If there is a cure for autism - and it's close cousin, aspergers - then most of us on slashdot will get a life.
Most people on Slashdot do not have Apserger's. What they have is a nice scapegoat for their own social awkwardness. I'm not socially awkward because I spent my youth with my nose buried in a computer rather than learning how to interact with other people. It's because I have Asperger's! Yeah!
At least the Wii has mature games early, RE4 came out really late in the GCN's life. Not sure about Eternal Darkness, but doubt it came out as early as Manhunt for Wii is coming out in the Wii's life.
Yes, RE4 came out late in the GC's life, but it was still earlier by a year than the PS2 version. However, that's not the only Resident Evil. Resident Evil 0 shipped 11/02 (a year after the US GC launch). Resident Evil 1 (the remake with updated graphics) shipped 4/02, which could arguably be called part of the "extended launch window". Resident Evil 2 and 3 shipped 1/03, and Resident Evil Code: Veronica X shipped 12/03. That's 5 Resident Evil games within the first two years of the GC's US life.
Eternal Darkness shipped 6/02, which was still quite early in the GC's life. The GC also had plenty of other non-kiddie titles such as the new Prince of Persia series (as opposed to the old ones on PC) and the Splinter Cell series. Unfortunately the fact that the console resembled a purple purse was a huge strike against it from the very start. The Wii's styling is much more "masculine", and it's 100% backwards compatible with GC games so you can catch up on all of those great games you may have missed without worrying about a reduction in testosterone levels:).
This is a good thing for the Wii, people will look upon it as being more mature now. This is really important (I mean look at the Gamecube 'nuff said) and great for popularity, but I don't care, I bought the Wii for Nintendo titles. I won't be buying this.
Right, because mature titles like Eternal Darkness or the Resident Evil series really helped the Gamecube shed its "kiddie" image...
That said, I'm right there with you. I bought my Wii in anticipation of games like WarioWare: Smooth Moves. I have my Xbox 360 for "mature" titles like Gears of War or Dead Rising.
In all likelihood, production costs have plummeted for the actual music, and I assume CD error rate has gone down. As a result, the cost to make a CD, from start to finish has seen the price of its components fall (as measured in utility/cost). Therefore, the price of CDs don't have to rise.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, what you say about the cost of manufacturing a CD is absolutely correct. What you're not factoring in is the increase in cost of studio time (rent goes up with inflation, as does the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation), marketing costs (have you seen the price of a 30s spot during the Super Bowl?), and of course the costs to pay RIAA's troupe of lawyers and executives.
Does it have to be that expensive to produce music? Absolutely not! With modern technology, an aspiring artist can record RIAA-quality (ha!) music at home for a mere fraction of the cost of studio time. Grassroots marketing, word of mouth, and touring can make for both cheap and effective promotion. Cutting out the middle man (RIAA) allows more money to go to the right places (production, artist) while still lowering prices. Will the RIAA ever get their acts together and do the Right Thing (tm)? I doubt it, since they're the quintessential middle man. Like the GEICO commercials, artists need to cut out the middle man and pass the savings on to you.
The DS is still going strong. There's enough titles from square-enix alone to make a fanboy salivate. This isn't surprising news as many people are content with the previous generation of systems and titles available for it. I know plenty of games from the last generation that i haven't even gotten around to playing yet.
There is no "next generation" for handhelds yet. The DS and PSP are both "current generation", and it's disingenuous to talk about the DS "still going strong" because there's no "DS 2" or "GameBoy SuperAdvance" to compete with it yet.
To me, the interesting thing about the PS2's continued dominance is what it says about the PS3. The Gamecube is dead because the Wii is much better while still being affordable. The Xbox is dead because the 360 is much better and just barely in reach of being affordable. The PS2 is still alive and thriving because while the PS3 may be technically better, it's completely unaffordable (and unlike the Wii, you can actually find PS3s in stores so lack of sales at this point has nothing to do with supply and everything to do with demand). Maybe Sony's hit on a great new idea, segmenting the console market into high-end (PS3) and low-end (PS2), similar to how the A/V market works (for example, at first DVD players were high-priced and high-end. Then they dropped in price and were more available, but the high-end was still expensive and had features like progressive scan. Then progressive scan players dropped in price and were more available, but the high-end was still expensive with features like upconverting to 720p or 1080i/p. And currently, upconverting players are rapidly dropping in price but the high-end is still there and expensive with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray).
