The mini uses the same ATI card as the latest eMac, which I can tell you first-hand handles World of Warcraft rather well.
Since we know there are no other games for the Mac (*ducks*), that should do the trick for the near future.
If you play a lot of games, I wouldn't tell you to get a Mac mini and a game console... I'd tell you to get a Mac mini and a KVM switch, and keep playing your twitch shooters on your uber-1337 game PC.
The only people who think phones are a "style" thing are people who don't own them and resent the hell out of "those rich yuppie bastards parading around with their stylish, tiny phones with silly ring-tones, rubbing their wealth in our noses."
The reason why small phones are "in style" is because carrying a big f-ing ear taco is a big hassle. A tiny phone which does the job is worth paying a lot more money. It's about function, not style.
The reason colors and accesories are popular is the same reason why some people have colorful key chains, to make their property easier to spot. This way, for example, you don't run out the door with your roommate's phone by mistake.
The reason why "fancy" ring tones are popular is obvious to anybody who's ever been on a job site as part of an army of consultants. If everybody's ring tone is the same, you can never tell who's phone is ringing. If yours is the only one which plays "Pennsylvania 6-5000" when a call is coming in, you don't need to look around the room like an idiot every time somebody calls you, wondering which phone is ringing.
And one more thing. Ringtones is already a multi-billion dollar industry.
I call Bullshit. Between Europe, Asia, and the US combined, I seriously doubt that there are more than a billion cell phone users, and of those, probably only a tiny portion of them, let's be genererous and say 5%, spend money on fancy ring-tones. That means each one of those people needs to spend about $40 on ringtones for it to even be a two-billion dollar industry. Somehow I doubt that this is the case.
One of the ways game console makers used to be able to save money was that they were creating systems to work with the relatively low resolution of NTSC televisions. This saved on the requirements of both the video processor and the CPU. Even in countries where higher resoltions (like PAL) were available, the odds are they were still playing on a 20" (or less) screen from several feet away.
The rising popularity of big-assed TV sets and HDTV resolutions has changed that. You can now create games for use with a TV set which push a $300 ATI card to its absolute limit.
Console systems are not just for people who can't afford a game PC. Many gamers prefer the couch to the computer desk, and are not willing to give up quality just because they are playing in the living room.
I suspect that the next generation of Play Station will cost more, too.
Animation: All motion pictures made from assembling still-life images into sequence.
Puppetry: All manipulation objects to represent people.
Machinima: Using the pre-rendered animation calculations of a computer game system to manipulate animated characters for the making of a motion picture.
In other words, Machinima is sort-of like puppetry, but with computer-animated figures instead of actual objects.
The reason it's spoken of as something different than traditional cell animation (or even CGI) is that machinima is able to use the motion and physics engine of the game to save all kinds of time. For Pixar to make a ball bounce, they must program a ball bouncing with the proper arc, and then render it.
For Disney to make a ball bounce, they must draw images of a ball, and create repeated cells with the ball in sequencial places on the screen according to how it's supposed to move.
For a machinima creator to make a ball bounce, they must find a game which has physics defined for bouncy balls, and manipulate a game character to drop one. It's a completely different method of production from what has come before. There is no pre-existing word which describes it.
If you want to call the word "stupid", come up with a better one and get it to stick.
Just be glad that it didn't become popular in the early 90s, or it would have been given either a stupid acronym (like "PMP" for "Pre-determined Motion Physics") or multiple capitalized words mashed together, the last one being "Ware" (like "GameFilmWare".)
See, "Machinima" suddenly doesn't sound so horrible, does it?
Well, the rise of personal computers over the 80s and 90s drove down the cost of high-quality transistors, which has resulted in the commotity parts going into budget-box amps today being of higher quality than what went in to many "hi-fi" pieces of gear during the 70s.
Also, digital audio has been corrected and refined since the days when Phillips and Sony first introduced the CD player.
The result is that the "high end" amp industry is pretty much dead (except for those who are addicted to tubes), the turntable industry is a small niche for old-timers who still own a lot of records (and party DJ's who still love the old radio-industry tables from Technics), but there's still one area where hi-fi is not dead.
Speakers.
There are dozens of tiny companies out there who still make better-sounding speakers than the Infinity, Bose, or Klipsch pieces of junk you see at Circuit City or Best Buy, often for less money.
