How many consoles have we gone through that had problems on release? Everything from the DS Lite cracking, to the xbox controllers being the size of a small gorilla, to the xbox360 over heating, to faulting dvd roms of the ps2. Its almost at the point where its guaranteed to have a flaw in it. And i feel worse for people who buy it on ebay at an extra $500/pop.
Wow, I must be blessed! My launch-day (actually week-before-launch-day, non-import) DS Lite still hasn't cracked its hinges. I liked the old big Xbox controllers (and the comparison is to an eight hundred pound grizzly bear). My launch window Xbox 360 has never overheated, and my purchased-pre-owned-yet-still-old PS2 has never had DVD issues. I did go through several original Xbox consoles due to bad DVD drives, but that wasn't in your list of "Bad Things That Happen At Launch".
Um, they're not forcing your TV to do anything. My TV has 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i modes and you can switch between them. Are you running a TV from the 1980s or something?
No, I have a DLP TV which runs at a native 720p resolution. While it supports 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i, it does so by converting any non-720p signals to 720p. In some cases, and I've only seen it rarely, the TV can introduce some lag due to this conversion process. Mostly, I rarely notice it because most of my components do 720p natively (PC, Xbox 360, upconverting DVD player).
I've seen King Kong running on the XBox 360 on an LCD screen at Walmart and was underwhelmed. Everything looked "sharp but jaggy".
King Kong was a launch title, and also ported to many other platforms. As such, it's not a great indicator of 360 HD graphical prowess. From launch, take a look at PGR3 or Call of Duty 2. Or look at more recent games like Oblivion or Dead Rising.
We can't even get HD in our rural area, so I'm not even looking at HD televisions.
I bet you can, if you looked into it a little bit more. My parents live in a rural area and they can get several OTA HD channels. If all else fails, you can always get DirecTV.
That, and everything is either humungous (40"+) or small (20" LCD screens). I can't put the first set in my house, and I can't view the smaller ones. I'm sure they're out there, but where's the 27"-32" screens?
Bravo to Nintendo on putting gameplay above graphics!
The flip side, boo to Nintendo for forcing my TV to have to upscale the 480p output from the Wii, which could potentially lead to lag in the gameplay! The Right Way(tm) to do this would've been for them to include an internal scaler that scales all output to a chosen resolution regardless of what resolution it was rendered. That's what the Xbox 360 does. Most games do render at 540p or 720p, but you can choose to output them at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and various other VGA resolutions (and soon 1080p). Gone are the days where each game gets to choose what resolution it supports. The games should render at whatever native resolution they want and let the console take care of scaling appropriately. (and the Xbox 360 has a very good scaler!)
This is why RTS games work on PCs but not on consoles (beyond the obvious control difficulties) - these games demand that a lot of information (unit health, unit selection, unit status, squads, tactics, waypoints, etc) be visible all at once, which before the HD era has simply not been possible.
While I don't disagree with your point as a whole, I don't think this is the best example. RTS games worked well enough back in the days of 320x240 resolutions (Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Warcraft I). Perhaps modern RTS games wouldn't work well at lower resolutions, but that's just a matter of design. If they had to work with a max res of 640x480, developers would continue to advance the genre. They'd just have to be smarter about how they display information.
On the other hand, the current state of HDTV adoption means that console games still have to work well on SDTV sets. Dead Rising is a great example of how to do it wrong. They used smaller fonts to fit more information on-screen, but ended up screwing SDTV customers in the process. As long as developers have to support SDTV as well as HDTV, don't expect text and information displays to take full advantage of the resolution provided by a 720p or 1080p HD set.
The funny part is that the GC Wireless controller (the Wavebird- the best controller I've ever owned, and the first Wireless controller that actually got it right) doesn't have Force Feedback either. And I've never cared. It's still a fantastic controller, and it not vibrating has never negatively affected my game-playing experience.
The Wavebird was a good controller, but I did find myself longing for rumble while playing Metroid Prime (probably because I first played it with the wired controller before eventually buying a Wavebird). That said, Microsoft and Logitech have significantly upped the ante by building solid, responsive wireless controllers with rumble that still have good battery life (my 360 controller can go a week or more without recharging, playing an hour or two a night).