Maybe I'm seeing thoughtfulness and insight for something that was fundamentally a blunder by Sony, but it'll be interesting to see how the high-end/low-end split works out for them.
Reading that line was literally the first time I felt any sort of regret for getting a Wii instead of an Xbox 360.;)
It's not too late! The act of purchasing a Wii does not disqualify one from Xbox 360 ownership as well. In fact, the two go well together.
I love my Wii, but there's just not a whole lot to play on it right now (WarioWare Smooth Moves was excellent but short). For now I'm getting much more mileage out of my 360.
Not if you ghost the drive after doing the upgrade.
Totally off-topic, but I initially read that as, "Not if you ghost drive after doing the upgrade," thinking "ghost driving" was something like "ghost riding". I could see how ghost riding your "whip" (and subsequently crashing or getting it stolen) could make OS disaster recovery less irritating by comparison.
Then I realized you meant Norton Ghost, the drive-imaging software, and your comment was suddenly much less funny.
So, why not make the pilot or the first episode of the season free to hook people on shows.
Why stop there? Why not provide the latest episode online for free in case you missed it or prioritized something else (or two something elses if you have a dual-tuner PVR, or three something elses if you recorded two shows and watched a third already-recorded show)? That's what NBC does with Heroes. But why not go even further? NBC provides all episodes of the current season of Friday Night Lights online for free. CBS has done the same thing with Jericho. There are probably other such shows out there provided online for free by the parent company that I just haven't stumbled across (I watch and enjoy Heroes and Jericho, and though I haven't watched it yet I ran across Friday Night Lights by accident).
Yes, these videos are streaming-online-only. Yes, it sucks to have to watch them in a browser rather than on your big screen TV. However this does bring up an interesting question -- if time-shifting is legal, as the courts have held up, and if time-shifting could imply a necessary format-shifting (from broadcast format to tape or disk, for example), might not this new behavior by CBS and NBC actually allow you to time-shift and format-shift not by watching the videos online but by downloading them in a more big screen-friendly format (say, DivX, playable on any HTPC) from a bittorrent tracker somewhere? Seems like a gray area to me. Obviously it would only apply to shows where the full episodes are available for free from the parent company, so shows like Battlestar Galactica or 24 are out. But for the shows I mentioned and others like them, it's definitely an interesting question, unfortunately probably only answerable by a court somewhere.
It does make you wonder how CBS can justify selling Jericho on Xbox Live Video Marketplace for $2/episode when they provide the exact same content online free of charge. Just food for thought...
This sucks for all those companies whose core business is making an AJAX framework.
Maybe for those businesses whose core is making an AJAX framework for ASP.NET (are there any such businesses out there?). Those focused on other languages/platforms (PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc) should have no problem competing with this since their target audience probably isn't going to switch from Ruby to C#.
Besides, it's not like this just came out of the blue. The Atlas framework (the in-progress codename for this v1.0 release) has been available for nearly two years in various different preview forms (Microsoft likes to release "Community Technical Previews" (CTPs) rather than "Betas" of bits like this). If your core business is building an AJAX framework for ASP.NET and you didn't see this coming, you have bigger problems than Microsoft trying to enter your market.
In any case, the bashers will bash away - no price cut means "teh PS3 is too expen$ive!!!", a price cut means "teh PS3 sux0rs!!! no 1 wants it!!!"
Obviously the PS3 sucks on multiple levels. Take away one of those levels (price) and you've still got a whole lot of suck going on -- no games, piss-poor online services, crappy controller problems, etc.
The question is, will prices rise when the games start coming out?
Prices where? On Ebay? Maybe. In stores? It depends. If price cuts were done by the retailer, they could reasonably adjust the price back up to MSRP and explain the previous price away as a "sale". If Sony did the price cut, they'd catch hell trying to bump the price back up.
When will Sony cut it's price for the PS3?
