Actually, they lose money on consoles they sell. So the best way to get your message accross would be for you and all your friends to buy Xboxes and then pirate games.
What next? Getting rid of peer-to-peer file sharing because some people might trade copyrighted data?
You can hardly call the people pirating on napster 'a few'. Napsters biggest problem with their defence is that they did activley police content, by trying to block things like wrapster and any other program that let you trade something other than mp3s on napster.
And I suppose game designers, beta testers, and that guy down the street making a killer game mod have absolutely no use for these?
That's just it, they have absolutly no use for these features.
Developers have no use for this, if they want a wall to be transparent they will just make it transparent. Beta testers don't have enough knowlege of the renderer to spot what's a bug and what isn't once the developers settings are dissabled. Mod guy won't need it if he has any decent tools, and even if he does need to see through walls, any good engine has debugging options that accomplish the same thing.
The only problem with the in game debugging options is that you can't turn them on when you're in a multiplayer game on a server that doesn't allow them.
Your car analogy makes no sense, these drivers are more like a set of tools designed specifically for stealing cars. These drivers are designed for, and marketed to, cheaters.
Rocket jumping was discovered in the first quake game. If it was considered cheating then it would never have been put in every single fps since. Also you mentioned half-life, it's worth noting that the designers descided to make a weapon that does a 0-damage rocket jump.
It's an advanced move for people who play a lot and know the levels.
Most game engines allready have debug options that make these drivers unecessary. These drivers were designed for one thing -- cheating. Chances are game patches will be released that recognise ASUS drivers and dissable the cheats, and ASUS will release new drivers that recognise the games... And the whole thing will degenerate into a giant cat and mouse game.
They probably didn't look quite as good, but I don't think there was as much work as you say.
Whoever made the images on the site was working with _very_ hi res scans of the film(or glass plates or whatever), then cut it down to a size suitable for web browsers.
Add the fact that the 3 images don't line up properly(the edges had to be cropped, this is a bigger problem with the low res versions on the site since you can't move the image up or down less than one pixel). Also there's the jpeg artifacts from the three different images.
But it's still practiced in parts of Utah. My point is that it's not really fair to criticize Muslims for practices that still happen in some backwards parts of the U.S.
I'm not defending child mariages in any way, but it's a little odd that the U.S. has laws against it, but many are unwilling to enforce them, yet people expect a country where people think it's their religious right to start their own harem to change.
It just bothers me that people battle for human rights overseas, but ignore things that happen much closer to home.
No DVD Media. This will drive up the cost of games and cause people to buy PS2s for the DVD movie player
AFAIK the gamecube disks are basicly dvds, they're just a non-standard size to stop piracy (which did a lot of damage to the dreamcast). It's a good idea, since no matter what mod chip is made, burned dvds won't fit into the machine.
As for the cost issue, making a cd with a jewel case in bulk costs less than a dollar. Lisencing fees typically bring the unit cost to about 10 dollars. Manufaturers have allready used special features like making PSX cds black, it's safe to assume that the price difference will be trivial.
As for dvd movies, there are many reports of problems with PS2s. Besides, playing movies is a neat feature, but it's not something that will make or break a system. Also, the X-box will requre an add-on to play dvds.
I should probably add that I'm not planning to buy a game cube, and I don't own an N64. But Nintendo has always provided a decent gaming experience and has never released a system that they didn't support (except for the virtual boy, but everyone knew it sucked right away). Nintendo has also had a much better insight into thier competition than the gaming magazines. Well they did miss the boat on CDs, when everyone was talking about how great the 32x was Nintendo ran an add that said it would be dead as soon as the saturn came out. Sega denied this, many game reviewers dismissed it as propaganda, but sure enough the saturn came out and the 32x died.
On a different topic, it's amazing how long these rants get when I should be studying.
I wouldn't be so quick to predict the end of the fad... I think marketers are much better at prolonging fads now. Look at the Backstreet Boys, in an amazing triamph over all precidents and taste, the're still here. Same with beanie babbies.
Pokemon is still going after two movies, almost all fads lose all their steam and die after one movie ie: spice girls, power rangers, transformers, the list goes on and on. Even X-files and South Park barley survived their movies.