Aside from that, the GameCube never really had games where rumble is essential (for example, driving simulators -- you really need rumble, or better yet real force feedback, to get a feel for track surface and braking). Imagine playing Gran Turismo without rumble.
If memory serves me there were articles coming out around the time of the XBox360 launch that said that publishers were having touble fitting everything on a DVD.
The only developer that ever really said anything about that was Bethesda, and they ended up being able to fit all of Oblivion on a single DVD anyway.
I'm not yet fully convinced that "next generation" games really need more than what a DVD can provide. Texture compression is well-known (and even free in some cases, depending on GPU and such), audio compression is well known, etc. More space invites developer laziness. That's not to say that more space will always be bad, just that right now it's not the bottleneck.
Rumble is unfortunately a necessity for some games, which use it as an important feature. Luckily you'll be able to plug in a GC controller.
You'll be able to plug in a GC controller on your PS3? Wow! I didn't know Sony was that progressive!
The WiiMote has rumble. The PS3 SIXAXIS controller does not. The Wii can plug in a GC controller that has rumble. No idea if the PS3 can plug in an old PS2 dual shock controller, though I doubt it will matter if games aren't written with rumble in mind.
Is gears of war suddenly so important that Slashdot is publishing links to pre-previews as some sort of scoop?
Well, Gears of War is supposed to be this year's Halo. While it has a competent team behind it (CliffyB!), I'm starting to think maybe it's been overhyped and will never live up to expectations.
Does anybody remember Brute Force? It was supposed to be 2003's Halo, got overhyped, and ended up as yet another mediocre third-person shooter that nobody remembers. To me, Gears of War looks like it's shaping up to be Brute Force rather than Halo. Hopefully the rest of the holiday titles will keep the 360 afloat if Gears of War can't. (sigh... and I so wanted Forza 2 for the holiday. Have to wait until next year, now.)
Sony has already slashed the number of units being delivered, due to anticipated lack of demand in the US and EU. This will create an artificial shortage so that they can try to spin it into buzz about how people want PS3 consoles.
They slashed the number of units being delivered because they can't produce enough units. Sony is still in their magical Kutaragi bubble where everybody will get a second job so they can buy a PS3. If it was just a matter of anticipated lack of demand, Sony would be full speed ahead and damn the torpedos. Which they are doing anyway, it's just "full speed" means "a paltry amount of consoles for NA and Japan, and none for EU".
They already figure that the Wii will sell four times as many consoles in the US and EU as the PS3 will. Shipments prove this.
The Wii will sell four times as many consoles in the US because they will ship four times as many (if not more). And they'll sell infinitely times as many consoles in EU because Sony's not shipping there yet. It's a numbers game -- if you can only get 400,000 consoles on the market, there's no way you're going to sell 1.6million.
If you don't have a really big HDTV that currently uses 1080p, you probably won't care one whit about Blu-Ray for at least three years - by which point there will be another choice of better game consoles to be concerned with.
And this is why it's stupid for Sony to try to shove Blu-Ray down our throats. That said, the extra graphical horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox 360 will still be impressive on an SDTV simply due to more polygons and more budget for effects. You won't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, but PS3 games will still look much better than PS2 games on the same TV (just as 360 games look better than Xbox games).
As for another console being out in three years, don't bet on it. Maybe that will be true if Microsoft holds to the same 4 year cycle as they did with the Xbox, but I doubt that will happen. They entered this generation early because it was imperative to beat Sony and Nintendo to the punch. If that pans out for them, expect the Xbox 360 to have at least a 5 year lifespan before there's an Xbox 720 (or whatever it'll be called). And Sony expects the PS3 to last for 10 years, so don't hold your breath for a PS4 unless you can wait until 2015...
Typical scenario, and no, I don't make this shit up. Although, the stolen items & currency are usually refunded, it's just asking for trouble if you sign up for something like this. Don't give your password(s) out to complete strangers, and you'll be better off for it.
