This is not about MP3 and digital music, because they are trying to shut down Napster, a distribution system, not MP3 itself. They are not trying (in this case) to stop you making MP3s of CDs you own (or even have in your possession), they are trying to stop you being able to get hold of their copyrighted material at no cost to you and no remuneration to them, in such an easy and increasingly mass-approved of manner. Seems fair to me that they might want to do that. Or are you suggesting that most Napster users are just trying to get MP3s of records they own, instead of just using a ripper program to make their own? Sounds pretty unlikely.
This is nothing like radio at all. Legitimate radio stations pay royalties to the record companies for each track they play. Pirate radio stations don't, and surprise! They get shut down. Napster doesn't have any mechanism for paying royalties, so if it is in anyway like radio, it is like pirate radio, and deserves to be shut down.
And your understanding of the GPL is plain wrong. What you say applies to code released under the BSD license, but the GPL firmly prohibits this sort of copying without complying with its strict code-release and future licensing clauses.
Why would Project Gutenburg, a not for profit project that makes available public domain (due to copyright expiration in the most part) texts available to the world, want to help out a comcercial entity whose business is to help music pirates?
Its just too funny watching you guys, who would foam at the mouth about the violation of a GPL'd copyright, well, foam at the mouth when these other guys try to protect their copyright.
This press release isn't about MP3 or digital music. Its about stopping a major source of piracy. That is all.
And for all the talk of using other distributed file copying systems, I seem to remember that before Napster dominated the scene there was another that was much harder to shut down. FTP. Thousands of site all over the world, thousands of people to be tracked down to put a stop to it, and hence too much work for anyone to stop it. Just a bit less convenient. So really, has the beloved Napster done the world a favour? Or has it just blurred in many peoples minds what piracy is? "Hey, these guys are a company, it must be alright to download this from them..."
May I suggest you get a Freeserve account? I too am a Demon customer, and here is the deal:
Demon's Surftime is supposed to start soon (when was it supposed to start? October?). They are not going to charge extra for the use of their Surftime number for the evenings and weekends package at least.
Freeserve don't charge at all, and are doing Surftime right now.
So get Surftime now, use Freeserve with it for free (they even do a cashback of 3UKP every three months if you use them regularly on Surftime!). Then, when Demon roll out their Surftime number, you are already fully ready to use it from day one, because Surftime is not in any way associated with any one ISP, it just gives you access to the Surftime numbers (there is a Surftime national dialing code, just like there is a local-rate national dialing code, and signing up for Surftime just lets you use those numbers unmetered).
Who knows, you might (like me) discover that other than the percieved lameness factor, Freeserve offer everything you want from an ISP. I am seriously considering leaving Demon now that I have tried Freeserve... The old Demon email address is a bit of a legacy though.
And I should point out that this wasn't my original idea, a friend put me on to it. He is pretty happy with the scheme too.
Re:Dying for PCs - but PCs are not everything!
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Vanishing Game Genres
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Right on fellow console believer! I totally agree with what you said about your console games still working in the future. I have some PC games that are never going to run again because they are hardware (3DFX) dependent as well as OS dependent. But my Atari 2600 wood-effect still runs Mr Do very nicely;-)
I haven't seen Chrono Cross yet, but my friend has promised to bring me a copy when he returns from the US next week. Fingers crossed. Can you believe that Square Europe are not even planning a release of it?
"calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable"
I am not trying to troll here, but I think they were trying to avoid saying "calmed down a lot in the last year as GNOME became stable and usable".
I have been following the development of both KDE and GNOME since KDE 0.99beta1 (pre-GNOME AFAIK). I have been using KDE predominantly since then (what is that, two and a half years?). And since the first GNOME releases, I have been wanting to use GNOME, but have always found it lacking. At least once every six months I download the sources to the latest GNOME and try to live with it for as long as I can. GNOME 1.2 is the first version I have tried that had enough stability that I really felt I could use it properly.
