As a game developer, I want these games to be reprinted for years to come... And not just the popular ones. In 15 years if someone decides they want to go back to their roots and try Rez, or TeleroBoxer, or Stretch Panic they should have a way to get it. I'm sure the original artists on the game (and I'm including code poets in that) would rather have more people playing their creations. It's not like we're in it for the money.
Right now an expensive game simply means that more people want to be able to play a game than can. Get it out to the people. I'm sorry if you've invested a lot of money in your collection and a reprint finds that value dwindling, but you shouldn't be in it for the money either.
The alternative to plagerism appears to be journalists who take ideas posted elsewhere and re-write them without any fact checking, losing the nuance of the article and frequently the point. This is what happens with a lot of tech articles, where reporters talk about how, for example, the Xbox 360 has been "recalled" when the source material said "unavailable." At least when they plagiarize the entire article we're one step closer to the actual investigation.
We need to demand that Journalists don't just repeat the news, but investigate it. Taking someone else's ideas or discoveries and reporting them as your own without even running a cursory background check is so common as to be acceptable. It lends credibility to these "facts," even though they might have no basis whatsoever. But if they're not going to spend the time to know what they're talking about, they could at least repeat verbatium from someone who does. That when when the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from you has someone crib from them, the original meaning hasn't been lost in layer upon layer of misinterpretation.
I hope this doesn't burn too many bridges, but while IBM charged the company $20,350 for the investigation, that doesn't mean that the person did $20,350 dollars worth of damages. If someone sniffs around the old apartment they used to live in, eventually deciding to steal a 2,000 dollar laptop, for criminal purposes the person has stolen 2,000 dollars worth of property. It doesn't matter if that homeowner then hires a PI at 200,000 dollars per hour, you've still stolen 2,000 dollars worth of property.
I don't know about you, but I can restore someone's access to a system that I sysadmin in about 15 minutes. Add an hour or two to restore backups of their home directory and any other data that may have been deleted with the account. Add in a 4 hour murphy's law buffer, and a day of tracing your steps through the system to make sure you didn't do anything else, and the company is out less than 1,000 dollars. Assume a generous 1000 dollars for the theoretical cost of "downtime" of the employee (which should have been all of "Hey, I can't log in. Hey Frank, I can't log in... Oh, it's working again, thanks!"). You're still at 2,000 dollars. Unless they have a nasty, unadministerable system, this should be the cost of the intrusion for damage purposes.
Again, what this person did was inexcusably petty and stupid. But the justice system should try his case fairly. His probably overworked defense lawyer is correct in pointing out that IBM is not a criminal investigation team. They are not the law. IBM is notorious for overcharging, overbilling, and frequently underperforming, and as a for-profit company should not be used as the sole source of information for what the cost of an intrusion works out to be.
Justice should be blind, but not to the source of their numbers. The principle of fair trials for everyong outweighs the stupidity of this particular person's action.
You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.
The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.
For Antivirus, use AVG. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall or Zone Alarm. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.
No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware and Spybot. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.
I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.
Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB, which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.
There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.
I believe it was Miyamoto that said a slipped release date is temporary, but a bad release is permanent.
Nintendo seems to understand this.
As a side note, the article seems to be comparing modern PC games to old console games. My memory of old PC games was that statistical likelyhood of any game you bought actually working was slim, and it would take almost days to find this out. Wrong sound card manufacturer? Game dies. Wrong video card manufacturer? Game dies. 486 Sx instead of Dx? Game dies.
Compared to PC games of yester year, modern PC games are a bastion of compatibility.
No. I would investigate whether or not it is true before buying his story hook, line and sinker. But if America just dismisses this guy because he may or may not have an ulterior motive, then that's sad. He might be insane and seething at his ex-employees. But he can still be right. This wouldn't an investigation against a citizen, but one against a government agency. Investigate, then if it's learned it isn't true, no harm done. Ignore it, and learn it was true, and a lot of harm is done.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claims that everyone believes already anyway... not so much.