Not for quite some time, I suspect. For several reasons:
Sony wants the PS3 to last on its own far longer than the PS1 or PS2. While they went back on that one a bit and said they will still do a PS4, we don't know if the PS4 will show up in 5 years (standard generation time frame) or 10.
Sony is losing a huge wad of cash on every PS3 sold, even at the $500/600 prices. Unless they're forced by market factors (nobody's buying, Microsoft drops 360 prices), expect Sony to keep the price as high as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can.
Sony's ego won't let them be the first to cut their prices, as that would be tantamount to admitting defeat. This is the same company that suggested (via Kutaragi) that gamers would get second jobs in order to afford a PS3.
When will Microsoft cut it's price on it's XBox 360, it's been over a year already.
So? There's no rule that says prices must drop after a year. What incentive does Microsoft have to drop the price right now? 360s are selling quite well (everywhere but Japan, and even that's picking up with Blue Dragon) at the current price point, and there's still no real competition (Wii is complementary, PS3 is dead in the water). Eventually Microsoft will have to drop the price, but they're sitting in a very good position right now. They could wait until manufacturing economies of scale make it possible to drop the price by $100 and still break even or even make a small profit.
software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction beyond the requirement that the source code must be made available for any binary distribution of another party's free software.
By that definition, BSD and MIT are not Free Software licenses because they do not require you to distribute the code for any changes you may make.
On the other hand, Wikipedia defines Open Source Software as:
any computer software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.
Note that there is a distinct lack of requirement to distribute your own private or public changes to such source code. Thus the difference between Free and Open Source is whether or not you must make available the source for any changes you make to the code. Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software. Free Software will always also be Open Source Software, but Open Source Software need not be Free.
BIG CLUE STICK --> The BSD and MIT licenses are Free Software Licenses!
The "Free" in FOSS means BOTH "Free as in GNU" and "Free as in free". So the BSD and MIT licenses count.
I always figured the "OS" part covered "Open Source" licenses like BSD and MIT. The 'F' tacked on at the beginning is a concession to RMS's insistence that GPL is "Free Software" and not "Open Source Software". Otherwise the acronym need only be "OSS".
More accurately, the "Free" in FOSS means "GNU/Free", where RMS's definition of "free" is different than most. It's the "free" in GPL which means "free to do whatever you like, so long as your code is publicly available under the GPL if you publicly release your modified software." That's different than "open source" (BSD, MIT/X, etc) where you can do whatever you like with the source, even choosing not to redistribute your changes, so long as you keep the copyright intact.
Neither "Free" nor "Open Source" says anything about how project development should be organized.
...is a qualified tax accountant, which you can access via an online virtual community called OutDoors, which features amazing high res graphics and panoramic 3d first person perspectives. When you locate the tax accountant, he or she will upload your financial data at a staggering speed with his or her eyes and ears, and using the revolutionary HumanBrain processor, calculate the maximum refund available to you.
But a qualified tax accountant will charge $50+ for basic preparation, and quite a bit more if you have any special circumstances. Now if you do have special circumstances, the money is well worth it to make sure that you're protected in case of an audit. On the other hand, if you have a very basic filing (deductions such as mortgage interest fall under the "basic filing" status IMHO), tax preparation software is only $20 compared to the $50+ you'll pay for an accountant and will do the job just as well. Pen and paper is free.
I'm not saying that a tax accountant is a bad idea. I'm just saying that for 90% of us it's way overkill and a waste of money.
About 7 or 8 years ago I was doing some work experience at a tv studio. They used to record everything on Betamax for archiving because a) the quality was slightly better, and b) the recordings would keep better quality for longer.
Are you sure they didn't use Betacam? It's derived from, but not the same as, Betamax. Betamax recorded a composite signal while Betacam recorded component and at a faster tape speed, thus providing better video and audio quality (suitable for archival purposes).
I suspect also that the bigger physical size also made them harder to lose:p
Betamax was smaller than VHS. Betacam tapes were originally the same form-factor as Betamax tapes, but later L tapes were larger than both.
Most people could not see the quality difference between the two formats.
