It works fine. GMail runs smoothly, Outlook Web Access runs smoothly. IE7 is just IE6 + more features and better CSS support. And they're using the standard HTTP request object now, not the MS* one
The "MS* one" defined the standard. But yes, it required creating an ActiveX object rather than being a native implementation. That said, while IE7 does now have a javascript-native XMLHTTPRequest implementation, it can also still run ActiveX controls. That means sites that do stupid things like parse UA strings for browser compatibility rather than using object detection will still work fine even though they'll go through their ActiveX codepath rather than using the native object.
What this really boils down to is a fundamental issue in how you write javascript across multiple browsers. You should never parse UA strings, because they can change (across releases, or just because the user says so like with Opera or Firefox). Sites that use UA detection are broken, even if they do work on some subset of browsers. The correct way to do cross-browser support is to use object detection. For example, look at the following code (I hope this formats correctly):
function OnKeyPress(e) { if (!e && window.event) { e = window.event; } else if (!e) { // can't get an event object, so let's just leave return false; }
var key; if (e.keyCode) { key = e.keyCode; } else if (e.which) { key = e.which; }
// you can now use key, which should be the same value across all browsers }
This is an event handler, where a browser like Firefox will pass in the event object but IE expects you to use the window.event global. So, you check for that. Once you have the event, different browsers use different fields to hold the key code (which will be the same across browsers), so you check for that as well. Nowhere did I check if this was running on Firefox, IE, or Opera. I just checked for what I needed, found it where I could, and bailed out otherwise. The above code will work on IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera, and should work in Konqueror, Safari, etc (I just don't have those available for testing).
Just to reiterate to make it clear, if you're using UA detection, or you're using a library that uses UA detection, your code is broken. Fix it!
But what is it that makes you guys actively detest phones that can do more than make phone calls? Is a phone that can play games more expensive than one that cannot? Is a phone with an MP3 player harder to dial than one without? What is it that turns you off to these things, rather than just having the phone in your pocket and ignoring all the features you don't need? Is it that you don't want to sign a service contract and therefore a new phone is expensive? Or is it something about the phone itself?
I can only answer for myself, but you've pretty much answered it. Yes, phones with those features are generally more expensive (or require a 2-year contract to be affordable). They also tend to have worse battery life, and are often prone to locking up. I'm sorry, but if my phone crashes on me then I'm not going to use it.
For my part, I don't mind service contracts too much, except that I'm currently month-to-month on a plan that no longer exists, and to upgrade my phone (for "free") would require re-signing a contract. Re-signing a contract would mean that I would lose my current plan, and I just can't see paying the same amount of money or more to get less. I'm currently on an "unlimited nights and weekends" plan, where "unlimited" actually means "unlimited" and not "5000 minutes." That plan no longer exists, and the current plan at an equivalent price gives me 1000 night and weekend minutes. I don't use 1000 minutes of phone time per month, but I just can't justify paying the same amount of money for less service. As it stands, I could use more than 1000 minutes if I wanted/needed to.
I don't buy into the "ignore it" argument. If I don't want the crap on my phone, I don't want that phone. I don't want to ignore it, or pretend it isn't there. I want it not to be there at all. I don't want a color screen. I don't want mp3 ringtones, games, or a camera. I don't want a phone that can lock-up or crash on me. What do I want? A phone that can send/receive phone calls (and maybe text messages, but that's not even truly necessary) and can store a contact list on a SIM chip. Anything more than that is unnecessary, and I don't want to pay for it (directly or indirectly), and I don't want it complicating my phone unnecessarily.
Oh, sure, I'm going to tell my landlord he has to buy a new router so I can play video games. I suppose I could offer to pay for it -- but I don't want to watch BG that badly.
It may be simpler than that. If his router is relatively new (say, purchased in the last ~3 years), it may just be a matter of configuring the UPnP support that's already available. Maybe a firmware upgrade would be needed, but that's it.
Besides, $80 to get your landlord a new router would be worth it for the better network experience you'll have being able to map your own ports on demand and only as long as they're needed. And as I mentioned, this is not just for pirating stuff. If anything, I'd say the ability to use a UPnP-aware torrent client is a side benefit. But then, I play games on Xbox Live, and I've suffered from not having a UPnP-aware NAT router.:)
Major carriers have an allotted sum that they can contribute to a person's first handset based on their one-year contract commitment. People in the handset selection teams for these companies choose the phones with the best feature set for that amount of money. There is no bonus for selecting a phone that is cheaper than this amount.
As mentioned in the article, bare-bones phones appeal to people who don't want a contract commitment. I can understand why carriers would not want to publicize phones cheaper than the subsidy amount, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't carry them. In fact, it's money in their pockets if someone were to choose a cheaper phone, because you know they wouldn't turn around and give a break on the contract price to that person.
Less expensive phones sometimes get that way by choosing inferior components, and antenna designs. But not always. The only way to know whether a phone was cheaper due to clever engineering or cheap components is to completely reverse engineer the design with a every competent team of engineers, or deploy thousands of them and carefully watch the complaints.
More often, less expensive phones get that way by offering fewer features. It just makes sense that a phone that has no camera or color screen will be cheaper than a phone that does. Sure, they may also skimp on engineering or quality components, but I just don't see how that's necessary when it's already so much cheaper to skip the camera, fast processor, and color screen.
This phone will never let him "discover" the joys of sending cool pictures at the zoo to his grandkids e-mail boxes (which he may already do with with Coolpix 8800).
Maybe he's already discovered that joy and decided he didn't need it. Or maybe he has no grandkids. Or maybe he'd rather actually take his grandkids to the zoo rather than just send them pictures.
disclaimer: I am a Treo650 fanboy who still has his T68 on the charger
And I'm a cell phone luddite, who is not only still using his 4 year old Motorola v60i flip-phone, but would require his cellular carrier to pay him to "upgrade" to something newer (but almost certainly not better, by my definition). Like the phone in the article, my v60i sends and receives phone calls and text messages, can easily store contact information on its SIM (while it has internal memory, I don't use it), and is simply functional rather than whiz-bang gadgety neat. And when my battery finally gives up the ghost (four years and still going strong, I wonder when it'll finally die?), I'll go buy another battery and keep on using my beloved v60i.
It did display a very informative message explaining that I had to export the proper ports through the router. Which would be fine, if it were my router. But it's not, and I'm not going to ask my landlord to help me become a file pirate.
