None of the high end games to be released for it have been announced yet, they're waiting for E3 for that so how can you know there'll be no killer apps for it at release?
The leak says the focus is "casual gamers", which in itself shows they don't understand the market they're targeting. So far, only Nintendo managed to make killer apps for the audience targeted by Natal, and every single time the entire industry laughed at Nintendo for these "poor games" before these games just exploded in sales. So an educated guess would be that MS has no killer app for this thing. We can't be sure of it, but it's likely. The last foray of MS into this trying to sell games to "casual gamers" was in holidays 2008 IIRC, and it was such a huge failure everybody in the game industry just do as if it never happened.
Also, as this isn't a simple camera, and is in fact an IR camera with depth sensing technology in it, that builds in hardware a 3D map of the environment, and can track actors in that environment, then what exactly is overpriced about it? It seems quite reasonable regardless for the level of technology in it.
You really expect that kind of technology for just the price of a new game?
The big problem is right there. It's overpriced means the price is too high compared to its value. In the entertainment industry, people don't care that the technology is higher grade, as what people give value to, is not technology (as in technology industry), but entertainment, the industry consoles are in. The consumer for entertainment doesn't care about technology, as long as it's good enough. For this not to be seen as overpriced, the thing need to come with at least 2 perceived killer app games. Technologists and early adopters will flock to it, but the mainstream sales they seem to want for Natal won't come from these people. A killer app like Wii Fit isn't even at 50 % of Wii sold, and it's already selling at amazing levels. That's the apps Natal needs to succeed, not just say "it has this and that and can do that".
I have an ATI AllInWonder 9800 Pro TV tuner card for my PC, and a Hauppauge USB TV Tuner stick for my laptop. Both are common as dirt, and neither of them are still supported by MythTV. Bummer.
It helps to understand what you're talking about though. MythTV doesn't support any specific card or stick, the Linux kernel does, and the OS brings in some generic interfaces upon that. MythTV then uses that. It helps to read the MythTV documentation when you don't know anything about these, before trying to install such a complex application. At least it would prevent you from saying stupid things, and direct you to LinuxTV site which lists hardware supported in Linux. I would be surprised your USB stick is not supported for example.
+1 Insightful. I've been using Myth since 2003 (and keeping it running using the same database from then to now is no mean feat, I can tell you - but that's the only option for people with TV recordings they don't want to delete as Myth has no way of importing random recordings).
This just proves that using a product for a long time doesn't mean you understand the product or are proficient with it. You clearly have no clue. These are the same problems I read about when I started installing MythTV, and it was a breeze to install for me, and nothing was a feat about MythTV. But then again, I'm no ordinary user.
In that time the install procedure has changed from "tortuous" to merely "painfully inconvenient" - there's still alot of manual text-editing steps involved, for those of us in the UK at least, and the amount of hoops I've had to jump with for MySQL is atrocious, and anyone else who's run into the various debacles involving charset settings can attest.
I've already switched to XBMC as a frontend UI as it's superior in every way (apart from LIRC setup).
Going on with the nonsense. Like most people that don't know what they are doing but are quick to criticize what they don't understand, you believe configuring all the parts necessary for MythTV to be of any use (disks, TV card, remote,...) are MythTV itself, which is clearly apparent here.
I agree that MythTV setup (the true one) is far from being user friendly yet, which is a cause of MythTV being a generic product that can be put on most Linux configurations, and offer lots of architectures possibilities. For now, using external frontends like XBMC is a sure way to lose 3/4 of MythTV features though. But if some user finds it more user friendly, why not. Not sure it will work with 0.23 though. And sure enough, using XBMC already makes you lose most of 0.22 features.
Actually, it does make a difference. Granted, most of the people using Myth are probably geeks who understand about point releases, but even I am skeptical of a product that is at 0.2x. That says to me its still in early development, is not ready for prime time, and the fact that MythTV has been around for, oh, roughly eight years (archive.org's oldest page is July 2002) and is still at such a low point number says to me that there is not much development going on in it. The fact that its a stable release is moot. If I were to start an operating system, it booted and simply displayed "Hello World" without crashing makes it a stable release - doesn't mean its ready for world wide use.
No, I agree with the parent. Find a release that is stable and relatively bug free, and call it 1.0 already. This staying at 0.x for 8 years simply says your project is either not organized, lacks proper development, or lacks the balls to release a product that's ready for prime-time.
All this text just to say : "I won't use it, I can't bash it without looking clueless, so I'll troll the product so that I can repel people from even trying it". For what purpose ? God knows. If you just need reassuring, lots of MythTV users (including me) are using it for years and it's stable, in the sense that everything I recorded years ago is still available in MythTV, despite several MythTV versions updated already (started with 0.19 through 0.22, sometimes even using SVN versions, and now I'll go to 0.23), and several disk (200 Go to 2 To) and PC (3rd mythbox) changes.
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0.
Well I was around at the time, and I used Gnome 1.4 (actually, I still compile it and still uses a few Gnome 1.4 programs to this day, like gcombust). I'm not surprised by these reactions, but to me, they come from trolls or from people with a very narrow-minded view of the world that basically revolves around american geeks using Gnome. Because Gnome 2.0 actually brought huge improvements for Gnome, at least in presentation. If I have to select two of the most important ones, it has to be i18n/l10n and fonts handling. But actually there are far more improvements than that. Comparing the usability worldwide of Gnome 2 and TWM, and saying TWM is better, is just plain stupid hyperbole. I can't believe people are so dense. Sure Gnome 2 came with its loads of bugs, but to say there was little improvements, wow!
The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
So this is due to a very narrow vision of users and the world outside english speaking users then. And blindness too, despite Gnome having improved on usability and disabled people assistance. The replacing Windows part was always wishful thinking by geeks that don't understand the majority of other people around them, which is perfectly normal, most of us have strong NT personalities, which represent around 10 % of world population. I argue that big improvements in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel series (at all levels including audio and video), the Gnome 2 progress, the freedesktop initiative and middleware tools between the kernel and desktop are even bigger improvements than what we saw in those Gnome 1 years. The experience was smoothed so much that some people don't even see the improvements anymore, despite them being right before their eyes.
"2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series"
I've noticed that open source software generally seems to be more hung-up and obsessed with version numbers than proprietary software. [...] Who cares if it is 2.30 or 3.0? My current nVidia video driver for Windows is 196.21 -- as long as it works, who cares?
Seems like to me you are the only one hung up about these version numbers here, and you seem to care a lot about these version numbers indeed, contradicting your question of "who cares?". The OP was only stating a possible fact, which seems to irk you to no end.
Nintendo survived the N64/Gamecube era stuff, which is something Sega didn't, due to their strong hand hold market position.
No! The GP just summarized some of the disconnected fantasy in which lots of people in the game industry live. That includes journalists, analysts and developers, or other techie people. Most techie people just lives in another world, and Slashdot is no different. I still remember when the Wii name was unveiled, or people saying Nintendo would be dead after Gamecube. But in the real world, Nintendo made more profit than Sony in the Gamecube generation. I mean, more profit than Sony that was dominating with its PS2, following its PS1. And Nintendo was making more profit with Gamecube plus its Game Boy line. And people were saying Nintendo would stop making hardware. That's how disconnected to reality people are in this industry. Nintendo never sell their console at loss, unless they're forced to like with GC, and even then, they never sell it at such a loss that they can never recoup it in a year's time. Sony is billions of dollars in the red this generation with PS3, as is MS with the XBox line. This would never happen to Nintendo with its business model. Sega tried the big corporation business model and got destroyed in the process. So no, Nintendo didn't just "survive", they just did worse than before, but they had enough cash to live confortably at least two more GC like generations.
