You might want to look up Huxley for the PC and Xbox360 coming out late this year. It's an MMOFPS that seems like it'll end up being a lot more in-depth than Planetside (which I played for a bit.. it was ok).
There was also another MMOFPS called Neocon or something like that, though I never tried it. I heard it kinda sucked.
For single player games with some sort of surprise/shock I'd look into BioShock which should be out this year as well. It's a sequal to System Shock 2, which was IMO one of the best FPSRPG games made.
Very true. I just visited Japan recently and one thing I did note was that all of their cell phones were HUGE. I have a tiny Samsung for work, and it has to be perhaps half the size of a typical Japanese cell phone. They like large flip phones with big screens, probably because they always are using them.
What a sight it is to see a Japanese school girl riding her bike down a street in the rain with an umbrella in one hand and her cell phone in the other, text messaging people as she juggles everything.
Yes you do. The reason is that in the elder scrolls games you can pick up everything, so there can't really be just a hotkey to pick up nearby loot or pick it up when you run over it. If that were the case, you'd soon have your bags full of candles, bowls, spoons, knives, forks, bottles, plates, baskets... etc. You'll find you actually have to determine what's of value rather than assuming everything is and picking it up.
It's a bit interesting, as in a lot of other RPGs if you can pick it up, it's either important or valuable. If you do the same in an Elder Scrolls game, you'll find that like in real life, picking up everything not nailed down isn't very helpful, and often quite a burden.
I think you completely missed the GP's point. It's ok though, maybe you're just... shorther.. than some people.
I personally use Linux at work and OS X at home, with windows purely for games, so I've never been infected myself. However just because I avoided infection doesn't mean that what Sony did was all fine hunky dory. They put automatically installable root kits onto CD's that normally don't contain data without any sort of warning or message to the user on what was being done to their own machine. There's a level of trust there that's gone now.
When you buy a product from a company, a big company with big products and a large market share, you tend to assume a certain amount of quality. I wouldn't expect GE to sell me a toaster whose electrical internals were messed up in such a way as it would cause fires within the first 3 months of use. We assume that there's some sort of quality control going on and that the company wouldn't want the bad consumer relations by poorly testing their products. Having bought from GE in the past, I'm pretty sure that most of their stuff is of an acceptable quality, so I'll continue to buy from them.
SCO distributes a version of UNIX, would you buy it or recommend it to an employer? If not, why? I mean I doubt you ever had to pay the $700 fee to run Linux due to its lawsuit against IBM. I believe most people here on/. wouldn't buy an SCO product even if they made something very revolutionary that seemed really neat and cool just on the principle that the company cannot be trusted.
Such is the position Sony has aligned itself with. They've constantly seemed to state that they do not trust their customers, even to the point of affecting other products not made by Sony (breaking them essentially) in order to protect their IP. If a company looks at me, as someone who just bought some of their stuff, as a thief; I'm inclined to show them the same amount of trust that they show me.
That's interesting. First you attempt to attack a platform (the one under topic naturally), and then immediately attack the users of that platform before they can place any defense as, you know, a second opinion on why they may disagree with you. You even attack the fact that they might disagree with you in a way that makes any sort of defense appear as though they are just spouting out fanboi flames.
Instant defense without even an attack, such as what you have shown here, really makes one wonder if their arguments can stand on their own merits. I for one believe they cannot.
but if one in 1000 Xbox2 units (let's not follow the naming propaganda, it's not like there have been 359 generations of Xboxen before...)
Exactly. This is why I put a sticker on my N64 over the logo to really say NES3. I mean, come on! Nintendo didn't release 62 other consoles between the SNES and N64! I also renamed my SNES the NES2 btw, can't stand that marketing hype.
64 indeed!
It's just a name, they can name it whatever they want. Numbers don't have to mean generations. Personally I would have preferred Xbox 2, but honestly the name means little in reality.
I don't know if it's as big of a deal in Japan. Well I guess it depends on the content, violence being worse than sex there.
I was just in Japan last week for vacation and went to a place in Osaka called Den Den Town. It's a street filled with shops that sell either anime action figures, manga, video games, or porn. The porn shops weren't shy about showing bared breasts on their front windows, right next to the video game and anime fan stores. I saw several UMD porn titles in video game shops in the PSP section as well. Something you'd never see in an EB Games or GameStop in the states.
