>>This reminds me of the scene in Ace Ventura, where Jim Carrey talks out of his ass.>Zelda was a Japanese game. Or have you forgotten that Nintendo is a Japanese company?
I was speaking of preorders in the US, not that Zelda was American.
Simply put, Japan's game market is much, much bigger than the US's. Even if it's shrinking now, it'll have to shrink to less than half of it's current size for the US market to "catch up".
That's why people saying that "The real money is in the US console market" crack me up. Crazy me, I figure going after the market with 2-3 times the number of customers is where I'd make more money. Silly, eh?
I wouldn't say Microsoft really came out of nowhere and almost tied Nintendo is representative of Microsoft's strength in the console biz. It's more along the lines of how weak Nintendo was earlier this year. Nintendo *really* stumbled recently, and Sony took a huge lead because of it. MS basically had a free ride because of that, as well.
There's a few things stopping MS from winning the console wars.
1. Japan is EXTREMELY Xenophobic. They aren't going to sell out their extremely LARGE (highest pre-selling American game: Zelda at 700k units. Highest pre-selling Japanese game: Dragon Warrior 7 at 3,000k units.) console market to a "Gaijin" company without VERY good reason. The XBox is NOT good enough to make them give up their stranglehold on the market.
If you don't get why Japan is where the console wars will be won or lost, let me point it out to you. 99% of all successful console games in the past 20 years have been from Japan. The only exception I can think of is Halo -- and that was a PC game which had it's XBox port released a year before the PC version. Unless Microsoft can invade and make progress in Japan, they will NEVER make any headway in the console market. Period.
2. Sony might drop the ball but the chances of them truely screwing up the PS3 is *very* slim. Yes, the cell processor is a gimmick and a scam, and will fall flat. The PS3 will almost definately be a success, however, because of sheer inertia.
The only thing that could really kill them is if their arrogance makes them do the same kind of stupid errors that Nintendo did in the late 80s that put Big N in the spot they are now (basically being arrogant asses, pissing on 3rd parties and trying to push people around). Granted, the PSP and their repeated micromanagement with stuff like Final Fantasy 11 in the US kinda hints at that same kinda arrogance... However. Nintendo would be far more likely to capitulate on this than Microsoft.
3. Nintendo is *not* going to be idle during all this. Nintendo blew *everyone* out of the water this E3. Sony had a mock up of a unfinished portable with a 2 hour battery life. Microsoft had games they announced a year ago. Nintendo had a playable version of their new portable and about 9 bombshell announcements, one after another. The "Reggielution" as it were got so many people fired up that it really breathed some very much needed fresh air into Nintendo's sails.
Nintendo is calling their next console the Nintendo Revolution. This represents Big N's new thinking -- that horsepower isn't going to be enough to win the next generation of console wars. They're right. The DS completely blew everyone away who saw it, not because it was so graphically potent -- although it was quite nice -- but rather, because it brought so many NEW THINGS to the table. Touch pad, Wireless Link, WIFI Internet on a portable, 2 screens, etc. These are going to bring new games, and new WAYS to play games, and that is going to push sales.
In other words -- Japan has 2 huge titans gearing up for a *huge* battle for #1. There's no room for some silly spoiled foreigner brat of a company to try and push their way in. Especially when all they can muster up for information at the largest console convention in the world is some new screenshots of a game that was announced at last year's E3. Unless Microsoft gets serious, they're not going to be getting anywhere.
Someone must have a pretty fancy crystal ball to tell us what is and isn't going to "sidelined" four years in the future.
It must be an especially magical ball too, considering the fast strides Linux has made in the last 2 years. Apparently 100,000 Linux Hackers all fall over dead in the near future or something to slow us down.
4 years from now we'll be running circles around Microsoft -- especially if they're next major version of Windows is 4 years away.
Ah, but you forget, that back in the day, Microsoft did not ignore the Internet.
Rather, they saw it as competition for "The Microsoft Network."
This represents the main problem facing Microsoft, and the stupid move they have done repeatedly: Rather than work with other people's standards, Microsoft has repeatedly tried to reinvent the wheel so that they get to be in the drivers seat. (And get to put up toll booths on the way, of course.)