By contrast, KDE 1.0 was close to rock solid two years ago. Of course the current KDE-2 betas are unstable - they are betas after all, but other than those, KDE hasn't had a release in the last year, so further it cannot have improved in stability. One could argue that certain key apps have seen maintenance work, such as KMail, but the flip side is that the distributions don't seem to update individual apps. I know a number of people in my local LUG who use recent versions of SuSe, Red Hat and Mandrake have found they still contain the 1.1 release version of KMail.
GNOME 1.2 is great, but face the truth, a big reason for KDE's historical success was its stability. Now that GNOME has caught up in terms of stability, competition can only get hotter!
If PC gamers find their market stifled they should go get a console (and I don't mean wait until December 2001 for a vapour-console). There is a very wide variety of games for PlayStation and N64, and Sega have some really exciting new and original games coming out for Dreamcast - you just _have_ to see Jet Set Radio! And they'll save a vast amount of money over upgrading their PC every six months mainly to benefit their games, too. Seriously, I am amazed that anyone would buy a graphics card that cost more than a complete (console) system.
Also there is a strong Linux contingent here, and for them consoles truly shine too. Once I got my first console, well dammit, no more excuse for keeping a dual-boot system. Sure beats trying to work out how to get your new mega-GPU working with DRI/Utah/Mesa...
Here in the UK I have only ever met one person who had 'switched' to a mobile from a landline. But almost everyone I know has got a mobile as well as a landline. There are a lot of mobile 'phones over here. The last figure I saw was that 56% of the population have _at least one_ (yes some people have more than one, even though all the networks have near 100% coverage), and that includes children and the elderly! I have a landline and a mobile. I have a WAP 'phone, but I find it's built-in modem, connected over IR to my laptop a lot more useful, and no slower once you turn images off.
I am beginning to 'smell the coffee' as far as moderation on/. is going. If this comment were posted to a discussion about GNOME, it would be equally funny. But that's not the moderation it would get. It would be flamebait. I guarentee it. Is it because GNOME fans moderate it this way here to further their anti-KDE agenda, or is it that KDE people read KDE stories and can laugh at themselves?
Glad to see that people still dare to make jokes around here anyway (nothing beats a bit of geek-humour;-), and Go KDE! I will begin downloading this as soon as the smoke stops coming out of my nearest mirror! Now where did I put my last KDE2 build script...
Thanks for explaining that, it sounds like a much more reasonable arrangement than it appeared. I wonder if the rationalisation of this is that 'the researchers deserve it' or 'the researchers know best how to exploit this to raise the most funds for this University'.
OK how does that work? These guys are academics, right? So their research was funded by the state? And maybe they might have had some industrial sponsors. They would be expected to right papers about their results. And yet they still get the right to make all the money out of it? Funny, I thought the government paid for this sort of thing to get research into the public domain... but this is patented, so although anyone can know about it, no-one can use it. If those were my tax-dollars, I would be pissed.
Lots of people here have discussed the port in terms of further penetration of Linux into NT space. This may well happen, but let's not forget that SGI see Linux, not Irix, as the long term OS for their hardware, and are doing some very good work on the Linux kernel and porting JFS. It seems considerably more likely that this port is the first stage for SoftImage in getting their product ready for the day that SGI make the leap.
Is it the case that children of any age are allowed to buy hardcore pR0n in the US or something? I mean are you guys getting worked up because children can watch pR0n but not play Soldier of Fortune? Or is it because games are coming under similar controls to films? Because if its the former, your liberalism is WAY out of control, and if its the latter, so what? Games are becoming more like films, so surely they deserve similar consideration?
And try to email someone in the business rather than in web-site development if you can. Because there are plenty of developers out there that really do think the sun shines out of Bill Gate's posterior, and that anyone that doesn't think likewise is an evil communist serial killer. Those people will take delight that some Linux user is excluded, and will do nothing. So try to get your message to the bean counters if you can.
The name of the product, and all the sales material on the site suggest that the ArcadePC is for use as a coin-op in an arcade. Does anyone know what you can (legally) run on these and charge money for? OK I see that you could write your own software and run that, but are there some software houses out there producing new arcade games for the coin-op market, that run on a PC? Do any of the arcade game producers commercially license any of their ROMs for use in emulators for use in a real pay-for arcade unit (rather than home use, as I believe Capcom do)?