The NSA is spying in masse on American citizens through paranoid data mining and abuses of that power for non-security reasons are happening? Wasn't this the agency that was monitoring what everyone checked out of the library?
I'm not saying that this isn't valuable to have come to light, or that this guy isn't courageous. It is really useful to have him come forward, and hopefully this will get as far as an open congressional investigation of the sort the intelligence community has needed for some time.
However, this isn't exactly a revalation. With Eschelon, subscription DB's, requisitioned phone logs, credit card purchasing history DB's, travel history DB's, requirements for encryption backdoors and system access... If you didn't already believe that this government is spying on its citizens, you haven't been paying attention.
The "transition drought" appears to be coming from analysts who believe that there will be a transition drought. As such they pencil in lower current generation sales, and don't believe there will be enough next-gen consoles to sell any games to. And this gets used as evidence that there will be a transition drought. See the circular logic?
The Genesis and Playstation both had some of their best games (and best-selling games) after their successors had come out. There is some life in the old systems yet.
Furthermore, old franchises are penciled in as fading out, which makes sense given how much people have been milking them these days. However, no new games are penciled in to be the big surprise hit. Because you can't plan for the surprise hits as an analyst. But the surprise hits are what keep publishers afloat... they're the new franchises that will be milked to death mercilessly. But none of these appear in the analysts numbers, because they can't be predicted, only expected.
All of these little biases add up to a terrible, terrible year where all gaming companies everywhere will go out of business. Just like last year. And the year before. And 2000...
Headline news is usually speculation
on
CNN On The $500 PS3
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· Score: 2, Informative
And if you look at history, pretty much all systems launch at about 400 dollars, adjusted for inflation.
This may sound odd, but Blu-Ray isn't that expensive once manufacturing is set up. Basically if Sony is willing to take a one-time hit to setup the manufacturing lines, and ignore sunk development costs, Blu-Ray shouldn't cost them much more than a standard DVD drive. However, those were costs Sony was planning on eating anyway to get Blu-Ray to be a popular standard, so it is really costing them nothing extra. Of course, Sony also plans to ship the PS3 will ship sans a HDD, which would be an extra 50 or so in material costs to put towards any special Blu-Ray manufacturing. (the article incorrectly claims the PS3 ships with a HDD, unless they know something we don't).
Chip fabs are also a sunk cost: it costs a stupid amount of money to setup a chip plant, but once you do the new ones cost about the same as the old ones. As Sony has been planning on making this chip standard in all of their electronics, that cost can also be counted against all of Sony's product lines once, and as such shouldn't cost the gaming division a bundle.
Sony has the advantage over Microsoft in this case in that they do a lot of consumer electronics manufacturing, and don't need to contract that out... they eat tooling costs once and can churn these things out cheaply. Microsoft has to pay for someone else to manufacture their stuff, and as such has tooling cost and profit added to each and every one of these that gets made for them.
In the article's defense it does say that analysts really don't know, and poses the theory that Sony may be faking everyone out and ship at a much lower price. Again, history has shown that the price will probably be about 400. Irrespective of manufacturing costs, Sony will find a way to make it about the same. Even if it were cheaper, Sony would probably sell it for about the same. That's the nature of console sales. Only Nintendo lowballs, and it doesn't seem to pay off for them anywhere but handhelds, as it destroys the illusion of value.
As a side note, I do wish that people would stop relying upon "analysts," as for the past few years analysts has been synnonymous with idiots. Those who can, do. Those who can't, analyze.
If you look at the keys, they're 32x32 icons. That's not very high-rez, and those are the concept pictures: the real thing may use 16x16 or less.
Likewise, my understanding was that the larger the display, the more expensive it becomes. This, like chips, is because of the increasing fragility and the increasing likelyhood of a manufacturing defect sending it all to pot. But these are postage-stamp size screens, and as such should be much cheaper.