Sometimes this works well (MS Word.DOC format, for example), other times it doesn't (MS's bastardized HTML,.NET), and other times they're beat upside the head with a cluebrick hard enough to change their ways in time ("The Microsoft Network").
THIS is where Microsoft will eventually screw up, royally. Microsoft will try to reinvent something fundamental to computing, for example, "TCP/MS" as a "secure replacement for TCP/IP (with mint sprinkles!)" and GNU/Linux + Apple will be there to smack them around for it. MS will either steadfastily try to force it, or change their tune too late, and they will start to lose clients because of it.
My worst accident was in trying out a new motherboard laying on top of some cardboard. A stumble sent it flying, and the keyboard port (a AT style -- DIN6?) ripped itself free of the motherboard.
It was a small jump (486 to 486DX, back when Intel had just announced the Pentium 3) but for me, that sucked.
Gameboy. Gameboy Pocket. Gameboy Color. Gameboy Advance. Gameboy DS.
If Gameboy Pocket games had suddenly not been able to play Gameboy games, we'd be seeing the PSP walk all over the Gameboy Advance. As it stands, most people are more interested in the DS than the PSP. Although, to it's credit, the DS has to get bonus points for actually being playable at E3, and not being a non-working design prototype with a computer + emulator nearby.
And, also, it's worth noting Nintendo has repeatedly said the GBA and the DS are seperate -- there will be a GBA2 in the future, the DS is not a replacement for the GBA -- which is why the DS will not play old Gameboy games, just Gameboy Advance games and DS games.
I use my backwards compatability every day. PS1 games play fine in the PS2, why do I need to hook up the PS1?
As for the xBox, well, lets see.
1. XBox-1 comfortably seats 7. 2. XBox-2, going by the American "bigger means better", will comfortably seat at least 9. 3. Putting the two next to each other will probably cause a small black hole to form in my living room.
Since singularities tend to disrupt the gaming process, I need to give this idea a big thumbs down.
Anyone else experiencing this? Before, if I right clicked on a file and selected save as, it would automatically download and save to my desktop. Now, the option seems to not do anything.
Obviously you're new to this whole intra-web thing.
People don't pay for stuff they get for free. If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off and found a new free host to mooch off of and left him high and dry with an outrageous bandiwdth bill.
You think he wasn't pushing them to try and get them to sign up for pay accounts already? The number one rule of the internet -- users are absolute resourch leeching mooches.
Hurray for American Ingenuity! Who else would think to wait till they saw something halfway across the world in the news, then quickly patent the idea in their home country?
You're also forgetting she had 3rd degree burns to her, you know, crotch?
And that McDonalds had been warned, repeatedly, that their coffee was scalding hot -- WAY too hot to even drink.
If my willy got burned by boiling coffee after a company was warned over and over that they were making coffee that was too hot for human consumption, and then they offered me less than 10% of my medical bills, I would sue them into the ground too.
>>Thus, we get games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, games doomed before they ever hit shelves because they were not deemed Manly enough.
I would point out, that "Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker" is one of the highest selling games in US History. No game before or after has hit as many preorders as Wind Waker did. (In the US.)
Well, knowing what it was, I decided to open it anyway just to see how well Firefox's popup blocker works.
Lets just say, it still needs work.
Oh, and the idiots at peoplesprimary.com need to be DDoSed, just because they're shitheads who deserve a $3000 bandwidth bill.:)
Oh, and am I wrong, or does this
if (typeof clipboardData != 'undefined') { var content = clipboardData.getData("Text"); document.forms["cl ip"].elements["content"].value = content; } document.forms["clip"].submit();
mean they're trying to get your browser to send them the contents of your clipboard? After disabling javascript I peeked at their little website, and that's what was in there.
Because the RIAA, MPAA, and a few other old school companies (Is Qwest vs VOIP next?) are completely incapable of thinking up new tactics to deal with this changing world we live in.
Instead, they keep repeating their same old tricks. Hard to copy media isn't anything new, that's one of the major reasons they moved from casettes to CDs, because no one could easily copy them. They're just trying to extend that old trick to digital media, and it's failing badly.
