I think everyone's referring to system link capable games. 16 player Halo is, of course, a bigger experience than 4 player split screen Halo. It's a big deal in college dorms and apartments, and vastly more popular than 4 player Halo obviously. Still, the Gamecube is much better suited for party games with wireless controllers and a smaller console (if you've ever had to untangle 8 or more controller wires to switch one controller to a different Xbox, you'd appreciate the wavebird).
Many people were expecting a price cut to be in effect a few weeks before E3, or at least be announced during it. Sales may have just slowed down because people expected this, and now they are picking up again which is "doubling" sales.
How about just using an old fashioned security camera everywhere then? You can just rewind the tapes from checkout to the entrance and find out exactly what people did in the store. If a person purchased anything with a credit/debit card, they can probably find out exactly who you are and, if they were so inclined, find out what you did as well by singling you out.
Yes, it may be easier to do compile certain data about customers, but not really any more than they have right now because most of the data is useless. There's a stronger link between products purchased together than ones that you look at based on impulse buys.
The problem with all the complaining is that I would say a fair share of it is the "I want to be the most powerful god-like character" or "How dare such and such got changed, now I need to get XYZ to be just as powerful?" It's a cyclical thing too in that once one class of players is satisified, another group complains that they didn't get any improvements. There's always that amount of complaining and when the players are always online, they have plenty of time to complain. Look at the Battle.net forums on Warcraft III for instance. There are always players complaining about such and such balances or that "X" race is better than "Y" race. Weed out all those complaints, and then I think you'll find the majority of bugs are fixed (interface bugs, pathfinding bugs, actual code changes and not gameplay issues, etc.).
And as for customer satisfaction, I think you should look at the turnover rate of players. Obviously players find some value in games like Everquest and Final Fantasy XI. Otherwise, they would end up like Anarchy Online.
Be careful about this. University of Texas at Austin actually had (or has) a hidden MS/technology tax in their course registrations. I heard $5 or so is given to MS for every course or something (multiply that by about 40,000+ people on campus, and you're talking a bit of change every semester). So you really probably paid more than the $25 cost of the license to use MS products all around campus in the labs, libraries, etc. and to get that "incredible" discount.
SOCOM, Gran Turismo, Jak and Daxter, and Ratchet and Clank are some made by Sony themselves. Now it seems the Virtual Fighter series, pretty much any game made by Squaresoft with the exception of FF:CC and any Gameboy Advance games I'm forgetting about, etc. There are quite a few more games but most of them aren't that famous. And I don't believe any of those have PC ports, except the Final Fantasies but I don't know many people that buy them on the PC.
Xbox is getting Ninja Gaiden of course and they have things like Steel Battlaion (sp?) and Crimson Skies. They don't have that many exclusives that aren't made by MS themselves, but that's becuase their library is smaller and they keep buying out any successful developer.
Gamecube has lots of exclusives but most of them are made by Nintendo. That doesn't make them any worse though 'cause most of their games are really great.
You just don't realize how crappy Anarchy Online and WWII Online were when they first started.:)
In seriousness, you probably can't tell the stability and the testers probably were only shown things that were guaranteed to work. However, at least it appears fun and things work as intended.
How can HP be turn into the very place that sells their gear? That doesn't seem possible. HP cannot represent themselves as a Best Buy - like electronic merchandise store becaue they would be competing with the entity that sells their stuff.
Why is CNN, a Time Warner owned channel, on cable services besides Time Warner's own cable service? Isn't Time Warner selling its cable channel to a competing cable service and helping the competing cable service? Why is the competing cable service buying the rights to air CNN when they're essentially funding a competitor?
Or better yet, watch what Microsoft does with all of its X-Boxes, SmartPhones, Media Center PCs, etc. They're essentially taking over the specific-use PC market and working their way up and cannablizing PC sales along the way. They're competiting with PC manufacturers like Dell who sell their stuff. That was the number one fear from a PC manufacturer's standpoint when MS announced the X-Box.
Another example more directly related is Microsoft selling music themselves. They're going to be "competing" against companies that have licensed their WMA DRM technology.