Most of Japan isn't christian, and sex isn't some great evil like it is for some reason here in the states. Violence may be a different matter, though I saw GTA there as well. Overall I don't think it shall be as much of an issue in Japan.
I disagree with the 'nothing is free' idea. A lot of people will always want to create content, and want that stuff to be read/heard/seen. New writers, artists or amature podcasters with ambitions of having their own radio shows. An artist needs an audience, and a lot of people will give their stuff away for free just for the opportunity for it to be listened to.
Knowing that what you created is being enjoyed by others is payment enough for a lot of people who don't do it as a full-time job. I know several artists and writers who are constantly looking for audiences and would give their stuff away (or at least copies of it) just for the exposure and feedback. As someone eluded to previously, capitalism hasn't gone as far as having to pay for a conversation.
Even now we post our opinions, writings one could call them though hardly professional, and charge not a whit. People will be giving away their creations for a long time to come as it is part of our nature as social creatures.
I agree with the FPS in an MMO like way.. The only game I've played like that was PlanetSide, which was damn fun. However, I wish there was a Planetside 2 with updated graphics and maybe a bit more in the way of obectives and goals.
Re:Nintendo is in trouble with the Revolution
on
Nintendo's New Look
·
· Score: 1
You really underestimate the vast amounts of resources (eg. money) Microsoft has. Last year they pulled in $10 billion in profits.. and that's after taking into account any losses from the first gen xbox along with the R&D and all that for the 360. They have $64 billion in assets and is worth $273 billion. (http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compin fo/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml?cusip=594918104)
They broke into a market they had no presence in and which is highly competitive and gained second place in their first generation. Money is what does that. They bought second place for a relatively high price, but still not much compaired to what resources they have. It would be asinine to think they would drop an entire market that they're second place on in the beginning of the next generation that they are currently the only company involved in. It would also be silly to assume they wouldn't follow through with trying to reap the benifits of their investment in the first xbox (userbase and infrastructure) along with the R&D of the 360 before this generation ends. I would actually be pretty surprised if MS isn't in the generation that follows the 360, as they will see this current generation as either a profit, or moving themselves further towards greater marketshare and eventual payoff. They're a stubborn company.
wow! How do you get 8 hours out of your PSP battery? I get like 4 on mine on a good day.. usually enough for 2-3 Lumines games before it goes dark. Bought an extra battery now since I'll be going to Japan and there's no way the thing will last any significant portion of a 13 hour plane trip.
Now the standby mode on the PSP is very good. You can have a game running but the whole system in standby for days and the game will snap right back up instantly when you flip the switch and barely any battery will be lost. But I could never get close to 8 hours of actual play time on one charge.
Ah, parrot the party line. I hope they're paying you well over there to troll like this. The PSP is a beautiful piece of hardware, with a solid and growing lineup (see my collection for a list of many of them, still missing about 5), and some great additional functionality (movies, music, web).
Man, I so wish that were true. I bought a PSP the day it came out, had it preordered in fact. It looked so pretty, I nearly threw my DS away. Boy would that have sucked. Besides Lumines, there hasn't been a single original GOOD game for that system. Maybe they're making the games for Japan and they haven't gotten here yet or something, I don't know. But the games really need a boost. It's great for watching movies (on mem stick, UMDs are such a rip off), but memory is really expensive and the battery isn't all that great.
PSP is ok for movies and maybe a very select few games. If you want a portable to actually play GAMES, get a DS or heck even a GBA SP. Sony focused too much on the media aspect and not the games. So sad.
The game you're referring to is called Mercury, and it's an interesting puzzle game. I have it. You can also color the mercury with ink jets laying around and combine different colored pieces for new colors (blue mercury + red mercury = purple mercury) for getting past certain doors and whatnot. However, Mercury was released like March of 2005, not long after release of the PSP. There's really a large short of good PSP Games. I hear the GTA game is good if you like GTA games.. basically the same ol' on a handheld. But new and interesting games are very hard to find even it being almost a year after release.
I have both the DS and PSP, and I will say the PSP's display and graphics kick the DS out of the water. It looks sooo pretty. However, the only things I'm actually viewing on the PSP is ripped movies on a 512mb memory stick. Lumines is good.. but I can't really say that for anything else. The DS however surprised the shit out of me with things like Kerby (totally awesome), Mario Kart, and Advanced Wars Dual Strike. I look forward to picking up the new Mario game as well.
Sony really needs to get some 3rd party support. The system is very nice, with decent control placement (barring the horrid analog stick) that could really do some nice games. I'd even take a FFVII port at this point, just someone make a damn good game for the system!