Also, as good as some of the quality $300-$500 speakers are, there are speakers in the over-$2000 range which are much, much better. Any audiophile who plays a good recording of the Firebird Suite through a pair of Vandersteens for the first time is likely to have an orgasm right there in the listening room.
I have the very set of B&W speakers you are talking about, and I'll back you up on that.
They are unremarkable-looking bookshelf speakers, but they sound absolutely breathtaking, with or without the subwoofer they designed for them.
I've also heard the Paradigms, and agree that they are also pretty darn good, and worth a listen when you are shopping.
You won't find B&W at Best Buy of Fries... You need to go to those little downtoen hi-fi boutique stores. They are worth the trip, though. Many of them have terrific listening rooms, and also 1-month no-questions-asked return policies (because they believe you should try out speakers in your own listening room before you decide for sure that you will buy them for good.)
Of course, a lot of old-school audiophiles would be mortified to hear you bought an integrated receiver with a remote controle.
Serious audio gear has a single on/off toggle, a difficult and byzantine system of pullies to change the tuner frequency, and require that you swap out resisters to change the volume.
A remote! Pfffft! Do you want hi-fi, or a bunch of silly tacked on toys!?
Next you'll be saying that your turntable has an electric motor, instead of being carefully hand-rotated at exactly 33 1/3 RPM by a well-trained butler. People are so easilly distracted by such frivolous extra features.
Or, if you turned desktop mounting off in 10.3, click on the little eject button next to the CD icon on the left bar of the finder window, which lists all volumes in glorious NeXT-like fashion.
Or, if it is mounted on the desktop, drag it down to the big Eject Icon which appears where the Trash used to be.
Or, just press and hold the Eject button. It's right there on the keyboard. Look next to those volume buttons that inspired all the whining.
I posit that such people do exist, and may indeed read Slashdot. Just consider that you would never know about it
Which is exactly why I consider it an issue of faith.
As with God, I can not prove that such people exist, nor can I prove that they don't, so lacking a compelling case one way or another on the basis of logic and evidence alone, I choose to accept the belief system which provides me with more happiness.
I have nothing against those who choose to believe that all non-TV ownwers are pompous windbags, but each of us needs to tolerate the view of the other, with the understanding that neither of us is relying on any special insight, but rather the choices of faith which each of us made based on our own human needs.
Even to choose to say, "I don't know whether such people exist or not, and never can know, so I shall not worry about it," is a perfectly valid choice, also based on emotion. Some people find it more comforting to embrace and accept "not knowing" than to for a worldview based around one axiom or another.
I think I have now sufficiently demonstrated that people who do watch TV are also perfectly capable of being pompous windbags. I hope you enjoyed it.
Somewhere, out there in America, there is a person who own no TV, yet feels no compulsion to tell the world about what a great person they are for owning no TV. I believe that person is out there. I have to believe it. To believe otherwise would suggest that not owning a TV automatically turns people into pompous windbags.
In answer to your question, yes, there really are two hours of TV that are worth watching on any given day, if you know where to look.
Start with PBS, which features a lot of great shows like "Secrets of the Dead", "Nova", and "Frontline", not to mention re-broadcasts of the best shows from England and Canada. Then you've got your cable shows. Awesome programs like "The Sopranos" and "Band of Brothers" were certainly worth watching. Even the regular networks manage to put out a few things worth watching in between their usual battery of lawyer shows, hospital dramas, and "family" sit-coms.
I've never understood how two people sitting in a living room, each reading shitty novels to themselves, is considered "quality time" by folks who insist that the same couple watching "Lost" on ABC together are completely wasting their lives.
What I wonder about is how the NYT survey would have counted people like me.
Last night, I was playing World of Warcraft while marathon-watching the Season 1 episodes of "Tru Calling" on DVD using the eMac that sits next to my game PC.
So, are multi-taskers like me counted as "on the Internet for five hours", "watching TV for five hours", or "both"?
If "both", then I managed to squeeze 10 man-hours of recreation into the time from 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM. Talk about productivity! w00t!
Your numbers include overseas sales (The Commodore brand was huge in both Japan and Western Europe, as I recall), and also depend on the ultra-cheap ($299) Vic-20.
The real sales numbers for the C64 were a stunning 17 Million or so; however, tracking sales any later than about 1985 is fairly pointless, as the Amiga and Mac had made both markets fairly irrelevant, but the aging Commodore64 was still selling briskly in some parts of the world.