In the business world, if you can sell a product through an outlet, even your competitors', you need to consider it. If it's mutually beneficial, then it will be done. Furthermore, from a CEO's perspective, it is better to compete and have a chance at a market rather than just give up and let someone else take it over without a fight. From the consumer's point of view, enjoy the competition while it lasts. This is the time to take advantage of the promotions, coupons, etc.
Further, even if I do accept such a premise, it does not provide me with a sufficient reason to choose the HP music store unless HP designs a portable music player that is totally proprietary and I got suckered into buying it.
It doesn't necessarily. That why you have to wait for the store to open. If they offered better service, convinence (whether it be one-click shopping or less restrictive DRM or such), and prices, then you would choose it just like a brick and mortar store where certain similiar qualities like service, price, convinence (easy to get to, easy to find the stuff you're looking for in the store) convinced you to buy from there.
Online retailers are all in the same physical place.
Not necessarily. Online retailers's physical locations may impact you in the form of taxes. If your state has an Apple store anywhere within it, you need to pay taxes on your iTunes Music Store purchases for instance. Savings on taxes plus free shipping are perhaps the major price advantage for most products sold on the web, and if most people could find a place that saves them money for the same items, most people take advantage of it.
Furthermore, while you can order things online, living in Austin/Round Rock, Texas may allow you to get quicker service for Dell products versus living in New York. Shipping times may be reduced as well as returns and such. Although not a huge deal to most, it is to some people that want things on the day of release for instance or need to be able to get customer service ASAP.
So this gives us no need to choose the HP music store over any other store. Further, HP hardware is not proprietary in the sense that getting music from the HP store would either be a required method of getting music or the easiest because of a lack of other sources. This seems to tell me one thing: HP's journey into online digital music sales will most likely be short lived.
Think of HP, Dell, and especially Gateway turning into the new Best Buys, Frys, and CompUSAs. They're already selling plasma TVs, PDAs, and digital cameras. This is just merely another technology product that they are offering. Then the reason why you pick HP versus Dell or Best Buy versus Frys is the customer service, prices, etc. just like a traditional retail outlet.
My key point is: if I'm going to have to download AAC files (which costs me money), then burn them to CD (which also costs me money) in order to listen to them on my other systems.
You paid for a digital file. If you had paid for the CD, you would have had to rip the CD, then transfer it to your MP3 player of choice or whatever. There are costs involved in going from one device to another whether it be in the form of time or money. The world is built on many incompatible standards.
However, at US$0.99 a song from iTMS, multiplied by the number of songs on a typical CD, it's awful close to the cost of buying a CD from the shop *and* I've now got less than I used to get buying a physical CD.
Most albums on iTunes Music Store are $9.99 (or less) for the entire album whether it had 11 songs or 18 songs or however many that were on the CD. If the album had 2 CDs, you pay more ($17 or so were a few). If the CD had less than 10 songs, you pay only $0.99 multiplied by the number of songs.
I'm not too sure where you live but most CDs in the US are $13-$15 just by doing casual shopping. Getting the full CD for $9.99 plus the cost of one CD-R ($0.15 or so if you buy in bulk) is hardly that huge of a cost. The only things you lose are the liner notes and the album art (well you get the front cover art as a BMP but I don't think many people will print it out) and maybe the jewel case if you're nitpicky.
The record companies haven't had to create a physical CD, ship it to store, and the bricks-and-mortar shop hasn't had to pay the expense of floor space to have it displayed somewhere. The non-existent shop hasn't had to train and employ people to handle the exchange of goods for cash, nor deal with stock control and cash flow issues that come from operating any physical-goods-for-money business. I'd like the record companies to acknowledge this and pass on these savings via lower costs for purchasing downloaded music.
Are you saying that you're just magically getting the files and that bandwidth is free? Apple provides the servers, service, software (for free even if you don't download songs and it's a fair audio media player at the least), bandwidth, etc. Imagine all the non-tech-savvy people calling the tech support lines to find out how they can share files and whatnot. That is costly. They went and got the actual audio masters and ripped it directly instead of just ripping a CD. The record companies still (need to) do promotions for the artists. There are still some costs involved.
