One risk to Wii that people here don't seem very concerned about is that it isn't very fast!
Correct. I'm not very concerned that the Wii has a far lower clock rate than its competitors.
As if simply being released at a certain date places a console within this "generation" of consoles.
Isn't that kind of the definition of a "generation"? A collection of contemporary items?
The Wii's controller may be cool, but what's to stop somebody making that for the XBox 360 or even the PS2?
Patents. Nintendo didn't spend the last few years investing heavily in controller R&D just to give the fruits of their labor away to the competition for free. No other console will be able to have a Wii-style controller without paying Nintendo for the privilege.
Even if Sony moves the PS3 relases date back to 2008, developers will still support it, and people will still buy it.
I wouldn't count on that, and apparently Wall Street doesn't either.
When Sony announced their bad news earlier this week, it wasn't just their stock price that fell. Game publishers that have supported Sony, like Electronic Arts and THQ, saw their prices fall along with it. Between the risk to their own bottom lines, and the market limitations that come along with releasing a console more expensive than and later than the competition, I would expect to see developer support fall off exponentially the longer Sony delays.
When a USA citizen buys something from a UK shop located in the UK and doing business in the UK, UK laws apply, UK taxes apply, and the rest is meaningless.
Define "located" and "doing business".
Every transaction has two endpoints. In cases like this, one of the endpoints is indisputably located within the jurisdiction of the United States. How would US laws NOT be applicable?
Any video format that transmits data in separate RGB channels is considered component. Even S-Video is sometimes considered a component video feed (I don't understand why, since it's "luminance/chrominance".
In that case, the 3-cable video interconnect commonly called "component", but more accurately described as "YPrPb", isn't a true component format by your definition, either. The signals aren't true red, green, and blue levels: the "green" line is a luminance signal, not unlike the one on the Y pin of an S-Video connector, and the other two are color deltas.
go for HDMI or DVI (which are the same video format, HDMI just includes 6 channels of audio as well).
The HDMI spec, AFAIK, does not support a fixed number of audio channels, but rather a single data stream which may be decoded by the receiver to 2.0, 5.1, 7.1, etc. Just like the SPDIF coaxial and optical digital audio jacks on existing gear, only built into the same cable assembly as the digital video.
Adult gamers will prefer to Wii, due to their Nintendo roots, innovative design, and cheaper price.
I don't think we can assume that the entire adult-gamer market has roots in Nintendo's classic systems anymore.
There's a new generation of post-adolescents about to come of age that weren't even BORN during Nintendo's 8-bit heyday. Their first tastes of console gaming weren't with Mario and Zelda, but rather with Cloud Strife and Lara Croft. Their nostalgic allegiance is with Sony. It is this type of gamer, the ones who just got a $50k/year job out of college and still live with Mom and Dad, to whom the PS3 seems to be targeted.
That being said, I don't think there's nearly enough of that type of gamer to sustain the PS3. Especially not, as you point out, when Microsoft has already had a console that targets the same type of gamer out for almost a year now.
Refundable micropayments. Seriously. Require people pay $1 to post a comment
$1 is not a micropayment. A tenth of a cent would be a micropayment.
Once you have checked their comment, you can add them to a whitelist that will never be charged again and refund them their $1. Spammers don't get their dollar back, don't get added to the whitelist, and have their comment removed.
Spammers learn to make the first comment they leave a legitimate one, get whitelisted, get their dollar back, and THEN proceed with the spamming once the trojan horse is through your gate.
Perhaps a solution is making the captcha time-intensive? If it takes an additional 30 seconds of 45 seconds, it might cut down on the number of captchas a person could solve in an hour.
It might also increase the number of legitimate users of your site who will give up in frustration and go to another site, similar to yours but with less aggravation.
360 and Wii could well be hitting the limit for data-storage on disk at launch, no room to expand later without a new hardware revision.
If by "new hardware revision" you mean "release the title on two DVD9's instead of just one", yes. But that's really not very onerous, to the developer or the publisher or the gamer.
If we assume that most modern console games are generally linear and contain about 40 hours of gameplay, then a hardcore gamer would only have to get up off the couch and swap discs in a 2-disc game maybe once per week. A more casual gamer, maybe only once per month. That's really not so bad.
Being that it's a Commodore 8-bit, it's probably actually PETSCII instead. Then what? It could take MINUTES to write a character-set conversion script!
So every Friday I rent a few videos, run them through the TBC to my OSX G5, and burn a DVD for future reference...
And THAT'S how it's done.