And except for the red background in one of the pictures, the normal keys are all black and white. They'll probably dump the red and go with B&W images on the regular keyboard keys, further driving down cost.
A bunch of low-rez postage-stamp sized color screens, and about 90 low-rez black-and-white keys? And about a million miles of tiny little wires? Should be do-able in 300 bucks. If they needed to drive costs down further, go traditional LCD on all of the normal keys with one big glowing backlight... that I could see coming in at 100 or less, though looking pretty crappy.
On the other hand, realistically they're probably not launching on Feb 1st. That's probably when they will make the announcement about the release date, or even announce the date they will announce the release date.
While in Orlando, we attended another 4 hour presentation to get free tickets for Disney. Disney is nice, but it's not worth the $55+ per person per day, but it was worth 4 hours of my time which included a nice lunch buffet.
If I'm doing the math correctly, that's 11$ per hour for 4 hours of your vacation time. That doesn't sound like a great deal to me. 7 days Daytona and Orlando for 99 sounds better, but the Disney one doesn't help your case.
I agree that it is a valid question. The CPU is just one part of a computer, and depending on what you do it may not even be the most important.
I have a ATI 9600 / 128. It was about $120 dollars when I bought it, which seemed reasonable at the time. High-end graphics cards go for $400 dollars, and can be doubled up for an $800 gaming graphics system. I haven't seen quads, but they must be right around the corner.
Oddly enough the one bottleneck that kept coming up during developing the one PC game I've worked on was RAM. If you ever ran out of RAM, your system went through the floor. If you could speed up your RAM bus, your game performance went up in almost direct proportion. There is just so much data in modern games (real or superfluous), that faster and better can be really helpful, and if you ever fall below a certain threshold (my game was about 512MB) your performance is screwed.
YMMV, but my gaming rig came in at about 700 dollars with specs that most people would be quite pleased with... 1GB RAM, 200GB silent HDD, a motherboard that didn't crap out in the first week, a 300W psu / "silent" antec sonata case, video capture card, 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives, a DVD+-RW dual layer drive... Basically, there is no need to spend more than 1,000 dollars to get a really solid home computer, including monitor. (If you're in the market for a server, you have special needs which may not be covered here)
like that's going to matter when you are buying a $1000 processor. i'd gladly pay the extra 3% for a cooler processor that performs, then my cooling solution could cost $30 less.
Or, as the processor is unlocked, overclock it until it runs at the same temperature. At that point it will be faster than the Intel.
No offense, but when did people start spending 1,000 dollars for just the processors in their gaming rigs?
People! Nothing takes advantage of that yet! And by the time things do, the processor will cost 1/8th of what it does today. I've been running an AMD 2400+ for a few years now, a simple 100$ processor, and I STILL haven't found a game that it can't run solidly.
Yeah, if you need a mission-critical server that you desperately need to be as fast as possible... distribute the load.
Basically the top end is for bragging rights and pure-profit silicon. Neither AMD nor Intel can claim bragging rights at the moment. And that's fine, they both should be working hard to push processor design further and further along, and a leadership question will only help that.
But no matter which is the faster processor, please don't buy one. If you really want the ultimate gaming experience, buy three gaming rigs for that price and invite some friends over. You'll be glad you did.
Educational software seems to be about the least educational software one can get... roughly the equivalent of afternoon children's programming on network television.
Genuinely educational software is only accidentally so. Microsoft Word probably exposes more educational possibilities than anything in the reader rabbit series. Your friendly GCC compiler (or even javascript) is far better at teaching math and logic than that stupid frog. And Photoshop / Maya 3D will give kids a far deeper understanding of images than any "art appreciation" flash tripe.
If you want really educational software, check out how well Gran Turismo players understand what the parts of a car are and how they interact with eachother. Or Sim City players understand budgeting issues and compromises. Or the abstraction skills of people who create their own web pages.
