We call other bodies that orbit planets "moons" because ours is named moon. It would only be like calling your dog "Dog", if the species of dog were named after it.
This is a lot different. I bet you could pick a couple city blocks in the US with more cell towers than the whole island of Jamaica.
The government telling people to exercise common sense would sound something more like: "Stop expecting the government and corporations to save you from every little thing. If you don't have phone service for a while, suck it up. You should have been better prepared yourself."
What people REALLY want is something e-paper about 13x19 tabloid size at 300dpi & reflective that can roll up.
I don't know anybody who wants a "book" they can roll up. Roll-up media went obsolete over 1000 years ago, and it did so for a reason. They don't lay flat, they're full of empty space when they're not in use. They don't fit well in any modern, common storage device (file cabinet, bookshelf, backpack)... The only people who think it's a good idea are the people who understand that current e-paper products break when you fold them.
The ideal form-factor is clearly "book", or "folded newspaper" size. And if you pick the latter, it better still work when you fold it in half and stick it under your arm, 'cause only the paper-boy rolls a newspaper.
Truly ideal would be something trade-paperback style, with 800-900 pages of ePaper, so you literally *could* stick a bunch of book marks in there.
Why should they release the demo before the game is out?
This is exactly the same kind of crap that all the programmers, software engineers, and IT guys I know bitch about all the time. Their bosses want something sooner than it was promised, so they use weasel-like techniques to get a promise of the end result that much sooner. "Ok, you can't finish until February. Can I have a functional prototype in late December?"... Well.. NO! They're just going to take the "prototype" and sell it like the actual release, and everybody knows it.
Same deal with a demo. The review sites are going to review it like it's the final product even though it's not done. A demo before christmas for a game that doesn't come out until next year isn't going to increase holiday sales. What's the point of the demo other than to distract the developers from producing the actual final product for a while?
Honestly I don't blame these guys for not releasing a demo of an incomplete product. I wouldn't either.
The point is that since Global Warming is the #1 man-made disaster of 2007, we won't have to worry about it for much longer. After all, it'll be 2008 in a few short weeks.
I would think the people would change the content on a reader a lot *more* frequently.
People typically don't add new music to their usual playlists very often (weekly if you're young, hardly ever if you're old?), but many people read daily periodicals. More and more people are starting to read things like blogs, which update several times daily... (And I'm not talking abour web surfing here.. Just reading static content on one site.)
Re:Will they ever listen?
on
The Cult of Kindle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly, I don't buy that.
Many people I know (including myself) who love books and want to love an ebook reader. Some day an ebook reader will succeed. We just haven't had one with all of the right features yet.
I don't think $400 is too outrageous, but $200 would be better. The wireless features are a huge step in the right direction... But they still need to work on contrast, page turning speed, size, style, battery life (for an ebook reader this better be measured in "years". As an integer >= 1), capacity, durability... Also, they need to fix the DRM thing. Take the price of a book, subtract the printing costs, the distribution costs, the retail markup, any promotional fees that they would have paid to bookstores, and sell the ebooks for *that* price. $3-5 for older books, $7-8 for new releases. Watermark them, and put them out in an unencrypted open format. For a bonus, you could make it color and have magazine subscriptions delivered to the device too, but that would be completely optional.
If they accomplished those things, they'd sell tens of millions of them. With the pace at which the market is improving, I'm optimistic that this will happen within 10 years.
There will always be people who want the real thing, but that doesn't mean ebooks can't be successful.
How about this, I'll make a list of games I consider "casual games" and I'll stop when they outnumber all available games for the PSN. Will that be good enough?*
Congratulations on padding out your list by including "classics" and games from inside a series (though you apparently didn't do the same when you were counting PS3 games). I especially like that you picked some classics that are available as download on the PS3 as well. Lastly, if I were you, I'd go back to the PS3 wikipedia list that you linked to, after you've learned to count.
I count 21 games in your list that I would consider "casual". I had already conceded the point that the number was higher than the 360, and was merely questioning your claim of degree. What more do you want.
In other words, I read your argument, and I still think you're wrong.
When people say "RTFA", it's generally implied that the reader actually comprehend what is written.
"Preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand" does not imply "maintaining competition" in the sense you describe, because this is not competition between equivalent products. When you pay a studio to make their movie a platform exclusive, you eliminate competition by making the devices un-equal. Suddenly if you want to watch movie x, you can only purchase format y, instead of having the choice between competing formats y & z. Make sense now?
What $17 PSN games are based around Motion control?
None. They're $9.99.
The 360's selection of causal games is only slightly larger than what the PS3 has, and that's with a 1-year head start. I don't see how you can say it "blows it out of the water".
But clearly you've never browsed the PSN catalog for PS3.
You can't file a patent for an arbitrary idea. At least not unless you do what this guy did, and write up your idea using sufficiently complicated legalese.
Let's "invent" something:
How about a book that remembers what page you were on automatically. When you close the book, it keeps track of what page you were on, so when you open the book the next time it opens to exactly the same page.
Neat, huh? If I filed a patent for that using simple terms, it would be denied. However if I drew up several claims, describing an ordinary book, and ordinary page turning, then simply added "means for remembering what page you are on" and "means for causing the book to open to the correct page" and other sufficient padding, I would probably get the patent. That is *exactly* what this guy did.
The problem with that is the actual invention is the means to do those things, and not the idea to invent those means. But nowhere in my mythical invention, nor in this guys patent does he describe what the means are. He left the novel part out of the patent. So now, when the technology exists to actually solve this problem, and when somebody other than him actually invested the capital to invent the device, he's coming along and saying that he deserves the profit.
What's worse about this particular patent is that it was filed right around the time where selecting arbitrary audio recordings from a list and playing them off random access media was becoming *very* common. Not only did he not specify an actual solution to a problem nor describe an actual device, but he was also filing a "something like that, but with a telephone" patent; so there is no reason why he couldn't have gotten technical.
Just because something like this didn't exist back then doesn't mean the idea isn't obvious.
In fact, the patent doesn't actually list any claims regarding how do what the other claims describe. So essentially he patented only the obvious parts of visual voicemail.
We really need to return to the days where a working prototype was required to receive a patent.
GripShift, Go! Sports Ski, Locoroco, Blast Factor, Super Rub-a-Dub, and fl0w (which unlike the web version, actually *is* a game. There's also a new expansion pack out for it).
Those are just the downloadables, and I didn't include games that use shaking... Note that every single one of those uses the tilt as a different game mechanic. It's also only about 1/3rd of the PS3 specific game content that is available for download...
In 12 months, the Wii will be 'living proof' that the Wii isn't a viable platform without mass storage. We may not need to wait 12 months. 8 weeks may be enough.
Nintendo got a lot of things right, but shipping a console without multiple gigabytes of storage in the post-Original XBox world is just plain inexcusable. You're going to see one of two things: Nintendo will allow downloaded content to be played off peripheral storage, or the Wii wii turn out to be a fad that passes as quickly as it arrived. The system (yes, I have one from release day) is already suffering in the downloadable content department since the low-hanging fruit in the virtual console space has been harvested. They could get back on track with downloadable Wii games, but the storage capacity just isn't there. The fact of the matter is that if it weren't for the price difference, the PS3 would be the superior casual-games machine at this point just because of the PSN content. The downloadable PS3 games (with motion control) are selling for 1/3rd what disc based Wii games are selling for, and quite frankly are more innovative than the series of Wii-hashes that Nintendo has been pumping out.
(Incidentally, I am seriously *not* trying to be a troll with this comment, though I'm fairly sure that's how it will be taken. Feel free to accuse me of being a Nintendo "hater". I'm used to it from all the times I'm a "Sony hater" when I say bad things about the PSP or PS3, or a "M$ hater" when I say bad stuff about the 360. It may be your handle, but at the moment I am "that one guy" who doesn't think the Wii is the second coming... Just like I was "that one guy" who was saying the lack of HD wasn't a big deal for the Wii and that it was going to sell like crazy back before it came out...)
A number of analysts agreed that Microsoft was losing about $50 each on the units at launch. Microsoft themselves hinted that it was a loss-leader product, and they expected to take two to five years to start making a profit on the device. Of course, since the losses from such a low-volume product are reported in the same bottom line as the black hole of cash that is the Xbox 360, it's hard to tell exactly how much they're losing...