The OP was not suggesting that Beta had higher quality pr0n. He was suggesting that in the VHS v. Beta war there was no interweb. When you can get (legally or illegally) high quality pr0n online, who cares if you can get high quality pr0n on HD-DVD as well?
I wouldn't be surprised if The Carmack has already learnt to make use of 360's three CPUs via, you know, multithreading. His (hardware) complaint was about PS3's 1+7 mix of two types of processor. (Maybe 2 PPE + 4 SPE would have been more usable/useful?)
It's theCarmack, dammit! No space! And the Cell's PPE has two hardware threads like each 360 core. TheCarmack would just prefer there were more general-purpose threads and fewer task-specific threads (where the "task" is essentially floating-point calculation).
Local elevation of privilege is now considered a DoS attack on Vista? I guess even submitters don't have to RTFA here anymore to get published.
The submitter read the article, and then directly lifted that line right out of it. Is the submitter an idiot for confusing local privilege escalation with DoS? No, because he wasn't the one who made that claim. Is the article author an idiot for making that statement? Definitely. Is the submitter an idiot for directly quoting the article without attributing it as a quote, thus passing it off as his own words and thoughts? Absolutely.
Yes, offtopic, but I think it deserves to be noted that its a pretty well written review.
I must not have read the same review as you. The one I read was full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, comma and semi-colon misuse and overuse, poor organization, minor typos, and unnecessary comparisons to the reviewer's own authoring abilities. The content of the review was decent, though I didn't get enough from the review to know whether or not the book would be useful for me. The presentation of the review left a lot to be desired. Assuming the reviewer really is a techinical author as he implies, he must have one heck of a good editor for his books. He should've asked his editor to proof this review before posting it up to Slashdot, because as it is right now it's only semi-readable.
To which EA will reply, have you not noticed that the games and control schemes going for the Wii are generally different? Or simply reply "fine then we're pulling Madden like we said". Microsoft is not the one in a position of strength here to make demands.
Actually, I think it's the other way around. Microsoft's head start in the market (or its lesser specs in comparison to PS3, take your pick) has made the 360 the platform of choice for multi-platform developers. EA will never come to Microsoft and say, "We're not going to do Madden unless you give us HD-DVD." They're going to go to Sony and say, "Too bad we can't take full advantage of all that Blu-Ray space, but we have to work on the 360 as well and you two are close enough (unlike the Wii) that you get to be the Xbox of this generation and have all the crappy ports."
Why should the 360 developer and user suffer with a limitation on storage that is needless?
Because it's not "needless". Microsoft made the decision to go with DVD-9 for the 360, so that's what the developers get to use. Microsoft can't make the switch to HD-DVD unless they're willing to replace the drives of 7+ million 360 customers for free. That's never going to happen, so you suck it up and live with it. The 360 may end up with multi-disk games, or lower texture resolutions, or more compression artifacts, or what have you, but switching to HD-DVD is simply not a viable solution for the 360.
As to the ZUNE. From everything I have read you can not fill it from your XBox! DUMB! DUMB! DUMB!
No, that just makes sense with the 360's current approach to media. It's an endpoint, not a provider. If you want to fill your Zune, do it from the PC where the Xbox is getting its info as well (you're not ripping CDs or vids directly to your 360, are you? That'd be dumb!). While it would be neat to be able to move Xbox Marketplace bits directly over to a Zune, that's a rather small scenario since the marketplace is more about games (XBLA), downloads for games, and demos. In fact the only thing I could see you moving to your Zune from Xbox Marketplace would be trailers (full TV shows and videos I'd expect to be DRMed to prevent that). Then again, trailers are in 480p or 720p format which means you'd either have to transcode them to put them on the Zune or Microsoft would have to offer lower resolution trailers.
Maybe future updates to 360 and Zune will make them work better. In the meantime, the 360's "normal" mode of connectivity with any media player (iPod, PlaysForSure devices, and I assume Zune) is read-only, which makes since given the lack of storage capacity on the 360.
HDMI=DRM! Sony has got to love it. DVI would be a better choice.
You do realize that DVI-D can do HDCP just like HDMI, right? In fact the video portion of HDMI is signal-compatible with DVI-D. The only other bit that you get with HDMI is audio, but unless you have an HDMI-enabled receiver I'd stick with the TOSLink digital audio output instead.