Also, you get to preview 30 seconds of any song that way you can also decide if you want the entire album or just the single song that got you interested in the first place. I've personally abused this feature by checking out various albums to see if I would like to get the whole thing or just the single. You get to buy individual tracks when before you only had the option of buying the single CDs that were out before and if an album contained a song that wasn't available separately, you were stuck wasting more money. You have search features, easy recommendations, top 100 lists, celeberity playlists (I find them useless but others I know like the feature), exclusives, you didn't have to drive somewhere to buy the CD, practically no wait times, etc.
The record companies are probably charging an arm and a leg more than they should. You do get somewhat of a cheaper price for the music, and for me, I didn't care too much for the physical media laying around so it works out for me. I just wanted to say that there are still plenty of costs involved. Looking at other Internet businesses, while there are surely great savings to be found, for the most part, the real advantage is the free shipping and no tax in certain stores.
iTMS isn't perfect by any means. I don't like DRM but the personal usage rights actually are decent. I don't like the idea of paying tax on an Internet purchase when I never have before. I would like higher quality files and even a better selection, but hey, it's acceptable right now.
There are many ways to defeat garbage collection. The easiest is for a A to refence B and B to reference A although I've never actually seen that one yet in production.
The reason you haven't seen it is because if you know anything about the basics of Java's garbage collection algorithms, you have to come up with a much more complex situation than this to "defeat garbage collection". Many programs have circular references, but due to the way that the garbage collector works, this is not a problem.
I also disagree with your definition of a memory leak for #1 and #2 in your examples. Both are just bugs that also happen to have the side-effect of exhausting memory. I'm not saying that there aren't memory leaks in Java as JVMs leaking memory is a valid example IMO, but if my program got stuck in a while loop and kept appending data to a data structure without terminating, I would consider that to be a bug in the exit conditions, not a memory leak.
I don't think Intel really wants to drive AMD out of business. It's better to have a known adversary than one that comes out of nowhere. Also, it helps to have some viable competition (just not one that gets too big) that way your company doesn't just sit and rot with no goals. If there wasn't any competition, the day that another company comes out with something better, you're at a loss at how to fight them.
Where do you get this idea? So far besides EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI (only in Japan right now), I don't think there are any other games that require an additional fee. The sports games (EA Sports, Sega) which are probably the most played online game do not require additional fees, and these are probably the most important games that matter to your everyday consumer. FPS and RTS games are the vasty minority of the market looking at the sales charts of GTA, Madden, or Final Fantasy.
BTW, it was confirmed earlier that PSO for X-Box would have an additional fee on top of X-Box Live, and honestly, I expect every other game that has a persistent world to charge online fees even if they are for X-Box. There's just no way that publishers would make an online world and just let MS rack in the $10 charge to themselves (which is about what is expected for the "fixed" subscription fee). Imagine there are even 2 popular persistent world games, and you have problems on how to divide that "fixed" subscription fee, and the maintaince costs on games like EQ/UO aren't that cheap either.
You can bet that Star Wars Galaxies will have an additional fee regardless if you play on PC, PS2, or X-Box.
X-Box Live may be pretty slick in requiring voice communication and also by having the same user ID across games, but don't expect that your $10/month (or whatever MS starts charging in a year) to get you anything more than that. X-Box Live will probably turn out like the online PC gaming market where most games are free with free downloadable content but the persistent world ones cost you some extra change.
Isn't the LucasArts Fan Network made up of JediKnightII.net / JediKnight.Net amongst other websites? Since most "networks" are really run by the same people under different aliases, I don't think it really matters if they created a new domain website for it.
AOL may be worried that integrating ICQ and AIM will have not only security problems (ICQ has been riddled with them over the years), but also the spammers would get a hold of AIM screennames too. AIM hasn't had nearly as bad a problem as ICQ has had, and if the two integrated and sex IM ads started being sent to AOL users via IM, it could be disasterous for a relatively safe IM enviornment right now when child safety and parental concern is a major concern for some AOL users.
I keep seeing people post that you only pay a flat rate fee and you get access to all of X-Box's online games. Why is it that in some articles about X-Box Live, there's also a statement like the following:
"Microsoft has committed to assisting publishers in the hosting, networking, security, and
billing for their online games."