This gamerscore farming is even worse than that, because you have to give them your Passport account, and your Live account most likely has a credit card associated with it (for renewing your subscription and buying Points). Imagine waking up one day and instead of all of your in-game gold being gone, you find out that your email account has been banned due to spamming, all of your Messenger contacts are pissed at you for sending them messages with virii and trojans, and your credit card charged $1000 for Point purchases (not so useful right now, but just wait until Points are used for micropayments across other Microsoft services, they become transferrable to other users, or even convertible into cash). Yeah, handing over the keys to your Live account is such a smart idea...
There's somewhat more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than "understanding a javascript function call". You have to contend with multiple implementations that work different ways. You have to work around the fact that javascript has little or no support for techniques that are typically used in writing large applications. Modularising a javascript application is hell. The method of defining a class is bizarre. Inheritance is horrible, particularly if the class you're inheriting from is in a different file, because there are no guarantees about the order in which they will be loaded. Multiple inheritance...? The language can do it, sure, but it isn't trivial.
And you've just proven that you don't understand JavaScript. JavaScript != Java (or C++, or C#). It's not designed around functions and classes. Javascript is a functional language, and as such is designed around closures. Closures allow you to define classes and functions, but they also allow you to do quite a bit more (and also let you shoot yourself in the foot if you like).
You're correct in saying that there's more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than just understanding a JavaScript function, but most of the things you mention are irrelevant (well, they're important to understanding JavaScript, but that's a core competency for any type of web design, not just AJAX). Using AJAX is easy, especially with all of the frameworks available that abstract browser compatibility issues for you. Using AJAX well is difficult (dealing with accessibility, server load, concurrency, etc).
Is a desktop GUI that is based on the menu system style of MythTV instead of "START". This would make it SO easy to navigate for novices, I mean, after all, what's wrong with a GUI for a computer that was made to be easy enough to navigate for people who watch TV?
That'd be great, if your 90% use case is on a TV (10' experience). For non-TV use, such a simplified UI would be extremely annoying and limiting.
Unfortunately, this is where designers usually screw up. They think "easy" == "simple", which is not necessarily the case at all. It's hard to build an easy interface for complex actions. Instead, we end up with crapfests like Bob, or one-size-fits-all attempts at a "simple" interface like you're suggesting, or an options dialog with tabs stacked three deep for "advanced" options.
In terms of "interfaces for people who watch TV", MythTV and Windows Media Center Edition get it mostly right -- the UI is a separate full-screen app that is great for when you're using the PC on a TV, but the "real" interface to the OS is still available for the rest of the time.
We Europeans are paying the equivalent of 75$ for PS2, Gamecube and XBox games and MS (and presumably Sony) still insist on a price hike for next gen.
By "MS" you mean "EA", right? Because Microsoft has kept their next-gen games priced the same as for the previous gen ($50, for the US market). Now I'm not completely familiar with pricing in European markets, and obviously exchange rates can make things more or less expensive, but I'd really be surprised if Microsoft increased the price of Microsoft-published games for the Xbox 360.
That said, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have no control over third parties. They can sell a game at $200 (Capcom's Steel Battallion), or they can sell at $20 (budget titles). Most third parties seem to stick with a $60 price for 360 titles, most likely because that's what EA did (because "HD titles cost more", even when there's nothing remotely HD about the title at all). If EA can get away with it, so can everybody else.
I wanted to use a modern, CSS-based liquid layout. So I bought a book, and dove in.
There's your first problem. No book is going to give you all of the latest techniques for doing "cool" things with CSS. For that you need to poke around online at places like CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, Liquid Designs, etc. If you must buy a book, a pocket reference is the best way to go (and even that really isn't necessary, since you can find good references online).
It seems like CSS does OK for fixed layouts but if you want to have a 200 pixel left sidebar and leave the rest of the page for content, I just can't figure out how to do it and have it look as nice as a simple table-driven layout.