OK you could put mame and some downloaded ROMs on it, but that could get you in trouble. Or is that what they are really suggesting it is for?
Xenon 2 was surely a classic Amiga game? I mean OK it got ported from Amiga to the PC, but in those days you might or might not have a sound card, like a year or so ago you might or might not have 3D graphics hardware. The Amiga was a (relatively) static platform, so the developers got the most out of it, and knew that everyone would get to hear the music.
What has licensing got to do with regulation? Licensing is about having to pay the government a seven or eight figure fee for the right to use some radio spectrum (at the moment). Currently there is only so much of it they can sell, but with the Internet... As the bandwidth is provided (mostly) by private companies, surely if anyone had the right to charge extra, it is the infrastructure companies? Surprise, they already do, by having bandwidth usage based pricing structures.
Its reasonable to charge for radio spectrum usage because there is only so much, and it is to no-one's advantage to have contention for the same frequency - when I drive anywhere near London, my car radio goes screwy because of all the local heroes with their pirate radio stations. But in the context of the Internet, it just means that you can only play if you are one of the big boys. Essentially it is corruption, but the state rather than an individual is taking the bribe.
A New Zealander said elsewhere in this thread that Australia tries hard to encourage local content. In the 'digital age', new producers will have nowhere to go to get a start, if their work doesn't fit with what the major producers think fits their market (because they would have to get their content taken by a major to get it broadcast). This is like saying that up-coming and garage bands can't play gigs in pubs/bars/local dance halls. The only place you can play is a large stadium, so your band has to have an audience of 50,000 if you want to perform in public.
How are they going to enforce this anyway? Are they going to port-scan all IP ranges known to be used by Australians, every few minutes? They would have to finger-print all likely software. How does this stop Australians getting their streams from outside Australia? This doesn't seem to be so much protecting local content as preventing it. And what happens to video conferencing over the Internet (or any other means)? Its a video stream, going potentially to more than one destination.
Is this a description of a role-play to help readers understand why some people might develop for X-Box? I think some people might miss that, so I had better counter the fud.
If you really were a 'professional' games developer, you would of course know that very few of the Dreamcast titles are based on WinCE. It is just an option, not a requirement. Sega produce their own OS too which is much closer to the metal, and vastly prefered for games development.
Anyone that actually spent money on games would see that Sony and Nintendo being 'anal' about releases on their platforms is of course a good thing. It is about quality. They do their best (for the developers and their own licensing revenues) to ensure that people buy originals of games, through proprietary media. They would be pretty stupid to then bring about mass customer dissatisfaction by allowing very low quality software go out the door (as often happens with PC games) with their name on it. Being less 'anal' might be good for developers with low quality products, desperate for a channel through which to recoup some of their losses by selling to the gullible, but its certainly not good for the reputation of the platform.
Do you really think dev-kits cost between $0.25M and $1M? A PS2 dev kit costs $10,000 , if you are in the position where you have to buy them. If you are a developer with a good track record, Sony will be giving them to you for free. Console makers don't make money out of dev kits, they need developer support to make the platform a success.
And do you think emulating Dreamcast is trivial? I believe the most efficient emulators can get to an average of five native instructions for each emulated instruction, when running CPU-bound activities. Dreamcast has a 233Mhz RISC processor, so it is about 1/3 the clock of X-Box, and being RISC is going to be requiring more instructions to do the same thing as a CISC design as found in X-Box. Its pie in the sky to suggest that someone could knock out a DC emulator for X-Box, and allow you to start on DC now, for instant port to X-Box if it is ever released. Bleemcast is possible because PS1 only has a 33Mhz processor to start with, and the architecture of the two consoles isn't that different, both being designed with ease of development in mind - at the hardware level. The X-Box might have ease of development at the software level if you are lucky, though I have seen enough posts here derriding the Direct-X development experience to make me think otherwise.