That seems to suggest that there will be the possibility of additional fees for some games. Online RPGs for instance are now expected to be updated regularly with new items, quests, etc., and I imagine that a static world would mean the death of the game. Yes, people would love to not download patches that fixes features that should have been in the game in the first place. However, people also love the dynamics of the game where the weapon you had last week may have been the best, but the new weapon drops on such and such mob is even better.
Back to the original point, who is going to pay for those updates, as these updates will certainly not be developed for free? That $10 a month will probably cover the bandwidth and matchmaking services, but it's doubtful it will help cover developer expenses, and if it doesn't cover their expenses, why bother making an online game? Sports games are suppose to update their statistics and rosters (injuries) as the real life season progresses for a more "realistic" game, so it's not only RPGs that would require developer maintaince. Let's say MS is generous and gives a portion of that $10 to developers. But what if gamers play more than one online RPG with more than one sports game? Then that $10 is split so many different ways that it becomes insignificant. And if developers have to pay for hosting at MS's datacenters, that is a recurring monthly fee for the developers possibly, and I doubt that the $50 you paid for the initial game can pay not only for the development costs of the game, but also the recurring monthly costs to be hosted by MS. I just don't think people should get their hopes up that this is a $10 flat fee.
Most of the HDTVs I've seen have more than one set of component in jacks, usually at least two. In any case, there are switch boxes for this, but they're pretty expensive. I wouldn't bother with component input from consoles to TV tho. The advantages compared to S-Video aren't that apparent to me especially if you're playing on a regular TV.
What exactly do you imagine Sony doing to provide support for more generic network games?
They already have gotten support from EA (sports games), Sega (sports games), and more than a handful of Japanese game developers. Racing games, fighting games, flight games, RPGs, FPS are all accounted for. I've heard more from Sony recently than Microsoft, but Microsoft is probably holding out for E3 this week.
Sony has been touting their partnerships with AOL and RealPlayer among others and support from game developers. Microsoft has been boasting about their service and their voice capabilities. Both are probably holding most of their game announcements for E3. In any case, neither is set to launch their services officially until Fall this year unless one of them pulls something out of thin air.
Personally, I don't understand all the fuss about the online race for this generation of consoles. It will mostly be all beta testing for the next generation, and the games are mostly unproven so far. Laggy fighting games where twitch reflexes are key to winning, racing games where most PC racing games have not fared well, and so forth all seem like a big hassle. Sports games are one of the few exceptions IMO. It's definitely intriguing to look at the games and see where the gaming companies think consoles are going, but right now, it's pretty unknown territory that in of itself is a gamble to even develop an online game for.
Re:How much more can parents take?
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Parents already pay a handful of monthly bills in terms of ISP subscriptions, cell phones, and other type of bills (think Disney channel or Everquest) for their kids. Another ~$10 won't be a big deal. Yes, things like Internet service and cell phones are used by adults, but teenagers and younger kids are primary users as well these days.
On another point, console game prices are headed south if the latest rumors regarding Sony and Nintendo are true. Most brand new titles today debut at $35-$40 for their first week lately in the Sunday ads much like their PC counterparts. Many of Sony's big titles are also going to their Greatest Hits series at a reduced costs for roughly $30 less than a year after they've been out.
I won't even attempt to convince you that while X-Box may be a PC in a box, in all fairness, it does have some things going for it. I'm a happy PS2-only owner at the moment BTW.
Like the AC said, you have to be really optimistic if you think that the console online wars are over. PS2 online games will also probably have fees (FFXI does). $150 for addons is quite a bit of money considering that the PS2 now only costs $200. I think the pricing will actually drop significantly to $100 or less for both eventually, but that's still a big chunk of change.
X-Box has Unreal Championship and an online version of Halo probably as well as Asheron's Call. I don't recall if SW: Galaxies will be going to PS2, and a quick lookover the FAQ says its undecided.
As a PS2 owner, I think Sony is the only one that has really announced concrete plans, and theirs will launch first in the US unless MS pulls something weird at E3. However, as far as who is in the better position, that's definitely undecided.
A few other sites such as Magic Box are reporting pretty good sales. While expectations are probably different with console gamers versus PC gamers, I haven't seen a PC MMORPG do any better yet. Also, building an initial fanbase is always rocky but if Square is able to stick it out for the long term and the game is good enough that word spreads, they may have the first Everquest on consoles.