You seem to want to make an analogy between writers seeking to be fairly compensated for the economic exploitation of their scripts ($0.08 a DVD isn't all that much to ask, IMO), and the record companies wanting to handsomely profit off of distributing someone else's music. Now that's a shitty analogy.
I don't want to make an analogy. I want to point out that you can be guilty by association.
You want me to be sympathetic to a group of people who see their bosses doing something bad, and instead of saying "let's do this the right way", they say "I want me a cut of that action!"? Since when do two wrongs make a right? Not only is that what they're doing, but they're doing it in such a way as to cause the problem to be further entrenched. If the writers get download royalties, you can bet your ass that when some bill comes up in congress to fix copyright, the television and movie studio lobbiests will be saying "you can't take that away from us, because we won't be able to cover our residuals".
Why? Simple. It's because the writers could be asking for a fair wage up-front. It seems like the logical way to go, since that means the corporation is taking the risk, rather than the individual writers, that a show will be successful.
But they're not asking for that. They're asking for residuals until the end of time (or until copyright expires, but we all know which will come first).
Nowadays, it's lost so much relevence that the "feature" is almost non-existent on the PS3
How is this "insightful"?
If by "almost non-existent" you mean: "supports a much larger percentage of the previous generation's library than the 360, had a larger library to support in the first place, and goes back two generations", then yeah. That's almost non-existent. Oh, unless you buy the one model that doesn't support backwards compatibility in order to be sold at a discount... But even that model supports backwards compatibility to an extent, because you can play downloaded PS1 games.
I don't know where you get the idea that it "[isn't] available to late adopters of the PS3". It just costs more money...
So because they sold their stake a few months ago, suddenly they never owned it?
Go back and read my comment again, and you will see that it's 100% true. Also, point out where I called them a "second Sony" for me, because I don't see that in there; I merely pointed out some questionable ethical practices, since the parent seemed concerned about such things.
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He was writing in English, not Latin.
We call other bodies that orbit planets "moons" because ours is named moon. It would only be like calling your dog "Dog", if the species of dog were named after it.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the name of earth's moon is "Moon", not "Luna". Luna is merely latin for "moon".
This is a lot different. I bet you could pick a couple city blocks in the US with more cell towers than the whole island of Jamaica.
The government telling people to exercise common sense would sound something more like: "Stop expecting the government and corporations to save you from every little thing. If you don't have phone service for a while, suck it up. You should have been better prepared yourself."
I don't know anybody who wants a "book" they can roll up. Roll-up media went obsolete over 1000 years ago, and it did so for a reason. They don't lay flat, they're full of empty space when they're not in use. They don't fit well in any modern, common storage device (file cabinet, bookshelf, backpack)... The only people who think it's a good idea are the people who understand that current e-paper products break when you fold them.
The ideal form-factor is clearly "book", or "folded newspaper" size. And if you pick the latter, it better still work when you fold it in half and stick it under your arm, 'cause only the paper-boy rolls a newspaper.
Truly ideal would be something trade-paperback style, with 800-900 pages of ePaper, so you literally *could* stick a bunch of book marks in there.
Why should they release the demo before the game is out?
This is exactly the same kind of crap that all the programmers, software engineers, and IT guys I know bitch about all the time. Their bosses want something sooner than it was promised, so they use weasel-like techniques to get a promise of the end result that much sooner. "Ok, you can't finish until February. Can I have a functional prototype in late December?"... Well.. NO! They're just going to take the "prototype" and sell it like the actual release, and everybody knows it.
Same deal with a demo. The review sites are going to review it like it's the final product even though it's not done. A demo before christmas for a game that doesn't come out until next year isn't going to increase holiday sales. What's the point of the demo other than to distract the developers from producing the actual final product for a while?
Honestly I don't blame these guys for not releasing a demo of an incomplete product. I wouldn't either.
I would never have known they even happened. Somehow I think I would have been better off.
If nobody watches the Spike Video Game Awards, did they even happen?
The point is that since Global Warming is the #1 man-made disaster of 2007, we won't have to worry about it for much longer. After all, it'll be 2008 in a few short weeks.