I still expect to see a 360 that is also a PVR and support for the Zune.
Acting as a PVR would obviously require a hard drive. It would also require a TV tuner (or support for USB tuners), otherwise you end up with the same solution you have today -- the 360 as an extender for a PC running Media Center elsewhere. As for the Zune, are you saying you want the 360 to be able to fill it? Or to be able to pull data off of it? Not owning a Zune, I'd hope that the latter scenario already works today. The former scenario is a little silly unless the 360 becomes more than just an interface to other machines (via UPnP or Media Center).
Of course part of me has a feeling that some people at Microsoft have looked long and hard at bit torrent and are going to include a secure P2P client in the 360 so that they can use them as a low cost file distribution network.
For that to work they'd need much larger hard drives. As it is, the 20GB doesn't allow you to keep around too many demos or videos. Two HD movies at 5-6MB each and you've filled the drive. How can I share out bits of a movie if I have to delete it in order to have space for other videos, demos, save games, etc?
There were already a number of game developers complaining about space even at launch, and that voice will just become stronger until Microsoft can no longer resit it.
That "number of game developers" was really just one. Bethesda (the guys who made Oblivion) voiced concerns about fitting Oblivion onto a DVD-9 disc well before the 360 ever shipped. Sure enough, they were able to make it fit. Anyway, it's too late to make a change now. If Microsoft were to allow games to ship on HD-DVD, they'd be alienating their already existing user base (which is at somewhere above 6-7 million now, if not even higher). Microsoft does listen to developers (Epic and Gears of War was the reason Microsoft put 512MB of RAM into the box instead of the initially-planned 256MB), but when the console is already out there's not a whole lot you can do anymore until the next generation.
All it takes is EA saying "you know what, Madden is just a little too big this year to fit on the 360 so we're going to have to cut you out".
To which Microsoft can reply, "Just use your Wii graphic assets, since you're still going to ship there on a DVD-9. People will still buy it anyway, because you have a lock on the NFL license."
Slashdot Mirror
Most people on Slashdot do not have Apserger's. What they have is a nice scapegoat for their own social awkwardness. I'm not socially awkward because I spent my youth with my nose buried in a computer rather than learning how to interact with other people. It's because I have Asperger's! Yeah!
Yes, RE4 came out late in the GC's life, but it was still earlier by a year than the PS2 version. However, that's not the only Resident Evil. Resident Evil 0 shipped 11/02 (a year after the US GC launch). Resident Evil 1 (the remake with updated graphics) shipped 4/02, which could arguably be called part of the "extended launch window". Resident Evil 2 and 3 shipped 1/03, and Resident Evil Code: Veronica X shipped 12/03. That's 5 Resident Evil games within the first two years of the GC's US life.
Eternal Darkness shipped 6/02, which was still quite early in the GC's life. The GC also had plenty of other non-kiddie titles such as the new Prince of Persia series (as opposed to the old ones on PC) and the Splinter Cell series. Unfortunately the fact that the console resembled a purple purse was a huge strike against it from the very start. The Wii's styling is much more "masculine", and it's 100% backwards compatible with GC games so you can catch up on all of those great games you may have missed without worrying about a reduction in testosterone levels :).
Right, because mature titles like Eternal Darkness or the Resident Evil series really helped the Gamecube shed its "kiddie" image ...
That said, I'm right there with you. I bought my Wii in anticipation of games like WarioWare: Smooth Moves. I have my Xbox 360 for "mature" titles like Gears of War or Dead Rising.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, what you say about the cost of manufacturing a CD is absolutely correct. What you're not factoring in is the increase in cost of studio time (rent goes up with inflation, as does the price of labor for the guy(s) running the boards), artist payments (in theory, this should also go up with inflation), marketing costs (have you seen the price of a 30s spot during the Super Bowl?), and of course the costs to pay RIAA's troupe of lawyers and executives.