Odd, I've done exactly that using a non-table layout, and I certainly didn't invent the technique. It's not purely semantic, as you end up with a couple extra divs to get your layout right, but it's a damn sight closer than table layouts. In fact, your example is actually quite trivial, compared to something like a three-column layout with bounding fixed-size sidebars around a liquid middle (there's a reason that's called the Holy Grail of CSS-based design).
Worse, after playing around with it I could not see where the advantages were over tables. Tables work, they don't take long to code up, and I feel I understand them completely with minimal effort. It seems like with a CSS layout, you waste a lot of time fighting bizarre browser compatibilty issues, while if you use tables, they "just work", far as I can tell -- and I've tested in IE, Safari, FireFox and a few others.
Oddly enough, movietally's table-based layout for its rounded-corner "Discover" box is broken on IE7 (the corners don't line up correctly). So much for "tables work". I'll grant you that CSS-based layouts can run into some funky cross-browser issues, but 9 times out of 10 the problem is not with the layout but with the designer who demands pixel-perfect magazine-like layouts in a medium that was never meant to do that (if you want that, build a PDF). If you get over your obsession for having everything lining up just so and instead focus on making the page accessible and understandable while still looking good, you'll find that CSS is often a lot easier and nicer to work with than table layouts. Besides, it makes it quite a bit easier to give your page a makeover to keep it fresh without having to recode everything (CSS Zen Garden is the prime example, but look at what Slashdot did with the recent site skinning contest -- that was limited to only CSS manipulation, which would've been impossible had Slashdot stuck with its outdated table-based design).
Nobody's saying that tables aren't useful. We're just saying that they should be used semantically. If you have some tabular data you want to display (say, a calendar), knock yourself out with tabley goodness.
Volume up! When it's an option, he usually has the "bubble speak" enabled so it's not just audio. A comfortable set of lightweight headphones can't hurt either.
I'm not hard of hearing, but I always turn on game subtitles when available because it makes games faster. Why should I sit through a minute of dialog when I can read that same information in 15 seconds? If a developer cares about story more than presentation, they'll make sure subtitles are available and each line of dialog is skippable to the next (games that skip the entire scene are just evil).
I suspect we will see a lot of complaints about scaling existing games and lower content media. And only a small handful if any games that supposedly use 1080p.
You're talking about Sony, right? Because no PS3 launch title will have a 1080p native resolution (I'm assuming the PS3 will scale everything to a single chosen resolution like the 360, and the "native" resolution is just what the game renders at internally), and many PS3 developers have insinuated that the console really isn't powerful enough to render games at native 1080p (scaling, sure).
The only benefit to the PS3's 1080p support is HDMI (on the $600 model...), which means when the MPAA flips the ICT bit in 2011 you'll still be able to play high definition movies at 1080p. Then again, if you really cared about playing HD movies you wouldn't use a combo console/DVD player anyway.
You act like that's something new. Audio Authority has had 2x1 and 4x1 DVI switches supporting 1080p and HDCP for some time now. Nothing supporting HDMI directly (neither does the one you linked), but HDMI <-> DVI is trivial.
You'll still need an audio mux (I like the 1177), and it doesn't look like AA's cheaper DVI switches support auto-switching, which is disappointing. Still, the IR remote should be convenient enough.
The only benefit to the Gefen item you linked is that it ships with cables for $350, while the AA is cableless at $350. Not that it really matters, since you'll still have to buy an HDMI to DVI cable to use either of them with HDMI sources and outputs.
Or you could spend $3500 and get the AVX-661 set and route 1080p video and digital audio through your entire house via Cat5e!
The general mindset of owning a game console is that you'll end up buying more games for it in the future. Nobody who's buying a Wii for games is going to somehow forget that there are more games than the one that shipped in the Wii box. If they enjoy Wii and Wii Sports for a few weeks, doesn't that create a greater chance that they'll go buy some extra games than if they had never bought a Wii to begin with?