That's already been addressed by Apple with announcements of new universal binay versions of the Pro applications; probably around the time of the intel replacement for the PowerMac. It's not like they've decided to not support their own new hardware with their top film editing software. They're converting it, it's just not done yet. And honestly, you're going to be using a desktop (e.g. PowerMac G5) a hell of a lot more than a laptop for major video editing.
But that doesn't really solve the grandparent's problem. He wants to be able to run both OS X and Windows (or linux) on the same machine so that he doesn't have to carry around 2 computers, one for each OS. Sure you can get a mini-sized PC. But can you get a Mini-sized PC that will run OS X and Windows? Otherwise you have to carry around 2 mini-sized PC's, and that's just not as appealing.
But they're not really obligated to support unsupported software such as windows.
I mean if you buy a Dell machine, will you expect them to support installing an intel version of OS X on it? I mean I have this great cheap fast Dell machine that can play games wonderfully, but damnit, Dell won't support iLife or the Pro apps.
That's the same sort of argument you could give to apple not supporting windows software on their apple hardware. They're different platforms, both in OS and actual hardware. Granted they both use x86 chips now, but the processor is not the only piece of a computer. As we see from the (currently) failed "Windows on Mac" experiments, the bios also plays an important role.
Once you buy the hardware, you can do as you like. It's your hardware, so install what OS you can figure out to install. But Apple shouldn't be under any requirement to help you out in your experimental ventures to install things never meant to be installed. Gateway won't help you with Linux, Sun isn't going to work with you to get Windows going on their Solaris machine.. It seems a bit silly to expect such things from Apple.
That... was really offtopic. In no way was the GP mentioning in any discouraging way any other person in history who was extraordinarily dedicated to a good cause, he was merely reflecting on this one man. Why would you try to twist his statement to be some sort of redicule towards Ghandi? That's like saying "Well, you dotated your charity money towards prizes for greater mathematical achievements.. but by doing so you denied giving money to these charities for cancer children. Therefor, you hate children and do not care that they have cancer."
I would agree with the GP that RMS is a very unique individual. Of the people alive today, he's one of the few balls-to-the-walls dedicated to his ideals. Every time I read an interview or statement by RMS I stop and laugh and think to myself "damn this guy is crazy.. that's so awesome." And I'm glad he his. I'm glad he got people together to follow some of his crazy rantings and actually build the GNU tools, which I use every day.
I for one think we need more whackos like this. They're funny, mostly harmless, and end up bringing some good to the world.
it's kind of funny listening to your rant... You've never used iTunes to get podcasts before. This is an obvious statement, else you wouldn't have made such a silly comment.
Apple really did do something good when they added podcasts into iTunes. Since iTunes is basically the only "official" way to get music onto an iPod anyway (and the one used by most people who own one), the whole podcast thing is made completely simple. You find a podcast in iTunes.. anyone can get their podcast in there, it doesn't take a license agreement or anything with apple, just an available feed that you tell them about. Every time you load up iTunes to resync your iPod, it automatically goes and downloads any new episodes of all of your podcast subscriptions. No bookmarks, no checking back on each one at different web sites for each one (imagine checking 20 websites a day, all for a different podcast, just to see if one updated). Just load up iTunes, update all of your podcasts, update your iPod, and you're good to go. I know on a mac anyway just plugging in the iPod will do all of those steps for you, as usually the default action to an iPod being plugged in is to run iTunes and update it.
Now granted, the end result of automatic podcast updates through iTunes will get you the same as if you went to those 20 different sites and downloaded sperate mp3 files from each and manually put them all onto your iPod (or other mp3 player I suppose), but it's not as easy. And this is where you sound the most silly.
It's exactly the same thing with a distribution method tacked on.
Well DUH! That's the key! Distribution methods are super important, that's what the grandparent was pointing out! Who wants to go and download each element of all web pages you travel to as all of their seperate components and put them together themselves when you can just use a web browser that does all of that for you? An easy distribution method will make a technology go from something that's "neat" that a bunch of geeks will toy with, to something that the general population will jump on.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to look up Huxley for the PC and Xbox360 coming out late this year. It's an MMOFPS that seems like it'll end up being a lot more in-depth than Planetside (which I played for a bit.. it was ok).
There was also another MMOFPS called Neocon or something like that, though I never tried it. I heard it kinda sucked.