First off, while I don't condone piracy, I see nothing wrong with finding a different encoding of something you already own (or in my case, when I accidentally deleted the recent episode of 24 from my DVR, finding a copy of that online so I can keep up with the story). That said, why put it to your landlord in those terms? Suggest he use a router with a proper UPnP implementation, because you need that to be able to play on Xbox Live (see my sig). Perfectly legal, up-front reason, and once you get past the stigma GRC tried to apply to UPnP you'll find that it's a very useful piece of technology and is safe so long as you take some precautions. And then once you convince him to implement UPnP, you can use a bittorrent client like Azureus with no problems at all. As well, you'll find that properly-written games will also work better, you'll be able to do file sharing from your IM client (MSN/Windows Live Messenger uses UPnP, not sure about others like gtalk, aim, icq, trillian, etc).
Any chance at you releasing the unfinished grease monkey control to the community for further development?
No need. Somebody else already did that, though development seems to have stalled for some time now. But their source is available, and it's written in C++ rather than the C# I used (mine was a proof of concept, so I didn't care about performance or extra requirements like having the.NET framework installed). I'm not a big fan of the direction they went with Turnabout (split basic/advanced installations with no ability to change basic to advanced without reinstalling, requiring a toolbar), but that's fixable by anyone who wants to take the time. The core functionality works well enough, though it has problems with framed pages (who uses framed pages anymore, anyway?), and the source is under a BSD-ish license so you could do a closed-source binary release if you really wanted to.
I stopped using Turnabout for two reasons
The toolbar interaction of Turnabout exposed an unfortunate design flaw in IE where you can no longer save pages as archives (it's not a bug because apparently it's working as designed). Worse, that same flaw causes javascript errors to disregard the "do not show error dialog" option, resulting in a bunch of annoying javascript error dialogs on every single page. You'd be surprised at the number of popular pages with broken javascript (usually ad-related scripts).
IE's tendency to leak memory resulted in the iexplore.exe process eating up 200-300MB of RAM after only an hour or two of usage. You could solve that with carefully-written scripts, but when you're trying to reuse scripts from the Greasemonkey community that were targetted to Firefox (which is less leaky) you don't reeally get that level of control.
If Turnabout were to ever resume development (or someone were to fork the code), and IE7 were to solve most of IE's leakiness, I'd very likely revisit using a Greasemonkey-like extension.
IE is kind of boring nowadays because it isn't extensible. At least, not voluntarily.
BS. It's not extensible through HTML/CSS/Javascript like Firefox, but it is extensible, and in many ways even moreso than Gecko-and-XUL-based browsers. You can add new functionality to IE via Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), or embed/extend the browser by referencing the browser COM object.
BHOs are actually a very powerful way of extending IE. For example, when popup blockers started showing up in other browsers way back in the day (~2001?), I wrote a BHO to add popup blocking support in IE. Toolbars provided by developers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are also BHOs, though you don't have to have a toolbar if you don't want to (BHOs require no UI interaction). At one point, I even wrote a Greasemonkey work-alike for IE, though I ended up abandoning the project due to time constraints (but the goal of building a proof of concept was successful). The MSN toolbar added tabbed browsing to IE6, and while it was a little flakey it still worked very well. So, what can't you do with BHOs?
That amount of power is also a problem, though. Like ActiveX, BHOs can be used by bad people. Also like ActiveX, IE has built incremental improvements to security to protect you from bad BHOs. It never should've been possible to have a drive-by badware-BHO installation in the first place, but Microsoft has learned the lesson. Good and bad, with great power comes great responsibility, whatever. You may not like the extensibility options in IE, but that doesn't mean that they're not there, nor that they're not as powerful, if not more powerful, as Firefox extensions.
Re:No Wonder The 360 Is Selling So Poorly
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Black Review
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· Score: 1
Black looks horrible on the PS2 compared to the Xbox version and especially compared to the 360 version. Black has the same problem on the PS2 that practically every other game on the PS2 has, jaggies everywhere. The screen shots that are posted above are clearly from the Xbox 360 version.
What? There is no Xbox 360 version of Black, and according to the developers there won't be. It's up to Microsoft to make the game run in backwards compatibility on the 360, if they're going to do that at all. Most likely, the screens are high-resolution promo screens (rendered in-game, but at 4x the normal resolution), if they're not from the Xbox or PS2 version.
for the same reason that people will never completely stop driving and start using public transportation.
I'm going to go off-topic a bit here. I'm not sure I buy your reasoning behind why people will never rely solely on public transportation. It's not because we like to have our own cars, or our privacy, or our own schedule. It is, but that's not the deal-breaker. More people would use public transportation significantly more if a few key pieces are put in place:
More service. Busses and trains need to come by every 5 minutes (10 at the outside), 24x7x365. I don't use public transporation because their's only one bus per hour coming by my house, and service stops at 6pm.
Better routes. It's useless to have busses or trains on 5-10 minute intervals when it takes 90-120 minutes to go 15 miles. The bus routes where I live are so circuitous that I would end up passing within a couple miles of my office no less than three different times, and still have to change busses at least twice, just for my morning commute. That means if I get on a bus at 8am (assuming I don't miss the 8am bus and have to wait for the 9:30am bus), I wouldn't make it into the office until 10am. And then I'd have to leave the office at 4pm to be able to catch the last bus home since service stops around my house at 6pm. If I'm going 15 miles and it takes me 30 minutes by car, it better not take more than 30 minutes by bus/train or I'm not using it.
You'll only ever see those things happen in dense metropolitan centers, at which point you do see people using only the bus or subway. How many people in downtown NYC own cars? How many people in Tokyo? There are places where such systems could be implemented and haven't (Seattle), but there are many places where it's simply not possible due to population density. Is it worth implementing full bus service for a county in middle-of-nowhere Texas with all of 20 residents? Rural and suburban areas will continue to need personal transportation for a very long time to come, and such areas make up the bulk of the US.
On another note, I wonder what you do to ground this sort of thing. I mean, we can get some pretty strong lightning here. How do you keep lightning from destroying your computer/wireless equipment in this case?
I assume you'd do the same thing you'd do in any other case of "tall stuff" (like a TV antenna) -- put a lightning rod on the tower that extends well above the tower's height, and run the insulated ground cable down to the ground.
That's a pretty artificial limitation you're imposing on yourself, and one that Google (and others) have already solved. I assume you want the "ctrl+enter" approach, where you type in "foo", press ctrl+enter, and end up with "www.foo.com". In that case, try "googlemaps". Similarly, you can get to "search.msn.com" by using "msnsearch", "local.live.com" (Microsoft's map url) with "virtualearth" (it'd be nice if "msnmaps" or similar worked, but "virtualearth" gets you there well enough), "search.yahoo.com" with "yahoosearch", "mail.yahoo.com" with "yahoomail", "mail.google.com" with "gmail", etc. It's all just DNS redirection, so you don't need any special browser support to use any of these.
Or better yet, just add Bookmarks/Favorites, and then you don't ever have to remember URLs.
Re:I hope the Revolution is successful
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
XBox 360 is a failed venture...even the Gamecube sold more units last quarter.