The thing is, the C-64 was not really marketed and sold as a competitor of the Apple or IBM. It was sold as an alternative to the Atari 2600 and (more importanlty) the Intelivision. In the minds of most consumers, it was a game console, designed to work with a TV set in your living room, and the selling point for this game system was that it could also be used as a computer.
The vast majority of the C-64s sold in the US were purchased by parents whose kids asked for an Atari, with a small minority buying them bought as a cheap alternative to Apples and IBMs.
It out-performed any game console of the day, but was rather feeble by 1983 standards for desktop computing. That is why almost every serious computer user I knew had an Apple, except for my Uncle (who owned his own business, and therefore had an early DOS box, typically referred to as a "business computer" by most folks at the time.)
I knew well what these cheap gadgets could do though, in spite of the lack of prestige. With a second-hand accoustic coupler, and a terminal program in BASIC copied by hand from the back of an issue of "Compute!", I was dialing into systems and running all kinds of interesting apps... and doing things which make me very thankful that we have a statute of limitations.
Come up with another type of massively-multiplayer game in which downtime is built in to the game concept (so players will be foreced to slow down and get to know each other), and some people will play it.
Anybody who learned about Pavlovian conditioning in Psych 101 understands why the system of nearly-random rewards makes these games so addictive, and why you eventually realize that you are not really having fun, but playing out of compusion. When people reach that point, they either quit, or decide that the company they keep while on-line is pleasant enough to stick around in spite of not caring much about the game itself.
As appealing as it may sound at first to play any sort of MMOG from the living room sofa, I'm not sure if this will ever really fly.
The thing about these games is that they are really just simplified MUDs with graphics, which is to say that they are pretty much an first-person (or nearly first-person) RPG with a text-based chat room attached to them.
The whole point of Playing EQ, AC, DAOC, CoH, WoW, etc., is the social aspect of the gameplay.
I think most of you already see where I'm going with this.
The X-Box has no keyboard, so unless you want to roleplay via voice chatter (in which case, "broadcast" and "shout" type messages will be more annoying than ever), this large part of the game is missing.
In the early development phase of EverQuest, it was pretty clear that Sony intended it to be a big hit for the PS2. As it turns out, they could only deliver a stripped-down version of it to the console, and almost everybody who played EQ did so on the PC.
By the same token, Commodore had all the C-64 developers and customers behind them
I was one of them, and they didn't get me behind the Amiga.
I can't speak for the other six guys.
The C-64 was far, far more popular than the Apple ][
In Bizarro World, perhaps. I vividly remember being surrounded by Apple geeks, and not only was I the only C-64 user I knew, I was the only one any of them knew. Commodore software was much more difficult to get your hands on than Apple software. The Apple ][ (along with the + and the e) completely dominated the market and that remained the case until IBM started running those annoying Charlie Chaplin ads and establishing itself as a player.
The Commodore Vic20 / 64 market just barely managed to stay ahead of Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the Timex Sinclair.
6 hours was last year's iPod. The current one goes for 11.
I run off the battery for several hours every day, with the older iPod you are talking about, it's still going strong. The duration has not even gone down as far as I've been able to notice.
The only reason you hear complaints is that people have unreasonable expectations about batteries. They think it should cost nothing, weigh nothing, take up no space, provide enough power to run a little hand-held computer with an internal HD (which is basically what an iPod is) and last forever.
A $50 battery which gets replaced every few years is not the end of the world, especially if you are somebody who can afford an iPod or PSP.
However, the short running time of the PSP is a bit of a disapointment for a portable game console. A battery with twice the time per charge would only slightly increase the size of this thing, and would make it a much more attractive toy.
The so-called "battery issues" of the iPod are completely overblown.
The iPod's internal battery often lasts much longer than they myths out there. A friend of mine and his wife bought the original generation-1 iPods. They are both still running with the original batteries.
Every laptop owner knows that rechargables need to be replaced after somewhere between 1 and 5 years, and it's hard to predict when that will be. $50 for a battery that lasts a matter of years is a bargain, compared to what it would cost to get that much power out of disposable Energizers or Duracels.
Oh... and the iPod battery is removable. Not easy to replace, because they chose to trade convenience of this one-every-few-years procedure for less bulk. I consider that a good trade.