I don't give a fsck what Scott says, its the film of the book. The only person who can rightfully come out and make a statement like that is Philip K Dick, and as he is sadly dead, that doesn't seem likely. Ridley Scott should say something more useful, like publicly raise the issue that the DVD version is a disgrace, or bringing to the public attention that the so-called Directors Cut of his film is not his choice of cut at all, but that of the film editor...and sucks. No, I haven't read the linked article BTW.
Serious gamers use consoles, so that they can forget about the OS and hardware upgrades, and concentrate on perfected gameplay as found in games like Mario 64, Gran Turismo or Soul Calibur. It is not only cheaper but more fun.
If you knew anything about MS Office formats, you would of course know that it is pretty unlikely that any non-Windows native software will ever be able to read them, because they rely heavily on OLE for data storage. So your points are really pretty invalid. They would of course be perfectly sensible if Word et. al. saved to a plain text file.
Great point about potential rise in property crime if tobacco is ever criminalised. Speaking as an ex-smoker, I have to say that there is NO likelihood of nicotene inhalers ever taking off - they really are sh*t!
Just in response to that bit about taking drugs harming no-one but the taker...
I don't know what kind of drug-use the US war on drugs targets. But recently in the news here in the UK was the research finding that 80% of property crime here is driven by Heroin addiction. We are mainly talking burglary here. Which is a truly shattering experience for the victim, as it shakes one's confidence upon being able to go out of your house and come back again without losing all your stuff.
So I would have to say that not all drug use is a victimless crime. Of course, if the DEA (is that right?) is mainly targeting people smoking Marijuana, that is a different matter.
I think if you were actually worried about quality you would be listening to a CD instead, and eagerly awaiting whatever the next-gen super CD thingy is going to be.
A good reason to get excited about MP3 is the momentum and wide acceptance it has. If you want to get music from other people, you need a common format. VQF hasn't been as widely ported as MP3 either. Unless you are an experienced geek, with access to a Windows machine (surely that's a self-excusionary situation?) you won't get it running on Linux or FreeBSD (via an XMMS plugin that uses WINE to call the VQF DLL).
Four years ago my college friends and I were really excited by MP3, which sounded pretty good through our low-rent stereos. Today, the only one of us still interested lives overseas and uses it because he can't locally buy the music he likes. The rest of us can't tolerate the quality.
You just want to morph consoles into PCs. You must be jealous or something. Maybe its all the excellent console games that never get ported to PC?
PCs are a moving target, as you point out, unlike consoles. As you yourself note, this makes PC games unstable. Then you go on to say that consoles should go down the same route as PCs. You also advocate a single de facto standard, apparently for the good of everyone.
In reality, the console manufacturers define very different markets for their products, and develop those markets in a way that one single standard couldn't hope to. Nintendo go for simplicity and elegance of gameplay, and an eye on the younger generation of gamers. Sony have gone for depth and hip-ness, focussing on games that you don't have to be embarrassed to be court playing if you are a grown-up. And then Sega deliver high-quality arcade conversions, with all the immediacy of play and accessibility involved in designing a game that doesn't leave you wondering what to do after you pay your quarter, and don't feel robbed even if your game only lasts a minute.
Just like the consoles, PCs have their genre. First person shooters and real time strategy games rule supreme on the PC, and for those games, PC is best of breed. 'One standard' hasn't helped to bring together this amazing gaming platform that you speak of, that has all the best games. When a predominantly console-based developer does decide to port to PC, it is some months or years after their console release - Final Fantasy 7 springs to mind.
Presumably you will insist that this is due to anti-competitive practices by the console makers, until such a day as there is only one console company in control of the market. Then you will answer anyone's complaint that the games market has gone stale by telling them that the console maker must be allowed the Freedom to Innovate.
And my point, I'm sure you realise, was that MHz is no measure of real power.
As for facts, perhaps I should have spent several days studying the data-sheets of the chips to make absolutely sure my claim was correct, then pasted in some relevant tables from them to reinforce my claim? Or should I have made a largely correct observation (that its based on a dinosaur processor whose raw numbers don't indicate the performance), backed it up with a snappy analogy, in time for some poor MS-sucker to read and perhaps not get taken in by the inevitable hype?