Nice baseless attack. Would you like to qualify it with anything, like "in Japan"? And which quarter? Q2 FY06, which is Q4 calendar year 05, when the Xbox 360 was only out for the last month? Q3 FY06, which doesn't end until March, and so numbers haven't been released yet? Maybe you could provide a link with your data? Here's mine, that shows you're correct so long as you add "in Japan" and only talk about the week ending February 12, 2006. Problem is, while you might make a case for extrapolating that data from one week to an entire quarter, you can't assume it represents non-Japan sales in any way.
Re:Non-CD Booting Options and Distro Support
on
Linux On Older Hardware
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't consider a machine that can boot from CDROM to be old:-) (And I especially don't consider any machine that supports USB to be old...)
"Old" is relative, but keep in mind that machines that can boot from CDROM and support USB have been around for nearly 10 years now (I bought just such a machine back in January 97, 9 years ago). A decade-old machine fits my definition of "old". Certainly machines based on a 386 or 486 CPU are older, but a p200 from 96-97 is definitely "old".
One would assume the one from Microsoft, since.NET is their name (pieces of.NET, like the C# language and the Common Language Runtime, have been standardized by ECMA).
Will all.NETs run on Vista?
If you mean, "Will the Mono and Rotor implementations of the ECMA-standardized bits run on Vista?" I'd assume so. And if not, they're open source so go make them work (yes, even Microsoft's Rotor is open source). Now if the question is whether.NET 1.0 or 1.1 will run on Vista, I have no idea. I'd assume not, but then.NET 2.0 is backwards-compatible and does a pretty good job without requiring you to recompile 1.x assemblies for 2.0. 2.0 is not forward-compatible, meaning that you can't take 2.0 assemblies and run them on a 1.x runtime thanks to necessary changes in the IL to truly support generics (unlike Java, where generics are just syntactic sugar for object boxing), among other things.
Will.NET run on linux, or will MS decide to litigate MONO and others out of existence?
When was the last time Microsoft litigated against someone? Yes, they have a stack of patents, but it's mostly for defensive purposes. And besides, Mono has worked pretty hard to stay clear of any patent-encumbered portions of.NET.
Will MS change license terms again, making it illegal to run.NET on anything but MS licensed systems?
They certainly can do that with their implementation. I see nothing wrong with them screwing users of pirated software. But their run-time EULA for.NET doesn't apply to Mono.
Will MS patches and updates applied to MS systems ?
What? What does patching have to do with.NET? And if Microsoft wants to force all patches through WGA, they have that right. They have no responsibility to users of pirated software. Since Microsoft's.NET implementation only runs on Windows, it doesn't apply at all to users of Mono on non-Microsoft platforms.
and on and on
Not really.
All of the above questions have one thing in common. All the answers come from Microsoft. All decisions are made by Microsoft, and not by the developer.
Well, no. Microsoft controls their implementation of.NET, but anybody is free to implement the ECMA standards (see Mono). Microsoft does have a say in the ECMA standard as an interested party, but ultimately it's up to ECMA what goes into the standard. As for support, Microsoft has a published lifecycle model for support that is very generous -- a minimum of 10 years for Business and Developer products, which means that.NET 1.0 will be supported until 2011..NET 1.1 will be supported even longer, and all.NET Framework versions can run side-by-side. If you haven't transitioned from 1.0 to 1.1 by 2011, it sucks to be you.
You may not consider it good but I did play Freelancer with KB/M. I liked it just fine.
You played Freelancer with KB/M because you had to play Freelancer with KB/M. It didn't support joysticks (intentionally). I also played Freelancer, and while I did get used to the controls eventually I still yearned for it to support a Joystick. So I went back to Freespace 1/2.
Sadly, nobody's making decent space flight sims anymore. Yeah, X3 shipped recently, but it's covered in nasty copy protection I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot poll. And yes, I know about Freespace 2 SCP, but it's still just Freespace (or user-created mods and games that never get past 10% completion). I'd try EVE Online, but I really don't want to get into the MMOG grind.
I agree with the "too small" thing. I just got my 360 last week and I already have a good amount of stuff on it. The quake 4 demo is over a gig. The PGR3 demo and a bunch of others are > 600 megs. HD trailers are hundreds of megs. Plus the 4 or 5 Live Arcade games I have too (not sure of the size on those though.
Perhaps you're just using it wrong? Demos aren't supposed to live forever. You play them, get a feel for the game, and delete it after a couple days. Same thing for videos. Watch them and delete them. Arcade games are capped at 50MB (because they need to be able to fit on a memory card, which is 64MB - some overhead = ~53MB).
Most complaints about the hard drive tend to be along the lines of, "I bought a 20GB drive, but it says I only have 12GB free. I haven't even used it yet! Did I get ripped off?" What's happening is two-fold. First, remember that 20GB in HD speak is not 20GB. It's 18.5GB. Now subtract ~5GB for buffers (I believe it's been said how much space is reserved by the system, but I don't remember the actual size), and then another 1GB or so for the videos and music that ship on the drive (that you can and should immediately delete), and it makes sense that you only have 12GB free out of the box, and it makes sense that you'll never see more than 13GB or 14GB free even if you completely wipe the drive (which you shouldn't do, because then you'll lose Hexic).
While I'd love to have a larger hard drive, and it definitely makes sense to have a bigger drive given demos and trailers on Marketplace, keep in mind that the Xbox went 4+ years with only an 8-10GB drive (of which 4-5GB was still reserved by the OS for buffers and cache). Also keep in mind that because the HD is now optional with the 360, you're not going to see games with saves greater than the size of a memory card (*cough*KOTOR*cought*). The only people I've ever heard of filling up their Xbox hard drive (assuming non-modders, of course) were people who had a ton of KOTOR 1 and 2 save games that they never deleted.
Picking the Xbox 360 as an example was not wise.
The RRP for most xbox games is £50... FIFTY POUNDS.
Well, I pulled my prices from Amazon.co.uk, which I guess is lower than other retailers. Then again, buying from Game is like buying from EBGames or Gamestop in the US -- you're going to pay more, when you could've gone down to Fry's and got that same $60 game for $45. Maybe there aren't any stores that run sales or discounts like that in the UK.
Anyway, it doesn't change all that much. Add £55 to the £494 I already calculated (because I used 5 games at £39 each) and you end up with £549. Still expensive, but also still £150 less than the GP's £700 price point. It does surprise me that PGR3 is £44.99, when Microsoft has been good about £ conversion everywhere else (previously, they'd just say $299 == £299 and leave it at that. Now they're saying $299 == £209). Anyway, the moral here is to shop around rather than just buying from Game.
By the time I bought a decent PC or modern console, say I bought five decent new games, you're into easily £700 for, what, a few weeks of decent gaming? That's a serious amount of money for some on-screen entertainment.
