It seems like people are going to great lengths to explain his clearly arbitrary price discrepancy. The cable? Give me a break. The PS3 is the only console I can think of since the 8-bit days that actually takes a standard video cable. You don't need any special Sony cable. Just a $4 HDMI cable does the trick.
Disclaimer: I own both a Wii and a PS3, and I have $0 of buyers remorse. Though given the fact that I've been playing mostly PS2 games lately due to the lack of quality new releases for both systems, perhaps if I had less disposable income I'd have $750 in remorse. I certainly couldn't tell you that I like one of them better than the other though. They both have their strengths. If you don't have an HDTV, the Wii is the clear winner, but otherwise the PS3 definitely holds its own.
If each of the games in Wii Sports counts as a game, then there are plenty of demos on the Playstation network for free download that would count equally. Either way, if assigning the value "$100" to Wii Sports isn't arbitrary I don't know what is.
Want people to take your post seriously instead of assuming you're a fanboy? Well then don't arbitrarily add $100 to the price of the thing you're biased against.
Perhaps close friends are more important to him than random encounters. You can have people over to your house, you know? It's not like bars/clubs are the only places you can go with people.
Of course, the moderating in this thread is almost certainly being done by people who wish they did either of those things but instead spend their non-working hours playing World of Warcraft...
No, "most people" is "most people". Perhaps it's you and your friends that are skewing your view of the matter. Let me help you out.
You can't go to most clubs, and all bars until you're 21 (In the US anyway). Most people stop going to clubs when they meet somebody and settle down... On average around age 25, but there are the people who can't seem to manage to grow up who keep at it for a while... So you have maybe half of the people from 21 to 25 years of age, a significantly smaller subset from 25 to the mid 30's, and almost nobody older than that. Leaving the vast majority of the population not going clubbing with any frequency.
The reason clubs and bars make so much money is that the people who do go there are either stupid enough, or desperate enough to pay their insanely high prices for libations.
Could Bioware make a battle system that mixes both RPG elements and the speed people want from Sonic games?
Bioware, you say? Well sure they can. You can be rolling through the scene at 100 [pause] mph [pause] while still [pause] having plenty of [pause] options in controlling your character's [pause] actions [pause].
Alternatively, you could let it play through at full speed, while you sit there saying "WTF! Why the hell did you do that."
I added SPF records for my domains in the hopes that I could get maybe a 20% reduction in bounces, and I got a 100% reduction. I know that 100% of ISPs aren't checking SPF records, so I can only assume that spammers have made a point to check for SPF and not use my domains in their headers.
Digital on demand over IP is dead on arrival. It's too DRM encumbered, too expensive, and pay-per-use in most cases. It will be generations before a sizeable number of people are willing to spend their entertainment dollars on content with no tangible media attached. (yeah, yeah. iTunes, etc. Call me when there's an online video service with a "Burn to DVD" button.)
Unless you mean pirated video on demand. That's another story entirely.
I have worked with HP laserjets that told me I had 200 pages left that I could print. After printing 192 pages it told me I could still print 320 pages. All said and done that day, I had printed some 500 pages and its final number was that I could still print another 250ish pages.
With laser printers, what you're describing isn't all that uncommon, because the toner hopper is the width of the drum, but the sensor on most printers is at one end. If the printer isn't level, all the toner ends up at one end of the cartridge, and you get false readings. Even after the printer says you're out of toner, you can usually remove the cartridge and lightly pivot it a few times to redistribute the toner and get a few dozen/hundred more pages. That doesn't apply to printers with an independent toner hopper, but those are practically non existent in the non-pro class these days.
This isn't the same at all as what inkjets do, which is refuse to print even when the cartridge is clearly still half full, waste most of the ink cleaning the cartridge, etc...
Or it could be that they're going to combine this with element randomization to make screen scraping their main site unreliable, or infeasible. That would be misguided, but companies make dumb decisions all the time.
Whichever company sends them their bandwidth bill I'd guess...