Thus reveals problem #2 with these groups. They are NOT used to people competing with them, yet alone their own customers. That is why you see people look so dumbfounded when people aren't content to just sit back and accept what is fed to them. (For example, that RIAA guy who muttered "un-fucking-believeable" when he saw that some "random college idiot" had dared to break their CSS cash cow.)
Rather than see their customers quietly put up with the record companies and the movie companies putting out some horribly self-serving content like they have so many times before, they're seeing us turn on them and use every bit of our skills to bypass and ignore their self-serving bits. You can see this in a few dozen ways:
1. Our own audio and video format that lack DRM to contest their digital versions of disposable dvds. (OGG and XviD/OGM) 2. P2P, which is a direct result of them trying to put out 1 or 2 good songs on a CD and force us to buy them. (iTunes store is the ultimate end result of this, and they're trying to kill that too by forcing Apple to bundle songs.) 3. Distributed and Encrypted P2P like Gnutella and WASTE, to fight them trying to make the very act of sharing content online illegal. (I consider attacks on P2P to be more of an attack on indy music and artists who don't mind their content being shared. Who would buy Metalijoke when there are 50 other small bands better than them who'd love to just be heard?) 4. Distributed projects in countries that haven't yet been "DMCA-afied", to fight them trying to destroy fair use.
Of course, they're doing their damnest to try and make the very act of even discussing their tricks illegal.
So, er, yah. Longer than I expected, but, quick synopsis -- basically, they're trying the same old trick because they're dinosaurs who can't think of anything new.
The whole point is the average person won't do the math, and assume that this is only going to affect people making, well, $27 an hour. It's the same thing as mentioning terrorism whenever you say Patriot Act -- watch the news, you'll see. Evenever they EVER mention the Patriot act, they mention Terrorism in the same breath. Both are intentional confusions of the issue, used in order to confuse the issue and give shrills a talking point to attack anyone critisizing them.
"Oh, you just love terrorism, that's why you say the Patriot Act is a violation of Civil Rights!" "Oh, you just wanna see these fat geeks who are already making $27 make time and a half!"
Fortunately I'm quite confident that when Bush is thrown out on his butt in November that these and so many other stupid anti-worker laws will be thrown out.
No problemo. For the record, I listened to Air America for like 2 hours before leaving for work earlier today on Real10, and it worked great. Never went over 2.5 kb/second, which is good because I'm in a situation where I'm supposed to manage my own bandwidth usage (not throttled, just get a nastygram if I use too much).
I had Everquest (in the bazaar), Mozilla 1.7 (with about 8 tabs open), MIRC (3 servers and about 9 rooms), ABC (with 3 downloads going), and RealPlayer open. Half a gig of Ram, 768 meg swap file. No noticable swapfile access when I switched between them all.
When I do the same thing with WinAmp 5, I experince a bit more swapfile access. So Real 10 appears to use up less ram than Winamp 5 -- but then again, I wasn't loading up 17 hours of MP3s with Real 10, either. I'll try that when I get home. However, I had been alt-tabbing a lot before then, and the majority of the swapfile usage goes away after doing so.
I usually have a lot of buffering when using Winamp and shoutcast, but didn't experience much with Air America on Real. Only buffered one time, and that was after about 45 minutes of constant listening.
This is pretty cool since I'm on a 801.11b wireless broadband connection (tower is about 8 miles away from my house). However, the feed was only 24kbit, so that might have been part of it.
Either way, it's a great imporvment so far over the older copies of Real. I don't intend to ditch WinAMP and BSPlayer, but I'm definately not regretting installing it.
Slashdot Mirror
>>This reminds me of the scene in Ace Ventura, where Jim Carrey talks out of his ass.>Zelda was a Japanese game. Or have you forgotten that Nintendo is a Japanese company?
I was speaking of preorders in the US, not that Zelda was American.
Simply put, Japan's game market is much, much bigger than the US's. Even if it's shrinking now, it'll have to shrink to less than half of it's current size for the US market to "catch up".
That's why people saying that "The real money is in the US console market" crack me up. Crazy me, I figure going after the market with 2-3 times the number of customers is where I'd make more money. Silly, eh?