Doesn't Red Hat only increment the major version number when there is a "major" compiler version change? If so, then they're just following their normal practices which I suppose is a good thing.
Like most anime DVDs today, there are removable English subtitles with the original Japanese audio track and a dubbed English audio track. ADV even has a French track and if I remember correctly a Spanish track as well on the Evangelion discs. The remastered volume 1 has a clean opening and ending too. As a side note, other than the audio tracks and the clean opening and ending, the ADV Eva DVDs are pretty much void of any extras.
What most anime fans complain about is the accuracy of the subtitles nowadays and whether or not the subtitles were taken from the original Japanese script or the dub English script. AFAIK, Eva's subtitles are fairly accurate and are based on the original Japanese dialogue. I don't know enough Japanese to verify what is said, but I think there would have been more complaining if it was a "dubtitle" script.
In more recent anime DVD releases (not Eva but recent releases from Bandai, Pioneer, and Right Stuf amongst others), even signs and other characters (you know those random "Boom!", "Zoom!", "Bang!"-type words that express actions/feelings) are only translated via a removable subtitle track, so there is even less touching of the video. There are usually 2 subtitle tracks. One that just has the signs for the dub viewers, and another that has both the signs and the translated Japanese dialogue.
I really like DVDs more than past VHS and laserdisc releases just because not only do you get better video and audio, it's a format that allows subtitles and dubs to coexist eliminating tension amongst dub versus sub buyers. It really is helpful to foreign film buyers as well. I hope any future format will keep if not build upon DVD's features in this area.
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I think everyone's referring to system link capable games. 16 player Halo is, of course, a bigger experience than 4 player split screen Halo. It's a big deal in college dorms and apartments, and vastly more popular than 4 player Halo obviously. Still, the Gamecube is much better suited for party games with wireless controllers and a smaller console (if you've ever had to untangle 8 or more controller wires to switch one controller to a different Xbox, you'd appreciate the wavebird).
Many people were expecting a price cut to be in effect a few weeks before E3, or at least be announced during it. Sales may have just slowed down because people expected this, and now they are picking up again which is "doubling" sales.
How about just using an old fashioned security camera everywhere then? You can just rewind the tapes from checkout to the entrance and find out exactly what people did in the store. If a person purchased anything with a credit/debit card, they can probably find out exactly who you are and, if they were so inclined, find out what you did as well by singling you out.
Yes, it may be easier to do compile certain data about customers, but not really any more than they have right now because most of the data is useless. There's a stronger link between products purchased together than ones that you look at based on impulse buys.
The problem with all the complaining is that I would say a fair share of it is the "I want to be the most powerful god-like character" or "How dare such and such got changed, now I need to get XYZ to be just as powerful?" It's a cyclical thing too in that once one class of players is satisified, another group complains that they didn't get any improvements. There's always that amount of complaining and when the players are always online, they have plenty of time to complain. Look at the Battle.net forums on Warcraft III for instance. There are always players complaining about such and such balances or that "X" race is better than "Y" race. Weed out all those complaints, and then I think you'll find the majority of bugs are fixed (interface bugs, pathfinding bugs, actual code changes and not gameplay issues, etc.).
And as for customer satisfaction, I think you should look at the turnover rate of players. Obviously players find some value in games like Everquest and Final Fantasy XI. Otherwise, they would end up like Anarchy Online.
Be careful about this. University of Texas at Austin actually had (or has) a hidden MS/technology tax in their course registrations. I heard $5 or so is given to MS for every course or something (multiply that by about 40,000+ people on campus, and you're talking a bit of change every semester). So you really probably paid more than the $25 cost of the license to use MS products all around campus in the labs, libraries, etc. and to get that "incredible" discount.
I was referring to Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge which I believe is an XBox exclusive.