That's how WHAT is done? Copyright infringement? Media piracy?
May I suggest that you try watching your rented movies instead of just burning archival copies to squirrel away? You might find it to be a more entertaining pastime.
The price isn't particularly outrageous for its features if you compare it to the Mac Mini for example.
Except I can do a lot more with a general-purpose computer like a $599 Mac Mini than I can with a $599 PS3. But the Mac doesn't come with a DVI cable included, so maybe it's a moot argument.
An attendance policy? Miss class 6 times, you fail. That's the policy at my university, and it works.
It works for collecting nonrefundable tuition fees from kids who don't or can't make it to class often enough. But does it work for providing the students an education?
Assuming it has an SP-DIF digital audio out, the number of channels is pretty much irrelevant. It's just moving the Dolby or DTS digital audio stream directly from the disc to the output port.
AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
You seem to be mistaken about the meaning of the term end-user.
So maybe you don't like the 12 tone scale, but if you play more than one scale in one song you are in BIG trouble if you don't use the system that J.S. Bach introduced.....how do you deal with that?
That's only an issue for instruments with fixed intonations: pianos, harps, fretted guitars. Other instrumentalists--wind players, brass, fretless strings--are easily able to change intonation by adjusting embrouchure or finger position.
Tuners are going to be the death of string playing, particularly with regards to traditional and baroque music.
I've started to see electric fiddles with frets on them.
I'd be as shocked and outraged over that as you seem to be, except I can see that an "electric fiddle" is not the same instrument as "a violin". You're not going to see Jean-Luc Ponty playing Vivaldi with the London Philharmonic.
Learn to hear intervals, not notes; and learn to tune by fifths. Then go out and get yourself a shitload of the oldest recordings of solo Irish and Old Time fiddle music you can find and learn to hear the microtones.
That's great advice, but I'm not sure it's all that applicable to a n00b musician who hasn't yet mastered the difference between B flat and B natural. Twelve-tone equal temperament may not be the last system of intonation a musician should learn, but it should be the first.
When you form a contract with another party, you earn a "right" to receive the consideration from them that you bargained for.
You typically earn the right to receive that consideration for a fixed period of time, not indefinitely.
If one party becomes unable or unwilling to provide that consideration, the resolution is usually to free both parties from the contract as per its dissolution terms. It is rare for a party to be FORCED to continue providing consideration unwillingly, beyond the contractual term (which, in the case of a cable internet service, might be 24 months at the outset, rolling over to month-to-month at its end).
However the unoriginal content and expensive disk medium that was crippled with bad load times (let alone battery life issues) held the PSP back.
I don't think I agree that a primary reason for the DS's phenomenal success has been the relative disappointment that the PSP has been. I think it's perfectly valid to measure the DS on its own merits.
I wonder -- if Sony had not developed the PSP, would Nintendo have bothered releasing the DS at all? Or would they have been content to eke a few more years of life out of the Gameboy Advance platform? In that regard, perhaps Sony does deserve some of the credit for the DS.
My Slashdot karma is excellent, and I meta-moderate almost every day, but I haven't gotten any mod points in years. I suspect I had that privilege taken away from me by one of the Editors after chastising him one too many times for abusing his position and attaching his opinions to the untouchable story submission instead of leaving a moderatable comment like the rest of us do.
As long as administrative roles are a necessity, there will always be opportunities for administrative misbehavior. And I don't expect servers to run themselves anytime soon.
But some folks have 3 terabytes (not porn btw) of HTPC stuff, considering how cheap hard drives are now and there's no good way to back up that much data..
I put it to you that most of that 3TB of home theater PC stuff does not NEED to be backed up.
Content you ripped from DVD's you own? The original discs ARE the backup. Re-rip them.
Content you downloaded from the Internet? It's probably still there. Re-download it.
Content you DVR'ed off of a television feed? Much of it will be fed to you again in reruns, or eventually on DVD.
Only when none of these apply do you need to make a backup.
Slashdot Mirror
tricks like static images for backgrounds to make the games look like there were much more graphically superior then they really were.
So instead of looking better, the games only LOOKED like they looked better? Is there a difference?
One risk to Wii that people here don't seem very concerned about is that it isn't very fast!
Correct. I'm not very concerned that the Wii has a far lower clock rate than its competitors.
As if simply being released at a certain date places a console within this "generation" of consoles.
Isn't that kind of the definition of a "generation"? A collection of contemporary items?
The Wii's controller may be cool, but what's to stop somebody making that for the XBox 360 or even the PS2?