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This is not about MP3 and digital music, because they are trying to shut down Napster, a distribution system, not MP3 itself. They are not trying (in this case) to stop you making MP3s of CDs you own (or even have in your possession), they are trying to stop you being able to get hold of their copyrighted material at no cost to you and no remuneration to them, in such an easy and increasingly mass-approved of manner. Seems fair to me that they might want to do that. Or are you suggesting that most Napster users are just trying to get MP3s of records they own, instead of just using a ripper program to make their own? Sounds pretty unlikely.
This is nothing like radio at all. Legitimate radio stations pay royalties to the record companies for each track they play. Pirate radio stations don't, and surprise! They get shut down. Napster doesn't have any mechanism for paying royalties, so if it is in anyway like radio, it is like pirate radio, and deserves to be shut down.
And your understanding of the GPL is plain wrong. What you say applies to code released under the BSD license, but the GPL firmly prohibits this sort of copying without complying with its strict code-release and future licensing clauses.
Why would Project Gutenburg, a not for profit project that makes available public domain (due to copyright expiration in the most part) texts available to the world, want to help out a comcercial entity whose business is to help music pirates?
Its just too funny watching you guys, who would foam at the mouth about the violation of a GPL'd copyright, well, foam at the mouth when these other guys try to protect their copyright.
This press release isn't about MP3 or digital music. Its about stopping a major source of piracy. That is all.
And for all the talk of using other distributed file copying systems, I seem to remember that before Napster dominated the scene there was another that was much harder to shut down. FTP. Thousands of site all over the world, thousands of people to be tracked down to put a stop to it, and hence too much work for anyone to stop it. Just a bit less convenient. So really, has the beloved Napster done the world a favour? Or has it just blurred in many peoples minds what piracy is? "Hey, these guys are a company, it must be alright to download this from them..."
May I suggest you get a Freeserve account? I too am a Demon customer, and here is the deal:
Demon's Surftime is supposed to start soon (when was it supposed to start? October?). They are not going to charge extra for the use of their Surftime number for the evenings and weekends package at least.
Freeserve don't charge at all, and are doing Surftime right now.
So get Surftime now, use Freeserve with it for free (they even do a cashback of 3UKP every three months if you use them regularly on Surftime!). Then, when Demon roll out their Surftime number, you are already fully ready to use it from day one, because Surftime is not in any way associated with any one ISP, it just gives you access to the Surftime numbers (there is a Surftime national dialing code, just like there is a local-rate national dialing code, and signing up for Surftime just lets you use those numbers unmetered).
Who knows, you might (like me) discover that other than the percieved lameness factor, Freeserve offer everything you want from an ISP. I am seriously considering leaving Demon now that I have tried Freeserve... The old Demon email address is a bit of a legacy though.
And I should point out that this wasn't my original idea, a friend put me on to it. He is pretty happy with the scheme too.
Right on fellow console believer! I totally agree with what you said about your console games still working in the future. I have some PC games that are never going to run again because they are hardware (3DFX) dependent as well as OS dependent. But my Atari 2600 wood-effect still runs Mr Do very nicely ;-)
I haven't seen Chrono Cross yet, but my friend has promised to bring me a copy when he returns from the US next week. Fingers crossed. Can you believe that Square Europe are not even planning a release of it?
"calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable" I am not trying to troll here, but I think they were trying to avoid saying "calmed down a lot in the last year as GNOME became stable and usable". I have been following the development of both KDE and GNOME since KDE 0.99beta1 (pre-GNOME AFAIK). I have been using KDE predominantly since then (what is that, two and a half years?). And since the first GNOME releases, I have been wanting to use GNOME, but have always found it lacking. At least once every six months I download the sources to the latest GNOME and try to live with it for as long as I can. GNOME 1.2 is the first version I have tried that had enough stability that I really felt I could use it properly. By contrast, KDE 1.0 was close to rock solid two years ago. Of course the current KDE-2 betas are unstable - they are betas after all, but other than those, KDE hasn't had a release in the last year, so further it cannot have improved in stability. One could argue that certain key apps have seen maintenance work, such as KMail, but the flip side is that the distributions don't seem to update individual apps. I know a number of people in my local LUG who use recent versions of SuSe, Red Hat and Mandrake have found they still contain the 1.1 release version of KMail. GNOME 1.2 is great, but face the truth, a big reason for KDE's historical success was its stability. Now that GNOME has caught up in terms of stability, competition can only get hotter!