Also, each of the parts of the pokemon empire is good enough to have survived on it's own (gameboy game, cartoon, card game, toys); They aren't just wildly milking their licensees.
All of the ultimate guages of pop culture (x-entertainment.com) seem to say that Pokemon isn't over yet.
Re:Somehow this isn't much of a surprise....
on
Gamecube In Danger?
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· Score: 1
games based on TV, such as Pokemon
Pokemon was originaly a game boy game. In Japan it was the fad that followed those anoying Tamagotchi's (sp?). AFAIK it launched the monster training genre (ie Monster Rancher for PSX). From what I hear the fad passed fairly quickly. When they brought it to the US, someone noticed that a game where you have to collect creatures is a marketers wet dream.
After a marketing onslaught using a good game, a decent cartoon (especially when you compare it with something like the Mario cartoon from the 80's), and a popular collectable card game (AKA the crack/cocaine of trading cards) from WotC, we have a Nintendo cash cow.
You might think that who made Pokemon is a small issue, but it's important to this discussion since Nintendo gets royalties for every single Pokemon product.
Or the practice of marrying girls off at ridiculously young ages.
Doesn't that happen in parts of the US? I seem to recall Elvis marrying a 16yr old. Or in areas of the country where people practice polygamy 14yr olds typically get married.
Well you have to admit, what Nintendo did (censoring the blood) was more honest than what Sega did (censoring the blood, rating it 14+ then adding a "secret" code to turn the blood back on).
do i personaly think they will get it out before x-mas? how man years late was nt5.0? 4? almost 5?
But this is a very different situation. The X-Box hardware has had it's final specs revealed. Each day it's delayed is another day closer to being obselete. In a way, hardware is a perishable good.
However, Win2k (NT5) is a vary different project then NT5 would have been had it been released 4 years earlier. In that time they were adding new features and trying to eliminate the bugs.
Delaying software _can_ lead to a better product. Delaying hardware that you can't improve is just rendering it out of date.
But you're forgetting, ripping and encoding is for the most part, something that's left up to techies. Most people just download songs and trade them.
Geeks are going to be the ones compressing the files and setting up the distrobution system, so it follows that we will choose the format. Farber is partly right... the average user will take what their given, but they will go to whatever format offers the most content. The average user will go with whatever works, and right now that's mp3.
Don't forget how long Real and MS were trying to push their own formats before they gave in and supported mp3s. mp3s never got help from any of the large corps(until long after it was standard) and never needed it.
Real has always sucked because they bend over backwards (or maybe forwards) to make things appear secure, and to try to sell you real player plus. They ignore obvious improvements like caching a stream, which would be great for those of us that have fast but inconsistent connections. Then there's the fact that they limit the volume in their player, so you can't hear just how low quality the sound is.
Look at DivX;-). If you don't have the codec, WMP won't download it for you. You have to search through various mirrors to find it. It has no corporate backing and encoding isn't exactly simple(I assume, I haven't tried it). By the logic of MS it should be dying, but it's not.
The piracy (and lets not get into any of that 'I only use it to back up my CDs' bullshit) community only needs to find an open format and the'll take it from there.
This isn't like MS beating Netscape, this is like MS trying to replace.JPEGs with Microsoft Image Files. And to encourage acceptance of the format, paintbrush will now only save jpegs at low quality. It's just not going to catch on.
You should see what they get away with on the french channels. If you're near Ottawa, channel 49 airs badly dubbed(from english to french) soft porn every saturday night, and most friday nights. Mind you, this is a broadcast station.
But you're forgetting, TV is allready a heavily censored medium. If you're under 18 I can understand why you may be upset. However, the rest of us will finally get to see all the hardcore sex and violence we want at 4 in the afternoon on broadcast channels.
It's the rarest and most valuable card, they stopped making them after unlimited edition (the first white border series, on their current numbering scheme it would be 2nd edition).
0 mana to play, sacrafice to give you 3 mana of any colour. If you got it in your first hand you could play a big creature on the second or third turn, before your oponent could cast anything to defend against it.
Wow, it's been a while since I thought about that.