I wouldn't say Microsoft really came out of nowhere and almost tied Nintendo is representative of Microsoft's strength in the console biz. It's more along the lines of how weak Nintendo was earlier this year. Nintendo *really* stumbled recently, and Sony took a huge lead because of it. MS basically had a free ride because of that, as well.
There's a few things stopping MS from winning the console wars.
1. Japan is EXTREMELY Xenophobic. They aren't going to sell out their extremely LARGE (highest pre-selling American game: Zelda at 700k units. Highest pre-selling Japanese game: Dragon Warrior 7 at 3,000k units.) console market to a "Gaijin" company without VERY good reason. The XBox is NOT good enough to make them give up their stranglehold on the market.
If you don't get why Japan is where the console wars will be won or lost, let me point it out to you. 99% of all successful console games in the past 20 years have been from Japan. The only exception I can think of is Halo -- and that was a PC game which had it's XBox port released a year before the PC version. Unless Microsoft can invade and make progress in Japan, they will NEVER make any headway in the console market. Period.
2. Sony might drop the ball but the chances of them truely screwing up the PS3 is *very* slim. Yes, the cell processor is a gimmick and a scam, and will fall flat. The PS3 will almost definately be a success, however, because of sheer inertia.
The only thing that could really kill them is if their arrogance makes them do the same kind of stupid errors that Nintendo did in the late 80s that put Big N in the spot they are now (basically being arrogant asses, pissing on 3rd parties and trying to push people around). Granted, the PSP and their repeated micromanagement with stuff like Final Fantasy 11 in the US kinda hints at that same kinda arrogance... However. Nintendo would be far more likely to capitulate on this than Microsoft.
3. Nintendo is *not* going to be idle during all this. Nintendo blew *everyone* out of the water this E3. Sony had a mock up of a unfinished portable with a 2 hour battery life. Microsoft had games they announced a year ago. Nintendo had a playable version of their new portable and about 9 bombshell announcements, one after another. The "Reggielution" as it were got so many people fired up that it really breathed some very much needed fresh air into Nintendo's sails.
Nintendo is calling their next console the Nintendo Revolution. This represents Big N's new thinking -- that horsepower isn't going to be enough to win the next generation of console wars. They're right. The DS completely blew everyone away who saw it, not because it was so graphically potent -- although it was quite nice -- but rather, because it brought so many NEW THINGS to the table. Touch pad, Wireless Link, WIFI Internet on a portable, 2 screens, etc. These are going to bring new games, and new WAYS to play games, and that is going to push sales.
In other words -- Japan has 2 huge titans gearing up for a *huge* battle for #1. There's no room for some silly spoiled foreigner brat of a company to try and push their way in. Especially when all they can muster up for information at the largest console convention in the world is some new screenshots of a game that was announced at last year's E3. Unless Microsoft gets serious, they're not going to be getting anywhere.
And Gnutella, too.
DC is well over 8.8PB, btw. I don't remember how high they are but it's quite nuts.
Someone must have a pretty fancy crystal ball to tell us what is and isn't going to "sidelined" four years in the future.
It must be an especially magical ball too, considering the fast strides Linux has made in the last 2 years. Apparently 100,000 Linux Hackers all fall over dead in the near future or something to slow us down.
4 years from now we'll be running circles around Microsoft -- especially if they're next major version of Windows is 4 years away.
Ah, but you forget, that back in the day, Microsoft did not ignore the Internet.
.DOC format, for example), other times it doesn't (MS's bastardized HTML, .NET), and other times they're beat upside the head with a cluebrick hard enough to change their ways in time ("The Microsoft Network").
Rather, they saw it as competition for "The Microsoft Network."
This represents the main problem facing Microsoft, and the stupid move they have done repeatedly: Rather than work with other people's standards, Microsoft has repeatedly tried to reinvent the wheel so that they get to be in the drivers seat. (And get to put up toll booths on the way, of course.)
Sometimes this works well (MS Word
THIS is where Microsoft will eventually screw up, royally. Microsoft will try to reinvent something fundamental to computing, for example, "TCP/MS" as a "secure replacement for TCP/IP (with mint sprinkles!)" and GNU/Linux + Apple will be there to smack them around for it. MS will either steadfastily try to force it, or change their tune too late, and they will start to lose clients because of it.
