in terms of desireability amongst the class of 9 year olds I teach the PS3 outranks the Wii by about 2:1. If this is representative then if Sony could just get the price right they would probably catch up pretty fast.
9-year-olds traditionally do not have much discretionary income. I somehow doubt that Sony can get the PS3 price down to the magical "eighteen bucks and a pack of baseball cards" that the market deems affordable.
So Nintendo is on track to sell 4 million Wii's this year, Microsoft is going strong with 3 million sales in the Xbox 360's second year, and Sony might hit 1.5 million PlayStation 3's sold.
The analysts would never have predicted it from the relative sales of the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2. Which goes to show that analysts who use past performance as an indicator of future performance are often idiots.
Seems like a potential legislative tweak to "safe harbor" would be to require service providers like Youtube to track ad hits/revenue gained from any particular content source. If Viacom can prove that the content was theirs, then Youtube should then have to turn over that money to the rightful copyright holder.
Then Viacom would start quietly putting up its own content on YouTube, waiting until it was no longer part of their business plan to have it publicly available, and then send YouTube a takedown notice and demand for restitution.
Viacom gets all the profits, and Google is stuck with all the distribution costs. That's even LESS fair than the current model where Viacom and YouTube both make profits off Viacom's works proportional to the resources they dedicate to distributing them.
I think we need to clarify what we mean by the terms "natural" and "non-natural" before we can debate which of those categories Monsanto's GM food products fall into.
If the government passes a law that makes my otherwise perfectly useful TV obsolete, they damn well better help me upgrade.
Your TV won't be obsolete, though.
Well, I guess the UHF/VHF tuner part of it will be. But most of us don't even use that tuner anymore -- we get our content from DVD players, game consoles, and already-digital cable boxes and satellite receivers. It's only the over-the-air analog TV signals that will stop working.
1st, it's only $100 more than a 360, if you want to compare what the systems actually include, assuming you're not interested in playing Blu-Ray discs or HD-DVD discs, otherwise, it's $100 cheaper than a 360.
You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be.
Bottom line is, if I want an Xbox 360 I can buy one for $300. If I want a PS3 I can buy one for $500.
Even if the PS3 is a good value to customers like you, that want every bell and whistle it's possible to attach to a console, that feel "tortured" when console-exclusive titles come out and you don't own them all -- it's NOT a good value to the majority of customers.
Sony made a console for people like you and it's great that you like it, but if they were relying on sales to people who are not like you, they could be in trouble.
IIRC, the Atari Jaguar was the most unwanted console that I can think of!
The Atari Panther was even MORE unwanted than that. Even Atari execs didn't want it, saying "Know what, screw Panther, let's cancel that project and focus our efforts on the Jaguar instead".
So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book.
Well, no. The typical consumer internet usage pattern does not exhibit sustained transfer rates.
But to the casual web browser, paying the extra $20 a month over dial-up is very well worth it when the higher burst speed means each web page loads in 1 second instead of 10.
"Even if the contract explicitly states it and the person signs it, the contract can still be considered void if the contract violates a law."
I doubt you'd be able to find a court that considers it a violation of the law to enforce a clause that allows one party to voluntary terminate the service contract at their discretion. That's pretty much boilerplate contract language, there.
Why Mortal Kombat instead of Street Fighter II, the game that inspired it (and about 1,000 other fighting games in the following 10 years?) While MK was notable at the time for introducing fatalties and featuring digitized pictures of real people as its character art, neither one was an idea that remained popular for very long. SFII was the true progenitor of the character-selectable one-on-one fighting genre.
7) Grand Theft Auto
Really, the top-down game from 1998? I don't think the title really achieved any cultural importance until the perspective changed to third-person 3-D in 2001 with GTA III.
It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
I work in the online real estate biz for a couple years, and I was constantly amazed at how little information about listings the agents actually had or were willing to share.
People! Give the buyer as much data as you can, and THEY WILL DO YOUR WORK FOR YOU. Spend an hour upfront sketching out the floorplan of the house, and you'll save ten hours wasted doing in-person showings for people who don't want the place because they couldn't tell from the one grainy photo you posted that the living room is only 8'x10'.
the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore.
Bullshit. The old file formats will still look as good as they ever have. It's just that they won't take advantage of the FULL potential of the newer, more capable hardware.
If you're satisfied with what you have now, why upgrade? This rule applies whether you're talking about PNG, DVD, or MP3.
It's ridiculous to be dithering your graphics down to a 256-color palette in 2007. The limit on color depth made sense when the format was developed, TWENTY YEARS AGO, but now that IE7 supports PNG alpha transparency and we have Flash for animation, GIF is an obsolete format.
Windows 95 came with a TCP stack included. OS/2 required you to spend an extra $80 to get the "Warp Connect" package if you intended to use the Internet. In 1995.
IBM's OS/2-native Web Explorer browser was also at all times at least one full major release behind Netscape, feature-wise.
Windows 95 took the market because it was a better consumer OS than OS/2.
Not too [sic] mention that 1080p content is pretty much the best you are going to get for TV sets and projectors.