For single player games with some sort of surprise/shock I'd look into BioShock which should be out this year as well. It's a sequal to System Shock 2, which was IMO one of the best FPSRPG games made.
Very true. I just visited Japan recently and one thing I did note was that all of their cell phones were HUGE. I have a tiny Samsung for work, and it has to be perhaps half the size of a typical Japanese cell phone. They like large flip phones with big screens, probably because they always are using them.
What a sight it is to see a Japanese school girl riding her bike down a street in the rain with an umbrella in one hand and her cell phone in the other, text messaging people as she juggles everything.
Yes you do. The reason is that in the elder scrolls games you can pick up everything, so there can't really be just a hotkey to pick up nearby loot or pick it up when you run over it. If that were the case, you'd soon have your bags full of candles, bowls, spoons, knives, forks, bottles, plates, baskets... etc. You'll find you actually have to determine what's of value rather than assuming everything is and picking it up.
It's a bit interesting, as in a lot of other RPGs if you can pick it up, it's either important or valuable. If you do the same in an Elder Scrolls game, you'll find that like in real life, picking up everything not nailed down isn't very helpful, and often quite a burden.
I think you completely missed the GP's point. It's ok though, maybe you're just... shorther.. than some people.
/. wouldn't buy an SCO product even if they made something very revolutionary that seemed really neat and cool just on the principle that the company cannot be trusted.
I personally use Linux at work and OS X at home, with windows purely for games, so I've never been infected myself. However just because I avoided infection doesn't mean that what Sony did was all fine hunky dory. They put automatically installable root kits onto CD's that normally don't contain data without any sort of warning or message to the user on what was being done to their own machine. There's a level of trust there that's gone now.
When you buy a product from a company, a big company with big products and a large market share, you tend to assume a certain amount of quality. I wouldn't expect GE to sell me a toaster whose electrical internals were messed up in such a way as it would cause fires within the first 3 months of use. We assume that there's some sort of quality control going on and that the company wouldn't want the bad consumer relations by poorly testing their products. Having bought from GE in the past, I'm pretty sure that most of their stuff is of an acceptable quality, so I'll continue to buy from them.
SCO distributes a version of UNIX, would you buy it or recommend it to an employer? If not, why? I mean I doubt you ever had to pay the $700 fee to run Linux due to its lawsuit against IBM. I believe most people here on
Such is the position Sony has aligned itself with. They've constantly seemed to state that they do not trust their customers, even to the point of affecting other products not made by Sony (breaking them essentially) in order to protect their IP. If a company looks at me, as someone who just bought some of their stuff, as a thief; I'm inclined to show them the same amount of trust that they show me.
That's interesting. First you attempt to attack a platform (the one under topic naturally), and then immediately attack the users of that platform before they can place any defense as, you know, a second opinion on why they may disagree with you. You even attack the fact that they might disagree with you in a way that makes any sort of defense appear as though they are just spouting out fanboi flames.
Instant defense without even an attack, such as what you have shown here, really makes one wonder if their arguments can stand on their own merits. I for one believe they cannot.
And Price of Persia just ripped it off of Blinx: Time Sweeper.
It's very hard to come up with a completely new concept. Implementing it well however can make all the difference.
Exactly. This is why I put a sticker on my N64 over the logo to really say NES3. I mean, come on! Nintendo didn't release 62 other consoles between the SNES and N64! I also renamed my SNES the NES2 btw, can't stand that marketing hype.
64 indeed!
It's just a name, they can name it whatever they want. Numbers don't have to mean generations. Personally I would have preferred Xbox 2, but honestly the name means little in reality.
So then what's your excuse for the Gamecube which came out 3 days after the xbox? Same generation and still a year after the PS2...
I don't know if it's as big of a deal in Japan. Well I guess it depends on the content, violence being worse than sex there.
I was just in Japan last week for vacation and went to a place in Osaka called Den Den Town. It's a street filled with shops that sell either anime action figures, manga, video games, or porn. The porn shops weren't shy about showing bared breasts on their front windows, right next to the video game and anime fan stores. I saw several UMD porn titles in video game shops in the PSP section as well. Something you'd never see in an EB Games or GameStop in the states.
Most of Japan isn't christian, and sex isn't some great evil like it is for some reason here in the states. Violence may be a different matter, though I saw GTA there as well. Overall I don't think it shall be as much of an issue in Japan.