Keep in mind that Nintendo is trying to bring in non-traditional gamers (or non-gamers) with the Wii and DS. How many people do you know who bought a DS for Brain Age and never purchased another game? I know at least two, out of the three people I know with a DS (my social circle isn't big on games, though I am). If Nintendo is truly dedicated to bringing in these casual gamers, they will make games that the casual gamers will want to buy. The DS so far has been hit and miss. Brain Age excelled at getting non gamers to buy a DS. The Big Brain Academy follow-up flopped pretty hard.
Personally, I wish Nintendo would ship a Sudoku game based off of Brain Age's Sudoku interface but with a proper game generator behind it. DS sales would instantly double.
We must be watching different videos. I've only seen the weather and the main menu videos so far (they're kind of slow to load right now), but I'm impressed with how smooth the pointer is!
Check out the Mii Channel video. My arm got tired just watching it.
COD2 is the most popular game for xbox360 because there isnt that many cool games out for it....
Out of the launch titles, sure. Geometry Wars was hands-down the best launch title, and it only costs $5. However, there have been a number of titles released since then that range from good to excellent (Oblivion, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Fight Night Round 3, etc). Maybe you have esoteric tastes (no hentai tentacle porn on 360... yet), or loyalty to a specific brand rather than genre (Ninety Nine Nights was a better Dynasty Warriors than Dynasty Warriors, Saints Row could have been renamed GTA4 and nobody would know the difference, etc). Or maybe you just have an aversion to Microsoft. All of that's fine, but I would ask that you be a little more explicit when you say there aren't any cool games. What's missing that you would want? (genres are more important than specific titles -- there'll never be a Gran Turismo on Xbox but Forza 2 and FIA GTR should be coming soon to fill in the simulation racer gap, for example).
I thought that the >4 CPU Windows systems were, in essence, specially tweaked systems to make it all worthwhile and that standard setups couldn't really make effective use of more than four processors. If so, I stand corrected. *looks around* Err, sit corrected, sorry.
Multi-core restrictions on Windows versions are mostly artificial. For example, 8-CPU systems running just fine on Windows 2003 Advanced Server without any special tweaking. The system the grandparent referred to must have been running Windows 2003 Data Center Edition to support more than 8 processors, but should still require no special tweaking.
That said, I'm sure the systems that make it to the top of TPC benchmarks are highly tweaked.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I must be blessed! My launch-day (actually week-before-launch-day, non-import) DS Lite still hasn't cracked its hinges. I liked the old big Xbox controllers (and the comparison is to an eight hundred pound grizzly bear). My launch window Xbox 360 has never overheated, and my purchased-pre-owned-yet-still-old PS2 has never had DVD issues. I did go through several original Xbox consoles due to bad DVD drives, but that wasn't in your list of "Bad Things That Happen At Launch".
No, I have a DLP TV which runs at a native 720p resolution. While it supports 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i, it does so by converting any non-720p signals to 720p. In some cases, and I've only seen it rarely, the TV can introduce some lag due to this conversion process. Mostly, I rarely notice it because most of my components do 720p natively (PC, Xbox 360, upconverting DVD player).
King Kong was a launch title, and also ported to many other platforms. As such, it's not a great indicator of 360 HD graphical prowess. From launch, take a look at PGR3 or Call of Duty 2. Or look at more recent games like Oblivion or Dead Rising.
I bet you can, if you looked into it a little bit more. My parents live in a rural area and they can get several OTA HD channels. If all else fails, you can always get DirecTV.
Indeed, where are they? Certainly a major retailer like Wal*Mart would have 26"-36" HD sets ...
The flip side, boo to Nintendo for forcing my TV to have to upscale the 480p output from the Wii, which could potentially lead to lag in the gameplay! The Right Way(tm) to do this would've been for them to include an internal scaler that scales all output to a chosen resolution regardless of what resolution it was rendered. That's what the Xbox 360 does. Most games do render at 540p or 720p, but you can choose to output them at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and various other VGA resolutions (and soon 1080p). Gone are the days where each game gets to choose what resolution it supports. The games should render at whatever native resolution they want and let the console take care of scaling appropriately. (and the Xbox 360 has a very good scaler!)