Some smart financial type there probably realized they were paying for it, but it wasn't generating any revenue. Goodwill of the OSS community is nice and all, but you can't spend it, or pay your bills with it.
Cue the people calling them "haters" any minute now though.
The difference between M and AO is one year. 17 for M and 18 for AO. They should just get rid of AO, and make 'M' 18+. Or reserve AO for porn games, or something. Saying a title should be 'M' instead of 'AO' is *not* saying that kids should be allowed to buy it. It's just politics.
Let me be more specific that that. If you can lead a group and fight in the group at the same time, and that's the game's idea of "complex strategy", then the strategy isn't very complex at all. You shouldn't be able to be in the trenches and still run the battle. If you can, it's a small battle, you're fooling yourself into thinking you're being effective, or you're merely providing moral support. (Replace the metaphor with your favorite in the case of naval and air combat games.... Unless you only play the cartoony fantasy type.)
If the game considers you "short one player" because you have a dedicated leader, I'd say the game is flawed. Yes ever if a hojillion people are addicted to it.
The reason that people use voice chat software is because text chat doesn't work for those groups. You have to take your hands off the movement/action keys to talk, so you can't talk at the same time that you're taking actions. Voice chat obviates that problem.
The reason that people use voice chat software is that:
They don't teach people to type correctly in school anymore. People are lazy.
So it has become the "standard" (At least in some games, not any that I play).
Any reasonable typist should be able to convey information as fast on average as if they were typing, because you can almost type that fast, and you can be typing while somebody else is typing... While many other people are typing in fact. Unlike many of the times when I've used voice chat and 3 people are constantly trying to talk at once so you can't tell what is going on.
You can have a commander that is precisely that. A commander. Relaying complex strategy, even if via text. It works. It works better than voice chat because the commander can easily be relaying orders to multiple groups. Voice is only better if you can't type fast.
Additionally, there's no scrollback for voice chat. With text chat you can maintain and follow several lines of conversation at a single time. Voice chat makes that impossible.
Difficulty of roleplaying: Strike 1 Squeeky immature jerks (sometimes): Strike 2 Loss of multi-chatting functionality and scrollback: Strike 3... I'll stick with text.
Does it occur to you that there may have simply been bad manufacturing runs?
My bet would be that they did the design to be RoHS compliant, and then they used leaded solder paste in the US models because they had lots left over and it's not illegal here yet.
Whatever happened, though, they should own up to the problem instead of lying their asses off. Until they do, and say *how* they fixed the problem (even in very general terms), I won't be buying their product. I don't want mine to break, and if they don't say there was a problem and that they fixed it, I just have to assume it will break.
In fact - traditional web pages can be more intuitive on slow connections because you don't have to guess if the page is updating part of it or not.
Only if the site designer is too stupid to include visual indications that a portion of the page is loading. Although there are a lot of crappy web app/page designers out there as a percentage of the industry.
Funny I know lots pf people (myself included) with 360s. Of the 15 or so one is on their 2nd console that cost them nothing under the warranty. It's hardware some will have issues. You act like every 360 owner is having issues.
Yay anecdotal evidence!
I know 8 people with 360s, and all of them have had theirs replaced at least once. Oddly, the majority of them still love the thing, and a few rewarded Microsoft through the purchase of an Elite to replace their out-of-warranty box when it broke.
And check on those financials. The defects have had a huge impact of the division's bottom line. The 360 would be a profit center for Microsoft right now without all the replacements. You just don't hear about it in the national news precicely because they *are* really good at covering it up, just like they're really good getting the national media to report on product lanuches that don't deserve coverage.
But have you seen the other idiots they let onto the road? We need traffic laws designed not for the top 50% of drivers, but for the bottom 50%.
While you're at it, why don't you limit all the rights people have to reflect what would be required for society to function if it were made up of only the least responsible people.