Educational software is a failure. It takes a superficial view of education, opting instead for flashy lights and animations. However, that doesn't mean that all software is a failure at educating people.
If there has been one constant in gaming, it is that analysts (especially Forrester analysts) constantly get it wrong. They don't always get it wrong the way people expect them to get it wrong, but they never get it right.
Let's pick this apart, shall we?
Although gaming is a huge industry, the report warned that turning a profit will become increasingly difficult... For players such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo the fact that the market is reaching saturation point coupled with the increasing costs of producing both games and consoles means profit margins may not be a big as they would like.
The report then goes on to claim that the market is reaching saturation point because almost half of everyone in the western world plays games. Honestly, for anyone making any product, that's a pretty good problem to have.
Likewise, consoles are the same price as always adjusted for inflation. The Genesis launched at 390, the Nes at 350, the Playstation at 370. Same Same.
Games are getting more expensive to produce, but only because people want better and better games, and capacity is making that possible. But it isn't required. The best game on the Xbox 360 is a downloadable vector-graphics game called Geometry Wars, and it is probably the most successful game of the 360 launch, despite being small enough to be made in a month with a team of three. Likewise, there is a lot of room for consolidation on teams... the proliferation of sub-quality clones was (and remains) a problem for many years, but consolidating those teams down to fewer bigger projects should produce better games overall, while letting smaller houses focus on the smaller, more experimental games.
Anyone who thinks there isn't any room for profit in gaming needs to expand their revenue streams a bit. Any team can keep their costs in line while still providing an amazing experience to the player and being rewarded with sales.
The report also warned that mobile phones and portable media players could supersede portable games consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
Analysts who believe the PSP and the DS will be replaced by mobile phones any time soon have obviously never used both the PSP and their mobile phone to play games. It is possible to play games on your phone, and it is even possible that someone will release a successful phone / game hybrid. But besides a shared battery there isn't a lot of point to a single, dedicated device. Heck, Phone PDA combos and phone MP3 combos have been in the works for years, and they're still terrible in a way that would be unacceptable in the console realm. Consoles require lots of dedicated single-use processing devices that don't make any sense for phones, and phones have all sorts of broadcast equipment that don't help out consoles at all. They're both small candy-bar shaped electronic devices, but there the similarities end.
"While gamers will increasingly use their new consoles for non-gaming activities, this functionality will not be enough to convince non-gamers that buying a console is the answer to their digital convergence dreams," he said.
Let me straighten this out for analysts: consoles play games and there is nothing wrong with that. Consoles sometimes play DVD's also, and that's cool too (though their interfaces are pretty bad). But in the same way that DVD players play DVDs, and televisions display television, consoles play videogames. That's what they do. They don't need to be digital Swiss Army Knives to justify their existence. In fact, pretty much every digital Swiss Army Knife console to come along has been terrible. They don't need to be PVR's. They just need to play the games that people desire to play, and that is it. Anything else is cream, and historically nothing else has been helpful. The
The reviewer does an inadequate job of describing the Leroy video. They're heading into basically a pit of death to get an item that Leroy needs, while Leroy himself is Away From Keyboard. So the crew spends a lot of time planning strategy, discussing timing, pulling out calculators to determine survival rates, and generally creating a rock solid, well-discussed, intricate plan of attack... That Leroy promptly ignores and charges in.
And they all get slaughtered. Not just killed, slaughtered. They get mauled like puppies in a lion's den. The plan falls apart completely, and so do they. Not only are there no survivors, they didn't take any of the millions of attackers out with them. It is a complete blow out.
To top it all off, over voice chat comes this little wimpering voice saying "It's... It's not my fault."
If you don't want someone on your website, you put a password on it. If you don't want someone on your wireless network, you put up some barrier. This has been the standard behavior on the network forever, and works pretty well. Open unless locked. Websites are like stores in downtown Manhattan, people assume you're open and try to walk in. If you're closed, you put a lock on the door so that people know what your policy is.