I don't think your numbers are quite right, though I'm not in the UK so I'm not completely sure about how prices stack up. Anyway, let's take an example. Assuming you can find an Xbox 360, that should cost you between £209 and £299 (Amazon.co.uk lists the Core for £209, but doesn't have a non-auction price for the Premium). Add a couple games at £39 each and you come to a total of £494 (assuming £299 Premium console and five £39 games, and not factoring in any extra taxes or shipping costs). That's a fair amount less than £700. While you could certainly spend £700 or more on a modern PC and games, keep in mind that you'll end up with a modern PC that can do a lot more than your current 1GHz or less PCs can handle (or at least can do the same tasks more quickly, anyway). Whether that's worth the price is up to you, but I doubt you'd upgrade a PC and then only use it for gaming.
Anyway, you completely missed a perfectly valid and affordable option: Get into the "current-gen" (some may say "previous-gen") consoles like PS2, Gamecube, or Xbox. From new, possibly including bundles, you will spend £115, £80, or £90 for each respective console (prices from Amazon.co.uk include a bundle for PS2 and Gamecube, but not for Xbox, and only consider listings with an "Our Price" value, as opposed to "Used & New" price listings that indicate auctions). New games for these consoles (and there are still new games being made, even for the Xbox that now has a successor console) run £29.99 or less (much less if you buy used), and there are a ton of Greatest Hits/Player's Choice/Platinum/Classic games you can choose from that cost between £10 and £20. Thus, you could pick up a PS2 and 5 greatest hits games for a total of £215, and possibly less. They may not be the latest and greatest, but since you don't have anything newer than a PSOne they'd all be new to you. There's five years (four years for GC and Xbox) of gaming that you can go through before even considering a next-gen system like Xbox 360 or PS3. And by the time you're ready for those, they'll be the bargain "current-gen" systems.
Look at the "solutions" to deceptive advertisement regulators have come up with, though. Now every time I connect my DS to a hotspot to play MarioKart, I get a little flash message saying "Warning: Game experience may change during online play"... I'd certainly $*%&ing hope so! Why else would I bother going online?
That warning is not there to prevent cases of deceptive advertising. It's a CYA move by the ESRB that lets you know while a game may be rated as T, there's no way the developer can stop people online from yelling the N-word or dropping F-bombs, tea-bagging your corpse or bragging about sleeping with your mother. That's also why any good parental control system (see the Xbox 360, for example) will have separate settings for online access.
If you want to blame anybody for that little bit of text, blame self-righteous idiots like Tipper Gore, Jack Thompson, and parents that would rather not have to think about how to raise their children properly. The ESRB requires that text to keep from being sued when little Johnny gets called a faggot while playing his E-rated game online. "We told you the game experience may change, and our rating may no longer be appropriate. Did you listen? No. And now you're going to sue us. Well, nya-nya, we're covered!"
One of the hardware issues I had read about the 360 when it was in production - the software companies developing for the 360 had to *REQUEST* 512 megs of RAM to be put in the system - MS was gonna put a measley 256 in the 360!
At least Microsoft listened.
If virtually every PC game (made to run on the OS Microsoft made, mind you) has a minimum of 256 and a recommended of 512 RAM, wouldnt it apply to consoles also?
Nope. PC games need so much RAM because they aren't the only thing running on a system and they can't make assumptions about the environment where they'll run (is the hard drive or optical drive fast enough to stream textures in a Just In Time manner?). Conversely, consoles are a solid target. You can make assumptions about the hardware, and you can write your code in such a way that RAM is nothing more than a temporary buffer as you pull stuff off of the hard drive or optical disk. That's how the Xbox got by with only 64MB of unified memory in 2001 (and the PS2 has only 4MB of video buffer!), and that's why the 360 could've done just fine with 256MB of RAM and is a console developer's wet dream at 512MB.
When a system launches, it should hav *no* problem playing launch games, and then towards the end of that console's ability to provide an abundance of GPU and CPU power, the truly KILLER apps get released for it (note on the PS2, Killzone, the soon to be released "Black", ect)
I haven't seen much about Black on the PS2, but you conveniently forgot to mention that it'll also be out on Xbox. Having played the demo, I didn't find it to be all that special, and I probably won't pick it up until I can get it used (to avoid lining EA's pockets). As for Killzone, I'm surprised you can mention that game with a straight face. It was supposed to be a Halo killer (keep in mind, Killzone shipped in 2004 while Halo shipped in 2001), and ended up with boring gameplay and a host of graphical and audio issues. While Halo has an average review rating of 96% and Halo 2 averages at 95%, Killzone has an average rating of only 73%. It's a little better if you look at user ratings rather than "official" reviews: H1/H2 average 8.8 and 8.3, while Killzone averages 7.7. Since those numbers are from users, they're obviously full of fanboys for and against both games, giving H2 a 1/10 because it's not Half-Life 2, or giving it a 10/10 because they're blind with fanboyism.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah -- 512MB of RAM vs. 256MB is nice, but certainly wasn't absolutely necessary. However, it's interesting to note that given the choice between having a hard drive as standard equipment (ie, no Core 360) or 512MB of RAM, almost every developer chose to have 512MB of RAM.
They will try to kill off innovative games on other platforms
Microsoft doesn't really have much control over other platforms, you know. Aside from purchasing development houses (which they've done twice in the past five years. How many developers have EA, Take Two, or Ubi purchased since then?), they have no way to stop developers from making innovative games on other platforms. All they can do is try to get developers to make innovative games on their platform, and they have a perfect opportunity to pull in the indy folks via XBLA. That's already happening with games like Mutant Storm, Outpost Kaloki, Wik, and Ultra Marble Blast (some of which have appeared on the PC or original Xbox, but all of which are from small-time developers -- I left out Geometry Wars because it's from BC, and I left out arcade ports because they're arcade ports). Maybe getting these developers to innovate on the XBLA platform is a way of locking them into the 360, but I don't think it'd be difficult for those developers to publish their games online for the PC as well (as I already mentioned, many do that now).
try to tie people to Xbox Live with restrictive licensing
What? I mean, really, what do you mean by this? Are you saying that they'll using licensing to prevent developers from making their games interoperate with other platforms (false -- Final Fantasy XI does just that)? I just don't see what licensing has to do with this at all. And besides, what do you think Sony's going to do with their Xbox Live clone, the HUB?
try to cut into the home theater market profits
Cut into those profits from where? DVD players? What profit can there be in a market where you can buy a $30 progressive scan DVD player that's perfectly adequate? If anything, the 360 will be a compliment to a home theater, because it works as a Media Center extender right out of the box. Since Vista will include media center functionality in every version, you won't be able to not buy a media center PC in a year if you want Windows (and if you don't, this doesn't apply to you anyway). The 360's media center integration has been called one of its greater strengths by most reviews, along with XBLA. The way I see it, MCE integration and Arcade are the 360's "backwards compatibility", where "backwards compatibility" is defined by it's functional purpose -- "A way to get some valuable usage out of a system during that first 9-12 months of its life when the number of good games just aren't there." Sony did this with PS1 games on the PS2 (which had an even worse launch line-up than the 360). The 360 does this by providing fun arcade games and media center integration.