Dammit, X has supported non-rectangular shaped windows since 1986, but try opening a round window in either KDE or Gnome, and what happens?
The round window extension was only written to showcase X's extensibility. AFAIK the only two apps that use it are xclock and xeyes. It's not worth redisigning your entire theme system to take into account those two apps.
Besides, if you really like xeyes it's availiable ask a gnome toolbar app.
The funny thing is, we tought it was only the close up of the boarder that was fake, but it turned out (like many suspected) that all of the screenshots had fake characters in them.
If that's the case how do you know that the edge issues aren't the result of the players being rendered using a different meathod?
For instance, in quake 2 all the creatures had some tricks done on them to make them look rounder. It doesn't seem impossible that combining the two rendering methods might create some edge artifacts.
However I'm no graphics expert, I hope someone can answer this.
There are no peer reviewed, placebo controlled, statistically tested, double blind studies to determine the efficacy of theraputic touch.
I agree with your point in general, but it's important to note that many medical procedures, such as chemotherepy, have never undergone double blind studies.
You might have to wait a while... 3DFX never supported T&L because tile based rendering is increadibly inefficiant when the number of polygons increase.
Not that our Un*x boxen are inherently any better. We just seem to "care" more about knowing what our servers are actually doing.
I think that the real problem here is that a lack of diversity in OS's creates huge security problems.
ie: One world, One Operating System, One exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it killed the Dreamcast. : )
You can hardly call the people pirating on napster 'a few'. Napsters biggest problem with their defence is that they did activley police content, by trying to block things like wrapster and any other program that let you trade something other than mp3s on napster.
Developers have no use for this, if they want a wall to be transparent they will just make it transparent. Beta testers don't have enough knowlege of the renderer to spot what's a bug and what isn't once the developers settings are dissabled. Mod guy won't need it if he has any decent tools, and even if he does need to see through walls, any good engine has debugging options that accomplish the same thing.
The only problem with the in game debugging options is that you can't turn them on when you're in a multiplayer game on a server that doesn't allow them.
Your car analogy makes no sense, these drivers are more like a set of tools designed specifically for stealing cars. These drivers are designed for, and marketed to, cheaters.
Most game engines allready have debug options that make these drivers unecessary. These drivers were designed for one thing -- cheating. Chances are game patches will be released that recognise ASUS drivers and dissable the cheats, and ASUS will release new drivers that recognise the games... And the whole thing will degenerate into a giant cat and mouse game.
Whoever made the images on the site was working with _very_ hi res scans of the film(or glass plates or whatever), then cut it down to a size suitable for web browsers.
Add the fact that the 3 images don't line up properly(the edges had to be cropped, this is a bigger problem with the low res versions on the site since you can't move the image up or down less than one pixel). Also there's the jpeg artifacts from the three different images.
But it's still practiced in parts of Utah. My point is that it's not really fair to criticize Muslims for practices that still happen in some backwards parts of the U.S.
I'm not defending child mariages in any way, but it's a little odd that the U.S. has laws against it, but many are unwilling to enforce them, yet people expect a country where people think it's their religious right to start their own harem to change.
It just bothers me that people battle for human rights overseas, but ignore things that happen much closer to home.
As for the cost issue, making a cd with a jewel case in bulk costs less than a dollar. Lisencing fees typically bring the unit cost to about 10 dollars. Manufaturers have allready used special features like making PSX cds black, it's safe to assume that the price difference will be trivial.
As for dvd movies, there are many reports of problems with PS2s. Besides, playing movies is a neat feature, but it's not something that will make or break a system. Also, the X-box will requre an add-on to play dvds.
I should probably add that I'm not planning to buy a game cube, and I don't own an N64. But Nintendo has always provided a decent gaming experience and has never released a system that they didn't support (except for the virtual boy, but everyone knew it sucked right away). Nintendo has also had a much better insight into thier competition than the gaming magazines. Well they did miss the boat on CDs, when everyone was talking about how great the 32x was Nintendo ran an add that said it would be dead as soon as the saturn came out. Sega denied this, many game reviewers dismissed it as propaganda, but sure enough the saturn came out and the 32x died.