GBA and Pokemon carried Nintendo through some dark times.
So this is pretty ridiculous to say. Unless you mean PS2 carried Sony through some dark times ? Nintendo made as much money as Sony and its PS2 with GC + GBA.
Nintendo isn't fault less. Like other Japanese tech companies they tend to make wild, custom built technology that may fly or crash.
Except that your premise is wrong, as Nintendo is not a tech company. Nintendo is an entertainment company. Nintendo doesn't sell technology, they sell fun, technology is just a mean to an end. This huge misunderstanding explains why techies are often terribly wrong when talking about Nintendo. I'm stil laughing at people that were sure that Nintendo would fail because the Wii wasn't HD, or people that still believe that people buy HDTV because of HD. This makes sense in the technology business, but has no sense in the entertainment one.
Conveniently forgetting stuff like Virtual Boy or the weak "successes" provided by Nintendo by Disk System, N64 and GameCube to praise their recent success is kind of naivety.
Focusing on these weak successes is stupid though. Look where it put Nintendo's competitors: they were being disrupted in plain sight and didn't even notice (nor the army of techies) and are now scrambling and tripping over themselves to copy sth they spit upon publicly for years (motion controls). You'd better look at Nintendo's track record to see that it's a mistake to believe they're not a competitor.
In particular, a big thing that will ruin the 3Ds is the price tag or increased software production costs.
Putting out Wii style controllers for the other two just feels like trying to tow a tank with a Kia, simply because you saw more folks were buying Kias than tanks, to use a/. car analogy. I just don't see enough casual games to make this worth the trouble, and trying to play ultra hardcore games with a Wii style controller would probably ultimately suck. I mean, who would want to stand there aiming for an 8 hour CoD fragfest?
I agree with everything you except the last sentence. I guess more than a million owners of CoD 3 (and 500 000+ owners of CoD:MW Reflex) on Wii beg to differ with what you said.
And the bad thing about Wiimote is that you have to keep your hand absolutely still or the stupid thing decides you're trying to swing it around. That's the only kind of control Wiimote's motion control really allows. Shake or swing it, and your character does something, usually completely unrelated to the motion;
What you say shows one of two things : you're a casual gamer that never played anything but crap games, or you never played a Wii game. The Wiimote actually does more than recognise movement, it also know its orientation in 3D space and has a pointer. And most good motion Wii games use that feature: Mario Kart Wii, No More Heroes, Wii Play, all the on rail shooters and FPS,... So clearly you are a very bad source of knowledge concerning the Wiimote and what it can do. And no, you don't have to keep your hand absolutely still, games like Wii Sports, that comes with the console, clearly shows how you have to do it for this not to happen.
The good news is that you can basically think of all of the good or even great games on the Wii and then imagine them with HD graphics and surround sound. The best examples I can think of are Resident Evil 4 Wii edition and Dead Space: Extraction. Both are highly polished, adult oriented, motion controlled shooter titles. Now imagine the graphics of Resident Evil 5 or original Dead Space on the PS3/360 with the motion controller functionality of the Wii.
The bad news is that you can basically only think of all of the good or even great games on the Wii and then imagine them with HD graphics. Surround sound is just stupid as the Wii already has surround sound, just like Gamecube actually (Dolby Prologic II, which is at least 5.0). Games can't be done in HD just because people want them. There's a reason why lots of games on the HD consoles are not even in HD resolution (which is minimum 1280x720). There's a reason why Capcom, who made Resident Evil 4, abandoned Monster Hunter Tri on the PS3 (HD console) to make it on the Wii (SD console), and it was basically cost. The same reason why Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix game) is only 720p on PS3 and not even HD on XB360, why they removed lots of game features, just to be able to output the game in HD.
RE5 will get motion controls on PS3, so part of your wish is granted anyway. Now we must see if the controls will be as good as those of RE4 on Wii, which seems another can of worms.
But anyway, several games on the Wii were done on it, because they just couldn't work cost wise if they had been made on HD consoles. Capcom lost tons of money with two big flops on HD consoles, Bionic Commando and Dark Void. HD is not the be all end all of games, and companies divisions in video games are struggling right now, and I'm sure it's because of this (the only ones not struggling are the still heavily PC based Activision and Nintendo).
One example of your dream game is No More Heroes. No More Heroes was the biggest success of Grasshoper studio led by Suda 51. It is a Wii game that initially was meant for XB360. Now, the publisher (not the developer Grasshoper) have made a port with HD graphics, but which removes motion controls, that I think made all the interest of the game. We will see how well or bad it sells on HD consoles.
The Balance Board doesn't come with the Wii console, yet games other than the Wii Fit game bundled with the Balance Board support it. The Classic Controller doesn't come with the Wii console, yet plenty of games support it. Controllers 2, 3, and 4 don't come with a console, but games that support them are the whole reason for gaming on a console instead of a PC.
Clearly this is the problem with the HD consoles, which focus on single player games or online multiplayer games, just like PC games. In fact, most games on these consoles, and most successful ones, are single player or online multiplayer affairs, meaning they are basically PC games. Only the Wii concentrate on console values and has lots of games with local multiplayer. It's no wonder, because lots of western developers on HD consoles are PC developers migrating en masse to the consoles.
Actually, this is all wrong. XBox 360 has been available for cheaper than the Wii for more than two years, at least in Europe. For example, Xbox 360 cheaper RRP is £160, and you can have it easily for £125 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/videogames/676520011/ref=amb_link_84048773_2?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1SKBT77N19WZRPE9W4AT&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=109912367&pf_rd_i=15826471).
Price is not what made the Wii sell, and in Europe, the XB360 got utterly destroyed by the Wii, even for all these years where the Wii was more expensive.
... why haven't console makers displaced phone makers by making their own portable phone hybrid handheld? They have all the background necessary to make a killer phone that could wipe out most other phones.
Console makers do not have the background necessary to make a killer phone. The truth is that they aren't even in the same business. Console makers are in the entertainment business, and phone makers are in the communication business. They are not the same at all, and the job that the devices need to do is completely different. Both dip their toe in other territories, but that's just to attract people that see no immediate value in the main job of their appliances. Actually, Sony doesn't really understand the job of its handheld consoles, and it's very apparent they're confused, thus why people connect it to fear of iPhones or iPod Touch as gaming devices. Notice that no one can say the same about Nintendo devices without looking like a fool. Nintendo masters perfectly the job of its devices, like the DS. It's a gaming device, in the entertainment business. Sony doesn't know if its appliances are gaming devices, or movie devices,... No clear direction. To make its job correctly, a handheld gaming device need some basic functionality cornered perfectly. One of them is battery life: it needs to be good enough. And the truth is that no gaming device except the Nintendo ones are adequate in just that. Thus why history shows that countless Nintendo competitors failed against the Gameboy, just because it had better battery life. No phone can even provide that, thus why Nintendo is not worried at all. But Sony, who didn't even respect this simple principle, can be worried.
Some principles necessary for a gaming device to do its job correctly are antagonistic to the ones necessary for a phone, at least for now. Things like robustness, resilience.