While I don't disagree with your point as a whole, I don't think this is the best example. RTS games worked well enough back in the days of 320x240 resolutions (Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Warcraft I). Perhaps modern RTS games wouldn't work well at lower resolutions, but that's just a matter of design. If they had to work with a max res of 640x480, developers would continue to advance the genre. They'd just have to be smarter about how they display information.
On the other hand, the current state of HDTV adoption means that console games still have to work well on SDTV sets. Dead Rising is a great example of how to do it wrong. They used smaller fonts to fit more information on-screen, but ended up screwing SDTV customers in the process. As long as developers have to support SDTV as well as HDTV, don't expect text and information displays to take full advantage of the resolution provided by a 720p or 1080p HD set.
From your original post:
The AC was giving you crap for misspelling "breaking".But now they only have empty wine bottles, and Christie's has all the money.
The Wavebird was a good controller, but I did find myself longing for rumble while playing Metroid Prime (probably because I first played it with the wired controller before eventually buying a Wavebird). That said, Microsoft and Logitech have significantly upped the ante by building solid, responsive wireless controllers with rumble that still have good battery life (my 360 controller can go a week or more without recharging, playing an hour or two a night).
Aside from that, the GameCube never really had games where rumble is essential (for example, driving simulators -- you really need rumble, or better yet real force feedback, to get a feel for track surface and braking). Imagine playing Gran Turismo without rumble.
The only developer that ever really said anything about that was Bethesda, and they ended up being able to fit all of Oblivion on a single DVD anyway.
I'm not yet fully convinced that "next generation" games really need more than what a DVD can provide. Texture compression is well-known (and even free in some cases, depending on GPU and such), audio compression is well known, etc. More space invites developer laziness. That's not to say that more space will always be bad, just that right now it's not the bottleneck.
You'll be able to plug in a GC controller on your PS3? Wow! I didn't know Sony was that progressive!
The WiiMote has rumble. The PS3 SIXAXIS controller does not. The Wii can plug in a GC controller that has rumble. No idea if the PS3 can plug in an old PS2 dual shock controller, though I doubt it will matter if games aren't written with rumble in mind.
Well, Gears of War is supposed to be this year's Halo. While it has a competent team behind it (CliffyB!), I'm starting to think maybe it's been overhyped and will never live up to expectations.
Does anybody remember Brute Force? It was supposed to be 2003's Halo, got overhyped, and ended up as yet another mediocre third-person shooter that nobody remembers. To me, Gears of War looks like it's shaping up to be Brute Force rather than Halo. Hopefully the rest of the holiday titles will keep the 360 afloat if Gears of War can't. (sigh ... and I so wanted Forza 2 for the holiday. Have to wait until next year, now.)
They slashed the number of units being delivered because they can't produce enough units. Sony is still in their magical Kutaragi bubble where everybody will get a second job so they can buy a PS3. If it was just a matter of anticipated lack of demand, Sony would be full speed ahead and damn the torpedos. Which they are doing anyway, it's just "full speed" means "a paltry amount of consoles for NA and Japan, and none for EU".
The Wii will sell four times as many consoles in the US because they will ship four times as many (if not more). And they'll sell infinitely times as many consoles in EU because Sony's not shipping there yet. It's a numbers game -- if you can only get 400,000 consoles on the market, there's no way you're going to sell 1.6million.
And this is why it's stupid for Sony to try to shove Blu-Ray down our throats. That said, the extra graphical horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox 360 will still be impressive on an SDTV simply due to more polygons and more budget for effects. You won't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, but PS3 games will still look much better than PS2 games on the same TV (just as 360 games look better than Xbox games).
As for another console being out in three years, don't bet on it. Maybe that will be true if Microsoft holds to the same 4 year cycle as they did with the Xbox, but I doubt that will happen. They entered this generation early because it was imperative to beat Sony and Nintendo to the punch. If that pans out for them, expect the Xbox 360 to have at least a 5 year lifespan before there's an Xbox 720 (or whatever it'll be called). And Sony expects the PS3 to last for 10 years, so don't hold your breath for a PS4 unless you can wait until 2015 ...