SOCOM, Gran Turismo, Jak and Daxter, and Ratchet and Clank are some made by Sony themselves. Now it seems the Virtual Fighter series, pretty much any game made by Squaresoft with the exception of FF:CC and any Gameboy Advance games I'm forgetting about, etc. There are quite a few more games but most of them aren't that famous. And I don't believe any of those have PC ports, except the Final Fantasies but I don't know many people that buy them on the PC. Xbox is getting Ninja Gaiden of course and they have things like Steel Battlaion (sp?) and Crimson Skies. They don't have that many exclusives that aren't made by MS themselves, but that's becuase their library is smaller and they keep buying out any successful developer. Gamecube has lots of exclusives but most of them are made by Nintendo. That doesn't make them any worse though 'cause most of their games are really great.
You just don't realize how crappy Anarchy Online and WWII Online were when they first started. :)
In seriousness, you probably can't tell the stability and the testers probably were only shown things that were guaranteed to work. However, at least it appears fun and things work as intended.
Why is CNN, a Time Warner owned channel, on cable services besides Time Warner's own cable service? Isn't Time Warner selling its cable channel to a competing cable service and helping the competing cable service? Why is the competing cable service buying the rights to air CNN when they're essentially funding a competitor?
Or better yet, watch what Microsoft does with all of its X-Boxes, SmartPhones, Media Center PCs, etc. They're essentially taking over the specific-use PC market and working their way up and cannablizing PC sales along the way. They're competiting with PC manufacturers like Dell who sell their stuff. That was the number one fear from a PC manufacturer's standpoint when MS announced the X-Box.
Another example more directly related is Microsoft selling music themselves. They're going to be "competing" against companies that have licensed their WMA DRM technology.
In the business world, if you can sell a product through an outlet, even your competitors', you need to consider it. If it's mutually beneficial, then it will be done. Furthermore, from a CEO's perspective, it is better to compete and have a chance at a market rather than just give up and let someone else take it over without a fight. From the consumer's point of view, enjoy the competition while it lasts. This is the time to take advantage of the promotions, coupons, etc.
It doesn't necessarily. That why you have to wait for the store to open. If they offered better service, convinence (whether it be one-click shopping or less restrictive DRM or such), and prices, then you would choose it just like a brick and mortar store where certain similiar qualities like service, price, convinence (easy to get to, easy to find the stuff you're looking for in the store) convinced you to buy from there.
Not necessarily. Online retailers's physical locations may impact you in the form of taxes. If your state has an Apple store anywhere within it, you need to pay taxes on your iTunes Music Store purchases for instance. Savings on taxes plus free shipping are perhaps the major price advantage for most products sold on the web, and if most people could find a place that saves them money for the same items, most people take advantage of it.
Furthermore, while you can order things online, living in Austin/Round Rock, Texas may allow you to get quicker service for Dell products versus living in New York. Shipping times may be reduced as well as returns and such. Although not a huge deal to most, it is to some people that want things on the day of release for instance or need to be able to get customer service ASAP.
Think of HP, Dell, and especially Gateway turning into the new Best Buys, Frys, and CompUSAs. They're already selling plasma TVs, PDAs, and digital cameras. This is just merely another technology product that they are offering. Then the reason why you pick HP versus Dell or Best Buy versus Frys is the customer service, prices, etc. just like a traditional retail outlet.
You paid for a digital file. If you had paid for the CD, you would have had to rip the CD, then transfer it to your MP3 player of choice or whatever. There are costs involved in going from one device to another whether it be in the form of time or money. The world is built on many incompatible standards.
Most albums on iTunes Music Store are $9.99 (or less) for the entire album whether it had 11 songs or 18 songs or however many that were on the CD. If the album had 2 CDs, you pay more ($17 or so were a few). If the CD had less than 10 songs, you pay only $0.99 multiplied by the number of songs.
I'm not too sure where you live but most CDs in the US are $13-$15 just by doing casual shopping. Getting the full CD for $9.99 plus the cost of one CD-R ($0.15 or so if you buy in bulk) is hardly that huge of a cost. The only things you lose are the liner notes and the album art (well you get the front cover art as a BMP but I don't think many people will print it out) and maybe the jewel case if you're nitpicky.
Are you saying that you're just magically getting the files and that bandwidth is free? Apple provides the servers, service, software (for free even if you don't download songs and it's a fair audio media player at the least), bandwidth, etc. Imagine all the non-tech-savvy people calling the tech support lines to find out how they can share files and whatnot. That is costly. They went and got the actual audio masters and ripped it directly instead of just ripping a CD. The record companies still (need to) do promotions for the artists. There are still some costs involved.