So all this talk about iPhone threatening gaming devices is just nonsense, surely put out by Apple viral marketers. They just don't make any sense at all, and it's very apparent that it's PR matter.
According to MetaCritic, there are 26 Xbox games with 90+ ratings, 20 PS3 games with 90+ ratings, and 9 games on the Wii with 90+ ratings. I don't see the value proposition in the Wii now that the more powerful and capable competition with better games have come down to a point where the price difference is largely irrelevant.
Staying locked in your bubble won't allow you to understand where you're wrong. But it's pretty obvious : "Metacritic", "more powerful and capable competition with better games". You are stuck in your old values that the Wii is disrupting right since before its launch, and you use Metacritic to confort you, a site that compile reviews from site stuck exactly in these same old values. Sorry, but the Wii just shattered the record of sales for a console in one month in the USA this december (3.81 millions Wii sold, PS2, previous record owner for home consoles, was at 2.69). It more than exceeded the sales of PS3 and XB360 combined.
Look, as much as all this Cathedral and Bazaar/Chaos crap sounds good in some righteous fight against the man, I've been using and helping to build Linux since 1995 and what we have sorely needed is some form of direction and vision.
No, we don't. That's the mentality of people that think they can save the world, and this can only end in frustration. I think most FOSS proponents have fallen for it when they were younger. But we all realize sooner or later that only frustration comes from such a goal.
OS X has made such massive leaps and bounds with a relatively small number of developers because they have a solid vision and goal steering their efforts.
But OSX is made by a business, FOSS is not usually driven by business. Which could be a problem, but fortunately it never has been a problem, because it affects business, and economic forces have made people with some business sense to use FOSS. There is still not to this day a company with enough business sense to drive FOSS like Apple with OSX, but it's not a problem because FOSS is, IMHO, a disruptive innovation. If someone with business would have seized it, it would have destroyed a lot of incumbent, MS included, in less than 5 years. There's a reason MS does all it can to reign in FOSS, and there's a reason they still haven't managed to destroy FOSS. MS is very wary of disruptive innovations and tries to destroy them all before it's too late.
We just flail about and continually eschew any sort of cohesive goal. It shows. Linus doesn't want to take control and everyone wants to claim that it is not needed, but amazingly the Kernel itself requires this type of management and oversight... and it is always the most progressive part of the whole. But what good is the best kernel without a supporting structure? It's time to either take the bull by the horns, or step back and allow a company like Google or Canonical to do it.
We don't have to step back anything. Anyway, most people working on FOSS aren't the business type, which is a problem if your goal is large expansion of FOSS. But people in FOSS someday realize that it's better to save yourself, that's a less frustrating goal. If your goal happens to save everyone around you, then it's a benefit. At least, it's not frustrating like thinking you'll save the world. I look at what has been done in 10 years, and frankly it's impressive. Most people fear that all of that disappear with them, but there's no need to worry about that IMHO. Canonical was the closest thing to lau,ch FOSS, but clearly Shuttleworth (sp?) lacked the business acumen to launch such a disruptive technology.
Canonical and Ubuntu have floundered and have not come out as that entity even with the success in interest they garnered (like Red Hat before it), so it's time for another to try. I could care less who finally does it, just get it done!
This I agree with, but it's not as simple as saying "someone do it". Actually, it would require most people in FOSS or making FOSS to take financial education (for which there is no real course) and business courses. Only then can this work. But that's not their main interest usually, even though most of them must be NT types (in Myers-Briggs personality).
But "make oldconfig" is there since years. It's not tedious at all to configure your new kernel when you have your old config file. Only the new options or the modified ones will show up. So the tools are already there for those that build their own kernel.
Apple and Nintendo and Amazon and so forth, want to be the gatekeepers of software and content, and frankly.. looking at the success of MS on the desktop, that approach doesn't seem to be a successful one.
This doesn't make sense. You identify loosely that Nintendo and Amazon (even Apple but that's rarely the case) are in the content business, and yet you compare it with MS on the desktop which is another market altogether. Ms on the desktop is in the technology business, which has nothing at all to do with the content business, and what works in the technology business (like vaporware) doesn't always work in the content business, like MS learned the hard way. The XBox division of MS was a far better and far more obvious thing to compare and yet you talk about MS on the desktop.
Video game systems will be the last bastion of this mentality though, i can promise you that.
No they won't, videogames are not at all in the technology business. And you're partly wrong anyway, Nintendo and the others don't want to be the gatekeepers of software or content, they want to maximise their customers and then keep them, which is what every business tries to do. Being in the content business, that means gathering the most and best content around them of course. That's why they allow others to create content on their hardware, and don't chose arbitrarily who pass and who doesn't.
I think it depends on what you are shopping for. If I'm in the market for a handful of new games at $60 each, adding in an ~$80 controller doesn't sound all that bad, and could be an impulse buy pretty easily.
When and where it will be marketed, it's cheap and attractive enough for an impulse buy for the type of person they are marketing to in the context of what they are likely intending to buy.
This is nonsense. Lots of people talk like the audience they want to attract already have a XB360. In which case they wouldn't need to attract them. Makes no sense at all. This news is only of interest to XB360 owners, not to any audience they want to attract. So this news makes no sense except if the goal is to prevent XB360 owners from buying a Wii.
If its that low, Natal actually has a real chance of making a dent in their user base.
In which user base? In MS user base? This has no chance on Wii user base: they have a Wii, not a XB360, and I doubt the XB360 + Natal will be £50. Get real people.
There are already 14 development studios confirmed to be working on natal titles, including Lionhead, Rare, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda Softworks, Capcom, Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, Konami, MTV Games, Namco Bandai, Sega, Square Enix, THQ and Ubisoft. Not a bad lineup for a peripheral, sounds more like a console lauch than a peripheral introduction.
It sounds like a very bad launch if the goal is to attract the Wii user base. Absolutely none of these studios have any good track record making games for the Wii audience, that could attract a user base. Those are the studios making the shovelware on Wii! Only Sega managed to make a system seller on Wii, but that was with help from Nintendo. Keep in mind that Nintendo is basically the sole developer attracting the new audience to the Wii.
Keep in mind that I have never, ever owned a gaming console. But the wiimote was, by all accounts, a game changer. Instead of pushing buttons, you moved something you held in your hand. But it's still a handheld controller, and is in some ways a ripoff of a standard game controller - the "only" changes were that you had fewer buttons and you used actual motion of one arm to control the device.
It's not the "next generation" Wiimote at all. On the contrary, I think it's bound to fail hard because it was made for completely different reasons than the Wiimote. Typical Nintendo tailor the controller to go with their games. The Wiimote was made to go perfectly with their games for everyone, meaning it was made to be fun for the most people. Natal is a reaction trying to coop the Wiimote success, by being "more advanced" ("next gen" like you say), meaning it's done for technology first. MS (and Sony) seem totally unable to follow the same values that Nintendo introduced, and are stuck in the old "more power means better". The HD consoles should have showed them that's not the case.
Also, the Wiimote provides touch feedback, and actually have peripherals allowing you to use motion control with both arms (not just one). I'm not sure not activating the touch sense is a good thing.
With this unit, the "controller as a device on your person" is gone. You use actual body movements and voice to control the game, not just the movements of one arm on a unit that still has buttons.