Yet transfer rates have only increased by 5 orders of magnitude... (The 550 could transfer data at about 8kB/sec)
I would think the people would change the content on a reader a lot *more* frequently.
People typically don't add new music to their usual playlists very often (weekly if you're young, hardly ever if you're old?), but many people read daily periodicals. More and more people are starting to read things like blogs, which update several times daily... (And I'm not talking abour web surfing here.. Just reading static content on one site.)
Honestly, I don't buy that.
Many people I know (including myself) who love books and want to love an ebook reader. Some day an ebook reader will succeed. We just haven't had one with all of the right features yet.
I don't think $400 is too outrageous, but $200 would be better. The wireless features are a huge step in the right direction... But they still need to work on contrast, page turning speed, size, style, battery life (for an ebook reader this better be measured in "years". As an integer >= 1), capacity, durability... Also, they need to fix the DRM thing. Take the price of a book, subtract the printing costs, the distribution costs, the retail markup, any promotional fees that they would have paid to bookstores, and sell the ebooks for *that* price. $3-5 for older books, $7-8 for new releases. Watermark them, and put them out in an unencrypted open format. For a bonus, you could make it color and have magazine subscriptions delivered to the device too, but that would be completely optional.
If they accomplished those things, they'd sell tens of millions of them. With the pace at which the market is improving, I'm optimistic that this will happen within 10 years.
There will always be people who want the real thing, but that doesn't mean ebooks can't be successful.
Congratulations on padding out your list by including "classics" and games from inside a series (though you apparently didn't do the same when you were counting PS3 games). I especially like that you picked some classics that are available as download on the PS3 as well. Lastly, if I were you, I'd go back to the PS3 wikipedia list that you linked to, after you've learned to count.
I count 21 games in your list that I would consider "casual". I had already conceded the point that the number was higher than the 360, and was merely questioning your claim of degree. What more do you want.
In other words, I read your argument, and I still think you're wrong.
When people say "RTFA", it's generally implied that the reader actually comprehend what is written.
"Preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand" does not imply "maintaining competition" in the sense you describe, because this is not competition between equivalent products. When you pay a studio to make their movie a platform exclusive, you eliminate competition by making the devices un-equal. Suddenly if you want to watch movie x, you can only purchase format y, instead of having the choice between competing formats y & z. Make sense now?
None. They're $9.99.
The 360's selection of causal games is only slightly larger than what the PS3 has, and that's with a 1-year head start. I don't see how you can say it "blows it out of the water".
But clearly you've never browsed the PSN catalog for PS3.
It's not that simple.
You can't file a patent for an arbitrary idea. At least not unless you do what this guy did, and write up your idea using sufficiently complicated legalese.
Let's "invent" something:
How about a book that remembers what page you were on automatically. When you close the book, it keeps track of what page you were on, so when you open the book the next time it opens to exactly the same page.
Neat, huh? If I filed a patent for that using simple terms, it would be denied. However if I drew up several claims, describing an ordinary book, and ordinary page turning, then simply added "means for remembering what page you are on" and "means for causing the book to open to the correct page" and other sufficient padding, I would probably get the patent. That is *exactly* what this guy did.
The problem with that is the actual invention is the means to do those things, and not the idea to invent those means. But nowhere in my mythical invention, nor in this guys patent does he describe what the means are. He left the novel part out of the patent. So now, when the technology exists to actually solve this problem, and when somebody other than him actually invested the capital to invent the device, he's coming along and saying that he deserves the profit.
What's worse about this particular patent is that it was filed right around the time where selecting arbitrary audio recordings from a list and playing them off random access media was becoming *very* common. Not only did he not specify an actual solution to a problem nor describe an actual device, but he was also filing a "something like that, but with a telephone" patent; so there is no reason why he couldn't have gotten technical.
Just because something like this didn't exist back then doesn't mean the idea isn't obvious.
In fact, the patent doesn't actually list any claims regarding how do what the other claims describe. So essentially he patented only the obvious parts of visual voicemail.
We really need to return to the days where a working prototype was required to receive a patent.
GripShift, Go! Sports Ski, Locoroco, Blast Factor, Super Rub-a-Dub, and fl0w (which unlike the web version, actually *is* a game. There's also a new expansion pack out for it).
