Same for DDR and Guitar Hero, which are apparently incredibly rare games for no apparent reason that I can see. One minute DDR was $168, the next it was $69.99. What's amusing is seeing how fast the Amazon resellers react and adjust their prices.
I don't think the resellers are actually adjusting their prices. What you're seeing is how Amazon's prices are displayed. If something is in stock, you'll see the "new" price, or $249 in the case of a Wii. When it's out of stock, you'll see the "New & Used from $XXX" price, which means you're buying from resellers. Once Amazon's stock runs out, the display flips from the "new" price back to the "new and used" price. The resellers likely aren't changing their prices at all, since they know that 30 minutes later they'll be relevant again.
Sony have decided nobody wants to buy a $500 console to play 8 year old games so they're ditching the feature. Since they continue selling the PS2 at ridiculously affordable prices, there's no point making the PS3 compatible. It's not like you can still buy a Gamecube or Xbox brand new, though, these days.
That "ridiculously affordable price" for the PS2 is still $130, which means you have to spend $630 rather than just $500 to get PS2 and PS3 support (assuming you don't already have a PS2, of course). As well, you now have to have two systems connected to your TV, two systems taking up power plugs and using power when in standby mode, two sets of controllers (PS2 controllers don't work with PS3), etc.
Just because Sony says nobody wants BC anymore doesn't mean it's true.
I never got to play KOTOR for example (has that made the list yet?), and the fun I'm having with Mass Effect makes me want to go check out earlier Bioware offerings
KOTOR 1 and 2 as well as Jade Empire (same engine as KOTOR, more of an active battle system similar to Mass Effect except with martial arts instead of guns) have been supported on BC for quite some time now. If you haven't played them, you really must. Especially if you're enjoying Mass Effect.
What I don't get is why we seemingly refuse to invest for the long-term in the United States. Sure, some companies do, generally the smarter ones. But when it comes to public infrastructure, politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.
Some companies tried that and it didn't really work out all that well.
Or even worse, signals that people pay for that are sent along copper, as is the case they are trying to get to here?
Who said anything about censorship? This was a push to get more regulatory control over the cable industry in order to do things like force a la carte subscription options. You could argue that government has no place to regulate private industry like that, but that has nothing to do with free speech or censorship.
Also, the FCC doesn't cover cable-only channels like FX (lots of "shit" and near nudity there with shows like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, with only self-regulation stopping them from going further), in terms of censorship. They cover broadcast channels that then happen to be re-distributed via cable.
What part about Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech is so hard to understand?
Congress can't make it illegal for you to say "shit" or "fuck" or show a tit on TV, but they don't have to allow you to use the public airwaves to do it.
It's frickin' 2007, can't we get a decent OS already?
Read my other reply where I said that most of the UAC prompts I see are for legitimate admin usage. What would you recommend? Going back to the XP and older model of always running users as admins? What do Linux and OS X do when you want to do some admin work? Oh, that's right, they prompt you. The only difference is that Vista doesn't make you put in a password, thought it can be configured to do so (see Stardock's new TweakVista tool, if you don't want to go registry diving yourself).
I neglected to say that those UAC prompts generally resulted from me taking administrative action like poking around in the registry (regedit will prompt UAC), where you would be prompted for credentials in OS X or Linux for similar actions. Definitely not standard user stuff. If I took out the admin-related work, I see less than one UAC prompt per week.
that's just a convenient cover story so they don't have to admit that they want DRM (so they can be the next iTunes Music Store). If they truly didn't want DRM, they wouldn't have it and there's not much that anybody would be able to do about it.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft is trying to be just that (the next iTMS) with Zune. And they even have a number of songs and albums available in a non-DRM mp3 format (all of the Radiohead content on Zune is in the non-DRM mp3 format, for example).
I've seen systems shipped with vista that had unsupported or broken components.
And how is that Microsoft's fault? There were plenty of broken systems like that when XP first shipped, and when Win98 first shipped, and Win95, and so on. Perhaps things would be better if Microsoft built their own machines, like Apple, but that's never going to happen.
and its onerous security notifications, adherence to DRM and general pointlessness, I don't think that "incompatibility with hardware" is really a valid statement.