This is the problem: a controller is not "a device on your person", it's an "extension of your person". Natal removes that and I think that's a very bad thing. EyeToy games are not exactly successful.
Not that this type of interface is totally new, but it is the first time it's being mass-marketed to such a low audience and is made affordable enough that just about anyone in a first-world country could scrape together the funds to get one, and to many this will be chump change.
This is complete nonsense. This interface is for now not mass-marketed at all at a low audience, it's totally off their radar. The only thing on "low audience" radar is the Wii. The only time MS tried to mass-market their product for a low audience (IIRC last holiday with Rare games and things like Lips), it was a big failure worldwide. And it's not affordable at all. This "low audience" still has to buy the console, and we don't know the price of the device with the console, but it won't be £50. This won't be chump change at all for most, especially those that already have a Wii. But these will be the minority, as they won't buy another console.
You were doing great up until that "it works on everything" part. Plenty of folks have pulled their hair out with Myth in the past and you make it sound like a breeze.
You were doing passable until "in the past". You wrongly assume that MythTV 0.22 is the same as 0.20, and this is your big problem. The same as 0.20 because 0.21 worked great already.
Look at the numbers of folks posting here that have given up on it and you can plainly see it's far from easy.
I see less people that failed a long time ago (surely with 0.20 or OS problems) than people I installed MythTV for, and for whom it works great. The sole thing not working "right" is the XMLTV part where I live, because it's not based on SchedulesDirect like provider yet (there are alternatives though).
I for one hope that this version is VERY good but please, the rah rah it works great stuff can be saved - most of us know better having tried it already.
No, you don't know better at all. As soon as you had problems, you ran everywhere saying it doesn't work, like you're doing now. I've actually used the development version of 0.22 without any issue till this day, and will soon swith to the stable one. So I've actually used 0.22 while you obviously have not. And sure enough it works great, even better than 0.21 that was already working great.
Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at.20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is.22. Now, based on that.02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
And while you're stuck with your obsessive compulsive nonsense on version numbers, people that actually care are using it. Besides, it's not.20, it's 0.20, and it's a version number, meaning it can become 0.22.1 for example. You must learn to read more carefully, you managed to miss the "0" a lot. I guess you only focus on useless things.
I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while.
MythTV has changed a lot since then. I've really started with version 0.21 (must have been 3 years ago at least) SVN, and the only crashes I experienced were with the frontend because of OS configuration problems (OpenGL, proprietary drivers,...). The important part, the backend, never failed me once.
Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing the commands in realtime, so I have no idea what the problem was. It was intermittent, and I never found a common thing that was happening at the same time.
Yes, this bug has been fixed, among tons of other ones.
Taking away constraints of OS/software, there is just no solution that leads to a great networked PVR system out there yet, in my opinion. To clarify, I'm not looking for a HTPC - I want a UI, consistent on every TV in my house, that lets me watch live TV (not that I ever do that), watch and/or schedule recordings (and have any available on any TV), watch DVDs, watch downloaded movies/shows, listen to music (both stored and streaming), and things like pictures and weather reports are kinda handy too.
That's not true, there is MythTV. It has changed a lot since even 0.21, and these aren't just cosmetic changes. MythTV 0.22 is really a true milestone. Don't let the state of MythTV 0.20 fool you and assume that it's still the same with MythTV 0.22, like a lot of people are doing in this discussion. You'll see lots of people talking about MythTV being buggy (meaning it has loads of bugs that makes it crash constantly) and very hard to use. These are basically myths now. Of course MythTV still has hidden bugs, but from your description of your experience with it, I think you'll be pretty pleased. I've gone through the transition from MythTV 0.21, through SVN of 0.22, on my "production box", because the world was changing around MythTV (migration to DVB-T, HD and new sound codecs in Europe), it still works like a charm, and never failed me.
As far as I remember, Nintendo has been trying to build up the corporate image of a "family friendly" entertainment company.
You remember wrong then. Or it's just semantic, I don't know. Nintendo actually built up a corporate image of a "for every member of the family" entertainment company. And strong evidence of this are their handheld consoles, which can't be played by all the family at once, but every member of the family can play games on them. Perhaps that's what you meant. Apart from that, Nintendo is just selling entertainment devices, and as for their home consoles, they're still selling a true home console. Home consoles always were local multiplayer devices, with at least 2 controllers that could be attached (there are some exceptions that were failures).
The elderly people on slashdot might remember the ridiculous censorship that Nintendo forced on "Maniac Mansion" before they backed its release for the NES (link: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html).
Given that Nintendo was heavily burned with lawsuits as soon as they tried to enter the western markets, I think history is far more complicated that simply citing one outcome like they did it to displease their customers.
Nintendo financially relies on embracing new target audiences for their products to evade direct competition with Sony and Microsoft.
What does this mean exactly? It makes no sense. Nintendo financially relies on their customers, and their business strategy is aiming at a population that includes everyone, contrary to their competitors that only target some specific demographics. And it has nothing to do with evading competition from Sony and MS. They're not preventing Sony or MS to target this audience at all. Sony and MS are the ones who actually are unable to target this audience, and are catching up to compete. Nintendo never prevented them to compete, and nothing of this has anything to do with financials. Nintendo is the one making money on its console from the start, while the two big competitors were losing money: if anything that should lower Nintendo's ability to compete. Financially, Nintendo just relied on their belief that the time was ripe for disruption, because the gaming industry was going more and more away from gaming. Just look at the competitors' consoles: they are adding lots of features that have nothing to do with gaming, their games are more and more alien to local multiplayer. Nintendo always financially relied on providing big values for gaming, not big values for specs.
Just recall the introduction of the Gameboy, which was technically inferior to its main competitor, the Atari Lynx or think of the WII, which shares most of its components with the not-quite-new Gamecube. Directly targeting the same audiences like Sony or Microsoft got Nintendo in trouble really soon. So, as long as Nintendo does not make an U-turn in its sales strategy it is therefore very likely that "mature" content will be nothing more than a niche that they accept but don't actively promote.
There's sth missing here. I don't see how you made the correlation between "technically inferior hardware" and "mature games". This just makes no sense. All previous generation consoles had very successful "mature" games and all were technically inferior to the Wii.
The problem is pretty simple really. And it's just not true that Nintendo would not actively promote a "mature" game. But it makes no sense to believe that people that want "mature" games will come to the Wii for "Madworld". Some people seriously believe that? Nintendo made efforts to have a GTA game on the Wii, which was turned down by Rockstar. To bring an audience for some genres, you need a big game, not lots of small ones. People will go where the big games of that genre are available. How can anyone expect people that like "mature" games to come to the Wii for Madworld when GTA 4 is on HD consoles? See the problem? It's pretty obvious.
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None of the high end games to be released for it have been announced yet, they're waiting for E3 for that so how can you know there'll be no killer apps for it at release?
The leak says the focus is "casual gamers", which in itself shows they don't understand the market they're targeting. So far, only Nintendo managed to make killer apps for the audience targeted by Natal, and every single time the entire industry laughed at Nintendo for these "poor games" before these games just exploded in sales. So an educated guess would be that MS has no killer app for this thing. We can't be sure of it, but it's likely.
The last foray of MS into this trying to sell games to "casual gamers" was in holidays 2008 IIRC, and it was such a huge failure everybody in the game industry just do as if it never happened.
