I don't care if the second coming of Christ is an exclusive for the PS3. I'm not paying that much money for a machine that just plays videogames and movies.
The court's job was to determine the intent of the law and it decided to go with what most people consider to be fruits rather than the more rigorous definition used by botanists.
My favorite part is the justification about how the people think it's a vegetable because of when they eat it:
in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert
That's not a justification, it's a description of how the words fruit and vegetable are used in everyday speech. The judge decided, correctly, that the lawmakers were using the words fruit and vegetable as they are commonly used rather than as they are used by botanists.
Yes, HDTVs are vastly outselling SDTVs now, but the thing is, there are still tons of SDTVs sitting in homes. Most people don't replace their TVs all that often, so it's going to be a while before the majority of TVs are HDTVs.
I've been thinking that maybe antitrust regulation should be applied to unions. If the unions were broken up into multiple unions that compete with eachother for members and contracts to provide labor it seems like we'd get better results than the current situation. Workers would still have access to the tactic of collective bargaining, but they would have to limit their demands or else the company would go to a competing union.
Well unless the wording of the bill explicitly says that they have to play through all conceivable states of the game I wouldn't worry about that. If you put 100 hours into a game like Spore or Animal Crossing you can more or less safely assume that any additional game play will be more or less the same.
The signs were flat with a small thick part at the bottom. If you've looked at pictures of them you should be able to see that there is no way they could contain a non-negligible explosive charge. It was apparent to any sane person who made a cursory examination of them that they were not bombs.
If you want to sell something to preteens, you market it to teens. If you want to sell something to teens you market it to young adults. Kids want to be like older kids and teens want to be like 20-30 year olds. That's why games marked mature aren't really targetted at people who are mature. Mature is just a marketing codeword to draw in teens who like to think of themselves as grown up.
Long term, it still helps them more to sell a console than not to sell it. They're taking huge losses right now and it's unlikely that all or even most of the current buyers will buy enough games to offset the loss, but if they don't get those consoles into homes they'll be hurting badly. They need marketshare so they can keep making deals for exclusive games so they can sell more consoles later when they're cheaper to produce.
So yeah, they're taking a massive loss per unit sold right now, but third party developers will start to bail on them if they don't sell PS3s. And not being able to sell PS3's later when they're cheaper would result in a much greater loss in potential profit.
Voltaire didn't actually ever say or write that. That phrase first occurred in a The Friends of Voltaire, written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906. She intended it to be a summary of Voltaire's philosophy on personal freedom. However, many people mistook this for a quotation and attributed it to Voltaire.
Anyway, I think you're getting a little bit wound up over a silly little snide comment. I do not support laws that hinder freedom of speech.
...but I think the world might actually be a better place if MySpace were crippled or shut down by these sorts of nanny laws. I think that MySpace is a net negative for mankind.
I had a tough time finding extra wiimotes where I live. I called various stores and eventually found a Toys-R-Us that claimed to have them. When I got there, I asked where the wiimotes were only to be directed to a shelf with at least a dozen nunchuks and classic controllers but not a single wiimote. When I inquired further, I was told that was all the "remotes" they had. I was going to explain to the woman that those things were entirely useless to me without the wiimote, but I decided not to be a dick and just let it slide.
I looked at the same numbers you did before making my post. I did make a miscalculation when I said that the 2x Blu-ray drive is only slightly faster than a 4x drive, but otherwise I stand by my assertion that the Blu-ray drive is underperforming compared to what Sony could have gotten by using DVD.
The 12x DVD drive has 1.8 times the max transfer rate of the 2x Blu-ray drive. I don't see how you can say that isn't a substantial difference. Also, (2*4.5)/1.35=6.67 not 8, so it's a stretch to say that the Blu-ray drive is equivalent to an 8x DVD drive. I also don't see how you are able to conclude that the difference between the two drives will be less prominent when comparing average transfer rates. I can't find any information to suggest that the average transfer rates wouldn't be roughly proportional to the max transfer rates. As such, I can only assume that load times will be roughly 1.8 times longer for a PS3 game running from Blu-ray than for a similarly implemented game on the 360.
I'm sure that works great for most games. But if a game exceeds 20GB, you won't be able to copy it onto the 20GB models and it'll still be cumbersome on the 60GB models. I'm guessing that the PS3 version of Oblivion must be large enough that a lot of people wouldn't want to copy it to their hard drive if they're looking for hacks to improve seek time.
Given the amount of money the Blu-ray drive costs, I don't think it sufficiently benefits the gaming capabilities of the PS3. They could have made something clever instead like a DVD drive with two lasers in order to read both sides of a double sided DVD. Then they'd get 17GB per disc and vastly better performance. But instead they foisted an immature technology on the PS3 in order to try to prop up Blu-ray (and I'm not even sure that Blu-ray needed to be propped up in the first place).