Those are just the downloadables, and I didn't include games that use shaking... Note that every single one of those uses the tilt as a different game mechanic. It's also only about 1/3rd of the PS3 specific game content that is available for download...
You think Super Rub-a-Dub is the only game in the playstation store with tilt control?
No, but she'd rather play Piyotama, Super-Rub-a-Dub, or Aquatica than Wii sports. Seriously.
Also, tilt control works just fine *without* a PSEye.
In 12 months, the Wii will be 'living proof' that the Wii isn't a viable platform without mass storage. We may not need to wait 12 months. 8 weeks may be enough.
Nintendo got a lot of things right, but shipping a console without multiple gigabytes of storage in the post-Original XBox world is just plain inexcusable. You're going to see one of two things: Nintendo will allow downloaded content to be played off peripheral storage, or the Wii wii turn out to be a fad that passes as quickly as it arrived. The system (yes, I have one from release day) is already suffering in the downloadable content department since the low-hanging fruit in the virtual console space has been harvested. They could get back on track with downloadable Wii games, but the storage capacity just isn't there. The fact of the matter is that if it weren't for the price difference, the PS3 would be the superior casual-games machine at this point just because of the PSN content. The downloadable PS3 games (with motion control) are selling for 1/3rd what disc based Wii games are selling for, and quite frankly are more innovative than the series of Wii-hashes that Nintendo has been pumping out.
(Incidentally, I am seriously *not* trying to be a troll with this comment, though I'm fairly sure that's how it will be taken. Feel free to accuse me of being a Nintendo "hater". I'm used to it from all the times I'm a "Sony hater" when I say bad things about the PSP or PS3, or a "M$ hater" when I say bad stuff about the 360. It may be your handle, but at the moment I am "that one guy" who doesn't think the Wii is the second coming... Just like I was "that one guy" who was saying the lack of HD wasn't a big deal for the Wii and that it was going to sell like crazy back before it came out...)
A number of analysts agreed that Microsoft was losing about $50 each on the units at launch. Microsoft themselves hinted that it was a loss-leader product, and they expected to take two to five years to start making a profit on the device. Of course, since the losses from such a low-volume product are reported in the same bottom line as the black hole of cash that is the Xbox 360, it's hard to tell exactly how much they're losing...
I don't want to make an analogy. I want to point out that you can be guilty by association.
You want me to be sympathetic to a group of people who see their bosses doing something bad, and instead of saying "let's do this the right way", they say "I want me a cut of that action!"? Since when do two wrongs make a right? Not only is that what they're doing, but they're doing it in such a way as to cause the problem to be further entrenched. If the writers get download royalties, you can bet your ass that when some bill comes up in congress to fix copyright, the television and movie studio lobbiests will be saying "you can't take that away from us, because we won't be able to cover our residuals".
Your "better" analogy is shit.
Why? Simple. It's because the writers could be asking for a fair wage up-front. It seems like the logical way to go, since that means the corporation is taking the risk, rather than the individual writers, that a show will be successful.
But they're not asking for that. They're asking for residuals until the end of time (or until copyright expires, but we all know which will come first).
Microsoft was always selling them at a loss to retailers. Now they're selling them at a huge loss to make way for the new versions.
Woot had them for $79 the other day...
Oh, and I assure you that the retailers are making money off it... Or the Zune wouldn't even be on the shelf.
How is this "insightful"?
If by "almost non-existent" you mean: "supports a much larger percentage of the previous generation's library than the 360, had a larger library to support in the first place, and goes back two generations", then yeah. That's almost non-existent. Oh, unless you buy the one model that doesn't support backwards compatibility in order to be sold at a discount... But even that model supports backwards compatibility to an extent, because you can play downloaded PS1 games.
I don't know where you get the idea that it "[isn't] available to late adopters of the PS3". It just costs more money...
So because they sold their stake a few months ago, suddenly they never owned it?
Go back and read my comment again, and you will see that it's 100% true. Also, point out where I called them a "second Sony" for me, because I don't see that in there; I merely pointed out some questionable ethical practices, since the parent seemed concerned about such things.
Oh, and work on those English reading skills....