Also, as this isn't a simple camera, and is in fact an IR camera with depth sensing technology in it, that builds in hardware a 3D map of the environment, and can track actors in that environment, then what exactly is overpriced about it? It seems quite reasonable regardless for the level of technology in it.
You really expect that kind of technology for just the price of a new game?
The big problem is right there. It's overpriced means the price is too high compared to its value. In the entertainment industry, people don't care that the technology is higher grade, as what people give value to, is not technology (as in technology industry), but entertainment, the industry consoles are in. The consumer for entertainment doesn't care about technology, as long as it's good enough.
For this not to be seen as overpriced, the thing need to come with at least 2 perceived killer app games. Technologists and early adopters will flock to it, but the mainstream sales they seem to want for Natal won't come from these people.
A killer app like Wii Fit isn't even at 50 % of Wii sold, and it's already selling at amazing levels. That's the apps Natal needs to succeed, not just say "it has this and that and can do that".
I have an ATI AllInWonder 9800 Pro TV tuner card for my PC, and a Hauppauge USB TV Tuner stick for my laptop. Both are common as dirt, and neither of them are still supported by MythTV. Bummer.
It helps to understand what you're talking about though.
MythTV doesn't support any specific card or stick, the Linux kernel does, and the OS brings in some generic interfaces upon that.
MythTV then uses that.
It helps to read the MythTV documentation when you don't know anything about these, before trying to install such a complex application.
At least it would prevent you from saying stupid things, and direct you to LinuxTV site which lists hardware supported in Linux. I would be surprised your USB stick is not supported for example.
+1 Insightful. I've been using Myth since 2003 (and keeping it running using the same database from then to now is no mean feat, I can tell you - but that's the only option for people with TV recordings they don't want to delete as Myth has no way of importing random recordings).
This just proves that using a product for a long time doesn't mean you understand the product or are proficient with it. You clearly have no clue.
These are the same problems I read about when I started installing MythTV, and it was a breeze to install for me, and nothing was a feat about MythTV.
But then again, I'm no ordinary user.
In that time the install procedure has changed from "tortuous" to merely "painfully inconvenient" - there's still alot of manual text-editing steps involved, for those of us in the UK at least, and the amount of hoops I've had to jump with for MySQL is atrocious, and anyone else who's run into the various debacles involving charset settings can attest.
I've already switched to XBMC as a frontend UI as it's superior in every way (apart from LIRC setup).
Going on with the nonsense. Like most people that don't know what they are doing but are quick to criticize what they don't understand, you believe configuring all the parts necessary for MythTV to be of any use (disks, TV card, remote, ...) are MythTV itself, which is clearly apparent here.
I agree that MythTV setup (the true one) is far from being user friendly yet, which is a cause of MythTV being a generic product that can be put on most Linux configurations, and offer lots of architectures possibilities.
For now, using external frontends like XBMC is a sure way to lose 3/4 of MythTV features though. But if some user finds it more user friendly, why not.
Not sure it will work with 0.23 though. And sure enough, using XBMC already makes you lose most of 0.22 features.
Actually, it does make a difference. Granted, most of the people using Myth are probably geeks who understand about point releases, but even I am skeptical of a product that is at 0.2x. That says to me its still in early development, is not ready for prime time, and the fact that MythTV has been around for, oh, roughly eight years (archive.org's oldest page is July 2002) and is still at such a low point number says to me that there is not much development going on in it. The fact that its a stable release is moot. If I were to start an operating system, it booted and simply displayed "Hello World" without crashing makes it a stable release - doesn't mean its ready for world wide use.
No, I agree with the parent. Find a release that is stable and relatively bug free, and call it 1.0 already. This staying at 0.x for 8 years simply says your project is either not organized, lacks proper development, or lacks the balls to release a product that's ready for prime-time.
All this text just to say : "I won't use it, I can't bash it without looking clueless, so I'll troll the product so that I can repel people from even trying it".
For what purpose ? God knows.
If you just need reassuring, lots of MythTV users (including me) are using it for years and it's stable, in the sense that everything I recorded years ago is still available in MythTV, despite several MythTV versions updated already (started with 0.19 through 0.22, sometimes even using SVN versions, and now I'll go to 0.23), and several disk (200 Go to 2 To) and PC (3rd mythbox) changes.
For those who were around for GNOME 1.2 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence that Linux on the desktop and GNOME in particular have made awfully little progress in the last decade. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, not 2000, and it was horrid; maybe if your first experience with GNOME was 2.0 then you might think 2.30 was a vast improvement- heck, TWM is a vast improvement on GNOME 2.0.
Well I was around at the time, and I used Gnome 1.4 (actually, I still compile it and still uses a few Gnome 1.4 programs to this day, like gcombust).
I'm not surprised by these reactions, but to me, they come from trolls or from people with a very narrow-minded view of the world that basically revolves around american geeks using Gnome. Because Gnome 2.0 actually brought huge improvements for Gnome, at least in presentation. If I have to select two of the most important ones, it has to be i18n/l10n and fonts handling. But actually there are far more improvements than that.
Comparing the usability worldwide of Gnome 2 and TWM, and saying TWM is better, is just plain stupid hyperbole.
I can't believe people are so dense. Sure Gnome 2 came with its loads of bugs, but to say there was little improvements, wow!
The progress GNOME made between 1998 and 2000, the big improvements in the 2.2 kernel series, and a host of other developments made it seem like Linux really would overtake Windows for desktop use soon. But I really don't find much about modern versions of GNOME that really improves on 1.2 or maybe 1.4; the last 9 years have seen little improvement in the Linux desktop IMO.
So this is due to a very narrow vision of users and the world outside english speaking users then. And blindness too, despite Gnome having improved on usability and disabled people assistance.
The replacing Windows part was always wishful thinking by geeks that don't understand the majority of other people around them, which is perfectly normal, most of us have strong NT personalities, which represent around 10 % of world population.
I argue that big improvements in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel series (at all levels including audio and video), the Gnome 2 progress, the freedesktop initiative and middleware tools between the kernel and desktop are even bigger improvements than what we saw in those Gnome 1 years.
The experience was smoothed so much that some people don't even see the improvements anymore, despite them being right before their eyes.
"2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series"
I've noticed that open source software generally seems to be more hung-up and obsessed with version numbers than proprietary software. [...] Who cares if it is 2.30 or 3.0? My current nVidia video driver for Windows is 196.21 -- as long as it works, who cares?
Seems like to me you are the only one hung up about these version numbers here, and you seem to care a lot about these version numbers indeed, contradicting your question of "who cares?".
The OP was only stating a possible fact, which seems to irk you to no end.
Nintendo survived the N64/Gamecube era stuff, which is something Sega didn't, due to their strong hand hold market position.
No!
The GP just summarized some of the disconnected fantasy in which lots of people in the game industry live. That includes journalists, analysts and developers, or other techie people.
Most techie people just lives in another world, and Slashdot is no different. I still remember when the Wii name was unveiled, or people saying Nintendo would be dead after Gamecube.
But in the real world, Nintendo made more profit than Sony in the Gamecube generation. I mean, more profit than Sony that was dominating with its PS2, following its PS1. And Nintendo was making more profit with Gamecube plus its Game Boy line. And people were saying Nintendo would stop making hardware. That's how disconnected to reality people are in this industry.
Nintendo never sell their console at loss, unless they're forced to like with GC, and even then, they never sell it at such a loss that they can never recoup it in a year's time.