If PC gamers find their market stifled they should go get a console (and I don't mean wait until December 2001 for a vapour-console). There is a very wide variety of games for PlayStation and N64, and Sega have some really exciting new and original games coming out for Dreamcast - you just _have_ to see Jet Set Radio! And they'll save a vast amount of money over upgrading their PC every six months mainly to benefit their games, too. Seriously, I am amazed that anyone would buy a graphics card that cost more than a complete (console) system.
Also there is a strong Linux contingent here, and for them consoles truly shine too. Once I got my first console, well dammit, no more excuse for keeping a dual-boot system. Sure beats trying to work out how to get your new mega-GPU working with DRI/Utah/Mesa...
Here in the UK I have only ever met one person who had 'switched' to a mobile from a landline. But almost everyone I know has got a mobile as well as a landline. There are a lot of mobile 'phones over here. The last figure I saw was that 56% of the population have _at least one_ (yes some people have more than one, even though all the networks have near 100% coverage), and that includes children and the elderly! I have a landline and a mobile. I have a WAP 'phone, but I find it's built-in modem, connected over IR to my laptop a lot more useful, and no slower once you turn images off.
I am beginning to 'smell the coffee' as far as moderation on /. is going. If this comment were posted to a discussion about GNOME, it would be equally funny. But that's not the moderation it would get. It would be flamebait. I guarentee it. Is it because GNOME fans moderate it this way here to further their anti-KDE agenda, or is it that KDE people read KDE stories and can laugh at themselves?
;-), and Go KDE! I will begin downloading this as soon as the smoke stops coming out of my nearest mirror! Now where did I put my last KDE2 build script...
Glad to see that people still dare to make jokes around here anyway (nothing beats a bit of geek-humour
Thanks for explaining that, it sounds like a much more reasonable arrangement than it appeared. I wonder if the rationalisation of this is that 'the researchers deserve it' or 'the researchers know best how to exploit this to raise the most funds for this University'.
OK how does that work? These guys are academics, right? So their research was funded by the state? And maybe they might have had some industrial sponsors. They would be expected to right papers about their results. And yet they still get the right to make all the money out of it? Funny, I thought the government paid for this sort of thing to get research into the public domain... but this is patented, so although anyone can know about it, no-one can use it. If those were my tax-dollars, I would be pissed.
Lots of people here have discussed the port in terms of further penetration of Linux into NT space. This may well happen, but let's not forget that SGI see Linux, not Irix, as the long term OS for their hardware, and are doing some very good work on the Linux kernel and porting JFS. It seems considerably more likely that this port is the first stage for SoftImage in getting their product ready for the day that SGI make the leap.
Is it the case that children of any age are allowed to buy hardcore pR0n in the US or something? I mean are you guys getting worked up because children can watch pR0n but not play Soldier of Fortune? Or is it because games are coming under similar controls to films? Because if its the former, your liberalism is WAY out of control, and if its the latter, so what? Games are becoming more like films, so surely they deserve similar consideration?
And try to email someone in the business rather than in web-site development if you can. Because there are plenty of developers out there that really do think the sun shines out of Bill Gate's posterior, and that anyone that doesn't think likewise is an evil communist serial killer. Those people will take delight that some Linux user is excluded, and will do nothing. So try to get your message to the bean counters if you can.
The name of the product, and all the sales material on the site suggest that the ArcadePC is for use as a coin-op in an arcade. Does anyone know what you can (legally) run on these and charge money for? OK I see that you could write your own software and run that, but are there some software houses out there producing new arcade games for the coin-op market, that run on a PC? Do any of the arcade game producers commercially license any of their ROMs for use in emulators for use in a real pay-for arcade unit (rather than home use, as I believe Capcom do)?