Does it have to be that expensive to produce music? Absolutely not! With modern technology, an aspiring artist can record RIAA-quality (ha!) music at home for a mere fraction of the cost of studio time. Grassroots marketing, word of mouth, and touring can make for both cheap and effective promotion. Cutting out the middle man (RIAA) allows more money to go to the right places (production, artist) while still lowering prices. Will the RIAA ever get their acts together and do the Right Thing (tm)? I doubt it, since they're the quintessential middle man. Like the GEICO commercials, artists need to cut out the middle man and pass the savings on to you.
There is no "next generation" for handhelds yet. The DS and PSP are both "current generation", and it's disingenuous to talk about the DS "still going strong" because there's no "DS 2" or "GameBoy SuperAdvance" to compete with it yet.
To me, the interesting thing about the PS2's continued dominance is what it says about the PS3. The Gamecube is dead because the Wii is much better while still being affordable. The Xbox is dead because the 360 is much better and just barely in reach of being affordable. The PS2 is still alive and thriving because while the PS3 may be technically better, it's completely unaffordable (and unlike the Wii, you can actually find PS3s in stores so lack of sales at this point has nothing to do with supply and everything to do with demand). Maybe Sony's hit on a great new idea, segmenting the console market into high-end (PS3) and low-end (PS2), similar to how the A/V market works (for example, at first DVD players were high-priced and high-end. Then they dropped in price and were more available, but the high-end was still expensive and had features like progressive scan. Then progressive scan players dropped in price and were more available, but the high-end was still expensive with features like upconverting to 720p or 1080i/p. And currently, upconverting players are rapidly dropping in price but the high-end is still there and expensive with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray).
Maybe I'm seeing thoughtfulness and insight for something that was fundamentally a blunder by Sony, but it'll be interesting to see how the high-end/low-end split works out for them.
It's not too late! The act of purchasing a Wii does not disqualify one from Xbox 360 ownership as well. In fact, the two go well together.
I love my Wii, but there's just not a whole lot to play on it right now (WarioWare Smooth Moves was excellent but short). For now I'm getting much more mileage out of my 360.
Totally off-topic, but I initially read that as, "Not if you ghost drive after doing the upgrade," thinking "ghost driving" was something like "ghost riding". I could see how ghost riding your "whip" (and subsequently crashing or getting it stolen) could make OS disaster recovery less irritating by comparison.
Then I realized you meant Norton Ghost, the drive-imaging software, and your comment was suddenly much less funny.
Why stop there? Why not provide the latest episode online for free in case you missed it or prioritized something else (or two something elses if you have a dual-tuner PVR, or three something elses if you recorded two shows and watched a third already-recorded show)? That's what NBC does with Heroes. But why not go even further? NBC provides all episodes of the current season of Friday Night Lights online for free. CBS has done the same thing with Jericho. There are probably other such shows out there provided online for free by the parent company that I just haven't stumbled across (I watch and enjoy Heroes and Jericho, and though I haven't watched it yet I ran across Friday Night Lights by accident).
Yes, these videos are streaming-online-only. Yes, it sucks to have to watch them in a browser rather than on your big screen TV. However this does bring up an interesting question -- if time-shifting is legal, as the courts have held up, and if time-shifting could imply a necessary format-shifting (from broadcast format to tape or disk, for example), might not this new behavior by CBS and NBC actually allow you to time-shift and format-shift not by watching the videos online but by downloading them in a more big screen-friendly format (say, DivX, playable on any HTPC) from a bittorrent tracker somewhere? Seems like a gray area to me. Obviously it would only apply to shows where the full episodes are available for free from the parent company, so shows like Battlestar Galactica or 24 are out. But for the shows I mentioned and others like them, it's definitely an interesting question, unfortunately probably only answerable by a court somewhere.
It does make you wonder how CBS can justify selling Jericho on Xbox Live Video Marketplace for $2/episode when they provide the exact same content online free of charge. Just food for thought ...
Maybe for those businesses whose core is making an AJAX framework for ASP.NET (are there any such businesses out there?). Those focused on other languages/platforms (PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc) should have no problem competing with this since their target audience probably isn't going to switch from Ruby to C#.