Why is it, then, that people who don't want deep linking on their sites don't simply use the Referer ID to determine where the person came from, and block out those who didn't come from the current site? Technologically speaking, it is a very simple trick that has been used for years on smaller sites here and there, and larger sites to prevent direct linking to images. From a scripting standpoint it is trivial to look at the referer id and redirect to the home page if it didn't originate on the serving site. It is as easy to do, as finding someone's IP address, yet the people who care don't seem to care enough to do it.
You don't solve a technological problem through legislation. You especially don't change standard network behaviors on a case-by-case basis through legislation. And quite frankly you don't voluntarily venture onto a network with certain standard behaviors and then complain to the feds about them. "Oh look, my mobile network line allows for incoming calls. Boo Hoo Hoo, Uncle Sam protect me."
Apple's iPod is a not a music player. It is a detachment device. When the world gets to be too much, you whip out your little white world and detach into your own universe. Because of this, everything on the iPod, from the pure white face to the uncluttered interface, is straightforward, clean, and unnoisy. I've owned a lot of MP3 players over the years, and the iPod is the only one I would describe as "calming." The rest of them are cluttered with features and buttons, aesthetically noisy, and generally not what you want to turn to when you want to de-stress.
That's not to say the iPod is perfect... all of the ones that I've used have had problems ranging from easy scratching to not being able to forward between songs while using the scroll wheel to adjust a song's position. It also takes far too long to figure out how to turn off the blasted thing, a problem common with a surprising number of MP3 players. But it is the least crappy of all of the current crop.
As for the cost, there are more cost-effective player out there. But your goal is de-stressing, not maximum hdd per dollar. If something costs 20% less but makes you want to throw it across the room every time you use it, it isn't a savings towards your goal. If you can get a bigger hard drive in a bigger player that is so big you can't fit it in your pocket and therefore never take it with you... what have you gotten for your money?
I know lots of New Yorkers with iPods. They all have alternative headphones. The white cords are ubiquitous on Boston subways, however, as well as on Bart/Muni in San Fransisco.
And in Job's defense, he didn't create the iPod, but he has driven a heck of a lot of technology projects through to maturation. He drove the first really end-user-centric computer, his drive brought computers from geeky grey boxes to cool centerpieces of the living room, and he made online music sales a legitimate industry. No he didn't make these things himself, but without him these things wouldn't have been made (or would have taken a lot longer to get where they were). Remember: before the MAC, mice were rare and exotic.
Dual-layer DVD+-R disks hold twice as much as the single-layer version, yet cost more than twice as much and haven't really taken off.
On the other hand, if all you really cared about was high capacity, why not buy a Hard Drive? For just 100 dollars you too could hold 260,000 MB in your hands.
HD-DVD's are lower capacity, but cheaper. Blu-Ray has a somewhat higher capacity, but is more expensive.
Either way we're not talking about Blu-Ray-RW yet, so how does capacity help?
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As a game developer, I want these games to be reprinted for years to come... And not just the popular ones. In 15 years if someone decides they want to go back to their roots and try Rez, or TeleroBoxer, or Stretch Panic they should have a way to get it. I'm sure the original artists on the game (and I'm including code poets in that) would rather have more people playing their creations. It's not like we're in it for the money.
Right now an expensive game simply means that more people want to be able to play a game than can. Get it out to the people. I'm sorry if you've invested a lot of money in your collection and a reprint finds that value dwindling, but you shouldn't be in it for the money either.
The alternative to plagerism appears to be journalists who take ideas posted elsewhere and re-write them without any fact checking, losing the nuance of the article and frequently the point. This is what happens with a lot of tech articles, where reporters talk about how, for example, the Xbox 360 has been "recalled" when the source material said "unavailable." At least when they plagiarize the entire article we're one step closer to the actual investigation.