Sony is billions of dollars in the red this generation with PS3, as is MS with the XBox line.
This would never happen to Nintendo with its business model. Sega tried the big corporation business model and got destroyed in the process.
So no, Nintendo didn't just "survive", they just did worse than before, but they had enough cash to live confortably at least two more GC like generations.
GBA and Pokemon carried Nintendo through some dark times.
So this is pretty ridiculous to say. Unless you mean PS2 carried Sony through some dark times ? Nintendo made as much money as Sony and its PS2 with GC + GBA.
Nintendo isn't fault less. Like other Japanese tech companies they tend to make wild, custom built technology that may fly or crash.
Except that your premise is wrong, as Nintendo is not a tech company. Nintendo is an entertainment company. Nintendo doesn't sell technology, they sell fun, technology is just a mean to an end. This huge misunderstanding explains why techies are often terribly wrong when talking about Nintendo.
I'm stil laughing at people that were sure that Nintendo would fail because the Wii wasn't HD, or people that still believe that people buy HDTV because of HD. This makes sense in the technology business, but has no sense in the entertainment one.
Conveniently forgetting stuff like Virtual Boy or the weak "successes" provided by Nintendo by Disk System, N64 and GameCube to praise their recent success is kind of naivety.
Focusing on these weak successes is stupid though. Look where it put Nintendo's competitors: they were being disrupted in plain sight and didn't even notice (nor the army of techies) and are now scrambling and tripping over themselves to copy sth they spit upon publicly for years (motion controls).
You'd better look at Nintendo's track record to see that it's a mistake to believe they're not a competitor.
In particular, a big thing that will ruin the 3Ds is the price tag or increased software production costs.
LOL, some people never learn.
Putting out Wii style controllers for the other two just feels like trying to tow a tank with a Kia, simply because you saw more folks were buying Kias than tanks, to use a /. car analogy. I just don't see enough casual games to make this worth the trouble, and trying to play ultra hardcore games with a Wii style controller would probably ultimately suck. I mean, who would want to stand there aiming for an 8 hour CoD fragfest?
I agree with everything you except the last sentence. I guess more than a million owners of CoD 3 (and 500 000+ owners of CoD:MW Reflex) on Wii beg to differ with what you said.
And the bad thing about Wiimote is that you have to keep your hand absolutely still or the stupid thing decides you're trying to swing it around. That's the only kind of control Wiimote's motion control really allows. Shake or swing it, and your character does something, usually completely unrelated to the motion;
What you say shows one of two things : you're a casual gamer that never played anything but crap games, or you never played a Wii game. ...
The Wiimote actually does more than recognise movement, it also know its orientation in 3D space and has a pointer. And most good motion Wii games use that feature: Mario Kart Wii, No More Heroes, Wii Play, all the on rail shooters and FPS,
So clearly you are a very bad source of knowledge concerning the Wiimote and what it can do.
And no, you don't have to keep your hand absolutely still, games like Wii Sports, that comes with the console, clearly shows how you have to do it for this not to happen.
The good news is that you can basically think of all of the good or even great games on the Wii and then imagine them with HD graphics and surround sound. The best examples I can think of are Resident Evil 4 Wii edition and Dead Space: Extraction. Both are highly polished, adult oriented, motion controlled shooter titles. Now imagine the graphics of Resident Evil 5 or original Dead Space on the PS3/360 with the motion controller functionality of the Wii.
The bad news is that you can basically only think of all of the good or even great games on the Wii and then imagine them with HD graphics. Surround sound is just stupid as the Wii already has surround sound, just like Gamecube actually (Dolby Prologic II, which is at least 5.0).
Games can't be done in HD just because people want them. There's a reason why lots of games on the HD consoles are not even in HD resolution (which is minimum 1280x720).
There's a reason why Capcom, who made Resident Evil 4, abandoned Monster Hunter Tri on the PS3 (HD console) to make it on the Wii (SD console), and it was basically cost.
The same reason why Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix game) is only 720p on PS3 and not even HD on XB360, why they removed lots of game features, just to be able to output the game in HD.
RE5 will get motion controls on PS3, so part of your wish is granted anyway. Now we must see if the controls will be as good as those of RE4 on Wii, which seems another can of worms.
But anyway, several games on the Wii were done on it, because they just couldn't work cost wise if they had been made on HD consoles. Capcom lost tons of money with two big flops on HD consoles, Bionic Commando and Dark Void. HD is not the be all end all of games, and companies divisions in video games are struggling right now, and I'm sure it's because of this (the only ones not struggling are the still heavily PC based Activision and Nintendo).
One example of your dream game is No More Heroes. No More Heroes was the biggest success of Grasshoper studio led by Suda 51. It is a Wii game that initially was meant for XB360.
Now, the publisher (not the developer Grasshoper) have made a port with HD graphics, but which removes motion controls, that I think made all the interest of the game. We will see how well or bad it sells on HD consoles.
The Balance Board doesn't come with the Wii console, yet games other than the Wii Fit game bundled with the Balance Board support it. The Classic Controller doesn't come with the Wii console, yet plenty of games support it. Controllers 2, 3, and 4 don't come with a console, but games that support them are the whole reason for gaming on a console instead of a PC.
Clearly this is the problem with the HD consoles, which focus on single player games or online multiplayer games, just like PC games. In fact, most games on these consoles, and most successful ones, are single player or online multiplayer affairs, meaning they are basically PC games. Only the Wii concentrate on console values and has lots of games with local multiplayer.
It's no wonder, because lots of western developers on HD consoles are PC developers migrating en masse to the consoles.
Actually, this is all wrong.
XBox 360 has been available for cheaper than the Wii for more than two years, at least in Europe.
For example, Xbox 360 cheaper RRP is £160, and you can have it easily for £125 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/videogames/676520011/ref=amb_link_84048773_2?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1SKBT77N19WZRPE9W4AT&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=109912367&pf_rd_i=15826471).
Price is not what made the Wii sell, and in Europe, the XB360 got utterly destroyed by the Wii, even for all these years where the Wii was more expensive.
... why haven't console makers displaced phone makers by making their own portable phone hybrid handheld? They have all the background necessary to make a killer phone that could wipe out most other phones.
Console makers do not have the background necessary to make a killer phone. ... No clear direction.
The truth is that they aren't even in the same business.
Console makers are in the entertainment business, and phone makers are in the communication business. They are not the same at all, and the job that the devices need to do is completely different.
Both dip their toe in other territories, but that's just to attract people that see no immediate value in the main job of their appliances.
Actually, Sony doesn't really understand the job of its handheld consoles, and it's very apparent they're confused, thus why people connect it to fear of iPhones or iPod Touch as gaming devices.
Notice that no one can say the same about Nintendo devices without looking like a fool. Nintendo masters perfectly the job of its devices, like the DS. It's a gaming device, in the entertainment business. Sony doesn't know if its appliances are gaming devices, or movie devices,
To make its job correctly, a handheld gaming device need some basic functionality cornered perfectly. One of them is battery life: it needs to be good enough. And the truth is that no gaming device except the Nintendo ones are adequate in just that. Thus why history shows that countless Nintendo competitors failed against the Gameboy, just because it had better battery life. No phone can even provide that, thus why Nintendo is not worried at all.
But Sony, who didn't even respect this simple principle, can be worried.
