, and Doc Ock doesn't know that Peter is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would effectively try to kill him.
Doc Ock is insane. His actions do not need to make sense. If he was enough in his right mind to understand the consequences of his actions in a "Parker survived me throwing a car at him, he must be spider-man" sense, then he wouldn't have thrown a car at Parker in the first place, since you don't try to kill people you need to interrogate!
Continuity: When Peter arrives at his aunt's home at the beginning of the movie, it's night. He talks to Harry in the kitchen a few minutes later, and look at the purple balloon by Peter's head, it reflects a window with lots of light coming through it.
Umm... okay, you can have that one, but maybe there could be a car or streetlight outside?
Factual error: In the scene where Peter is saving the children from the burning building, there is no smoke from the fire. Black smoke would be bellowing out the windows. He wouldn't be able to just stand up and walk through the building.
OMFG A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE HAD AN INACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF A FIRE??? WHO WOULD HAVE EVER SEEN THAT COMING!
Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it.
Perhaps the ball is more dense than he is, and thus sinks faster? Fat does float.
Audio problem: It's clear that due to the tentacles' heaviness, they have to made some kind of sound when moving. But yet when Doc Ock takes the tritium from Harry in his house, he leaves without making any sound at all.
OK...
Factual error: Nobody would dare to cut a metal piece with a saw without eye protection, much less in a surgical room, like the surgeon that wanted to remove Doc Ock's tentacles.
OK...
Revealing: In the scene where Doc Ock comes out of the hospital and throws a car onto another one, you can tell the man in there is just a dummy. He has no reaction what so ever. He just sits there as if nothing happened.
You know they do make these dummies you can leave in a car to make it appear as if an unoccupied car is occupied, to prevent it from being stolen... it isn't inconcievable the car's occupant could have been one of those.
Revealing: In the scene at the end where Spider-Man and Mary Jane are in the big web, there is a close-up which shows the webbing behind them. We can blatantly see that it's wire wrapped in plastic of some kind to make it look like web.
Oh what fucking ever.
Factual error: Dr. Octavius says his fusion relies on tritium and that there is only 25 pounds of the substance in the world. In reality, tritium is merely an isotope of hydrogen and is a good deal more common than that. For example, there is a large region of the North Pacific that contains tritium-rich salt water. Submitted by Phoenix
OK, but nuclear power is basically treated as a black box in this movie and there's no limit of things to complain about about this mysterious "fusion" technology... come to think of it, why does this list complain about a fire not looking right but complain about the little mini-sun "fusion" reaction occuring COMPLETELY unshielded in the middle of a room with journalists standing 30 feet away?
Factual error: Considering the brightness of the fusion process, Dr. Octavius has to wear special goggles to be able to see it. Yet no one else in the room is wearing such goggles or seem hurt by watchi
Yes, Slashdot was founded in 1997. What I should have said there was "whenever I first started reading slashdot, but I don't remember exactly when that was".
Apple has created a consumer UNIX satisfactory to both end and power users that is capable of running POSIX and most Linux-targeted software without modification, just compile and it runs. This is a major coup, and it surprises me people don't see this. If someone had come on slashdot 10 years ago and said that in 10 years there would be a consumer-targeted UNIX that could easily run whatever Linux/GNU software you threw at it in millions of homes, what would the reaction have been?
You should also be aware seminal european electronic music label Warp Records does much the same thing with their catalog.
So the whole Sun fear of "embrace and extend" is completely moronic. You can ALREADY extend Java in completely incompatible ways.
I think from Sun's perspective this is not a problem because JNI, or things like Apple's cocoa bridge, are fairly insular. You don't *have* to adopt software with a JNI component, and if you do this you pretty much agree that you're being hardware tied to some extent.
I think Sun's worry about "incompatibilities" have mostly come from worries over silent, endemic incompatibilities. Things like that early Microsoft java VM where the API implementation randomly switched the call order for H and V values. That's a much more insidious problem because rather than hardware tying it introduces hardware incompatibility. If someone tries to run a Java program with a JNI component on the wrong platform, they get a "can't run" error and they know to contact their vendor. If someone tries to run a java program on a platform with a VM incompatibility, and it sort of works... well what do you do there? First off that's far more embarrassing to the Java platform, because instead of "your program was hardware-tied", it's "your program didn't work right".
Second off it's far harder to fix; with an incompatibility issue with JNI or some other method of "escaping" the Java world, the incompatibility issue is modular and quarantined at least to some extent. The fix there would be to switch out the native module with a compatible one, which may not be easy but is at least doable. An incompatibility where different VMs may behave differently with respect to a single piece of java code though... how do you deal with that? That's not something you can fix by swapping out the incompatible portion, it infects the entire problem. THIS is what Sun is worried about-- limiting the areas where you break WORA to quarantined modular components, not enforcing WORA under all circumstances-- and it's something that has *has been a problem with Java in the past*, with some of Microsoft's "extentions" to Java.
Of course there are ways around this, and I'm not saying Sun is being totally reasonable, but this is basically what Sun's problem here is I think. Note that they're being very tight-fisted about this compatibility thing not just at the source level, but also in terms of who's allowed to be certified as adopting to the Java standard. From what I have heard it is very hard even to get the Java certification suites if you are trying to create a compatible implementation of Java, because they're trying to make sure all Java implementors conform to the standard.
Silicon Knights is not connected with Geist, Geist is being done by N-space. Too Human has been little more than a rumor for years.
In any case the question I am wondering is this: Once they were done with Twin Snakes, what did they start on next? They're no longer exclusive to Nintendo but that doesn't mean they're dumping the gamecube either.
Wind Waker was directed by Eiji Aonuma, not Miyamoto.
is that you, probably qualifying as a "hardcore" gamer, are not the concern. The concern is the casual gamer, the people who won't just keep playing video games no matter now bad they get, the people who wno't go to the bother of tracking down abandonware games from eras where the games were actually fun.
These people are a rather huge segment and if video games do not do a good job as presenting themselves as something interesting, creative, rewarding, and worth the money, these people may well go spend their disposable income on something else.
I believe that the adoption figures for XBox Live are something like five to ten percent of all XBox users at the absolute most optimistic. And that's probably about as good as a console online system could possibly get, something that the XBox developer community has poured a huge amount of effort into.
Online is certainly a feature some people want in a console, but that may not necessarily mean that it's the best thing to put effort into at this exact point in time...
That said, the Nintendo DS does indeed have wireless ethernet, it has has the potential to have its online features made real, good use of, and Nintendo has made very vague comments indicating that they will be releasing online-capable titles themselves. So I'm looking forward to this, and I think the chances the next Nintendo console will have internet or at least wireless ethernet built in from the start are VERY good.
I find this part interesting. The one area in which Microsoft has been REALLY successful with the XBox is in winning the hearts and minds of western developers. I've found it worrying that Sony and Nintendo might not realize this is happening because they're concentrating on Japanese customers and developers and the XBox is bombing horribly in Japan. I'd be glad to see if Nintendo made actual moves to woo U.S. developers, it would be very easy to just neglect U.S. developers in the console market but this is certainly a foolish thing to do in the long run...
Of course then my question becomes, WHAT IS SILICON KNIGHTS UP TO?
MS has more money than they have use for anyway. What matters is whether or not they're going to have to disist the forced exclusive bundling of Windows Media Player with Microsoft Windows.
Look up sometime how much money Microsoft is throwing away on the XBox with no apparent hope of recouping a cent of it anytime in the forseeable future. Next to that 500 million euros doesn't seem significant.
The Justice Department's IT division has been one of the great success stories of WOM technology.