This gamerscore farming is even worse than that, because you have to give them your Passport account, and your Live account most likely has a credit card associated with it (for renewing your subscription and buying Points). Imagine waking up one day and instead of all of your in-game gold being gone, you find out that your email account has been banned due to spamming, all of your Messenger contacts are pissed at you for sending them messages with virii and trojans, and your credit card charged $1000 for Point purchases (not so useful right now, but just wait until Points are used for micropayments across other Microsoft services, they become transferrable to other users, or even convertible into cash). Yeah, handing over the keys to your Live account is such a smart idea ...
And you've just proven that you don't understand JavaScript. JavaScript != Java (or C++, or C#). It's not designed around functions and classes. Javascript is a functional language, and as such is designed around closures. Closures allow you to define classes and functions, but they also allow you to do quite a bit more (and also let you shoot yourself in the foot if you like).
You're correct in saying that there's more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than just understanding a JavaScript function, but most of the things you mention are irrelevant (well, they're important to understanding JavaScript, but that's a core competency for any type of web design, not just AJAX). Using AJAX is easy, especially with all of the frameworks available that abstract browser compatibility issues for you. Using AJAX well is difficult (dealing with accessibility, server load, concurrency, etc).
As far as I can tell, it's hiding nothing. Does that mean I have to die now?
That'd be great, if your 90% use case is on a TV (10' experience). For non-TV use, such a simplified UI would be extremely annoying and limiting.
Unfortunately, this is where designers usually screw up. They think "easy" == "simple", which is not necessarily the case at all. It's hard to build an easy interface for complex actions. Instead, we end up with crapfests like Bob, or one-size-fits-all attempts at a "simple" interface like you're suggesting, or an options dialog with tabs stacked three deep for "advanced" options.
In terms of "interfaces for people who watch TV", MythTV and Windows Media Center Edition get it mostly right -- the UI is a separate full-screen app that is great for when you're using the PC on a TV, but the "real" interface to the OS is still available for the rest of the time.
By "MS" you mean "EA", right? Because Microsoft has kept their next-gen games priced the same as for the previous gen ($50, for the US market). Now I'm not completely familiar with pricing in European markets, and obviously exchange rates can make things more or less expensive, but I'd really be surprised if Microsoft increased the price of Microsoft-published games for the Xbox 360.
That said, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have no control over third parties. They can sell a game at $200 (Capcom's Steel Battallion), or they can sell at $20 (budget titles). Most third parties seem to stick with a $60 price for 360 titles, most likely because that's what EA did (because "HD titles cost more", even when there's nothing remotely HD about the title at all). If EA can get away with it, so can everybody else.
There's your first problem. No book is going to give you all of the latest techniques for doing "cool" things with CSS. For that you need to poke around online at places like CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, Liquid Designs, etc. If you must buy a book, a pocket reference is the best way to go (and even that really isn't necessary, since you can find good references online).
Odd, I've done exactly that using a non-table layout, and I certainly didn't invent the technique. It's not purely semantic, as you end up with a couple extra divs to get your layout right, but it's a damn sight closer than table layouts. In fact, your example is actually quite trivial, compared to something like a three-column layout with bounding fixed-size sidebars around a liquid middle (there's a reason that's called the Holy Grail of CSS-based design).
Oddly enough, movietally's table-based layout for its rounded-corner "Discover" box is broken on IE7 (the corners don't line up correctly). So much for "tables work". I'll grant you that CSS-based layouts can run into some funky cross-browser issues, but 9 times out of 10 the problem is not with the layout but with the designer who demands pixel-perfect magazine-like layouts in a medium that was never meant to do that (if you want that, build a PDF). If you get over your obsession for having everything lining up just so and instead focus on making the page accessible and understandable while still looking good, you'll find that CSS is often a lot easier and nicer to work with than table layouts. Besides, it makes it quite a bit easier to give your page a makeover to keep it fresh without having to recode everything (CSS Zen Garden is the prime example, but look at what Slashdot did with the recent site skinning contest -- that was limited to only CSS manipulation, which would've been impossible had Slashdot stuck with its outdated table-based design).