The idea is to "prove" that McCarthy was right in slashing the hell out of our rights because 1% of 1% of 1% of the US was "evil."
A thought that BushCo seem to all share, and that all responsible Americans (All people?) must show to be folly whenever they can.
My worst accident was in trying out a new motherboard laying on top of some cardboard. A stumble sent it flying, and the keyboard port (a AT style -- DIN6?) ripped itself free of the motherboard.
It was a small jump (486 to 486DX, back when Intel had just announced the Pentium 3) but for me, that sucked.
Gameboy.
Gameboy Pocket.
Gameboy Color.
Gameboy Advance.
Gameboy DS.
If Gameboy Pocket games had suddenly not been able to play Gameboy games, we'd be seeing the PSP walk all over the Gameboy Advance. As it stands, most people are more interested in the DS than the PSP. Although, to it's credit, the DS has to get bonus points for actually being playable at E3, and not being a non-working design prototype with a computer + emulator nearby.
And, also, it's worth noting Nintendo has repeatedly said the GBA and the DS are seperate -- there will be a GBA2 in the future, the DS is not a replacement for the GBA -- which is why the DS will not play old Gameboy games, just Gameboy Advance games and DS games.
I use my backwards compatability every day. PS1 games play fine in the PS2, why do I need to hook up the PS1?
As for the xBox, well, lets see.
1. XBox-1 comfortably seats 7.
2. XBox-2, going by the American "bigger means better", will comfortably seat at least 9.
3. Putting the two next to each other will probably cause a small black hole to form in my living room.
Since singularities tend to disrupt the gaming process, I need to give this idea a big thumbs down.
Anyone else experiencing this? Before, if I right clicked on a file and selected save as, it would automatically download and save to my desktop. Now, the option seems to not do anything.
Obviously you're new to this whole intra-web thing.
People don't pay for stuff they get for free. If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off and found a new free host to mooch off of and left him high and dry with an outrageous bandiwdth bill.
You think he wasn't pushing them to try and get them to sign up for pay accounts already? The number one rule of the internet -- users are absolute resourch leeching mooches.
http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html
Ow. I'd hate to see their mail inboxes.
Hurray for American Ingenuity! Who else would think to wait till they saw something halfway across the world in the news, then quickly patent the idea in their home country?
He's in Hong-Kong. You know, the country 99% of Modchips, Pirated Games, and "Development Devices" come to the US from?
MS/Nintendo/Sony can't do squat.
What's the full story on the McDonalds thing? I heard they moved to Linux in Germany recently -- were they using SCO Unix before?
Hopefully those 2 BTX boards pictured are not typical boards. I cannot imagine a ATX replacement with... 1 expansion slot. Eww.
You're also forgetting she had 3rd degree burns to her, you know, crotch?
And that McDonalds had been warned, repeatedly, that their coffee was scalding hot -- WAY too hot to even drink.
If my willy got burned by boiling coffee after a company was warned over and over that they were making coffee that was too hot for human consumption, and then they offered me less than 10% of my medical bills, I would sue them into the ground too.
>>Thus, we get games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, games doomed before they ever hit shelves because they were not deemed Manly enough.
I would point out, that "Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker" is one of the highest selling games in US History. No game before or after has hit as many preorders as Wind Waker did. (In the US.)
There's more to it than that.
Imagine a web forum the size of the alt.hierarchy in usenet, with years of history, "culture", and about 50,000,000 in jokes.
That's 2ch. It's freaking huge in Japan. As big as Slashdot is amongst English speaking nerds, 2ch is with Japanese nerds.
That's not even mentioning the ascii art, the memes, etc.
Lets just say, it still needs work.
Oh, and the idiots at peoplesprimary.com need to be DDoSed, just because they're shitheads who deserve a $3000 bandwidth bill.
Oh, and am I wrong, or does thismean they're trying to get your browser to send them the contents of your clipboard? After disabling javascript I peeked at their little website, and that's what was in there.
Because the RIAA, MPAA, and a few other old school companies (Is Qwest vs VOIP next?) are completely incapable of thinking up new tactics to deal with this changing world we live in.