I'm not even sure "onerous security notifications" and "adherence to DRM" are valid statements. If you're seeing a bunch of UAC prompts, either you're running some really crap apps that don't understand how to work in a multi-user environment, you're doing a lot of admin work (in which case you may as well just turn off UAC), or you're doing something very, very wrong. In an average week of work + home computing, I see maybe two or three UAC prompts the entire time, and I'm running with UAC on.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "adherence to DRM", but I assume you're referring to the old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release that claimed all audio and video would be degraded if you weren't using DRMed content and/or locked down hardware. That's been proven false many times over. Obviously Vista has to follow certain rules in order to play HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray content, but that's the fault of the MPAA, not Microsoft. Either you implement the secure pipeline and require hardware to match (HDMI-everything), or you don't get to play that content at full resolution. The same applies to any OS, not just Vista.
EA never again produces another PS3 title, leaving a sizable void for a better, smarter studio to fill in the gap. Personally, I wouldn't shed a single tear if EA announced that they will never develop for the PS3 again.
You may not care, but Sony definitely would. No EA Sports games == console death. Microsoft knows this. That's why they gave up so much in order to get EA to make online-multiplayer games on Xbox Live (Microsoft gave up their in-house sports studios, as well as opened up the Xbox Live service to allow EA to "own" the customer relationship and just let Live act as a gateway into EA's servers for EA games). It seems to have worked out well for Microsoft as well, since this time around EA is using the 360 as their primary platform from which everything else is ported.
Whether or not you like EA sports titles doesn't matter. Without them, any console will be dead within a year.
Blame Sony's movie studios; they're the ones that mandated the hypervisor, so far as I can tell, and that's why the system's sort of gimped by running on a virtual machine.
What does' Sony's movie business have to do with running a hypervisor? The Xbox 360 is also a hypervisor-based system, but Microsoft doesn't have a movie studio business. They went with a hypervisor approach for security -- the hypervisor makes the system much more difficult to hack, which is why we still haven't seen any valid Xbox 360 mod chips 2 years into the life of the console (the DVD-ROM firmware hack doesn't count, as that just bypassed the drive's media check and not the system's code signature check). Using a hypervisor doesn't have to eat all of your memory and kill your performance, unless you're Sony, I guess.
How is this thing going to dissipate its waste heat? Put it in a bathtub?
Do you put your PC in a bathtub to dissipate its waste heat? Given the lack of technical information in both the article and the Hyperion site, I'm just speculating, but with the small size of the reactor it may be feasible to dissipate the heat through the air. The image in the article shows what looks to be a heat sink (finned material) between the inner core and the outer casing. Perhaps that filled with mineral oil or antifreeze would be enough to spread the sufficiently heat to the outer stainless steel casing for dispersal through the air?
FWIW, my sister has an iPhone and tells me that the reception is noticeably worse than her previous phone (a Razor, I think).
As long as we're going with anecdotal evidence, I switched from a Razor to an iPhone a couple weeks ago and haven't noticed any signal strength issues.
I suppose there's no IT involved in modern "agriculture". OK.
There's plenty of IT involved in modern agriculture as practiced in first-world nations like the US. That's not the kind of agriculture these third world countries need. Not yet, anyway.
However I do disagree with the parent poster somewhat. Most third world countries "get" agriculture. The problem is that they're so often fighting one another, putting gangs and despots in power who then in turn steal or burn agricultural output leaving the poor to starve, displacing them from their homes and families, if not just outright killing them. Solve the military/political problems and you'll solve the food/shelter/water problems. Only once those problems are solved does it make any sense at all to start shipping over PCs.
umm... Can someone please check on Metallica and see how they are doing? I hear they have a song on this game. We must remain vigilant.
The game in question is Rock the 80s. Metallica has songs on Guitar Hero III and Rock Band, but they're the actual songs rather than covers. This is one place where Metallica can't sue.
Won't it potentially drive some more sales for their other stuff from people who learn about them through the game? Or perhaps it's because it's so close people won't bother going to buy the original or other Romantics tunes?
Guitar Hero III is actually driving online sales of songs in the game, though the effect is not so clear on physical album sales. I would expect that even cover songs drive sales, with better covers driving even more sales. Assuming the Romantics have songs available on various online music sites (iTunes, Zune, Rhapsody, etc), and assuming that they still see some royalties from the sale of their songs, this seems like a very stupid move.
Then again, we are talking about GH: Rock the 80s, a lack-luster stand-alone GH game that's only available on the PS2 and has been on the market for a while. It may not longer be driving online sales, so this is a final effort to squeeze a little bit more money out of the license.