Besides, it's not like this just came out of the blue. The Atlas framework (the in-progress codename for this v1.0 release) has been available for nearly two years in various different preview forms (Microsoft likes to release "Community Technical Previews" (CTPs) rather than "Betas" of bits like this). If your core business is building an AJAX framework for ASP.NET and you didn't see this coming, you have bigger problems than Microsoft trying to enter your market.
Obviously the PS3 sucks on multiple levels. Take away one of those levels (price) and you've still got a whole lot of suck going on -- no games, piss-poor online services, crappy controller problems, etc.
Prices where? On Ebay? Maybe. In stores? It depends. If price cuts were done by the retailer, they could reasonably adjust the price back up to MSRP and explain the previous price away as a "sale". If Sony did the price cut, they'd catch hell trying to bump the price back up.
Not for quite some time, I suspect. For several reasons:
So? There's no rule that says prices must drop after a year. What incentive does Microsoft have to drop the price right now? 360s are selling quite well (everywhere but Japan, and even that's picking up with Blue Dragon) at the current price point, and there's still no real competition (Wii is complementary, PS3 is dead in the water). Eventually Microsoft will have to drop the price, but they're sitting in a very good position right now. They could wait until manufacturing economies of scale make it possible to drop the price by $100 and still break even or even make a small profit.
Well, the Wikipedia definition says:
By that definition, BSD and MIT are not Free Software licenses because they do not require you to distribute the code for any changes you may make.On the other hand, Wikipedia defines Open Source Software as:
Note that there is a distinct lack of requirement to distribute your own private or public changes to such source code. Thus the difference between Free and Open Source is whether or not you must make available the source for any changes you make to the code. Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software. Free Software will always also be Open Source Software, but Open Source Software need not be Free.No, but they are Open Source Software Licenses.
I always figured the "OS" part covered "Open Source" licenses like BSD and MIT. The 'F' tacked on at the beginning is a concession to RMS's insistence that GPL is "Free Software" and not "Open Source Software". Otherwise the acronym need only be "OSS".
More accurately, the "Free" in FOSS means "GNU/Free", where RMS's definition of "free" is different than most. It's the "free" in GPL which means "free to do whatever you like, so long as your code is publicly available under the GPL if you publicly release your modified software." That's different than "open source" (BSD, MIT/X, etc) where you can do whatever you like with the source, even choosing not to redistribute your changes, so long as you keep the copyright intact.
Neither "Free" nor "Open Source" says anything about how project development should be organized.
I'm guessing you were sloshed when you posted this, based on your typing skills.
But a qualified tax accountant will charge $50+ for basic preparation, and quite a bit more if you have any special circumstances. Now if you do have special circumstances, the money is well worth it to make sure that you're protected in case of an audit. On the other hand, if you have a very basic filing (deductions such as mortgage interest fall under the "basic filing" status IMHO), tax preparation software is only $20 compared to the $50+ you'll pay for an accountant and will do the job just as well. Pen and paper is free.
I'm not saying that a tax accountant is a bad idea. I'm just saying that for 90% of us it's way overkill and a waste of money.
Are you sure they didn't use Betacam? It's derived from, but not the same as, Betamax. Betamax recorded a composite signal while Betacam recorded component and at a faster tape speed, thus providing better video and audio quality (suitable for archival purposes).
Betamax was smaller than VHS. Betacam tapes were originally the same form-factor as Betamax tapes, but later L tapes were larger than both.
The OP was not suggesting that Beta had higher quality pr0n. He was suggesting that in the VHS v. Beta war there was no interweb. When you can get (legally or illegally) high quality pr0n online, who cares if you can get high quality pr0n on HD-DVD as well?
It's theCarmack, dammit! No space! And the Cell's PPE has two hardware threads like each 360 core. TheCarmack would just prefer there were more general-purpose threads and fewer task-specific threads (where the "task" is essentially floating-point calculation).
The submitter read the article, and then directly lifted that line right out of it. Is the submitter an idiot for confusing local privilege escalation with DoS? No, because he wasn't the one who made that claim. Is the article author an idiot for making that statement? Definitely. Is the submitter an idiot for directly quoting the article without attributing it as a quote, thus passing it off as his own words and thoughts? Absolutely.