Some principles necessary for a gaming device to do its job correctly are antagonistic to the ones necessary for a phone, at least for now. Things like robustness, resilience.
So all this talk about iPhone threatening gaming devices is just nonsense, surely put out by Apple viral marketers. They just don't make any sense at all, and it's very apparent that it's PR matter.
According to MetaCritic, there are 26 Xbox games with 90+ ratings, 20 PS3 games with 90+ ratings, and 9 games on the Wii with 90+ ratings.
I don't see the value proposition in the Wii now that the more powerful and capable competition with better games have come down to a point where the price difference is largely irrelevant.
Staying locked in your bubble won't allow you to understand where you're wrong.
But it's pretty obvious : "Metacritic", "more powerful and capable competition with better games".
You are stuck in your old values that the Wii is disrupting right since before its launch, and you use Metacritic to confort you, a site that compile reviews from site stuck exactly in these same old values.
Sorry, but the Wii just shattered the record of sales for a console in one month in the USA this december (3.81 millions Wii sold, PS2, previous record owner for home consoles, was at 2.69).
It more than exceeded the sales of PS3 and XB360 combined.
Look, as much as all this Cathedral and Bazaar/Chaos crap sounds good in some righteous fight against the man, I've been using and helping to build Linux since 1995 and what we have sorely needed is some form of direction and vision.
No, we don't.
That's the mentality of people that think they can save the world, and this can only end in frustration. I think most FOSS proponents have fallen for it when they were younger. But we all realize sooner or later that only frustration comes from such a goal.
OS X has made such massive leaps and bounds with a relatively small number of developers because they have a solid vision and goal steering their efforts.
But OSX is made by a business, FOSS is not usually driven by business. Which could be a problem, but fortunately it never has been a problem, because it affects business, and economic forces have made people with some business sense to use FOSS.
There is still not to this day a company with enough business sense to drive FOSS like Apple with OSX, but it's not a problem because FOSS is, IMHO, a disruptive innovation.
If someone with business would have seized it, it would have destroyed a lot of incumbent, MS included, in less than 5 years. There's a reason MS does all it can to reign in FOSS, and there's a reason they still haven't managed to destroy FOSS. MS is very wary of disruptive innovations and tries to destroy them all before it's too late.
We just flail about and continually eschew any sort of cohesive goal. It shows. Linus doesn't want to take control and everyone wants to claim that it is not needed, but amazingly the Kernel itself requires this type of management and oversight... and it is always the most progressive part of the whole. But what good is the best kernel without a supporting structure? It's time to either take the bull by the horns, or step back and allow a company like Google or Canonical to do it.
We don't have to step back anything. Anyway, most people working on FOSS aren't the business type, which is a problem if your goal is large expansion of FOSS. But people in FOSS someday realize that it's better to save yourself, that's a less frustrating goal. If your goal happens to save everyone around you, then it's a benefit. At least, it's not frustrating like thinking you'll save the world.
I look at what has been done in 10 years, and frankly it's impressive. Most people fear that all of that disappear with them, but there's no need to worry about that IMHO.
Canonical was the closest thing to lau,ch FOSS, but clearly Shuttleworth (sp?) lacked the business acumen to launch such a disruptive technology.
Canonical and Ubuntu have floundered and have not come out as that entity even with the success in interest they garnered (like Red Hat before it), so it's time for another to try. I could care less who finally does it, just get it done!
This I agree with, but it's not as simple as saying "someone do it".
Actually, it would require most people in FOSS or making FOSS to take financial education (for which there is no real course) and business courses. Only then can this work.
But that's not their main interest usually, even though most of them must be NT types (in Myers-Briggs personality).
i'm glad that at least some kernel hackers recognise this, and 2.6.32 actually has support for new configuration method, which looks at already loaded modules and some other stuff to create trimmed down kernel config - http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges#head-11f54cdac41ad6150ef817fd68597554d9d05a5f
But "make oldconfig" is there since years.
It's not tedious at all to configure your new kernel when you have your old config file. Only the new options or the modified ones will show up.
So the tools are already there for those that build their own kernel.
Apple and Nintendo and Amazon and so forth, want to be the gatekeepers of software and content, and frankly.. looking at the success of MS on the desktop, that approach doesn't seem to be a successful one.
This doesn't make sense. You identify loosely that Nintendo and Amazon (even Apple but that's rarely the case) are in the content business, and yet you compare it with MS on the desktop which is another market altogether. Ms on the desktop is in the technology business, which has nothing at all to do with the content business, and what works in the technology business (like vaporware) doesn't always work in the content business, like MS learned the hard way.
The XBox division of MS was a far better and far more obvious thing to compare and yet you talk about MS on the desktop.
Video game systems will be the last bastion of this mentality though, i can promise you that.
No they won't, videogames are not at all in the technology business.
And you're partly wrong anyway, Nintendo and the others don't want to be the gatekeepers of software or content, they want to maximise their customers and then keep them, which is what every business tries to do.
Being in the content business, that means gathering the most and best content around them of course. That's why they allow others to create content on their hardware, and don't chose arbitrarily who pass and who doesn't.
I think it depends on what you are shopping for. If I'm in the market for a handful of new games at $60 each, adding in an ~$80 controller doesn't sound all that bad, and could be an impulse buy pretty easily.
When and where it will be marketed, it's cheap and attractive enough for an impulse buy for the type of person they are marketing to in the context of what they are likely intending to buy.
This is nonsense. Lots of people talk like the audience they want to attract already have a XB360. In which case they wouldn't need to attract them. Makes no sense at all.
This news is only of interest to XB360 owners, not to any audience they want to attract.
So this news makes no sense except if the goal is to prevent XB360 owners from buying a Wii.
If its that low, Natal actually has a real chance of making a dent in their user base.
In which user base? In MS user base?
This has no chance on Wii user base: they have a Wii, not a XB360, and I doubt the XB360 + Natal will be £50. Get real people.
There are already 14 development studios confirmed to be working on natal titles, including Lionhead, Rare, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda Softworks, Capcom, Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, Konami, MTV Games, Namco Bandai, Sega, Square Enix, THQ and Ubisoft. Not a bad lineup for a peripheral, sounds more like a console lauch than a peripheral introduction.
It sounds like a very bad launch if the goal is to attract the Wii user base. Absolutely none of these studios have any good track record making games for the Wii audience, that could attract a user base. Those are the studios making the shovelware on Wii!
Only Sega managed to make a system seller on Wii, but that was with help from Nintendo.
Keep in mind that Nintendo is basically the sole developer attracting the new audience to the Wii.
I'd say it's more the "next generation" wiimote.
Keep in mind that I have never, ever owned a gaming console. But the wiimote was, by all accounts, a game changer. Instead of pushing buttons, you moved something you held in your hand. But it's still a handheld controller, and is in some ways a ripoff of a standard game controller - the "only" changes were that you had fewer buttons and you used actual motion of one arm to control the device.
It's not the "next generation" Wiimote at all. On the contrary, I think it's bound to fail hard because it was made for completely different reasons than the Wiimote.
Typical Nintendo tailor the controller to go with their games. The Wiimote was made to go perfectly with their games for everyone, meaning it was made to be fun for the most people.
Natal is a reaction trying to coop the Wiimote success, by being "more advanced" ("next gen" like you say), meaning it's done for technology first.