If Activision or Harmonix came to me and was like, "Hey, we are going to do a cover of your song for GH/RB" I'd have a pretty damn good idea of what they are doing. It's not going to be a Salsa cover of a rock song, but a pretty damn close cover with at best some parts adapted to fit the game better!
I don't know about that. They did do a metal cover of The Devil Went Down to Georgia for the GH3 finale:).
If that's really a repeating issue on his box, and folks aren't reporting similar experiences because you "can't return video games," then establishing a class is the way to make sure anyone with problems can jump on the bandwagon. It lowers the barrier to file suit, in the same way that corporations have had that barrier lowered, vis-a-vis bulk subpoena provisions in the DMCA.
This guy is just an idiot with a console that hasn't completely died yet. Halo 3 isn't causing his console to crash. His almost-broken console is causing Halo 3 to crash. He simply needs to call Xbox support and get it fixed or replaced for free.
Leave it to a Californian to file a lawsuit where a simple phone call would suffice.
According to the video I watched on the Amazon site, it is indeed wireless and connects to "Amazon's whisper net" for free. Like WiFi but no need to log into anything as it does find service just like a cell phone. From there, you can look at the catalog of downloadable stuff and download for the presented price much like a downloadable Amazon website. You can email stuff to your Kindle, but that costs money. They never mention exactly what the whisper net is or how much coverage it has.
But it's still EVDO. It's just that Amazon is paying for your EVDO connection because you're going to pay them for books. Think of it like the Kindle has a SIM card inside it that's setup for an Amazon corporate account, so every time you use the EVDO network Amazon gets charged. They go ahead and subsidize that because they expect the cost to be minimal compared to the profit of selling books anywhere, anytime.
When the game was ported to the 360 they developed a way to stream the levels, avoiding that problem.
You must be playing a different Xbox 360 port of HL2 than I am, as there were plenty of "Loading..." bars in HL2 from the Orange Box. It's also quite obvious that a new "level" has loaded after a loading bar rather than just streaming in some new data. Though you're still looking at the same place and the same geometry, you'll often notice lighting differences from before and after the load. I haven't played through Ep2 yet, so maybe loading changed there.
Portal did a good job of hiding loads during the elevator rides, but the late-game breaks that convention since data still needs to load but there are no more elevators.
Not always true. If your credit card company uses the average daily balance system of calculating interest rates, you benefit from paying it down as low as possible as often as possible.
That's assuming you're going to carry a balance. No credit card company charges you interest if you pay off your balance each month, and that was the scenario given by the original poster. But yes, you're correct. If you're going to carry a balance on your card, you're better off paying it off as soon as you possibly can, even if that means paying multiple times within a single month. The quicker you get the balance down, the less interest you'll have to pay.
Without a decent income GPs credit limit likely isn't high enough to buy a plane ticket anywhere plus a decent dinner or a Wii plus a few games. It's easy to get a credit card but it's not always easy to get a credit limit for more than a few hundred dollars.
You'd be very surprised what credit companies give students these days, then. Back when I was a college freshman 11 years ago with no real job (just lab sitting) I was able to get two cards with several-thousand dollar limits each. I didn't use them for much then, but getting them establish credit and now those same cards have 11 year credit histories on them and are still the only cards I have or want. Long credit is good credit.
I pay off the card in full every month, if not more often (if I've made a large purchase) to keep the balance down.
Unless you're paying off a large purchase in order to make room for another large purchase within the same month (in which case you may want to rethink what you're doing), paying your credit card bill multiple times per month is costing you money. As long as your bill is paid off at the end, it doesn't matter whether the charge sat on the card for 1 day or 30 -- you're not going to get a finance charge. At the same time, the moeny that you used to pay off your bill in the middle of the month could've been generating you interest for another couple weeks before spending it to pay the bill at the end of the month. While the amount of interest you're going to make in that amount of time is minimal unless you're talking about large dollar amounts, over time that amount can add up. And even if you are just throwing away a couple of cents each time, that's real money you're losing.
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I don't think the resellers are actually adjusting their prices. What you're seeing is how Amazon's prices are displayed. If something is in stock, you'll see the "new" price, or $249 in the case of a Wii. When it's out of stock, you'll see the "New & Used from $XXX" price, which means you're buying from resellers. Once Amazon's stock runs out, the display flips from the "new" price back to the "new and used" price. The resellers likely aren't changing their prices at all, since they know that 30 minutes later they'll be relevant again.