And so, in the console market, I predict* that their games will be clones of previous successes, that Xbox Live will degenerate into the same kind of experience as you get at msn.com, and that the home theater market will largely ignore them as being way too expensive.
And I predict that there will be a mix of "old faithful" games (Halo 3, EA's sports regurgitation year after year, another Splinter Cell, another Ghost Recon, etc) and innovative games (whether full titles or on XBLA), Xbox Live will continue to be a great service even when the 12 year olds continuously drop the N-bomb and question your sexual orientation, and the home theater market will only care about the 360 as a game machine or media center extender (because it's not meant to be a top of the line DVD player, and even if it was the home theater market segment will always prefer stand-alone units).
Has anyone noticed the HBO black outline phenomenon? HBO will play shows like BBC's "Extras" with black bars on all four sides. They broadcast the 16:9 material in 4:3 (broadcasting black bars on the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio), and then when the 4:3 content is shown on my 16:9 TV, I also get black bars on the left and right! In 720p and 1080i, my TV's zoom function does not operate, so I have no choice but to watch with a large proportion of my TV area black.
Are you sure you're watching HBO's HD channel? I've noticed this if I switch over to one of the non-HD HBO channels, but the HD channel generally does the right thing with 16:9 images. Then again, I've never bothered watching Extras, but original shows like Sopranos or Deadwood show up fine as 16:9, as do most movies (some are broadcast as 4:3, so I get sidebars). I've definitely noticed this on non-HD movie channels like Sundance or IFC, where the material is letterboxed but the channel is 4:3 SD.
Why not make those black bars grey? That should solve the uneven burn-in problem for CRTs and plasma. On LCoS, DLP, and LCD it's not an issue.
You'll still risk burning in the edges of the bars (because the interior 4:3 portion won't age as "averagely" as the gray bars, unless all you ever watch is a gray screen). Take it one step further and periodically move the position of the 4:3 window. My old Mitsubishi CRT RPTV did this with its gray bars, and I hear modern plasma screens do something similar. The nice thing about shifting the screen is that it prevents burn-in from static images as well, like game HUDs or network bugs (most of which are transparent-ish now, but are still nasty enough).
Or, you could just get a professional calibration and not worry about it so much. Get your contrast out of torchmode and you'd have to really work to bet burn-in on a CRT.
But hey, you need the HDTV graphics, fast processor, and expensive components for... what was that successful launch title again? Oh yeah, Geometry Wars
For what it's worth, Geometry Wars is deceptively complex. The background consists of 60,000 nodes in a weak gravitational balance, the calculations for which consume an entire core. The total number of enemies on screen can be enormous, and though they're relatively simple both in geometry and AI the sheer number of them is quite impressive. And that's not even counting all of the particles the game spawns and tracks.
You might say to yourself, "I can write that," and you probably can. But you'll quickly find out that it can take a really beefy PC to do what looks so simple on the 360. HGEWars only models some 10,000 nodes for the background grid, doesn't have all of the various enemy types, AI, and particles modelled yet (gravity wells will be a huge performance hit, given their interaction with the grid nodes), and is still very performance-intensive. Surely that's due in part to being very early in development, but then GW:RE apparently only took some 3 months to write in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The "MS* one" defined the standard. But yes, it required creating an ActiveX object rather than being a native implementation. That said, while IE7 does now have a javascript-native XMLHTTPRequest implementation, it can also still run ActiveX controls. That means sites that do stupid things like parse UA strings for browser compatibility rather than using object detection will still work fine even though they'll go through their ActiveX codepath rather than using the native object.
What this really boils down to is a fundamental issue in how you write javascript across multiple browsers. You should never parse UA strings, because they can change (across releases, or just because the user says so like with Opera or Firefox). Sites that use UA detection are broken, even if they do work on some subset of browsers. The correct way to do cross-browser support is to use object detection. For example, look at the following code (I hope this formats correctly):
This is an event handler, where a browser like Firefox will pass in the event object but IE expects you to use the window.event global. So, you check for that. Once you have the event, different browsers use different fields to hold the key code (which will be the same across browsers), so you check for that as well. Nowhere did I check if this was running on Firefox, IE, or Opera. I just checked for what I needed, found it where I could, and bailed out otherwise. The above code will work on IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera, and should work in Konqueror, Safari, etc (I just don't have those available for testing).Just to reiterate to make it clear, if you're using UA detection, or you're using a library that uses UA detection, your code is broken. Fix it!
The word "crucification" is not used in the article at all, either, so they can't even blame it on that.
I can only answer for myself, but you've pretty much answered it. Yes, phones with those features are generally more expensive (or require a 2-year contract to be affordable). They also tend to have worse battery life, and are often prone to locking up. I'm sorry, but if my phone crashes on me then I'm not going to use it.
For my part, I don't mind service contracts too much, except that I'm currently month-to-month on a plan that no longer exists, and to upgrade my phone (for "free") would require re-signing a contract. Re-signing a contract would mean that I would lose my current plan, and I just can't see paying the same amount of money or more to get less. I'm currently on an "unlimited nights and weekends" plan, where "unlimited" actually means "unlimited" and not "5000 minutes." That plan no longer exists, and the current plan at an equivalent price gives me 1000 night and weekend minutes. I don't use 1000 minutes of phone time per month, but I just can't justify paying the same amount of money for less service. As it stands, I could use more than 1000 minutes if I wanted/needed to.
I don't buy into the "ignore it" argument. If I don't want the crap on my phone, I don't want that phone. I don't want to ignore it, or pretend it isn't there. I want it not to be there at all. I don't want a color screen. I don't want mp3 ringtones, games, or a camera. I don't want a phone that can lock-up or crash on me. What do I want? A phone that can send/receive phone calls (and maybe text messages, but that's not even truly necessary) and can store a contact list on a SIM chip. Anything more than that is unnecessary, and I don't want to pay for it (directly or indirectly), and I don't want it complicating my phone unnecessarily.
It may be simpler than that. If his router is relatively new (say, purchased in the last ~3 years), it may just be a matter of configuring the UPnP support that's already available. Maybe a firmware upgrade would be needed, but that's it.