I disagree with the 'nothing is free' idea. A lot of people will always want to create content, and want that stuff to be read/heard/seen. New writers, artists or amature podcasters with ambitions of having their own radio shows. An artist needs an audience, and a lot of people will give their stuff away for free just for the opportunity for it to be listened to.
Knowing that what you created is being enjoyed by others is payment enough for a lot of people who don't do it as a full-time job. I know several artists and writers who are constantly looking for audiences and would give their stuff away (or at least copies of it) just for the exposure and feedback. As someone eluded to previously, capitalism hasn't gone as far as having to pay for a conversation.
Even now we post our opinions, writings one could call them though hardly professional, and charge not a whit. People will be giving away their creations for a long time to come as it is part of our nature as social creatures.
Apple has definately done at least one thing horrible with this embedded warning:
/. to start writing bad poetry and try to share it with the world.
Caused every geek on
WHY JOBS? WHY?!
I agree with the FPS in an MMO like way.. The only game I've played like that was PlanetSide, which was damn fun. However, I wish there was a Planetside 2 with updated graphics and maybe a bit more in the way of obectives and goals.
You really underestimate the vast amounts of resources (eg. money) Microsoft has. Last year they pulled in $10 billion in profits.. and that's after taking into account any losses from the first gen xbox along with the R&D and all that for the 360. They have $64 billion in assets and is worth $273 billion. (http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compin fo/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml?cusip=594918104)
They broke into a market they had no presence in and which is highly competitive and gained second place in their first generation. Money is what does that. They bought second place for a relatively high price, but still not much compaired to what resources they have. It would be asinine to think they would drop an entire market that they're second place on in the beginning of the next generation that they are currently the only company involved in. It would also be silly to assume they wouldn't follow through with trying to reap the benifits of their investment in the first xbox (userbase and infrastructure) along with the R&D of the 360 before this generation ends. I would actually be pretty surprised if MS isn't in the generation that follows the 360, as they will see this current generation as either a profit, or moving themselves further towards greater marketshare and eventual payoff. They're a stubborn company.
wow! How do you get 8 hours out of your PSP battery? I get like 4 on mine on a good day.. usually enough for 2-3 Lumines games before it goes dark. Bought an extra battery now since I'll be going to Japan and there's no way the thing will last any significant portion of a 13 hour plane trip.
Now the standby mode on the PSP is very good. You can have a game running but the whole system in standby for days and the game will snap right back up instantly when you flip the switch and barely any battery will be lost. But I could never get close to 8 hours of actual play time on one charge.
Ah, parrot the party line. I hope they're paying you well over there to troll like this. The PSP is a beautiful piece of hardware, with a solid and growing lineup (see my collection for a list of many of them, still missing about 5), and some great additional functionality (movies, music, web).
Man, I so wish that were true. I bought a PSP the day it came out, had it preordered in fact. It looked so pretty, I nearly threw my DS away. Boy would that have sucked. Besides Lumines, there hasn't been a single original GOOD game for that system. Maybe they're making the games for Japan and they haven't gotten here yet or something, I don't know. But the games really need a boost. It's great for watching movies (on mem stick, UMDs are such a rip off), but memory is really expensive and the battery isn't all that great.
PSP is ok for movies and maybe a very select few games. If you want a portable to actually play GAMES, get a DS or heck even a GBA SP. Sony focused too much on the media aspect and not the games. So sad.
The game you're referring to is called Mercury, and it's an interesting puzzle game. I have it. You can also color the mercury with ink jets laying around and combine different colored pieces for new colors (blue mercury + red mercury = purple mercury) for getting past certain doors and whatnot. However, Mercury was released like March of 2005, not long after release of the PSP. There's really a large short of good PSP Games. I hear the GTA game is good if you like GTA games.. basically the same ol' on a handheld. But new and interesting games are very hard to find even it being almost a year after release.
I have both the DS and PSP, and I will say the PSP's display and graphics kick the DS out of the water. It looks sooo pretty. However, the only things I'm actually viewing on the PSP is ripped movies on a 512mb memory stick. Lumines is good.. but I can't really say that for anything else. The DS however surprised the shit out of me with things like Kerby (totally awesome), Mario Kart, and Advanced Wars Dual Strike. I look forward to picking up the new Mario game as well.
Sony really needs to get some 3rd party support. The system is very nice, with decent control placement (barring the horrid analog stick) that could really do some nice games. I'd even take a FFVII port at this point, just someone make a damn good game for the system!