That "ridiculously affordable price" for the PS2 is still $130, which means you have to spend $630 rather than just $500 to get PS2 and PS3 support (assuming you don't already have a PS2, of course). As well, you now have to have two systems connected to your TV, two systems taking up power plugs and using power when in standby mode, two sets of controllers (PS2 controllers don't work with PS3), etc.
Just because Sony says nobody wants BC anymore doesn't mean it's true.
KOTOR 1 and 2 as well as Jade Empire (same engine as KOTOR, more of an active battle system similar to Mass Effect except with martial arts instead of guns) have been supported on BC for quite some time now. If you haven't played them, you really must. Especially if you're enjoying Mass Effect.
Some companies tried that and it didn't really work out all that well.
Who said anything about censorship? This was a push to get more regulatory control over the cable industry in order to do things like force a la carte subscription options. You could argue that government has no place to regulate private industry like that, but that has nothing to do with free speech or censorship.
Also, the FCC doesn't cover cable-only channels like FX (lots of "shit" and near nudity there with shows like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, with only self-regulation stopping them from going further), in terms of censorship. They cover broadcast channels that then happen to be re-distributed via cable.
Congress can't make it illegal for you to say "shit" or "fuck" or show a tit on TV, but they don't have to allow you to use the public airwaves to do it.
Read my other reply where I said that most of the UAC prompts I see are for legitimate admin usage. What would you recommend? Going back to the XP and older model of always running users as admins? What do Linux and OS X do when you want to do some admin work? Oh, that's right, they prompt you. The only difference is that Vista doesn't make you put in a password, thought it can be configured to do so (see Stardock's new TweakVista tool, if you don't want to go registry diving yourself).
I neglected to say that those UAC prompts generally resulted from me taking administrative action like poking around in the registry (regedit will prompt UAC), where you would be prompted for credentials in OS X or Linux for similar actions. Definitely not standard user stuff. If I took out the admin-related work, I see less than one UAC prompt per week.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft is trying to be just that (the next iTMS) with Zune. And they even have a number of songs and albums available in a non-DRM mp3 format (all of the Radiohead content on Zune is in the non-DRM mp3 format, for example).
And how is that Microsoft's fault? There were plenty of broken systems like that when XP first shipped, and when Win98 first shipped, and Win95, and so on. Perhaps things would be better if Microsoft built their own machines, like Apple, but that's never going to happen.
I'm not even sure "onerous security notifications" and "adherence to DRM" are valid statements. If you're seeing a bunch of UAC prompts, either you're running some really crap apps that don't understand how to work in a multi-user environment, you're doing a lot of admin work (in which case you may as well just turn off UAC), or you're doing something very, very wrong. In an average week of work + home computing, I see maybe two or three UAC prompts the entire time, and I'm running with UAC on.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "adherence to DRM", but I assume you're referring to the old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release that claimed all audio and video would be degraded if you weren't using DRMed content and/or locked down hardware. That's been proven false many times over. Obviously Vista has to follow certain rules in order to play HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray content, but that's the fault of the MPAA, not Microsoft. Either you implement the secure pipeline and require hardware to match (HDMI-everything), or you don't get to play that content at full resolution. The same applies to any OS, not just Vista.
You may not care, but Sony definitely would. No EA Sports games == console death. Microsoft knows this. That's why they gave up so much in order to get EA to make online-multiplayer games on Xbox Live (Microsoft gave up their in-house sports studios, as well as opened up the Xbox Live service to allow EA to "own" the customer relationship and just let Live act as a gateway into EA's servers for EA games). It seems to have worked out well for Microsoft as well, since this time around EA is using the 360 as their primary platform from which everything else is ported.
Whether or not you like EA sports titles doesn't matter. Without them, any console will be dead within a year.
What does' Sony's movie business have to do with running a hypervisor? The Xbox 360 is also a hypervisor-based system, but Microsoft doesn't have a movie studio business. They went with a hypervisor approach for security -- the hypervisor makes the system much more difficult to hack, which is why we still haven't seen any valid Xbox 360 mod chips 2 years into the life of the console (the DVD-ROM firmware hack doesn't count, as that just bypassed the drive's media check and not the system's code signature check). Using a hypervisor doesn't have to eat all of your memory and kill your performance, unless you're Sony, I guess.