Patents. Nintendo didn't spend the last few years investing heavily in controller R&D just to give the fruits of their labor away to the competition for free. No other console will be able to have a Wii-style controller without paying Nintendo for the privilege.
Even if Sony moves the PS3 relases date back to 2008, developers will still support it, and people will still buy it.
I wouldn't count on that, and apparently Wall Street doesn't either.
When Sony announced their bad news earlier this week, it wasn't just their stock price that fell. Game publishers that have supported Sony, like Electronic Arts and THQ, saw their prices fall along with it. Between the risk to their own bottom lines, and the market limitations that come along with releasing a console more expensive than and later than the competition, I would expect to see developer support fall off exponentially the longer Sony delays.
When a USA citizen buys something from a UK shop located in the UK and doing business in the UK, UK laws apply, UK taxes apply, and the rest is meaningless.
Define "located" and "doing business".
Every transaction has two endpoints. In cases like this, one of the endpoints is indisputably located within the jurisdiction of the United States. How would US laws NOT be applicable?
And the Wii is far too underpowered to support features like real-time weapon change.
If you hit a Giant Feudal Crab's weak point in a Wii game, you'll be lucky to get only MILD damage from it.
Any video format that transmits data in separate RGB channels is considered component. Even S-Video is sometimes considered a component video feed (I don't understand why, since it's "luminance/chrominance".
In that case, the 3-cable video interconnect commonly called "component", but more accurately described as "YPrPb", isn't a true component format by your definition, either. The signals aren't true red, green, and blue levels: the "green" line is a luminance signal, not unlike the one on the Y pin of an S-Video connector, and the other two are color deltas.
go for HDMI or DVI (which are the same video format, HDMI just includes 6 channels of audio as well).
The HDMI spec, AFAIK, does not support a fixed number of audio channels, but rather a single data stream which may be decoded by the receiver to 2.0, 5.1, 7.1, etc. Just like the SPDIF coaxial and optical digital audio jacks on existing gear, only built into the same cable assembly as the digital video.
Thus: HDMI = DVI + SPDIF.
Oh, + DRM also. Can't forget about that.
Adult gamers will prefer to Wii, due to their Nintendo roots, innovative design, and cheaper price.
I don't think we can assume that the entire adult-gamer market has roots in Nintendo's classic systems anymore.
There's a new generation of post-adolescents about to come of age that weren't even BORN during Nintendo's 8-bit heyday. Their first tastes of console gaming weren't with Mario and Zelda, but rather with Cloud Strife and Lara Croft. Their nostalgic allegiance is with Sony. It is this type of gamer, the ones who just got a $50k/year job out of college and still live with Mom and Dad, to whom the PS3 seems to be targeted.
That being said, I don't think there's nearly enough of that type of gamer to sustain the PS3. Especially not, as you point out, when Microsoft has already had a console that targets the same type of gamer out for almost a year now.
To be fair, $100 more for a High-Def player is cheap.
To be fair, $500 for a home entertainment device--ANY home entertainment device--does not qualify as "cheap" to me.
To be fair, I have no desire to own a High-Def player at this point in time, so that $100 would be wasted money if I were to buy a PS3.
a self-contained VM in hardware
Or, to put it a little more succintly, "a machine".
Refundable micropayments. Seriously. Require people pay $1 to post a comment
$1 is not a micropayment. A tenth of a cent would be a micropayment.
Once you have checked their comment, you can add them to a whitelist that will never be charged again and refund them their $1. Spammers don't get their dollar back, don't get added to the whitelist, and have their comment removed.
Spammers learn to make the first comment they leave a legitimate one, get whitelisted, get their dollar back, and THEN proceed with the spamming once the trojan horse is through your gate.
And the arms race escalates all over again.
Perhaps a solution is making the captcha time-intensive? If it takes an additional 30 seconds of 45 seconds, it might cut down on the number of captchas a person could solve in an hour.
It might also increase the number of legitimate users of your site who will give up in frustration and go to another site, similar to yours but with less aggravation.
360 and Wii could well be hitting the limit for data-storage on disk at launch, no room to expand later without a new hardware revision.
If by "new hardware revision" you mean "release the title on two DVD9's instead of just one", yes. But that's really not very onerous, to the developer or the publisher or the gamer.
If we assume that most modern console games are generally linear and contain about 40 hours of gameplay, then a hardcore gamer would only have to get up off the couch and swap discs in a 2-disc game maybe once per week. A more casual gamer, maybe only once per month. That's really not so bad.