Also, you get to preview 30 seconds of any song that way you can also decide if you want the entire album or just the single song that got you interested in the first place. I've personally abused this feature by checking out various albums to see if I would like to get the whole thing or just the single. You get to buy individual tracks when before you only had the option of buying the single CDs that were out before and if an album contained a song that wasn't available separately, you were stuck wasting more money. You have search features, easy recommendations, top 100 lists, celeberity playlists (I find them useless but others I know like the feature), exclusives, you didn't have to drive somewhere to buy the CD, practically no wait times, etc.
The record companies are probably charging an arm and a leg more than they should. You do get somewhat of a cheaper price for the music, and for me, I didn't care too much for the physical media laying around so it works out for me. I just wanted to say that there are still plenty of costs involved. Looking at other Internet businesses, while there are surely great savings to be found, for the most part, the real advantage is the free shipping and no tax in certain stores.
iTMS isn't perfect by any means. I don't like DRM but the personal usage rights actually are decent. I don't like the idea of paying tax on an Internet purchase when I never have before. I would like higher quality files and even a better selection, but hey, it's acceptable right now.
I also disagree with your definition of a memory leak for #1 and #2 in your examples. Both are just bugs that also happen to have the side-effect of exhausting memory. I'm not saying that there aren't memory leaks in Java as JVMs leaking memory is a valid example IMO, but if my program got stuck in a while loop and kept appending data to a data structure without terminating, I would consider that to be a bug in the exit conditions, not a memory leak.
I don't think Intel really wants to drive AMD out of business. It's better to have a known adversary than one that comes out of nowhere. Also, it helps to have some viable competition (just not one that gets too big) that way your company doesn't just sit and rot with no goals. If there wasn't any competition, the day that another company comes out with something better, you're at a loss at how to fight them.
BTW, it was confirmed earlier that PSO for X-Box would have an additional fee on top of X-Box Live, and honestly, I expect every other game that has a persistent world to charge online fees even if they are for X-Box. There's just no way that publishers would make an online world and just let MS rack in the $10 charge to themselves (which is about what is expected for the "fixed" subscription fee). Imagine there are even 2 popular persistent world games, and you have problems on how to divide that "fixed" subscription fee, and the maintaince costs on games like EQ/UO aren't that cheap either.
You can bet that Star Wars Galaxies will have an additional fee regardless if you play on PC, PS2, or X-Box.
X-Box Live may be pretty slick in requiring voice communication and also by having the same user ID across games, but don't expect that your $10/month (or whatever MS starts charging in a year) to get you anything more than that. X-Box Live will probably turn out like the online PC gaming market where most games are free with free downloadable content but the persistent world ones cost you some extra change.
Isn't the LucasArts Fan Network made up of JediKnightII.net / JediKnight.Net amongst other websites? Since most "networks" are really run by the same people under different aliases, I don't think it really matters if they created a new domain website for it.
AOL may be worried that integrating ICQ and AIM will have not only security problems (ICQ has been riddled with them over the years), but also the spammers would get a hold of AIM screennames too. AIM hasn't had nearly as bad a problem as ICQ has had, and if the two integrated and sex IM ads started being sent to AOL users via IM, it could be disasterous for a relatively safe IM enviornment right now when child safety and parental concern is a major concern for some AOL users.
That seems to suggest that there will be the possibility of additional fees for some games. Online RPGs for instance are now expected to be updated regularly with new items, quests, etc., and I imagine that a static world would mean the death of the game. Yes, people would love to not download patches that fixes features that should have been in the game in the first place. However, people also love the dynamics of the game where the weapon you had last week may have been the best, but the new weapon drops on such and such mob is even better.