OK you could put mame and some downloaded ROMs on it, but that could get you in trouble. Or is that what they are really suggesting it is for?
Xenon 2 was surely a classic Amiga game? I mean OK it got ported from Amiga to the PC, but in those days you might or might not have a sound card, like a year or so ago you might or might not have 3D graphics hardware. The Amiga was a (relatively) static platform, so the developers got the most out of it, and knew that everyone would get to hear the music.
What has licensing got to do with regulation? Licensing is about having to pay the government a seven or eight figure fee for the right to use some radio spectrum (at the moment). Currently there is only so much of it they can sell, but with the Internet... As the bandwidth is provided (mostly) by private companies, surely if anyone had the right to charge extra, it is the infrastructure companies? Surprise, they already do, by having bandwidth usage based pricing structures.
Its reasonable to charge for radio spectrum usage because there is only so much, and it is to no-one's advantage to have contention for the same frequency - when I drive anywhere near London, my car radio goes screwy because of all the local heroes with their pirate radio stations. But in the context of the Internet, it just means that you can only play if you are one of the big boys. Essentially it is corruption, but the state rather than an individual is taking the bribe.
A New Zealander said elsewhere in this thread that Australia tries hard to encourage local content. In the 'digital age', new producers will have nowhere to go to get a start, if their work doesn't fit with what the major producers think fits their market (because they would have to get their content taken by a major to get it broadcast). This is like saying that up-coming and garage bands can't play gigs in pubs/bars/local dance halls. The only place you can play is a large stadium, so your band has to have an audience of 50,000 if you want to perform in public.
How are they going to enforce this anyway? Are they going to port-scan all IP ranges known to be used by Australians, every few minutes? They would have to finger-print all likely software. How does this stop Australians getting their streams from outside Australia? This doesn't seem to be so much protecting local content as preventing it. And what happens to video conferencing over the Internet (or any other means)? Its a video stream, going potentially to more than one destination.
Is this a description of a role-play to help readers understand why some people might develop for X-Box? I think some people might miss that, so I had better counter the fud.
If you really were a 'professional' games developer, you would of course know that very few of the Dreamcast titles are based on WinCE. It is just an option, not a requirement. Sega produce their own OS too which is much closer to the metal, and vastly prefered for games development.
Anyone that actually spent money on games would see that Sony and Nintendo being 'anal' about releases on their platforms is of course a good thing. It is about quality. They do their best (for the developers and their own licensing revenues) to ensure that people buy originals of games, through proprietary media. They would be pretty stupid to then bring about mass customer dissatisfaction by allowing very low quality software go out the door (as often happens with PC games) with their name on it. Being less 'anal' might be good for developers with low quality products, desperate for a channel through which to recoup some of their losses by selling to the gullible, but its certainly not good for the reputation of the platform.
Do you really think dev-kits cost between $0.25M and $1M? A PS2 dev kit costs $10,000 , if you are in the position where you have to buy them. If you are a developer with a good track record, Sony will be giving them to you for free. Console makers don't make money out of dev kits, they need developer support to make the platform a success.
And do you think emulating Dreamcast is trivial? I believe the most efficient emulators can get to an average of five native instructions for each emulated instruction, when running CPU-bound activities. Dreamcast has a 233Mhz RISC processor, so it is about 1/3 the clock of X-Box, and being RISC is going to be requiring more instructions to do the same thing as a CISC design as found in X-Box. Its pie in the sky to suggest that someone could knock out a DC emulator for X-Box, and allow you to start on DC now, for instant port to X-Box if it is ever released. Bleemcast is possible because PS1 only has a 33Mhz processor to start with, and the architecture of the two consoles isn't that different, both being designed with ease of development in mind - at the hardware level. The X-Box might have ease of development at the software level if you are lucky, though I have seen enough posts here derriding the Direct-X development experience to make me think otherwise.