The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 only spins at 2x speed. Even with the density advantage of Blu-ray it ends up only giving slightly better transfer rates than the 4x DVD drive in the PS2. The 360 uses a 12x DVD drive and I can't find any information on the speed of the Wii's drive, but it's probably also somewhere in the neighborhood of 12x.
The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the game across multiple discs.
They're using virtual console releases to pad gaps between the release dates of highly anticipated Wii games. Expect to see the big virtual console titles released during months when there aren't any good Wii games being released.
The last time I checked, most of my NES cartridges were virtually unreadable. I don't think I want to go back to having to deal with corroded contacts.
ESA is a trade association. It's a non-profit organization that only exists to provide a united front for the video game industry.
The reason that E3 went from being a massive spectacle to a private business oriented event was because ESA's members want it that way. While E3 had developed into a big event where game companies spend tons of money to show off their upcoming products, its primary intent was always to bring developers, publishers, and retailers together to make business deals. E3 had become clogged with people who were peripheral to the video game industry at best and the frivolous competition for attention between exhibitors had become too expensive to be worthwhile.
So Doug Lowenstein didn't lose ESA any money. It costs money to host E3. No money was lost by scaling down E3 because the new E3 will cost less to host. And ESA doesn't make any money anyway because it's just a trade association, not a business. It's unlikely that Doug Lowenstein's resignation resulted from the changes to E3 because the game industry wanted those changes to E3.
The phrase "the ends justify the means" is a poor justification for one's actions. If you fail to achieve "the ends" then all you have accomplished is damning yourself (metaphorically and/or literally). This issue is of particular importance to the debate over torture since torture has a tendency to produce false information (as can be seen from the many witch hunts throughout history).
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." --Friedrich Nietzsche
We could easily bring order to Iraq using the right techniques. Guerrilla tactics are extremely hard for an army to combat (especially a foreign one), and there is only one method that is proven to work consistently to suppress guerrilla fighters: massacre civilians in response to each attack. So are you willing to order our soldiers to massacre civilians, even the women and children, in order to bring order to Iraq? Are you willing to become a monster to achieve your goals?
Of course torture isn't as evil as slaughtering civilians, but it's still something that we as a society decided was wrong a long time ago. I don't think we should try to bring back torture now, because some people think it would be convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if the second coming of Christ is an exclusive for the PS3. I'm not paying that much money for a machine that just plays videogames and movies.
Or they could have it support USB headsets.
That's not a justification, it's a description of how the words fruit and vegetable are used in everyday speech. The judge decided, correctly, that the lawmakers were using the words fruit and vegetable as they are commonly used rather than as they are used by botanists.
Yes, HDTVs are vastly outselling SDTVs now, but the thing is, there are still tons of SDTVs sitting in homes. Most people don't replace their TVs all that often, so it's going to be a while before the majority of TVs are HDTVs.
I've been thinking that maybe antitrust regulation should be applied to unions. If the unions were broken up into multiple unions that compete with eachother for members and contracts to provide labor it seems like we'd get better results than the current situation. Workers would still have access to the tactic of collective bargaining, but they would have to limit their demands or else the company would go to a competing union.
I think you mean Ploject Seeds.
You may be surprised to learn this but there is more than one game available for the Wii.
Well unless the wording of the bill explicitly says that they have to play through all conceivable states of the game I wouldn't worry about that. If you put 100 hours into a game like Spore or Animal Crossing you can more or less safely assume that any additional game play will be more or less the same.
The signs were flat with a small thick part at the bottom. If you've looked at pictures of them you should be able to see that there is no way they could contain a non-negligible explosive charge. It was apparent to any sane person who made a cursory examination of them that they were not bombs.
Metroid Metal
If you want to sell something to preteens, you market it to teens. If you want to sell something to teens you market it to young adults. Kids want to be like older kids and teens want to be like 20-30 year olds. That's why games marked mature aren't really targetted at people who are mature. Mature is just a marketing codeword to draw in teens who like to think of themselves as grown up.
Long term, it still helps them more to sell a console than not to sell it. They're taking huge losses right now and it's unlikely that all or even most of the current buyers will buy enough games to offset the loss, but if they don't get those consoles into homes they'll be hurting badly. They need marketshare so they can keep making deals for exclusive games so they can sell more consoles later when they're cheaper to produce.
So yeah, they're taking a massive loss per unit sold right now, but third party developers will start to bail on them if they don't sell PS3s. And not being able to sell PS3's later when they're cheaper would result in a much greater loss in potential profit.
Voltaire didn't actually ever say or write that. That phrase first occurred in a The Friends of Voltaire, written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906. She intended it to be a summary of Voltaire's philosophy on personal freedom. However, many people mistook this for a quotation and attributed it to Voltaire.
Anyway, I think you're getting a little bit wound up over a silly little snide comment. I do not support laws that hinder freedom of speech.
...but I think the world might actually be a better place if MySpace were crippled or shut down by these sorts of nanny laws. I think that MySpace is a net negative for mankind.