Back to the original point, who is going to pay for those updates, as these updates will certainly not be developed for free? That $10 a month will probably cover the bandwidth and matchmaking services, but it's doubtful it will help cover developer expenses, and if it doesn't cover their expenses, why bother making an online game? Sports games are suppose to update their statistics and rosters (injuries) as the real life season progresses for a more "realistic" game, so it's not only RPGs that would require developer maintaince. Let's say MS is generous and gives a portion of that $10 to developers. But what if gamers play more than one online RPG with more than one sports game? Then that $10 is split so many different ways that it becomes insignificant. And if developers have to pay for hosting at MS's datacenters, that is a recurring monthly fee for the developers possibly, and I doubt that the $50 you paid for the initial game can pay not only for the development costs of the game, but also the recurring monthly costs to be hosted by MS. I just don't think people should get their hopes up that this is a $10 flat fee.
Most of the HDTVs I've seen have more than one set of component in jacks, usually at least two. In any case, there are switch boxes for this, but they're pretty expensive. I wouldn't bother with component input from consoles to TV tho. The advantages compared to S-Video aren't that apparent to me especially if you're playing on a regular TV.
They already have gotten support from EA (sports games), Sega (sports games), and more than a handful of Japanese game developers. Racing games, fighting games, flight games, RPGs, FPS are all accounted for. I've heard more from Sony recently than Microsoft, but Microsoft is probably holding out for E3 this week.
Sony has been touting their partnerships with AOL and RealPlayer among others and support from game developers. Microsoft has been boasting about their service and their voice capabilities. Both are probably holding most of their game announcements for E3. In any case, neither is set to launch their services officially until Fall this year unless one of them pulls something out of thin air.
Personally, I don't understand all the fuss about the online race for this generation of consoles. It will mostly be all beta testing for the next generation, and the games are mostly unproven so far. Laggy fighting games where twitch reflexes are key to winning, racing games where most PC racing games have not fared well, and so forth all seem like a big hassle. Sports games are one of the few exceptions IMO. It's definitely intriguing to look at the games and see where the gaming companies think consoles are going, but right now, it's pretty unknown territory that in of itself is a gamble to even develop an online game for.
On another point, console game prices are headed south if the latest rumors regarding Sony and Nintendo are true. Most brand new titles today debut at $35-$40 for their first week lately in the Sunday ads much like their PC counterparts. Many of Sony's big titles are also going to their Greatest Hits series at a reduced costs for roughly $30 less than a year after they've been out.
I won't even attempt to convince you that while X-Box may be a PC in a box, in all fairness, it does have some things going for it. I'm a happy PS2-only owner at the moment BTW.
X-Box has Unreal Championship and an online version of Halo probably as well as Asheron's Call. I don't recall if SW: Galaxies will be going to PS2, and a quick lookover the FAQ says its undecided.
As a PS2 owner, I think Sony is the only one that has really announced concrete plans, and theirs will launch first in the US unless MS pulls something weird at E3. However, as far as who is in the better position, that's definitely undecided.
A few other sites such as Magic Box are reporting pretty good sales. While expectations are probably different with console gamers versus PC gamers, I haven't seen a PC MMORPG do any better yet. Also, building an initial fanbase is always rocky but if Square is able to stick it out for the long term and the game is good enough that word spreads, they may have the first Everquest on consoles.
Doesn't Red Hat only increment the major version number when there is a "major" compiler version change? If so, then they're just following their normal practices which I suppose is a good thing.
What most anime fans complain about is the accuracy of the subtitles nowadays and whether or not the subtitles were taken from the original Japanese script or the dub English script. AFAIK, Eva's subtitles are fairly accurate and are based on the original Japanese dialogue. I don't know enough Japanese to verify what is said, but I think there would have been more complaining if it was a "dubtitle" script.
In more recent anime DVD releases (not Eva but recent releases from Bandai, Pioneer, and Right Stuf amongst others), even signs and other characters (you know those random "Boom!", "Zoom!", "Bang!"-type words that express actions/feelings) are only translated via a removable subtitle track, so there is even less touching of the video. There are usually 2 subtitle tracks. One that just has the signs for the dub viewers, and another that has both the signs and the translated Japanese dialogue.
I really like DVDs more than past VHS and laserdisc releases just because not only do you get better video and audio, it's a format that allows subtitles and dubs to coexist eliminating tension amongst dub versus sub buyers. It really is helpful to foreign film buyers as well. I hope any future format will keep if not build upon DVD's features in this area.