I don't give a fsck what Scott says, its the film of the book. The only person who can rightfully come out and make a statement like that is Philip K Dick, and as he is sadly dead, that doesn't seem likely. Ridley Scott should say something more useful, like publicly raise the issue that the DVD version is a disgrace, or bringing to the public attention that the so-called Directors Cut of his film is not his choice of cut at all, but that of the film editor...and sucks. No, I haven't read the linked article BTW.
Serious gamers use consoles, so that they can forget about the OS and hardware upgrades, and concentrate on perfected gameplay as found in games like Mario 64, Gran Turismo or Soul Calibur. It is not only cheaper but more fun.
If you knew anything about MS Office formats, you would of course know that it is pretty unlikely that any non-Windows native software will ever be able to read them, because they rely heavily on OLE for data storage. So your points are really pretty invalid. They would of course be perfectly sensible if Word et. al. saved to a plain text file.
Great point about potential rise in property crime if tobacco is ever criminalised. Speaking as an ex-smoker, I have to say that there is NO likelihood of nicotene inhalers ever taking off - they really are sh*t!
Just in response to that bit about taking drugs harming no-one but the taker...
I don't know what kind of drug-use the US war on drugs targets. But recently in the news here in the UK was the research finding that 80% of property crime here is driven by Heroin addiction. We are mainly talking burglary here. Which is a truly shattering experience for the victim, as it shakes one's confidence upon being able to go out of your house and come back again without losing all your stuff.
So I would have to say that not all drug use is a victimless crime. Of course, if the DEA (is that right?) is mainly targeting people smoking Marijuana, that is a different matter.
I think if you were actually worried about quality you would be listening to a CD instead, and eagerly awaiting whatever the next-gen super CD thingy is going to be.
A good reason to get excited about MP3 is the momentum and wide acceptance it has. If you want to get music from other people, you need a common format. VQF hasn't been as widely ported as MP3 either. Unless you are an experienced geek, with access to a Windows machine (surely that's a self-excusionary situation?) you won't get it running on Linux or FreeBSD (via an XMMS plugin that uses WINE to call the VQF DLL).
Four years ago my college friends and I were really excited by MP3, which sounded pretty good through our low-rent stereos. Today, the only one of us still interested lives overseas and uses it because he can't locally buy the music he likes. The rest of us can't tolerate the quality.
You just want to morph consoles into PCs. You must be jealous or something. Maybe its all the excellent console games that never get ported to PC?
PCs are a moving target, as you point out, unlike consoles. As you yourself note, this makes PC games unstable. Then you go on to say that consoles should go down the same route as PCs. You also advocate a single de facto standard, apparently for the good of everyone.
In reality, the console manufacturers define very different markets for their products, and develop those markets in a way that one single standard couldn't hope to. Nintendo go for simplicity and elegance of gameplay, and an eye on the younger generation of gamers. Sony have gone for depth and hip-ness, focussing on games that you don't have to be embarrassed to be court playing if you are a grown-up. And then Sega deliver high-quality arcade conversions, with all the immediacy of play and accessibility involved in designing a game that doesn't leave you wondering what to do after you pay your quarter, and don't feel robbed even if your game only lasts a minute.
Just like the consoles, PCs have their genre. First person shooters and real time strategy games rule supreme on the PC, and for those games, PC is best of breed. 'One standard' hasn't helped to bring together this amazing gaming platform that you speak of, that has all the best games. When a predominantly console-based developer does decide to port to PC, it is some months or years after their console release - Final Fantasy 7 springs to mind.
Presumably you will insist that this is due to anti-competitive practices by the console makers, until such a day as there is only one console company in control of the market. Then you will answer anyone's complaint that the games market has gone stale by telling them that the console maker must be allowed the Freedom to Innovate.
And my point, I'm sure you realise, was that MHz is no measure of real power.
As for facts, perhaps I should have spent several days studying the data-sheets of the chips to make absolutely sure my claim was correct, then pasted in some relevant tables from them to reinforce my claim? Or should I have made a largely correct observation (that its based on a dinosaur processor whose raw numbers don't indicate the performance), backed it up with a snappy analogy, in time for some poor MS-sucker to read and perhaps not get taken in by the inevitable hype?
And what's with your obsession with cricket?