That said, the current iPod has an 11-hour battery, allowing you to listen for an international flight without a recharge. The PSP battery, from the sound of it, doesn't even keep you amused for the duration that you'll be delayed on the tarmac.
Somehow our generation managed to grow up without skateparks and didn't kill anybody.
We didn't even have GTA to relieve the boredom. You had to pray your friend from a rich family bought an Atari so you could play Pitfall or something.
If kids today have a problem, it's not lack of recrational options: It's too much structure in their recreation. Their nights and weekends are jammed with busy little after-school activities. When we were kids, an after-school activity was "go outside." If kids today can't find a way to have fun with some cheap dirt bikes, a box of old golf balls, and the lumber pile behind their Dad's tool shed, it's no wonder their graffiti sucks.
What kid would choose little-league la crosse over a fun game of "Bike Over Broken Wall Studs With A Box On Your Head While Your Friends Whip Golf Balls At You As Hard As They Can"? Only the sissy ones, that's who.
When I was 12, I was exposed to things far more explicit than Grand Theft Auto. If this was a series of "cop" games, it could be every bit as riddled with "mature" content, and nobody would bat an eye at a pre-teen playing it. For some reason, the fact that you get to play the villian in these games has otherwise libertine and morally loose folks running around screaming "where were the parents when this horrible atrocity happened? Oh, the humanity! The kid is playing a game which has cartoon hookers in it! Where's my pitchfork? Burn the witch! Burn the witch! We shall clense the Earth with fire!"
Chill. Some idiot kids vandalized property, and then fished for the easiest excuse they could find. The blame lies with those kids. This is not a new problem, nor one we are clueless about dealing with. Make them clean highway ditches every Saturday for a couple Summers, and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
The mini uses the same ATI card as the latest eMac, which I can tell you first-hand handles World of Warcraft rather well.
Since we know there are no other games for the Mac (*ducks*), that should do the trick for the near future.
If you play a lot of games, I wouldn't tell you to get a Mac mini and a game console... I'd tell you to get a Mac mini and a KVM switch, and keep playing your twitch shooters on your uber-1337 game PC.
My Mac mini order would have gone through by now if you bastards were not slashdotting the store to gawk at the specs!
Somebody hurry up and start an EQ2 vs. WoW flamewar or something, so the Apple Store servers will free up!
79 comments and nobody has asked me to imagine a Beowolf cluster of these yet. C'mon, /. trolls and crapflooders, you're losing your touch.
Seriously, though... If he did have a cluster of them, it might have stood up to the Slashdotting, and he could have cooked a whole cow at once!
Why should you care if I like my box to sport a little bling bling?
On another forum, and in another context, that question would sound really horrible... yet still none of my business.
The only people who think phones are a "style" thing are people who don't own them and resent the hell out of "those rich yuppie bastards parading around with their stylish, tiny phones with silly ring-tones, rubbing their wealth in our noses."
The reason why small phones are "in style" is because carrying a big f-ing ear taco is a big hassle. A tiny phone which does the job is worth paying a lot more money. It's about function, not style.
The reason colors and accesories are popular is the same reason why some people have colorful key chains, to make their property easier to spot. This way, for example, you don't run out the door with your roommate's phone by mistake.
The reason why "fancy" ring tones are popular is obvious to anybody who's ever been on a job site as part of an army of consultants. If everybody's ring tone is the same, you can never tell who's phone is ringing. If yours is the only one which plays "Pennsylvania 6-5000" when a call is coming in, you don't need to look around the room like an idiot every time somebody calls you, wondering which phone is ringing.
And one more thing. Ringtones is already a multi-billion dollar industry.
I call Bullshit. Between Europe, Asia, and the US combined, I seriously doubt that there are more than a billion cell phone users, and of those, probably only a tiny portion of them, let's be genererous and say 5%, spend money on fancy ring-tones. That means each one of those people needs to spend about $40 on ringtones for it to even be a two-billion dollar industry. Somehow I doubt that this is the case.
One of the ways game console makers used to be able to save money was that they were creating systems to work with the relatively low resolution of NTSC televisions. This saved on the requirements of both the video processor and the CPU. Even in countries where higher resoltions (like PAL) were available, the odds are they were still playing on a 20" (or less) screen from several feet away.
The rising popularity of big-assed TV sets and HDTV resolutions has changed that. You can now create games for use with a TV set which push a $300 ATI card to its absolute limit.