Nobody's saying that tables aren't useful. We're just saying that they should be used semantically. If you have some tabular data you want to display (say, a calendar), knock yourself out with tabley goodness.
The Beatles were British, not German!
("Beatles" with an 'a' is the specific spelling for the band, like a musical "beat". "Beetle" is the spelling of the insect, car, etc.)
I'm not hard of hearing, but I always turn on game subtitles when available because it makes games faster. Why should I sit through a minute of dialog when I can read that same information in 15 seconds? If a developer cares about story more than presentation, they'll make sure subtitles are available and each line of dialog is skippable to the next (games that skip the entire scene are just evil).
You're talking about Sony, right? Because no PS3 launch title will have a 1080p native resolution (I'm assuming the PS3 will scale everything to a single chosen resolution like the 360, and the "native" resolution is just what the game renders at internally), and many PS3 developers have insinuated that the console really isn't powerful enough to render games at native 1080p (scaling, sure).
The only benefit to the PS3's 1080p support is HDMI (on the $600 model ...), which means when the MPAA flips the ICT bit in 2011 you'll still be able to play high definition movies at 1080p. Then again, if you really cared about playing HD movies you wouldn't use a combo console/DVD player anyway.
You act like that's something new. Audio Authority has had 2x1 and 4x1 DVI switches supporting 1080p and HDCP for some time now. Nothing supporting HDMI directly (neither does the one you linked), but HDMI <-> DVI is trivial.
You'll still need an audio mux (I like the 1177), and it doesn't look like AA's cheaper DVI switches support auto-switching, which is disappointing. Still, the IR remote should be convenient enough.
The only benefit to the Gefen item you linked is that it ships with cables for $350, while the AA is cableless at $350. Not that it really matters, since you'll still have to buy an HDMI to DVI cable to use either of them with HDMI sources and outputs.
Or you could spend $3500 and get the AVX-661 set and route 1080p video and digital audio through your entire house via Cat5e!
Keep in mind that Nintendo is trying to bring in non-traditional gamers (or non-gamers) with the Wii and DS. How many people do you know who bought a DS for Brain Age and never purchased another game? I know at least two, out of the three people I know with a DS (my social circle isn't big on games, though I am). If Nintendo is truly dedicated to bringing in these casual gamers, they will make games that the casual gamers will want to buy. The DS so far has been hit and miss. Brain Age excelled at getting non gamers to buy a DS. The Big Brain Academy follow-up flopped pretty hard.
Personally, I wish Nintendo would ship a Sudoku game based off of Brain Age's Sudoku interface but with a proper game generator behind it. DS sales would instantly double.
Check out the Mii Channel video. My arm got tired just watching it.
Of course, I'm still going to buy a Wii ...
Out of the launch titles, sure. Geometry Wars was hands-down the best launch title, and it only costs $5. However, there have been a number of titles released since then that range from good to excellent (Oblivion, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Fight Night Round 3, etc). Maybe you have esoteric tastes (no hentai tentacle porn on 360 ... yet), or loyalty to a specific brand rather than genre (Ninety Nine Nights was a better Dynasty Warriors than Dynasty Warriors, Saints Row could have been renamed GTA4 and nobody would know the difference, etc). Or maybe you just have an aversion to Microsoft. All of that's fine, but I would ask that you be a little more explicit when you say there aren't any cool games. What's missing that you would want? (genres are more important than specific titles -- there'll never be a Gran Turismo on Xbox but Forza 2 and FIA GTR should be coming soon to fill in the simulation racer gap, for example).
Multi-core restrictions on Windows versions are mostly artificial. For example, 8-CPU systems running just fine on Windows 2003 Advanced Server without any special tweaking. The system the grandparent referred to must have been running Windows 2003 Data Center Edition to support more than 8 processors, but should still require no special tweaking.
That said, I'm sure the systems that make it to the top of TPC benchmarks are highly tweaked.