Do you put your PC in a bathtub to dissipate its waste heat? Given the lack of technical information in both the article and the Hyperion site, I'm just speculating, but with the small size of the reactor it may be feasible to dissipate the heat through the air. The image in the article shows what looks to be a heat sink (finned material) between the inner core and the outer casing. Perhaps that filled with mineral oil or antifreeze would be enough to spread the sufficiently heat to the outer stainless steel casing for dispersal through the air?
As long as we're going with anecdotal evidence, I switched from a Razor to an iPhone a couple weeks ago and haven't noticed any signal strength issues.
There's plenty of IT involved in modern agriculture as practiced in first-world nations like the US. That's not the kind of agriculture these third world countries need. Not yet, anyway.
However I do disagree with the parent poster somewhat. Most third world countries "get" agriculture. The problem is that they're so often fighting one another, putting gangs and despots in power who then in turn steal or burn agricultural output leaving the poor to starve, displacing them from their homes and families, if not just outright killing them. Solve the military/political problems and you'll solve the food/shelter/water problems. Only once those problems are solved does it make any sense at all to start shipping over PCs.
If you've been trying to buy Rock the 80s for Wii, you've got a much longer wait than you think. That game was only released on PS2.
The game in question is Rock the 80s. Metallica has songs on Guitar Hero III and Rock Band, but they're the actual songs rather than covers. This is one place where Metallica can't sue.
Guitar Hero III is actually driving online sales of songs in the game, though the effect is not so clear on physical album sales. I would expect that even cover songs drive sales, with better covers driving even more sales. Assuming the Romantics have songs available on various online music sites (iTunes, Zune, Rhapsody, etc), and assuming that they still see some royalties from the sale of their songs, this seems like a very stupid move.
Then again, we are talking about GH: Rock the 80s, a lack-luster stand-alone GH game that's only available on the PS2 and has been on the market for a while. It may not longer be driving online sales, so this is a final effort to squeeze a little bit more money out of the license.
I don't know about that. They did do a metal cover of The Devil Went Down to Georgia for the GH3 finale :).
This guy is just an idiot with a console that hasn't completely died yet. Halo 3 isn't causing his console to crash. His almost-broken console is causing Halo 3 to crash. He simply needs to call Xbox support and get it fixed or replaced for free.
Leave it to a Californian to file a lawsuit where a simple phone call would suffice.
But it's still EVDO. It's just that Amazon is paying for your EVDO connection because you're going to pay them for books. Think of it like the Kindle has a SIM card inside it that's setup for an Amazon corporate account, so every time you use the EVDO network Amazon gets charged. They go ahead and subsidize that because they expect the cost to be minimal compared to the profit of selling books anywhere, anytime.
You must be playing a different Xbox 360 port of HL2 than I am, as there were plenty of "Loading ..." bars in HL2 from the Orange Box. It's also quite obvious that a new "level" has loaded after a loading bar rather than just streaming in some new data. Though you're still looking at the same place and the same geometry, you'll often notice lighting differences from before and after the load. I haven't played through Ep2 yet, so maybe loading changed there.
Portal did a good job of hiding loads during the elevator rides, but the late-game breaks that convention since data still needs to load but there are no more elevators.
That's assuming you're going to carry a balance. No credit card company charges you interest if you pay off your balance each month, and that was the scenario given by the original poster. But yes, you're correct. If you're going to carry a balance on your card, you're better off paying it off as soon as you possibly can, even if that means paying multiple times within a single month. The quicker you get the balance down, the less interest you'll have to pay.
You'd be very surprised what credit companies give students these days, then. Back when I was a college freshman 11 years ago with no real job (just lab sitting) I was able to get two cards with several-thousand dollar limits each. I didn't use them for much then, but getting them establish credit and now those same cards have 11 year credit histories on them and are still the only cards I have or want. Long credit is good credit.
Unless you're paying off a large purchase in order to make room for another large purchase within the same month (in which case you may want to rethink what you're doing), paying your credit card bill multiple times per month is costing you money. As long as your bill is paid off at the end, it doesn't matter whether the charge sat on the card for 1 day or 30 -- you're not going to get a finance charge. At the same time, the moeny that you used to pay off your bill in the middle of the month could've been generating you interest for another couple weeks before spending it to pay the bill at the end of the month. While the amount of interest you're going to make in that amount of time is minimal unless you're talking about large dollar amounts, over time that amount can add up. And even if you are just throwing away a couple of cents each time, that's real money you're losing.