MS (and Sony) seem totally unable to follow the same values that Nintendo introduced, and are stuck in the old "more power means better". The HD consoles should have showed them that's not the case.
Also, the Wiimote provides touch feedback, and actually have peripherals allowing you to use motion control with both arms (not just one). I'm not sure not activating the touch sense is a good thing.
With this unit, the "controller as a device on your person" is gone. You use actual body movements and voice to control the game, not just the movements of one arm on a unit that still has buttons.
This is the problem: a controller is not "a device on your person", it's an "extension of your person". Natal removes that and I think that's a very bad thing. EyeToy games are not exactly successful.
Not that this type of interface is totally new, but it is the first time it's being mass-marketed to such a low audience and is made affordable enough that just about anyone in a first-world country could scrape together the funds to get one, and to many this will be chump change.
This is complete nonsense.
This interface is for now not mass-marketed at all at a low audience, it's totally off their radar. The only thing on "low audience" radar is the Wii.
The only time MS tried to mass-market their product for a low audience (IIRC last holiday with Rare games and things like Lips), it was a big failure worldwide.
And it's not affordable at all. This "low audience" still has to buy the console, and we don't know the price of the device with the console, but it won't be £50.
This won't be chump change at all for most, especially those that already have a Wii. But these will be the minority, as they won't buy another console.
You were doing great up until that "it works on everything" part. Plenty of folks have pulled their hair out with Myth in the past and you make it sound like a breeze.
You were doing passable until "in the past". You wrongly assume that MythTV 0.22 is the same as 0.20, and this is your big problem. The same as 0.20 because 0.21 worked great already.
Look at the numbers of folks posting here that have given up on it and you can plainly see it's far from easy.
I see less people that failed a long time ago (surely with 0.20 or OS problems) than people I installed MythTV for, and for whom it works great. The sole thing not working "right" is the XMLTV part where I live, because it's not based on SchedulesDirect like provider yet (there are alternatives though).
I for one hope that this version is VERY good but please, the rah rah it works great stuff can be saved - most of us know better having tried it already.
No, you don't know better at all. As soon as you had problems, you ran everywhere saying it doesn't work, like you're doing now. I've actually used the development version of 0.22 without any issue till this day, and will soon swith to the stable one. So I've actually used 0.22 while you obviously have not.
And sure enough it works great, even better than 0.21 that was already working great.
Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
And while you're stuck with your obsessive compulsive nonsense on version numbers, people that actually care are using it. .20, it's 0.20, and it's a version number, meaning it can become 0.22.1 for example. You must learn to read more carefully, you managed to miss the "0" a lot.
Besides, it's not
I guess you only focus on useless things.
I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while.
MythTV has changed a lot since then. I've really started with version 0.21 (must have been 3 years ago at least) SVN, and the only crashes I experienced were with the frontend because of OS configuration problems (OpenGL, proprietary drivers, ...). The important part, the backend, never failed me once.
Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing the commands in realtime, so I have no idea what the problem was. It was intermittent, and I never found a common thing that was happening at the same time.
Yes, this bug has been fixed, among tons of other ones.
Taking away constraints of OS/software, there is just no solution that leads to a great networked PVR system out there yet, in my opinion. To clarify, I'm not looking for a HTPC - I want a UI, consistent on every TV in my house, that lets me watch live TV (not that I ever do that), watch and/or schedule recordings (and have any available on any TV), watch DVDs, watch downloaded movies/shows, listen to music (both stored and streaming), and things like pictures and weather reports are kinda handy too.
That's not true, there is MythTV. It has changed a lot since even 0.21, and these aren't just cosmetic changes. MythTV 0.22 is really a true milestone.
Don't let the state of MythTV 0.20 fool you and assume that it's still the same with MythTV 0.22, like a lot of people are doing in this discussion. You'll see lots of people talking about MythTV being buggy (meaning it has loads of bugs that makes it crash constantly) and very hard to use. These are basically myths now.
Of course MythTV still has hidden bugs, but from your description of your experience with it, I think you'll be pretty pleased. I've gone through the transition from MythTV 0.21, through SVN of 0.22, on my "production box", because the world was changing around MythTV (migration to DVB-T, HD and new sound codecs in Europe), it still works like a charm, and never failed me.
As far as I remember, Nintendo has been trying to build up the corporate image of a "family friendly" entertainment company.
You remember wrong then. Or it's just semantic, I don't know.
Nintendo actually built up a corporate image of a "for every member of the family" entertainment company.
And strong evidence of this are their handheld consoles, which can't be played by all the family at once, but every member of the family can play games on them.
Perhaps that's what you meant.
Apart from that, Nintendo is just selling entertainment devices, and as for their home consoles, they're still selling a true home console. Home consoles always were local multiplayer devices, with at least 2 controllers that could be attached (there are some exceptions that were failures).
The elderly people on slashdot might remember the ridiculous censorship that Nintendo forced on "Maniac Mansion" before they backed its release for the NES (link: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html).
Given that Nintendo was heavily burned with lawsuits as soon as they tried to enter the western markets, I think history is far more complicated that simply citing one outcome like they did it to displease their customers.
Nintendo financially relies on embracing new target audiences for their products to evade direct competition with Sony and Microsoft.
What does this mean exactly? It makes no sense.
Nintendo financially relies on their customers, and their business strategy is aiming at a population that includes everyone, contrary to their competitors that only target some specific demographics.
And it has nothing to do with evading competition from Sony and MS. They're not preventing Sony or MS to target this audience at all. Sony and MS are the ones who actually are unable to target this audience, and are catching up to compete. Nintendo never prevented them to compete, and nothing of this has anything to do with financials.
Nintendo is the one making money on its console from the start, while the two big competitors were losing money: if anything that should lower Nintendo's ability to compete.
Financially, Nintendo just relied on their belief that the time was ripe for disruption, because the gaming industry was going more and more away from gaming.
Just look at the competitors' consoles: they are adding lots of features that have nothing to do with gaming, their games are more and more alien to local multiplayer.
Nintendo always financially relied on providing big values for gaming, not big values for specs.
Just recall the introduction of the Gameboy, which was technically inferior to its main competitor, the Atari Lynx or think of the WII, which shares most of its components with the not-quite-new Gamecube. Directly targeting the same audiences like Sony or Microsoft got Nintendo in trouble really soon. So, as long as Nintendo does not make an U-turn in its sales strategy it is therefore very likely that "mature" content will be nothing more than a niche that they accept but don't actively promote.
There's sth missing here. I don't see how you made the correlation between "technically inferior hardware" and "mature games". This just makes no sense. All previous generation consoles had very successful "mature" games and all were technically inferior to the Wii.
The problem is pretty simple really. And it's just not true that Nintendo would not actively promote a "mature" game. But it makes no sense to believe that people that want "mature" games will come to the Wii for "Madworld". Some people seriously believe that?
Nintendo made efforts to have a GTA game on the Wii, which was turned down by Rockstar.
To bring an audience for some genres, you need a big game, not lots of small ones. People will go where the big games of that genre are available. How can anyone expect people that like "mature" games to come to the Wii for Madworld when GTA 4 is on HD consoles?
See the problem? It's pretty obvious.
Say it out loud and you can't help but notice that "mature games on Wii" is an absurd, even oxymoronic, phrase.
For the teenager audience which is the target for these "mature" games, sure enough it's hard to fathom.