Besides, $80 to get your landlord a new router would be worth it for the better network experience you'll have being able to map your own ports on demand and only as long as they're needed. And as I mentioned, this is not just for pirating stuff. If anything, I'd say the ability to use a UPnP-aware torrent client is a side benefit. But then, I play games on Xbox Live, and I've suffered from not having a UPnP-aware NAT router. :)
As mentioned in the article, bare-bones phones appeal to people who don't want a contract commitment. I can understand why carriers would not want to publicize phones cheaper than the subsidy amount, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't carry them. In fact, it's money in their pockets if someone were to choose a cheaper phone, because you know they wouldn't turn around and give a break on the contract price to that person.
More often, less expensive phones get that way by offering fewer features. It just makes sense that a phone that has no camera or color screen will be cheaper than a phone that does. Sure, they may also skimp on engineering or quality components, but I just don't see how that's necessary when it's already so much cheaper to skip the camera, fast processor, and color screen.
Maybe he's already discovered that joy and decided he didn't need it. Or maybe he has no grandkids. Or maybe he'd rather actually take his grandkids to the zoo rather than just send them pictures.
And I'm a cell phone luddite, who is not only still using his 4 year old Motorola v60i flip-phone, but would require his cellular carrier to pay him to "upgrade" to something newer (but almost certainly not better, by my definition). Like the phone in the article, my v60i sends and receives phone calls and text messages, can easily store contact information on its SIM (while it has internal memory, I don't use it), and is simply functional rather than whiz-bang gadgety neat. And when my battery finally gives up the ghost (four years and still going strong, I wonder when it'll finally die?), I'll go buy another battery and keep on using my beloved v60i.
First off, while I don't condone piracy, I see nothing wrong with finding a different encoding of something you already own (or in my case, when I accidentally deleted the recent episode of 24 from my DVR, finding a copy of that online so I can keep up with the story). That said, why put it to your landlord in those terms? Suggest he use a router with a proper UPnP implementation, because you need that to be able to play on Xbox Live (see my sig). Perfectly legal, up-front reason, and once you get past the stigma GRC tried to apply to UPnP you'll find that it's a very useful piece of technology and is safe so long as you take some precautions. And then once you convince him to implement UPnP, you can use a bittorrent client like Azureus with no problems at all. As well, you'll find that properly-written games will also work better, you'll be able to do file sharing from your IM client (MSN/Windows Live Messenger uses UPnP, not sure about others like gtalk, aim, icq, trillian, etc).
No need. Somebody else already did that, though development seems to have stalled for some time now. But their source is available, and it's written in C++ rather than the C# I used (mine was a proof of concept, so I didn't care about performance or extra requirements like having the .NET framework installed). I'm not a big fan of the direction they went with Turnabout (split basic/advanced installations with no ability to change basic to advanced without reinstalling, requiring a toolbar), but that's fixable by anyone who wants to take the time. The core functionality works well enough, though it has problems with framed pages (who uses framed pages anymore, anyway?), and the source is under a BSD-ish license so you could do a closed-source binary release if you really wanted to.
I stopped using Turnabout for two reasons
If Turnabout were to ever resume development (or someone were to fork the code), and IE7 were to solve most of IE's leakiness, I'd very likely revisit using a Greasemonkey-like extension.
BS. It's not extensible through HTML/CSS/Javascript like Firefox, but it is extensible, and in many ways even moreso than Gecko-and-XUL-based browsers. You can add new functionality to IE via Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), or embed/extend the browser by referencing the browser COM object.
BHOs are actually a very powerful way of extending IE. For example, when popup blockers started showing up in other browsers way back in the day (~2001?), I wrote a BHO to add popup blocking support in IE. Toolbars provided by developers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are also BHOs, though you don't have to have a toolbar if you don't want to (BHOs require no UI interaction). At one point, I even wrote a Greasemonkey work-alike for IE, though I ended up abandoning the project due to time constraints (but the goal of building a proof of concept was successful). The MSN toolbar added tabbed browsing to IE6, and while it was a little flakey it still worked very well. So, what can't you do with BHOs?
That amount of power is also a problem, though. Like ActiveX, BHOs can be used by bad people. Also like ActiveX, IE has built incremental improvements to security to protect you from bad BHOs. It never should've been possible to have a drive-by badware-BHO installation in the first place, but Microsoft has learned the lesson. Good and bad, with great power comes great responsibility, whatever. You may not like the extensibility options in IE, but that doesn't mean that they're not there, nor that they're not as powerful, if not more powerful, as Firefox extensions.
What? There is no Xbox 360 version of Black, and according to the developers there won't be. It's up to Microsoft to make the game run in backwards compatibility on the 360, if they're going to do that at all. Most likely, the screens are high-resolution promo screens (rendered in-game, but at 4x the normal resolution), if they're not from the Xbox or PS2 version.
I'm going to go off-topic a bit here. I'm not sure I buy your reasoning behind why people will never rely solely on public transportation. It's not because we like to have our own cars, or our privacy, or our own schedule. It is, but that's not the deal-breaker. More people would use public transportation significantly more if a few key pieces are put in place:
You'll only ever see those things happen in dense metropolitan centers, at which point you do see people using only the bus or subway. How many people in downtown NYC own cars? How many people in Tokyo? There are places where such systems could be implemented and haven't (Seattle), but there are many places where it's simply not possible due to population density. Is it worth implementing full bus service for a county in middle-of-nowhere Texas with all of 20 residents? Rural and suburban areas will continue to need personal transportation for a very long time to come, and such areas make up the bulk of the US.
I assume you'd do the same thing you'd do in any other case of "tall stuff" (like a TV antenna) -- put a lightning rod on the tower that extends well above the tower's height, and run the insulated ground cable down to the ground.
That's a pretty artificial limitation you're imposing on yourself, and one that Google (and others) have already solved. I assume you want the "ctrl+enter" approach, where you type in "foo", press ctrl+enter, and end up with "www.foo.com". In that case, try "googlemaps". Similarly, you can get to "search.msn.com" by using "msnsearch", "local.live.com" (Microsoft's map url) with "virtualearth" (it'd be nice if "msnmaps" or similar worked, but "virtualearth" gets you there well enough), "search.yahoo.com" with "yahoosearch", "mail.yahoo.com" with "yahoomail", "mail.google.com" with "gmail", etc. It's all just DNS redirection, so you don't need any special browser support to use any of these.
Or better yet, just add Bookmarks/Favorites, and then you don't ever have to remember URLs.
Nice baseless attack. Would you like to qualify it with anything, like "in Japan"? And which quarter? Q2 FY06, which is Q4 calendar year 05, when the Xbox 360 was only out for the last month? Q3 FY06, which doesn't end until March, and so numbers haven't been released yet? Maybe you could provide a link with your data? Here's mine, that shows you're correct so long as you add "in Japan" and only talk about the week ending February 12, 2006. Problem is, while you might make a case for extrapolating that data from one week to an entire quarter, you can't assume it represents non-Japan sales in any way.