It's just ASCII after all, no big problem.
Being that it's a Commodore 8-bit, it's probably actually PETSCII instead. Then what? It could take MINUTES to write a character-set conversion script!
So every Friday I rent a few videos, run them through the TBC to my OSX G5, and burn a DVD for future reference...
And THAT'S how it's done.
That's how WHAT is done? Copyright infringement? Media piracy?
May I suggest that you try watching your rented movies instead of just burning archival copies to squirrel away? You might find it to be a more entertaining pastime.
No console I'm aware of has ever had standard connections on the back...
Back in the 8-bit days, most consoles had standardized RF signal outputs. The NES even had standard composite video and (mono) audio jacks.
The price isn't particularly outrageous for its features if you compare it to the Mac Mini for example.
Except I can do a lot more with a general-purpose computer like a $599 Mac Mini than I can with a $599 PS3. But the Mac doesn't come with a DVI cable included, so maybe it's a moot argument.
An attendance policy? Miss class 6 times, you fail. That's the policy at my university, and it works.
It works for collecting nonrefundable tuition fees from kids who don't or can't make it to class often enough. But does it work for providing the students an education?
And 5.1 (or maybe even 7.1!) sound output.
Assuming it has an SP-DIF digital audio out, the number of channels is pretty much irrelevant. It's just moving the Dolby or DTS digital audio stream directly from the disc to the output port.
AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
You seem to be mistaken about the meaning of the term end-user.
So maybe you don't like the 12 tone scale, but if you play more than one scale in one song you are in BIG trouble if you don't use the system that J.S. Bach introduced.....how do you deal with that?
That's only an issue for instruments with fixed intonations: pianos, harps, fretted guitars. Other instrumentalists--wind players, brass, fretless strings--are easily able to change intonation by adjusting embrouchure or finger position.
Tuners are going to be the death of string playing, particularly with regards to traditional and baroque music.
I've started to see electric fiddles with frets on them.
I'd be as shocked and outraged over that as you seem to be, except I can see that an "electric fiddle" is not the same instrument as "a violin". You're not going to see Jean-Luc Ponty playing Vivaldi with the London Philharmonic.
Learn to hear intervals, not notes; and learn to tune by fifths. Then go out and get yourself a shitload of the oldest recordings of solo Irish and Old Time fiddle music you can find and learn to hear the microtones.
That's great advice, but I'm not sure it's all that applicable to a n00b musician who hasn't yet mastered the difference between B flat and B natural. Twelve-tone equal temperament may not be the last system of intonation a musician should learn, but it should be the first.
When you form a contract with another party, you earn a "right" to receive the consideration from them that you bargained for.
You typically earn the right to receive that consideration for a fixed period of time, not indefinitely.
If one party becomes unable or unwilling to provide that consideration, the resolution is usually to free both parties from the contract as per its dissolution terms. It is rare for a party to be FORCED to continue providing consideration unwillingly, beyond the contractual term (which, in the case of a cable internet service, might be 24 months at the outset, rolling over to month-to-month at its end).
However the unoriginal content and expensive disk medium that was crippled with bad load times (let alone battery life issues) held the PSP back.
I don't think I agree that a primary reason for the DS's phenomenal success has been the relative disappointment that the PSP has been. I think it's perfectly valid to measure the DS on its own merits.
I wonder -- if Sony had not developed the PSP, would Nintendo have bothered releasing the DS at all? Or would they have been content to eke a few more years of life out of the Gameboy Advance platform? In that regard, perhaps Sony does deserve some of the credit for the DS.
But then who watches the watcher watchers?
My Slashdot karma is excellent, and I meta-moderate almost every day, but I haven't gotten any mod points in years. I suspect I had that privilege taken away from me by one of the Editors after chastising him one too many times for abusing his position and attaching his opinions to the untouchable story submission instead of leaving a moderatable comment like the rest of us do.
As long as administrative roles are a necessity, there will always be opportunities for administrative misbehavior. And I don't expect servers to run themselves anytime soon.
But some folks have 3 terabytes (not porn btw) of HTPC stuff, considering how cheap hard drives are now and there's no good way to back up that much data..
I put it to you that most of that 3TB of home theater PC stuff does not NEED to be backed up.
Content you ripped from DVD's you own? The original discs ARE the backup. Re-rip them.
Content you downloaded from the Internet? It's probably still there. Re-download it.
Content you DVR'ed off of a television feed? Much of it will be fed to you again in reruns, or eventually on DVD.
Only when none of these apply do you need to make a backup.