I am going to remember you said this in five years, when Sony starts trying to convince us that anything less than their new 2560x1440p displays looks like crap.
Film is ridiculously expensive. Think about any time you've ever bought camera film.
I see your point, but the quality of film stock used for a print of a theatrical release isn't going to be the same quality as even a mid-grade consumer 35mm still camera.
With the still photo, the viewer is going to see the image captured by a single rectangle of celluloid for seconds, minutes, even hours at a time. For a theatrical film, it's gone 1/24 of a second later.
We won't be running out of space just like we didn't run out of food.
Correction: we haven't run out of food, yet.
But we animals have a self-correcting system as far as that goes; if the food supply isn't sufficient to support a large population, then the population simply grows at a slower rate. The same will happen with our data; if we reach a point where we can't store all the non-ephemeral data we generate, we'll reflexively limit the amount of non-ephemeral data that we generate.
None of those are problems with web apps, they're problems with the decisions the companies made in developing said web apps.
If they require client-side Java code or any ActiveX controls beyond XMLHttpRequest*, I wouldn't even call them web apps; they are client applications which are distributed via HTTP.
(* What's with the irregular capitalization, Microsoft? Why not "XmlHttpRequest" or "XMLHTTPRequest"?)
A slot 1-only cart will never be able to play GBA games
I'd never say never about that.
When the DS hardware is in GBA mode, it's using the slower of the DS's two processors, and at only half the available clockspeed. It's possible--not necessarily practical, but possible--that a reasonably playable GBA emulator could be implemented in software allowing GBA titles to be run from Slot-1.
But since actual hardware compatibility is available for the cost of a Slot-2 card, I don't think we'll see much hobbyist effort toward that end. If you need GBA support, get a Slot-2 device and a passthrough.
Slashdot Mirror
in terms of desireability amongst the class of 9 year olds I teach the PS3 outranks the Wii by about 2:1. If this is representative then if Sony could just get the price right they would probably catch up pretty fast.
9-year-olds traditionally do not have much discretionary income. I somehow doubt that Sony can get the PS3 price down to the magical "eighteen bucks and a pack of baseball cards" that the market deems affordable.
So Nintendo is on track to sell 4 million Wii's this year, Microsoft is going strong with 3 million sales in the Xbox 360's second year, and Sony might hit 1.5 million PlayStation 3's sold.
The analysts would never have predicted it from the relative sales of the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2. Which goes to show that analysts who use past performance as an indicator of future performance are often idiots.
I went to a school that taught development, OOP, OOA, SA in two years.
Development, OOP, OOA, and SA can't all be learned in just two years. Not thoroughly, at least.
it is still fucking me over, everone asks for a degree when I could run circles around a person with a degree.
Or maybe it's your smug attitude that's keeping you out of all the prime jobs.
Humble up and learn to accept that there are people who know more than you. Maybe in time you will come to know what they know.
Seems like a potential legislative tweak to "safe harbor" would be to require service providers like Youtube to track ad hits/revenue gained from any particular content source. If Viacom can prove that the content was theirs, then Youtube should then have to turn over that money to the rightful copyright holder.
Then Viacom would start quietly putting up its own content on YouTube, waiting until it was no longer part of their business plan to have it publicly available, and then send YouTube a takedown notice and demand for restitution.
Viacom gets all the profits, and Google is stuck with all the distribution costs. That's even LESS fair than the current model where Viacom and YouTube both make profits off Viacom's works proportional to the resources they dedicate to distributing them.
Viacom's product is now less valuable because thousands or millions of people have already seen it.
Huh?
Creative products become MORE valuable when more people are exposed to them, not less valuable.
Took less than five minutes for justification #1. Any more takers?
Stop treating legitimate counterarguments to your position as thoughtless knee-jerk justifications.
I think we need to clarify what we mean by the terms "natural" and "non-natural" before we can debate which of those categories Monsanto's GM food products fall into.
Those that were too quick to discard blu-ray as the next beta will have a nice ample serve of humble pie waiting for them.
Okay, okay. Blu-Ray isn't the next Beta.
It's the next DVD-Audio, and HD-DVD is the next SACD.
Neither of which has yet managed to convinced the majority of the market to give up the 25-plus-year-old CD format.
If the government passes a law that makes my otherwise perfectly useful TV obsolete, they damn well better help me upgrade.
Your TV won't be obsolete, though.
Well, I guess the UHF/VHF tuner part of it will be. But most of us don't even use that tuner anymore -- we get our content from DVD players, game consoles, and already-digital cable boxes and satellite receivers. It's only the over-the-air analog TV signals that will stop working.
1st, it's only $100 more than a 360, if you want to compare what the systems actually include, assuming you're not interested in playing Blu-Ray discs or HD-DVD discs, otherwise, it's $100 cheaper than a 360.
You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be.
Bottom line is, if I want an Xbox 360 I can buy one for $300. If I want a PS3 I can buy one for $500.