"Old" is relative, but keep in mind that machines that can boot from CDROM and support USB have been around for nearly 10 years now (I bought just such a machine back in January 97, 9 years ago). A decade-old machine fits my definition of "old". Certainly machines based on a 386 or 486 CPU are older, but a p200 from 96-97 is definitely "old".
One would assume the one from Microsoft, since .NET is their name (pieces of .NET, like the C# language and the Common Language Runtime, have been standardized by ECMA).
If you mean, "Will the Mono and Rotor implementations of the ECMA-standardized bits run on Vista?" I'd assume so. And if not, they're open source so go make them work (yes, even Microsoft's Rotor is open source). Now if the question is whether .NET 1.0 or 1.1 will run on Vista, I have no idea. I'd assume not, but then .NET 2.0 is backwards-compatible and does a pretty good job without requiring you to recompile 1.x assemblies for 2.0. 2.0 is not forward-compatible, meaning that you can't take 2.0 assemblies and run them on a 1.x runtime thanks to necessary changes in the IL to truly support generics (unlike Java, where generics are just syntactic sugar for object boxing), among other things.
When was the last time Microsoft litigated against someone? Yes, they have a stack of patents, but it's mostly for defensive purposes. And besides, Mono has worked pretty hard to stay clear of any patent-encumbered portions of .NET.
They certainly can do that with their implementation. I see nothing wrong with them screwing users of pirated software. But their run-time EULA for .NET doesn't apply to Mono.
What? What does patching have to do with .NET? And if Microsoft wants to force all patches through WGA, they have that right. They have no responsibility to users of pirated software. Since Microsoft's .NET implementation only runs on Windows, it doesn't apply at all to users of Mono on non-Microsoft platforms.
Not really.
Well, no. Microsoft controls their implementation of .NET, but anybody is free to implement the ECMA standards (see Mono). Microsoft does have a say in the ECMA standard as an interested party, but ultimately it's up to ECMA what goes into the standard. As for support, Microsoft has a published lifecycle model for support that is very generous -- a minimum of 10 years for Business and Developer products, which means that .NET 1.0 will be supported until 2011. .NET 1.1 will be supported even longer, and all .NET Framework versions can run side-by-side. If you haven't transitioned from 1.0 to 1.1 by 2011, it sucks to be you.
You played Freelancer with KB/M because you had to play Freelancer with KB/M. It didn't support joysticks (intentionally). I also played Freelancer, and while I did get used to the controls eventually I still yearned for it to support a Joystick. So I went back to Freespace 1/2.
Sadly, nobody's making decent space flight sims anymore. Yeah, X3 shipped recently, but it's covered in nasty copy protection I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot poll. And yes, I know about Freespace 2 SCP, but it's still just Freespace (or user-created mods and games that never get past 10% completion). I'd try EVE Online, but I really don't want to get into the MMOG grind.
Perhaps you're just using it wrong? Demos aren't supposed to live forever. You play them, get a feel for the game, and delete it after a couple days. Same thing for videos. Watch them and delete them. Arcade games are capped at 50MB (because they need to be able to fit on a memory card, which is 64MB - some overhead = ~53MB).
Most complaints about the hard drive tend to be along the lines of, "I bought a 20GB drive, but it says I only have 12GB free. I haven't even used it yet! Did I get ripped off?" What's happening is two-fold. First, remember that 20GB in HD speak is not 20GB. It's 18.5GB. Now subtract ~5GB for buffers (I believe it's been said how much space is reserved by the system, but I don't remember the actual size), and then another 1GB or so for the videos and music that ship on the drive (that you can and should immediately delete), and it makes sense that you only have 12GB free out of the box, and it makes sense that you'll never see more than 13GB or 14GB free even if you completely wipe the drive (which you shouldn't do, because then you'll lose Hexic).
While I'd love to have a larger hard drive, and it definitely makes sense to have a bigger drive given demos and trailers on Marketplace, keep in mind that the Xbox went 4+ years with only an 8-10GB drive (of which 4-5GB was still reserved by the OS for buffers and cache). Also keep in mind that because the HD is now optional with the 360, you're not going to see games with saves greater than the size of a memory card (*cough*KOTOR*cought*). The only people I've ever heard of filling up their Xbox hard drive (assuming non-modders, of course) were people who had a ton of KOTOR 1 and 2 save games that they never deleted.
Well, I pulled my prices from Amazon.co.uk, which I guess is lower than other retailers. Then again, buying from Game is like buying from EBGames or Gamestop in the US -- you're going to pay more, when you could've gone down to Fry's and got that same $60 game for $45. Maybe there aren't any stores that run sales or discounts like that in the UK.
Anyway, it doesn't change all that much. Add £55 to the £494 I already calculated (because I used 5 games at £39 each) and you end up with £549. Still expensive, but also still £150 less than the GP's £700 price point. It does surprise me that PGR3 is £44.99, when Microsoft has been good about £ conversion everywhere else (previously, they'd just say $299 == £299 and leave it at that. Now they're saying $299 == £209). Anyway, the moral here is to shop around rather than just buying from Game.
I don't think your numbers are quite right, though I'm not in the UK so I'm not completely sure about how prices stack up. Anyway, let's take an example. Assuming you can find an Xbox 360, that should cost you between £209 and £299 (Amazon.co.uk lists the Core for £209, but doesn't have a non-auction price for the Premium). Add a couple games at £39 each and you come to a total of £494 (assuming £299 Premium console and five £39 games, and not factoring in any extra taxes or shipping costs). That's a fair amount less than £700. While you could certainly spend £700 or more on a modern PC and games, keep in mind that you'll end up with a modern PC that can do a lot more than your current 1GHz or less PCs can handle (or at least can do the same tasks more quickly, anyway). Whether that's worth the price is up to you, but I doubt you'd upgrade a PC and then only use it for gaming.
Anyway, you completely missed a perfectly valid and affordable option: Get into the "current-gen" (some may say "previous-gen") consoles like PS2, Gamecube, or Xbox. From new, possibly including bundles, you will spend £115, £80, or £90 for each respective console (prices from Amazon.co.uk include a bundle for PS2 and Gamecube, but not for Xbox, and only consider listings with an "Our Price" value, as opposed to "Used & New" price listings that indicate auctions). New games for these consoles (and there are still new games being made, even for the Xbox that now has a successor console) run £29.99 or less (much less if you buy used), and there are a ton of Greatest Hits/Player's Choice/Platinum/Classic games you can choose from that cost between £10 and £20. Thus, you could pick up a PS2 and 5 greatest hits games for a total of £215, and possibly less. They may not be the latest and greatest, but since you don't have anything newer than a PSOne they'd all be new to you. There's five years (four years for GC and Xbox) of gaming that you can go through before even considering a next-gen system like Xbox 360 or PS3. And by the time you're ready for those, they'll be the bargain "current-gen" systems.