On a different topic, it's amazing how long these rants get when I should be studying.
Pokemon is still going after two movies, almost all fads lose all their steam and die after one movie ie: spice girls, power rangers, transformers, the list goes on and on. Even X-files and South Park barley survived their movies.
Also, each of the parts of the pokemon empire is good enough to have survived on it's own (gameboy game, cartoon, card game, toys); They aren't just wildly milking their licensees.
All of the ultimate guages of pop culture (x-entertainment.com) seem to say that Pokemon isn't over yet.
Pokemon was originaly a game boy game. In Japan it was the fad that followed those anoying Tamagotchi's (sp?). AFAIK it launched the monster training genre (ie Monster Rancher for PSX). From what I hear the fad passed fairly quickly. When they brought it to the US, someone noticed that a game where you have to collect creatures is a marketers wet dream.
After a marketing onslaught using a good game, a decent cartoon (especially when you compare it with something like the Mario cartoon from the 80's), and a popular collectable card game (AKA the crack/cocaine of trading cards) from WotC, we have a Nintendo cash cow.
You might think that who made Pokemon is a small issue, but it's important to this discussion since Nintendo gets royalties for every single Pokemon product.
Well you have to admit, what Nintendo did (censoring the blood) was more honest than what Sega did (censoring the blood, rating it 14+ then adding a "secret" code to turn the blood back on).
But this is a very different situation. The X-Box hardware has had it's final specs revealed. Each day it's delayed is another day closer to being obselete. In a way, hardware is a perishable good.
However, Win2k (NT5) is a vary different project then NT5 would have been had it been released 4 years earlier. In that time they were adding new features and trying to eliminate the bugs.
Delaying software _can_ lead to a better product. Delaying hardware that you can't improve is just rendering it out of date.
Geeks are going to be the ones compressing the files and setting up the distrobution system, so it follows that we will choose the format. Farber is partly right... the average user will take what their given, but they will go to whatever format offers the most content. The average user will go with whatever works, and right now that's mp3.
Don't forget how long Real and MS were trying to push their own formats before they gave in and supported mp3s. mp3s never got help from any of the large corps(until long after it was standard) and never needed it.
Real has always sucked because they bend over backwards (or maybe forwards) to make things appear secure, and to try to sell you real player plus. They ignore obvious improvements like caching a stream, which would be great for those of us that have fast but inconsistent connections. Then there's the fact that they limit the volume in their player, so you can't hear just how low quality the sound is.
Look at DivX ;-). If you don't have the codec, WMP won't download it for you. You have to search through various mirrors to find it. It has no corporate backing and encoding isn't exactly simple(I assume, I haven't tried it). By the logic of MS it should be dying, but it's not.
The piracy (and lets not get into any of that 'I only use it to back up my CDs' bullshit) community only needs to find an open format and the'll take it from there.
This isn't like MS beating Netscape, this is like MS trying to replace .JPEGs with Microsoft Image Files. And to encourage acceptance of the format, paintbrush will now only save jpegs at low quality. It's just not going to catch on.
You should see what they get away with on the french channels. If you're near Ottawa, channel 49 airs badly dubbed(from english to french) soft porn every saturday night, and most friday nights. Mind you, this is a broadcast station.
Haven't you heard of it? C Gots an Interpreter. :P
Isn't 420 a marijuana reference? I guess IBM didn't want free advertising on smokedot :)
This is a good thing.
0 mana to play, sacrafice to give you 3 mana of any colour. If you got it in your first hand you could play a big creature on the second or third turn, before your oponent could cast anything to defend against it.
Wow, it's been a while since I thought about that.
And we all know what EA does to companies it buys... hint: it rhymes with 'village'.
Besides, if you really like xeyes it's availiable ask a gnome toolbar app.
For instance, in quake 2 all the creatures had some tricks done on them to make them look rounder. It doesn't seem impossible that combining the two rendering methods might create some edge artifacts.
However I'm no graphics expert, I hope someone can answer this.
You might have to wait a while... 3DFX never supported T&L because tile based rendering is increadibly inefficiant when the number of polygons increase.
ie: One world, One Operating System, One exploit.