Console systems are not just for people who can't afford a game PC. Many gamers prefer the couch to the computer desk, and are not willing to give up quality just because they are playing in the living room.
I suspect that the next generation of Play Station will cost more, too.
Animation: All motion pictures made from assembling still-life images into sequence.
Puppetry: All manipulation objects to represent people.
Machinima: Using the pre-rendered animation calculations of a computer game system to manipulate animated characters for the making of a motion picture.
In other words, Machinima is sort-of like puppetry, but with computer-animated figures instead of actual objects.
The reason it's spoken of as something different than traditional cell animation (or even CGI) is that machinima is able to use the motion and physics engine of the game to save all kinds of time. For Pixar to make a ball bounce, they must program a ball bouncing with the proper arc, and then render it.
For Disney to make a ball bounce, they must draw images of a ball, and create repeated cells with the ball in sequencial places on the screen according to how it's supposed to move.
For a machinima creator to make a ball bounce, they must find a game which has physics defined for bouncy balls, and manipulate a game character to drop one. It's a completely different method of production from what has come before. There is no pre-existing word which describes it.
If you want to call the word "stupid", come up with a better one and get it to stick.
Just be glad that it didn't become popular in the early 90s, or it would have been given either a stupid acronym (like "PMP" for "Pre-determined Motion Physics") or multiple capitalized words mashed together, the last one being "Ware" (like "GameFilmWare".)
See, "Machinima" suddenly doesn't sound so horrible, does it?
Well, the rise of personal computers over the 80s and 90s drove down the cost of high-quality transistors, which has resulted in the commotity parts going into budget-box amps today being of higher quality than what went in to many "hi-fi" pieces of gear during the 70s.
Also, digital audio has been corrected and refined since the days when Phillips and Sony first introduced the CD player.
The result is that the "high end" amp industry is pretty much dead (except for those who are addicted to tubes), the turntable industry is a small niche for old-timers who still own a lot of records (and party DJ's who still love the old radio-industry tables from Technics), but there's still one area where hi-fi is not dead.
Speakers.
There are dozens of tiny companies out there who still make better-sounding speakers than the Infinity, Bose, or Klipsch pieces of junk you see at Circuit City or Best Buy, often for less money.
Also, as good as some of the quality $300-$500 speakers are, there are speakers in the over-$2000 range which are much, much better. Any audiophile who plays a good recording of the Firebird Suite through a pair of Vandersteens for the first time is likely to have an orgasm right there in the listening room.
I have the very set of B&W speakers you are talking about, and I'll back you up on that.
They are unremarkable-looking bookshelf speakers, but they sound absolutely breathtaking, with or without the subwoofer they designed for them.
I've also heard the Paradigms, and agree that they are also pretty darn good, and worth a listen when you are shopping.
You won't find B&W at Best Buy of Fries... You need to go to those little downtoen hi-fi boutique stores. They are worth the trip, though. Many of them have terrific listening rooms, and also 1-month no-questions-asked return policies (because they believe you should try out speakers in your own listening room before you decide for sure that you will buy them for good.)
Of course, a lot of old-school audiophiles would be mortified to hear you bought an integrated receiver with a remote controle.
Serious audio gear has a single on/off toggle, a difficult and byzantine system of pullies to change the tuner frequency, and require that you swap out resisters to change the volume.
A remote! Pfffft! Do you want hi-fi, or a bunch of silly tacked on toys!?
Next you'll be saying that your turntable has an electric motor, instead of being carefully hand-rotated at exactly 33 1/3 RPM by a well-trained butler. People are so easilly distracted by such frivolous extra features.
Oh no, not that!
Bose does suck. Yes, it did back in the 80s, too.
True hi-fi shops only kept them around on the show floor so they could demonstrate how much better the good stuff was.
Or, if you turned desktop mounting off in 10.3, click on the little eject button next to the CD icon on the left bar of the finder window, which lists all volumes in glorious NeXT-like fashion.
Or, if it is mounted on the desktop, drag it down to the big Eject Icon which appears where the Trash used to be.
Or, just press and hold the Eject button. It's right there on the keyboard. Look next to those volume buttons that inspired all the whining.
Is saying "I don't read any blogs" going to become the new "I don't even own a TV"?
I posit that such people do exist, and may indeed read Slashdot. Just consider that you would never know about it
Which is exactly why I consider it an issue of faith.