Instead, they keep repeating their same old tricks. Hard to copy media isn't anything new, that's one of the major reasons they moved from casettes to CDs, because no one could easily copy them. They're just trying to extend that old trick to digital media, and it's failing badly.
Thus reveals problem #2 with these groups. They are NOT used to people competing with them, yet alone their own customers. That is why you see people look so dumbfounded when people aren't content to just sit back and accept what is fed to them. (For example, that RIAA guy who muttered "un-fucking-believeable" when he saw that some "random college idiot" had dared to break their CSS cash cow.)
Rather than see their customers quietly put up with the record companies and the movie companies putting out some horribly self-serving content like they have so many times before, they're seeing us turn on them and use every bit of our skills to bypass and ignore their self-serving bits. You can see this in a few dozen ways:
1. Our own audio and video format that lack DRM to contest their digital versions of disposable dvds. (OGG and XviD/OGM)
2. P2P, which is a direct result of them trying to put out 1 or 2 good songs on a CD and force us to buy them. (iTunes store is the ultimate end result of this, and they're trying to kill that too by forcing Apple to bundle songs.)
3. Distributed and Encrypted P2P like Gnutella and WASTE, to fight them trying to make the very act of sharing content online illegal. (I consider attacks on P2P to be more of an attack on indy music and artists who don't mind their content being shared. Who would buy Metalijoke when there are 50 other small bands better than them who'd love to just be heard?)
4. Distributed projects in countries that haven't yet been "DMCA-afied", to fight them trying to destroy fair use.
Of course, they're doing their damnest to try and make the very act of even discussing their tricks illegal.
So, er, yah. Longer than I expected, but, quick synopsis -- basically, they're trying the same old trick because they're dinosaurs who can't think of anything new.
The whole point is the average person won't do the math, and assume that this is only going to affect people making, well, $27 an hour. It's the same thing as mentioning terrorism whenever you say Patriot Act -- watch the news, you'll see. Evenever they EVER mention the Patriot act, they mention Terrorism in the same breath. Both are intentional confusions of the issue, used in order to confuse the issue and give shrills a talking point to attack anyone critisizing them.
"Oh, you just love terrorism, that's why you say the Patriot Act is a violation of Civil Rights!" "Oh, you just wanna see these fat geeks who are already making $27 make time and a half!"
Fortunately I'm quite confident that when Bush is thrown out on his butt in November that these and so many other stupid anti-worker laws will be thrown out.
No problemo. For the record, I listened to Air America for like 2 hours before leaving for work earlier today on Real10, and it worked great. Never went over 2.5 kb/second, which is good because I'm in a situation where I'm supposed to manage my own bandwidth usage (not throttled, just get a nastygram if I use too much).
I had Everquest (in the bazaar), Mozilla 1.7 (with about 8 tabs open), MIRC (3 servers and about 9 rooms), ABC (with 3 downloads going), and RealPlayer open. Half a gig of Ram, 768 meg swap file. No noticable swapfile access when I switched between them all.
When I do the same thing with WinAmp 5, I experince a bit more swapfile access. So Real 10 appears to use up less ram than Winamp 5 -- but then again, I wasn't loading up 17 hours of MP3s with Real 10, either. I'll try that when I get home. However, I had been alt-tabbing a lot before then, and the majority of the swapfile usage goes away after doing so.
I usually have a lot of buffering when using Winamp and shoutcast, but didn't experience much with Air America on Real. Only buffered one time, and that was after about 45 minutes of constant listening.
This is pretty cool since I'm on a 801.11b wireless broadband connection (tower is about 8 miles away from my house). However, the feed was only 24kbit, so that might have been part of it.
Either way, it's a great imporvment so far over the older copies of Real. I don't intend to ditch WinAMP and BSPlayer, but I'm definately not regretting installing it.
Actually, the original story of Real 10's release, linked in the article, is dated Jan 08, 2004.
If Ad Aware's team (and Spybot's) could not find any spyware in it after 3 months of looking, than maybe logic should say that there isn't any.
So uh, I don't believe they're going that route. Either that, or they're using some new stuff that Spybot updated this morning doesn't catch.