I had a tough time finding extra wiimotes where I live. I called various stores and eventually found a Toys-R-Us that claimed to have them. When I got there, I asked where the wiimotes were only to be directed to a shelf with at least a dozen nunchuks and classic controllers but not a single wiimote. When I inquired further, I was told that was all the "remotes" they had. I was going to explain to the woman that those things were entirely useless to me without the wiimote, but I decided not to be a dick and just let it slide.
I looked at the same numbers you did before making my post. I did make a miscalculation when I said that the 2x Blu-ray drive is only slightly faster than a 4x drive, but otherwise I stand by my assertion that the Blu-ray drive is underperforming compared to what Sony could have gotten by using DVD.
The 12x DVD drive has 1.8 times the max transfer rate of the 2x Blu-ray drive. I don't see how you can say that isn't a substantial difference. Also, (2*4.5)/1.35=6.67 not 8, so it's a stretch to say that the Blu-ray drive is equivalent to an 8x DVD drive. I also don't see how you are able to conclude that the difference between the two drives will be less prominent when comparing average transfer rates. I can't find any information to suggest that the average transfer rates wouldn't be roughly proportional to the max transfer rates. As such, I can only assume that load times will be roughly 1.8 times longer for a PS3 game running from Blu-ray than for a similarly implemented game on the 360.
I'm sure that works great for most games. But if a game exceeds 20GB, you won't be able to copy it onto the 20GB models and it'll still be cumbersome on the 60GB models. I'm guessing that the PS3 version of Oblivion must be large enough that a lot of people wouldn't want to copy it to their hard drive if they're looking for hacks to improve seek time.
Given the amount of money the Blu-ray drive costs, I don't think it sufficiently benefits the gaming capabilities of the PS3. They could have made something clever instead like a DVD drive with two lasers in order to read both sides of a double sided DVD. Then they'd get 17GB per disc and vastly better performance. But instead they foisted an immature technology on the PS3 in order to try to prop up Blu-ray (and I'm not even sure that Blu-ray needed to be propped up in the first place).
The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 only spins at 2x speed. Even with the density advantage of Blu-ray it ends up only giving slightly better transfer rates than the 4x DVD drive in the PS2. The 360 uses a 12x DVD drive and I can't find any information on the speed of the Wii's drive, but it's probably also somewhere in the neighborhood of 12x.
The Blu-ray drive's slow transfer rate is only made worse by the fact that high definition games have to pull a lot more data off of the disc and the hack discussed in the article will only improve the seek time. I can't help but think that Sony going with Blu-ray at this point in time was ill-advised. If Blu-ray were a bit more mature they would have faster drives. As it is now, they're trading speed for capacity and games REALLY need speed and if they lack capacity it's generally feasible to spread the game across multiple discs.
Elebits is probably the next best thing. It's incredibly satisfying to throw cars around with the capture gun.
They're using virtual console releases to pad gaps between the release dates of highly anticipated Wii games. Expect to see the big virtual console titles released during months when there aren't any good Wii games being released.
The last time I checked, most of my NES cartridges were virtually unreadable. I don't think I want to go back to having to deal with corroded contacts.
OK, I'll fill you in:
ESA is a trade association. It's a non-profit organization that only exists to provide a united front for the video game industry.
The reason that E3 went from being a massive spectacle to a private business oriented event was because ESA's members want it that way. While E3 had developed into a big event where game companies spend tons of money to show off their upcoming products, its primary intent was always to bring developers, publishers, and retailers together to make business deals. E3 had become clogged with people who were peripheral to the video game industry at best and the frivolous competition for attention between exhibitors had become too expensive to be worthwhile.
So Doug Lowenstein didn't lose ESA any money. It costs money to host E3. No money was lost by scaling down E3 because the new E3 will cost less to host. And ESA doesn't make any money anyway because it's just a trade association, not a business. It's unlikely that Doug Lowenstein's resignation resulted from the changes to E3 because the game industry wanted those changes to E3.
The phrase "the ends justify the means" is a poor justification for one's actions. If you fail to achieve "the ends" then all you have accomplished is damning yourself (metaphorically and/or literally). This issue is of particular importance to the debate over torture since torture has a tendency to produce false information (as can be seen from the many witch hunts throughout history).
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." --Friedrich Nietzsche
We could easily bring order to Iraq using the right techniques. Guerrilla tactics are extremely hard for an army to combat (especially a foreign one), and there is only one method that is proven to work consistently to suppress guerrilla fighters: massacre civilians in response to each attack. So are you willing to order our soldiers to massacre civilians, even the women and children, in order to bring order to Iraq? Are you willing to become a monster to achieve your goals?
Of course torture isn't as evil as slaughtering civilians, but it's still something that we as a society decided was wrong a long time ago. I don't think we should try to bring back torture now, because some people think it would be convenient.
Beloved son
You can't argue with actors portraying arson investigators! Obviously you must have been holding the match upside down.