That's already been addressed by Apple with announcements of new universal binay versions of the Pro applications; probably around the time of the intel replacement for the PowerMac. It's not like they've decided to not support their own new hardware with their top film editing software. They're converting it, it's just not done yet. And honestly, you're going to be using a desktop (e.g. PowerMac G5) a hell of a lot more than a laptop for major video editing.
But that doesn't really solve the grandparent's problem. He wants to be able to run both OS X and Windows (or linux) on the same machine so that he doesn't have to carry around 2 computers, one for each OS. Sure you can get a mini-sized PC. But can you get a Mini-sized PC that will run OS X and Windows? Otherwise you have to carry around 2 mini-sized PC's, and that's just not as appealing.
But they're not really obligated to support unsupported software such as windows.
I mean if you buy a Dell machine, will you expect them to support installing an intel version of OS X on it? I mean I have this great cheap fast Dell machine that can play games wonderfully, but damnit, Dell won't support iLife or the Pro apps.
That's the same sort of argument you could give to apple not supporting windows software on their apple hardware. They're different platforms, both in OS and actual hardware. Granted they both use x86 chips now, but the processor is not the only piece of a computer. As we see from the (currently) failed "Windows on Mac" experiments, the bios also plays an important role.
Once you buy the hardware, you can do as you like. It's your hardware, so install what OS you can figure out to install. But Apple shouldn't be under any requirement to help you out in your experimental ventures to install things never meant to be installed. Gateway won't help you with Linux, Sun isn't going to work with you to get Windows going on their Solaris machine.. It seems a bit silly to expect such things from Apple.
At least we know a CEO that actually does something (in the eyes of the public) that justifies a high salary.
:)
You bet your ass he works hard for that $1 a year salary.
Peons like us can only dream of that sort of thing
Prince of Persia: not an online game, but still was succesful.
Which was also released on console first.
I want one. That case mod is the bomb.
That... was really offtopic. In no way was the GP mentioning in any discouraging way any other person in history who was extraordinarily dedicated to a good cause, he was merely reflecting on this one man. Why would you try to twist his statement to be some sort of redicule towards Ghandi? That's like saying "Well, you dotated your charity money towards prizes for greater mathematical achievements.. but by doing so you denied giving money to these charities for cancer children. Therefor, you hate children and do not care that they have cancer."
I would agree with the GP that RMS is a very unique individual. Of the people alive today, he's one of the few balls-to-the-walls dedicated to his ideals. Every time I read an interview or statement by RMS I stop and laugh and think to myself "damn this guy is crazy.. that's so awesome." And I'm glad he his. I'm glad he got people together to follow some of his crazy rantings and actually build the GNU tools, which I use every day.
I for one think we need more whackos like this. They're funny, mostly harmless, and end up bringing some good to the world.
Yeah.. too bad the X Window System used in *nix has been around since 1984.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
-- Henry Spencer
it's kind of funny listening to your rant... You've never used iTunes to get podcasts before. This is an obvious statement, else you wouldn't have made such a silly comment.
Apple really did do something good when they added podcasts into iTunes. Since iTunes is basically the only "official" way to get music onto an iPod anyway (and the one used by most people who own one), the whole podcast thing is made completely simple. You find a podcast in iTunes.. anyone can get their podcast in there, it doesn't take a license agreement or anything with apple, just an available feed that you tell them about. Every time you load up iTunes to resync your iPod, it automatically goes and downloads any new episodes of all of your podcast subscriptions. No bookmarks, no checking back on each one at different web sites for each one (imagine checking 20 websites a day, all for a different podcast, just to see if one updated). Just load up iTunes, update all of your podcasts, update your iPod, and you're good to go. I know on a mac anyway just plugging in the iPod will do all of those steps for you, as usually the default action to an iPod being plugged in is to run iTunes and update it.
Now granted, the end result of automatic podcast updates through iTunes will get you the same as if you went to those 20 different sites and downloaded sperate mp3 files from each and manually put them all onto your iPod (or other mp3 player I suppose), but it's not as easy. And this is where you sound the most silly.
It's exactly the same thing with a distribution method tacked on.
Well DUH! That's the key! Distribution methods are super important, that's what the grandparent was pointing out! Who wants to go and download each element of all web pages you travel to as all of their seperate components and put them together themselves when you can just use a web browser that does all of that for you? An easy distribution method will make a technology go from something that's "neat" that a bunch of geeks will toy with, to something that the general population will jump on.