That warning is not there to prevent cases of deceptive advertising. It's a CYA move by the ESRB that lets you know while a game may be rated as T, there's no way the developer can stop people online from yelling the N-word or dropping F-bombs, tea-bagging your corpse or bragging about sleeping with your mother. That's also why any good parental control system (see the Xbox 360, for example) will have separate settings for online access.
If you want to blame anybody for that little bit of text, blame self-righteous idiots like Tipper Gore, Jack Thompson, and parents that would rather not have to think about how to raise their children properly. The ESRB requires that text to keep from being sued when little Johnny gets called a faggot while playing his E-rated game online. "We told you the game experience may change, and our rating may no longer be appropriate. Did you listen? No. And now you're going to sue us. Well, nya-nya, we're covered!"
At least Microsoft listened.
Nope. PC games need so much RAM because they aren't the only thing running on a system and they can't make assumptions about the environment where they'll run (is the hard drive or optical drive fast enough to stream textures in a Just In Time manner?). Conversely, consoles are a solid target. You can make assumptions about the hardware, and you can write your code in such a way that RAM is nothing more than a temporary buffer as you pull stuff off of the hard drive or optical disk. That's how the Xbox got by with only 64MB of unified memory in 2001 (and the PS2 has only 4MB of video buffer!), and that's why the 360 could've done just fine with 256MB of RAM and is a console developer's wet dream at 512MB.
I haven't seen much about Black on the PS2, but you conveniently forgot to mention that it'll also be out on Xbox. Having played the demo, I didn't find it to be all that special, and I probably won't pick it up until I can get it used (to avoid lining EA's pockets). As for Killzone, I'm surprised you can mention that game with a straight face. It was supposed to be a Halo killer (keep in mind, Killzone shipped in 2004 while Halo shipped in 2001), and ended up with boring gameplay and a host of graphical and audio issues. While Halo has an average review rating of 96% and Halo 2 averages at 95%, Killzone has an average rating of only 73%. It's a little better if you look at user ratings rather than "official" reviews: H1/H2 average 8.8 and 8.3, while Killzone averages 7.7. Since those numbers are from users, they're obviously full of fanboys for and against both games, giving H2 a 1/10 because it's not Half-Life 2, or giving it a 10/10 because they're blind with fanboyism.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah -- 512MB of RAM vs. 256MB is nice, but certainly wasn't absolutely necessary. However, it's interesting to note that given the choice between having a hard drive as standard equipment (ie, no Core 360) or 512MB of RAM, almost every developer chose to have 512MB of RAM.
Microsoft doesn't really have much control over other platforms, you know. Aside from purchasing development houses (which they've done twice in the past five years. How many developers have EA, Take Two, or Ubi purchased since then?), they have no way to stop developers from making innovative games on other platforms. All they can do is try to get developers to make innovative games on their platform, and they have a perfect opportunity to pull in the indy folks via XBLA. That's already happening with games like Mutant Storm, Outpost Kaloki, Wik, and Ultra Marble Blast (some of which have appeared on the PC or original Xbox, but all of which are from small-time developers -- I left out Geometry Wars because it's from BC, and I left out arcade ports because they're arcade ports). Maybe getting these developers to innovate on the XBLA platform is a way of locking them into the 360, but I don't think it'd be difficult for those developers to publish their games online for the PC as well (as I already mentioned, many do that now).
What? I mean, really, what do you mean by this? Are you saying that they'll using licensing to prevent developers from making their games interoperate with other platforms (false -- Final Fantasy XI does just that)? I just don't see what licensing has to do with this at all. And besides, what do you think Sony's going to do with their Xbox Live clone, the HUB?
Cut into those profits from where? DVD players? What profit can there be in a market where you can buy a $30 progressive scan DVD player that's perfectly adequate? If anything, the 360 will be a compliment to a home theater, because it works as a Media Center extender right out of the box. Since Vista will include media center functionality in every version, you won't be able to not buy a media center PC in a year if you want Windows (and if you don't, this doesn't apply to you anyway). The 360's media center integration has been called one of its greater strengths by most reviews, along with XBLA. The way I see it, MCE integration and Arcade are the 360's "backwards compatibility", where "backwards compatibility" is defined by it's functional purpose -- "A way to get some valuable usage out of a system during that first 9-12 months of its life when the number of good games just aren't there." Sony did this with PS1 games on the PS2 (which had an even worse launch line-up than the 360). The 360 does this by providing fun arcade games and media center integration.
And I predict that there will be a mix of "old faithful" games (Halo 3, EA's sports regurgitation year after year, another Splinter Cell, another Ghost Recon, etc) and innovative games (whether full titles or on XBLA), Xbox Live will continue to be a great service even when the 12 year olds continuously drop the N-bomb and question your sexual orientation, and the home theater market will only care about the 360 as a game machine or media center extender (because it's not meant to be a top of the line DVD player, and even if it was the home theater market segment will always prefer stand-alone units).
Are you sure you're watching HBO's HD channel? I've noticed this if I switch over to one of the non-HD HBO channels, but the HD channel generally does the right thing with 16:9 images. Then again, I've never bothered watching Extras, but original shows like Sopranos or Deadwood show up fine as 16:9, as do most movies (some are broadcast as 4:3, so I get sidebars). I've definitely noticed this on non-HD movie channels like Sundance or IFC, where the material is letterboxed but the channel is 4:3 SD.
You'll still risk burning in the edges of the bars (because the interior 4:3 portion won't age as "averagely" as the gray bars, unless all you ever watch is a gray screen). Take it one step further and periodically move the position of the 4:3 window. My old Mitsubishi CRT RPTV did this with its gray bars, and I hear modern plasma screens do something similar. The nice thing about shifting the screen is that it prevents burn-in from static images as well, like game HUDs or network bugs (most of which are transparent-ish now, but are still nasty enough).
Or, you could just get a professional calibration and not worry about it so much. Get your contrast out of torchmode and you'd have to really work to bet burn-in on a CRT.
For what it's worth, Geometry Wars is deceptively complex. The background consists of 60,000 nodes in a weak gravitational balance, the calculations for which consume an entire core. The total number of enemies on screen can be enormous, and though they're relatively simple both in geometry and AI the sheer number of them is quite impressive. And that's not even counting all of the particles the game spawns and tracks.
You might say to yourself, "I can write that," and you probably can. But you'll quickly find out that it can take a really beefy PC to do what looks so simple on the 360. HGEWars only models some 10,000 nodes for the background grid, doesn't have all of the various enemy types, AI, and particles modelled yet (gravity wells will be a huge performance hit, given their interaction with the grid nodes), and is still very performance-intensive. Surely that's due in part to being very early in development, but then GW:RE apparently only took some 3 months to write in the first place.