As with God, I can not prove that such people exist, nor can I prove that they don't, so lacking a compelling case one way or another on the basis of logic and evidence alone, I choose to accept the belief system which provides me with more happiness.
I have nothing against those who choose to believe that all non-TV ownwers are pompous windbags, but each of us needs to tolerate the view of the other, with the understanding that neither of us is relying on any special insight, but rather the choices of faith which each of us made based on our own human needs.
Even to choose to say, "I don't know whether such people exist or not, and never can know, so I shall not worry about it," is a perfectly valid choice, also based on emotion. Some people find it more comforting to embrace and accept "not knowing" than to for a worldview based around one axiom or another.
I think I have now sufficiently demonstrated that people who do watch TV are also perfectly capable of being pompous windbags. I hope you enjoyed it.
But that is $180 (plus tax) added onto of your $600 ebay score.
No, it's not.
1. "Under $600" means "$200 - $550, depending on configuration."
2. Many systems being sold on eBay have up-to-date software on them already.
Somewhere, out there in America, there is a person who own no TV, yet feels no compulsion to tell the world about what a great person they are for owning no TV. I believe that person is out there. I have to believe it. To believe otherwise would suggest that not owning a TV automatically turns people into pompous windbags.
In answer to your question, yes, there really are two hours of TV that are worth watching on any given day, if you know where to look.
Start with PBS, which features a lot of great shows like "Secrets of the Dead", "Nova", and "Frontline", not to mention re-broadcasts of the best shows from England and Canada. Then you've got your cable shows. Awesome programs like "The Sopranos" and "Band of Brothers" were certainly worth watching. Even the regular networks manage to put out a few things worth watching in between their usual battery of lawyer shows, hospital dramas, and "family" sit-coms.
I've never understood how two people sitting in a living room, each reading shitty novels to themselves, is considered "quality time" by folks who insist that the same couple watching "Lost" on ABC together are completely wasting their lives.
What I wonder about is how the NYT survey would have counted people like me.
Last night, I was playing World of Warcraft while marathon-watching the Season 1 episodes of "Tru Calling" on DVD using the eMac that sits next to my game PC.
So, are multi-taskers like me counted as "on the Internet for five hours", "watching TV for five hours", or "both"?
If "both", then I managed to squeeze 10 man-hours of recreation into the time from 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM. Talk about productivity! w00t!
Your numbers include overseas sales (The Commodore brand was huge in both Japan and Western Europe, as I recall), and also depend on the ultra-cheap ($299) Vic-20.
The real sales numbers for the C64 were a stunning 17 Million or so; however, tracking sales any later than about 1985 is fairly pointless, as the Amiga and Mac had made both markets fairly irrelevant, but the aging Commodore64 was still selling briskly in some parts of the world.
The thing is, the C-64 was not really marketed and sold as a competitor of the Apple or IBM. It was sold as an alternative to the Atari 2600 and (more importanlty) the Intelivision. In the minds of most consumers, it was a game console, designed to work with a TV set in your living room, and the selling point for this game system was that it could also be used as a computer.
The vast majority of the C-64s sold in the US were purchased by parents whose kids asked for an Atari, with a small minority buying them bought as a cheap alternative to Apples and IBMs.
It out-performed any game console of the day, but was rather feeble by 1983 standards for desktop computing. That is why almost every serious computer user I knew had an Apple, except for my Uncle (who owned his own business, and therefore had an early DOS box, typically referred to as a "business computer" by most folks at the time.)
I knew well what these cheap gadgets could do though, in spite of the lack of prestige. With a second-hand accoustic coupler, and a terminal program in BASIC copied by hand from the back of an issue of "Compute!", I was dialing into systems and running all kinds of interesting apps... and doing things which make me very thankful that we have a statute of limitations.
Come up with another type of massively-multiplayer game in which downtime is built in to the game concept (so players will be foreced to slow down and get to know each other), and some people will play it.
Anybody who learned about Pavlovian conditioning in Psych 101 understands why the system of nearly-random rewards makes these games so addictive, and why you eventually realize that you are not really having fun, but playing out of compusion. When people reach that point, they either quit, or decide that the company they keep while on-line is pleasant enough to stick around in spite of not caring much about the game itself.
As appealing as it may sound at first to play any sort of MMOG from the living room sofa, I'm not sure if this will ever really fly.
The thing about these games is that they are really just simplified MUDs with graphics, which is to say that they are pretty much an first-person (or nearly first-person) RPG with a text-based chat room attached to them.