Or instead of being stupid-passionate about cell phones while driving, we could just fix our broken drivers testing system so that the people who don't know that they're too shitty a driver to handle knowing when to drop the phone wouldn't have their licenses in the first place; because if you take away their cell phones they'll just go back to applying make-up/reading the newspaper/facing the rear seat to yell at their brats/generally not paying attention to the road anyway. The cell phone thing is a symptom, not the problem. You don't even notice that the people who know how to use their phones responsibly are on the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like people are going to great lengths to explain his clearly arbitrary price discrepancy. The cable? Give me a break. The PS3 is the only console I can think of since the 8-bit days that actually takes a standard video cable. You don't need any special Sony cable. Just a $4 HDMI cable does the trick.
Disclaimer: I own both a Wii and a PS3, and I have $0 of buyers remorse. Though given the fact that I've been playing mostly PS2 games lately due to the lack of quality new releases for both systems, perhaps if I had less disposable income I'd have $750 in remorse. I certainly couldn't tell you that I like one of them better than the other though. They both have their strengths. If you don't have an HDTV, the Wii is the clear winner, but otherwise the PS3 definitely holds its own.
If each of the games in Wii Sports counts as a game, then there are plenty of demos on the Playstation network for free download that would count equally. Either way, if assigning the value "$100" to Wii Sports isn't arbitrary I don't know what is.
Want people to take your post seriously instead of assuming you're a fanboy? Well then don't arbitrarily add $100 to the price of the thing you're biased against.
Perhaps close friends are more important to him than random encounters. You can have people over to your house, you know? It's not like bars/clubs are the only places you can go with people.
Of course, the moderating in this thread is almost certainly being done by people who wish they did either of those things but instead spend their non-working hours playing World of Warcraft...
No, "most people" is "most people". Perhaps it's you and your friends that are skewing your view of the matter. Let me help you out.
You can't go to most clubs, and all bars until you're 21 (In the US anyway). Most people stop going to clubs when they meet somebody and settle down... On average around age 25, but there are the people who can't seem to manage to grow up who keep at it for a while... So you have maybe half of the people from 21 to 25 years of age, a significantly smaller subset from 25 to the mid 30's, and almost nobody older than that. Leaving the vast majority of the population not going clubbing with any frequency.
The reason clubs and bars make so much money is that the people who do go there are either stupid enough, or desperate enough to pay their insanely high prices for libations.
Bioware, you say? Well sure they can. You can be rolling through the scene at 100 [pause] mph [pause] while still [pause] having plenty of [pause] options in controlling your character's [pause] actions [pause].
Alternatively, you could let it play through at full speed, while you sit there saying "WTF! Why the hell did you do that."
Dispite what you see on prime-time television, most people don't do either of those things with any regularity, if at all.
Scroll to the top of this page and click the "Games" link under "Sections".
The spike in 360 sales is because people are replacing their out-of-warranty red ring of death 360s with new elites. >:)
I'll second this.
I added SPF records for my domains in the hopes that I could get maybe a 20% reduction in bounces, and I got a 100% reduction. I know that 100% of ISPs aren't checking SPF records, so I can only assume that spammers have made a point to check for SPF and not use my domains in their headers.
Digital on demand over IP is dead on arrival. It's too DRM encumbered, too expensive, and pay-per-use in most cases. It will be generations before a sizeable number of people are willing to spend their entertainment dollars on content with no tangible media attached. (yeah, yeah. iTunes, etc. Call me when there's an online video service with a "Burn to DVD" button.)
Unless you mean pirated video on demand. That's another story entirely.
With laser printers, what you're describing isn't all that uncommon, because the toner hopper is the width of the drum, but the sensor on most printers is at one end. If the printer isn't level, all the toner ends up at one end of the cartridge, and you get false readings. Even after the printer says you're out of toner, you can usually remove the cartridge and lightly pivot it a few times to redistribute the toner and get a few dozen/hundred more pages. That doesn't apply to printers with an independent toner hopper, but those are practically non existent in the non-pro class these days.
This isn't the same at all as what inkjets do, which is refuse to print even when the cartridge is clearly still half full, waste most of the ink cleaning the cartridge, etc...