Even if the PS3 is a good value to customers like you, that want every bell and whistle it's possible to attach to a console, that feel "tortured" when console-exclusive titles come out and you don't own them all -- it's NOT a good value to the majority of customers.
Sony made a console for people like you and it's great that you like it, but if they were relying on sales to people who are not like you, they could be in trouble.
IIRC, the Atari Jaguar was the most unwanted console that I can think of!
The Atari Panther was even MORE unwanted than that. Even Atari execs didn't want it, saying "Know what, screw Panther, let's cancel that project and focus our efforts on the Jaguar instead".
So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book.
Well, no. The typical consumer internet usage pattern does not exhibit sustained transfer rates.
But to the casual web browser, paying the extra $20 a month over dial-up is very well worth it when the higher burst speed means each web page loads in 1 second instead of 10.
"Even if the contract explicitly states it and the person signs it, the contract can still be considered void if the contract violates a law."
I doubt you'd be able to find a court that considers it a violation of the law to enforce a clause that allows one party to voluntary terminate the service contract at their discretion. That's pretty much boilerplate contract language, there.
"DSL: the bandwidth you pay for is really yours."
And what leads you to believe that DSL service providers aren't doing the exact same kinds of transfer limits and bandwidth shaping?
6) Mortal Kombat
Why Mortal Kombat instead of Street Fighter II, the game that inspired it (and about 1,000 other fighting games in the following 10 years?) While MK was notable at the time for introducing fatalties and featuring digitized pictures of real people as its character art, neither one was an idea that remained popular for very long. SFII was the true progenitor of the character-selectable one-on-one fighting genre.
7) Grand Theft Auto
Really, the top-down game from 1998? I don't think the title really achieved any cultural importance until the perspective changed to third-person 3-D in 2001 with GTA III.
"you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games"
And if you've been gaming for more than 20 years, you don't need Google to know about Zork.
It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
I work in the online real estate biz for a couple years, and I was constantly amazed at how little information about listings the agents actually had or were willing to share.
People! Give the buyer as much data as you can, and THEY WILL DO YOUR WORK FOR YOU. Spend an hour upfront sketching out the floorplan of the house, and you'll save ten hours wasted doing in-person showings for people who don't want the place because they couldn't tell from the one grainy photo you posted that the living room is only 8'x10'.
the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore.
Bullshit. The old file formats will still look as good as they ever have. It's just that they won't take advantage of the FULL potential of the newer, more capable hardware.
If you're satisfied with what you have now, why upgrade? This rule applies whether you're talking about PNG, DVD, or MP3.
now that GIF is off-patent we have that too
We have it, but there's no reason to use it.
It's ridiculous to be dithering your graphics down to a 256-color palette in 2007. The limit on color depth made sense when the format was developed, TWENTY YEARS AGO, but now that IE7 supports PNG alpha transparency and we have Flash for animation, GIF is an obsolete format.
anyone can compare, say, OS/2 with Windows 95
Windows 95 came with a TCP stack included. OS/2 required you to spend an extra $80 to get the "Warp Connect" package if you intended to use the Internet. In 1995.
IBM's OS/2-native Web Explorer browser was also at all times at least one full major release behind Netscape, feature-wise.
Windows 95 took the market because it was a better consumer OS than OS/2.
Not too [sic] mention that 1080p content is pretty much the best you are going to get for TV sets and projectors.
I am going to remember you said this in five years, when Sony starts trying to convince us that anything less than their new 2560x1440p displays looks like crap.
Film is ridiculously expensive. Think about any time you've ever bought camera film.
I see your point, but the quality of film stock used for a print of a theatrical release isn't going to be the same quality as even a mid-grade consumer 35mm still camera.
With the still photo, the viewer is going to see the image captured by a single rectangle of celluloid for seconds, minutes, even hours at a time. For a theatrical film, it's gone 1/24 of a second later.
We won't be running out of space just like we didn't run out of food.
Correction: we haven't run out of food, yet.
But we animals have a self-correcting system as far as that goes; if the food supply isn't sufficient to support a large population, then the population simply grows at a slower rate. The same will happen with our data; if we reach a point where we can't store all the non-ephemeral data we generate, we'll reflexively limit the amount of non-ephemeral data that we generate.
None of those are problems with web apps, they're problems with the decisions the companies made in developing said web apps.
If they require client-side Java code or any ActiveX controls beyond XMLHttpRequest*, I wouldn't even call them web apps; they are client applications which are distributed via HTTP.
(* What's with the irregular capitalization, Microsoft? Why not "XmlHttpRequest" or "XMLHTTPRequest"?)
A slot 1-only cart will never be able to play GBA games
I'd never say never about that.
When the DS hardware is in GBA mode, it's using the slower of the DS's two processors, and at only half the available clockspeed. It's possible--not necessarily practical, but possible--that a reasonably playable GBA emulator could be implemented in software allowing GBA titles to be run from Slot-1.
But since actual hardware compatibility is available for the cost of a Slot-2 card, I don't think we'll see much hobbyist effort toward that end. If you need GBA support, get a Slot-2 device and a passthrough.