The whole point of Playing EQ, AC, DAOC, CoH, WoW, etc., is the social aspect of the gameplay.
I think most of you already see where I'm going with this.
The X-Box has no keyboard, so unless you want to roleplay via voice chatter (in which case, "broadcast" and "shout" type messages will be more annoying than ever), this large part of the game is missing.
In the early development phase of EverQuest, it was pretty clear that Sony intended it to be a big hit for the PS2. As it turns out, they could only deliver a stripped-down version of it to the console, and almost everybody who played EQ did so on the PC.
By the same token, Commodore had all the C-64 developers and customers behind them
I was one of them, and they didn't get me behind the Amiga.
I can't speak for the other six guys.
The C-64 was far, far more popular than the Apple ][
In Bizarro World, perhaps. I vividly remember being surrounded by Apple geeks, and not only was I the only C-64 user I knew, I was the only one any of them knew. Commodore software was much more difficult to get your hands on than Apple software. The Apple ][ (along with the + and the e) completely dominated the market and that remained the case until IBM started running those annoying Charlie Chaplin ads and establishing itself as a player.
The Commodore Vic20 / 64 market just barely managed to stay ahead of Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the Timex Sinclair.
6 hours was last year's iPod. The current one goes for 11.
I run off the battery for several hours every day, with the older iPod you are talking about, it's still going strong. The duration has not even gone down as far as I've been able to notice.
The only reason you hear complaints is that people have unreasonable expectations about batteries. They think it should cost nothing, weigh nothing, take up no space, provide enough power to run a little hand-held computer with an internal HD (which is basically what an iPod is) and last forever.
A $50 battery which gets replaced every few years is not the end of the world, especially if you are somebody who can afford an iPod or PSP.
However, the short running time of the PSP is a bit of a disapointment for a portable game console. A battery with twice the time per charge would only slightly increase the size of this thing, and would make it a much more attractive toy.
The so-called "battery issues" of the iPod are completely overblown.
The iPod's internal battery often lasts much longer than they myths out there. A friend of mine and his wife bought the original generation-1 iPods. They are both still running with the original batteries.
Every laptop owner knows that rechargables need to be replaced after somewhere between 1 and 5 years, and it's hard to predict when that will be. $50 for a battery that lasts a matter of years is a bargain, compared to what it would cost to get that much power out of disposable Energizers or Duracels.
Oh... and the iPod battery is removable. Not easy to replace, because they chose to trade convenience of this one-every-few-years procedure for less bulk. I consider that a good trade.
That said, the current iPod has an 11-hour battery, allowing you to listen for an international flight without a recharge. The PSP battery, from the sound of it, doesn't even keep you amused for the duration that you'll be delayed on the tarmac.
Somehow our generation managed to grow up without skateparks and didn't kill anybody.
We didn't even have GTA to relieve the boredom. You had to pray your friend from a rich family bought an Atari so you could play Pitfall or something.
If kids today have a problem, it's not lack of recrational options: It's too much structure in their recreation. Their nights and weekends are jammed with busy little after-school activities. When we were kids, an after-school activity was "go outside." If kids today can't find a way to have fun with some cheap dirt bikes, a box of old golf balls, and the lumber pile behind their Dad's tool shed, it's no wonder their graffiti sucks.
What kid would choose little-league la crosse over a fun game of "Bike Over Broken Wall Studs With A Box On Your Head While Your Friends Whip Golf Balls At You As Hard As They Can"? Only the sissy ones, that's who.
Now get off my lawn!
When did Slashdot become over-run with puritans?
When I was 12, I was exposed to things far more explicit than Grand Theft Auto. If this was a series of "cop" games, it could be every bit as riddled with "mature" content, and nobody would bat an eye at a pre-teen playing it. For some reason, the fact that you get to play the villian in these games has otherwise libertine and morally loose folks running around screaming "where were the parents when this horrible atrocity happened? Oh, the humanity! The kid is playing a game which has cartoon hookers in it! Where's my pitchfork? Burn the witch! Burn the witch! We shall clense the Earth with fire!"
Chill. Some idiot kids vandalized property, and then fished for the easiest excuse they could find. The blame lies with those kids. This is not a new problem, nor one we are clueless about dealing with. Make them clean highway ditches every Saturday for a couple Summers, and move on.