I must not have read the same review as you. The one I read was full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, comma and semi-colon misuse and overuse, poor organization, minor typos, and unnecessary comparisons to the reviewer's own authoring abilities. The content of the review was decent, though I didn't get enough from the review to know whether or not the book would be useful for me. The presentation of the review left a lot to be desired. Assuming the reviewer really is a techinical author as he implies, he must have one heck of a good editor for his books. He should've asked his editor to proof this review before posting it up to Slashdot, because as it is right now it's only semi-readable.
Fallopian tubes?
Actually, I think it's the other way around. Microsoft's head start in the market (or its lesser specs in comparison to PS3, take your pick) has made the 360 the platform of choice for multi-platform developers. EA will never come to Microsoft and say, "We're not going to do Madden unless you give us HD-DVD." They're going to go to Sony and say, "Too bad we can't take full advantage of all that Blu-Ray space, but we have to work on the 360 as well and you two are close enough (unlike the Wii) that you get to be the Xbox of this generation and have all the crappy ports."
Because it's not "needless". Microsoft made the decision to go with DVD-9 for the 360, so that's what the developers get to use. Microsoft can't make the switch to HD-DVD unless they're willing to replace the drives of 7+ million 360 customers for free. That's never going to happen, so you suck it up and live with it. The 360 may end up with multi-disk games, or lower texture resolutions, or more compression artifacts, or what have you, but switching to HD-DVD is simply not a viable solution for the 360.
No, that just makes sense with the 360's current approach to media. It's an endpoint, not a provider. If you want to fill your Zune, do it from the PC where the Xbox is getting its info as well (you're not ripping CDs or vids directly to your 360, are you? That'd be dumb!). While it would be neat to be able to move Xbox Marketplace bits directly over to a Zune, that's a rather small scenario since the marketplace is more about games (XBLA), downloads for games, and demos. In fact the only thing I could see you moving to your Zune from Xbox Marketplace would be trailers (full TV shows and videos I'd expect to be DRMed to prevent that). Then again, trailers are in 480p or 720p format which means you'd either have to transcode them to put them on the Zune or Microsoft would have to offer lower resolution trailers.
Maybe future updates to 360 and Zune will make them work better. In the meantime, the 360's "normal" mode of connectivity with any media player (iPod, PlaysForSure devices, and I assume Zune) is read-only, which makes since given the lack of storage capacity on the 360.
You do realize that DVI-D can do HDCP just like HDMI, right? In fact the video portion of HDMI is signal-compatible with DVI-D. The only other bit that you get with HDMI is audio, but unless you have an HDMI-enabled receiver I'd stick with the TOSLink digital audio output instead.
Acting as a PVR would obviously require a hard drive. It would also require a TV tuner (or support for USB tuners), otherwise you end up with the same solution you have today -- the 360 as an extender for a PC running Media Center elsewhere. As for the Zune, are you saying you want the 360 to be able to fill it? Or to be able to pull data off of it? Not owning a Zune, I'd hope that the latter scenario already works today. The former scenario is a little silly unless the 360 becomes more than just an interface to other machines (via UPnP or Media Center).
For that to work they'd need much larger hard drives. As it is, the 20GB doesn't allow you to keep around too many demos or videos. Two HD movies at 5-6MB each and you've filled the drive. How can I share out bits of a movie if I have to delete it in order to have space for other videos, demos, save games, etc?
That "number of game developers" was really just one. Bethesda (the guys who made Oblivion) voiced concerns about fitting Oblivion onto a DVD-9 disc well before the 360 ever shipped. Sure enough, they were able to make it fit. Anyway, it's too late to make a change now. If Microsoft were to allow games to ship on HD-DVD, they'd be alienating their already existing user base (which is at somewhere above 6-7 million now, if not even higher). Microsoft does listen to developers (Epic and Gears of War was the reason Microsoft put 512MB of RAM into the box instead of the initially-planned 256MB), but when the console is already out there's not a whole lot you can do anymore until the next generation.
To which Microsoft can reply, "Just use your Wii graphic assets, since you're still going to ship there on a DVD-9. People will still buy it anyway, because you have a lock on the NFL license."