Or it could be that they're going to combine this with element randomization to make screen scraping their main site unreliable, or infeasible. That would be misguided, but companies make dumb decisions all the time.
Their CFO, who realized they were spending money providing a service which generated no revenue?
Whichever company sends them their bandwidth bill I'd guess...
Some smart financial type there probably realized they were paying for it, but it wasn't generating any revenue. Goodwill of the OSS community is nice and all, but you can't spend it, or pay your bills with it.
Cue the people calling them "haters" any minute now though.
The difference between M and AO is one year. 17 for M and 18 for AO. They should just get rid of AO, and make 'M' 18+. Or reserve AO for porn games, or something. Saying a title should be 'M' instead of 'AO' is *not* saying that kids should be allowed to buy it. It's just politics.
Let me be more specific that that. If you can lead a group and fight in the group at the same time, and that's the game's idea of "complex strategy", then the strategy isn't very complex at all. You shouldn't be able to be in the trenches and still run the battle. If you can, it's a small battle, you're fooling yourself into thinking you're being effective, or you're merely providing moral support. (Replace the metaphor with your favorite in the case of naval and air combat games.... Unless you only play the cartoony fantasy type.)
If the game considers you "short one player" because you have a dedicated leader, I'd say the game is flawed. Yes ever if a hojillion people are addicted to it.
The reason that people use voice chat software is that:
They don't teach people to type correctly in school anymore.
People are lazy.
So it has become the "standard" (At least in some games, not any that I play).
Any reasonable typist should be able to convey information as fast on average as if they were typing, because you can almost type that fast, and you can be typing while somebody else is typing... While many other people are typing in fact. Unlike many of the times when I've used voice chat and 3 people are constantly trying to talk at once so you can't tell what is going on.
Frankly, that's bullshit.
You can have a commander that is precisely that. A commander. Relaying complex strategy, even if via text. It works. It works better than voice chat because the commander can easily be relaying orders to multiple groups. Voice is only better if you can't type fast.
Also: not all games involve "raids".
Additionally, there's no scrollback for voice chat. With text chat you can maintain and follow several lines of conversation at a single time. Voice chat makes that impossible.
Difficulty of roleplaying: Strike 1
Squeeky immature jerks (sometimes): Strike 2
Loss of multi-chatting functionality and scrollback: Strike 3... I'll stick with text.
My bet would be that they did the design to be RoHS compliant, and then they used leaded solder paste in the US models because they had lots left over and it's not illegal here yet.
Whatever happened, though, they should own up to the problem instead of lying their asses off. Until they do, and say *how* they fixed the problem (even in very general terms), I won't be buying their product. I don't want mine to break, and if they don't say there was a problem and that they fixed it, I just have to assume it will break.
Only if the site designer is too stupid to include visual indications that a portion of the page is loading. Although there are a lot of crappy web app/page designers out there as a percentage of the industry.
Yay anecdotal evidence!
I know 8 people with 360s, and all of them have had theirs replaced at least once. Oddly, the majority of them still love the thing, and a few rewarded Microsoft through the purchase of an Elite to replace their out-of-warranty box when it broke.
And check on those financials. The defects have had a huge impact of the division's bottom line. The 360 would be a profit center for Microsoft right now without all the replacements. You just don't hear about it in the national news precicely because they *are* really good at covering it up, just like they're really good getting the national media to report on product lanuches that don't deserve coverage.
While you're at it, why don't you limit all the rights people have to reflect what would be required for society to function if it were made up of only the least responsible people.
Or instead of being stupid-passionate about cell phones while driving, we could just fix our broken drivers testing system so that the people who don't know that they're too shitty a driver to handle knowing when to drop the phone wouldn't have their licenses in the first place; because if you take away their cell phones they'll just go back to applying make-up/reading the newspaper/facing the rear seat to yell at their brats/generally not paying attention to the road anyway. The cell phone thing is a symptom, not the problem. You don't even notice that the people who know how to use their phones responsibly are on the phone.