We need to demand that Journalists don't just repeat the news, but investigate it. Taking someone else's ideas or discoveries and reporting them as your own without even running a cursory background check is so common as to be acceptable. It lends credibility to these "facts," even though they might have no basis whatsoever. But if they're not going to spend the time to know what they're talking about, they could at least repeat verbatium from someone who does. That when when the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from you has someone crib from them, the original meaning hasn't been lost in layer upon layer of misinterpretation.
I hope this doesn't burn too many bridges, but while IBM charged the company $20,350 for the investigation, that doesn't mean that the person did $20,350 dollars worth of damages. If someone sniffs around the old apartment they used to live in, eventually deciding to steal a 2,000 dollar laptop, for criminal purposes the person has stolen 2,000 dollars worth of property. It doesn't matter if that homeowner then hires a PI at 200,000 dollars per hour, you've still stolen 2,000 dollars worth of property.
I don't know about you, but I can restore someone's access to a system that I sysadmin in about 15 minutes. Add an hour or two to restore backups of their home directory and any other data that may have been deleted with the account. Add in a 4 hour murphy's law buffer, and a day of tracing your steps through the system to make sure you didn't do anything else, and the company is out less than 1,000 dollars. Assume a generous 1000 dollars for the theoretical cost of "downtime" of the employee (which should have been all of "Hey, I can't log in. Hey Frank, I can't log in... Oh, it's working again, thanks!"). You're still at 2,000 dollars. Unless they have a nasty, unadministerable system, this should be the cost of the intrusion for damage purposes.
Again, what this person did was inexcusably petty and stupid. But the justice system should try his case fairly. His probably overworked defense lawyer is correct in pointing out that IBM is not a criminal investigation team. They are not the law. IBM is notorious for overcharging, overbilling, and frequently underperforming, and as a for-profit company should not be used as the sole source of information for what the cost of an intrusion works out to be.
Justice should be blind, but not to the source of their numbers. The principle of fair trials for everyong outweighs the stupidity of this particular person's action.
You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.
The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.
For Antivirus, use AVG. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall or Zone Alarm. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.
No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware and Spybot. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.
I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.
Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB, which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.
There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.
I believe it was Miyamoto that said a slipped release date is temporary, but a bad release is permanent.
Nintendo seems to understand this.
As a side note, the article seems to be comparing modern PC games to old console games. My memory of old PC games was that statistical likelyhood of any game you bought actually working was slim, and it would take almost days to find this out. Wrong sound card manufacturer? Game dies. Wrong video card manufacturer? Game dies. 486 Sx instead of Dx? Game dies.
Compared to PC games of yester year, modern PC games are a bastion of compatibility.
With the way things are currently going, by 2010 all games will ship in miniature crates.
No. I would investigate whether or not it is true before buying his story hook, line and sinker. But if America just dismisses this guy because he may or may not have an ulterior motive, then that's sad. He might be insane and seething at his ex-employees. But he can still be right. This wouldn't an investigation against a citizen, but one against a government agency. Investigate, then if it's learned it isn't true, no harm done. Ignore it, and learn it was true, and a lot of harm is done.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claims that everyone believes already anyway... not so much.
The NSA is spying in masse on American citizens through paranoid data mining and abuses of that power for non-security reasons are happening? Wasn't this the agency that was monitoring what everyone checked out of the library?
I'm not saying that this isn't valuable to have come to light, or that this guy isn't courageous. It is really useful to have him come forward, and hopefully this will get as far as an open congressional investigation of the sort the intelligence community has needed for some time.
However, this isn't exactly a revalation. With Eschelon, subscription DB's, requisitioned phone logs, credit card purchasing history DB's, travel history DB's, requirements for encryption backdoors and system access... If you didn't already believe that this government is spying on its citizens, you haven't been paying attention.
The "transition drought" appears to be coming from analysts who believe that there will be a transition drought. As such they pencil in lower current generation sales, and don't believe there will be enough next-gen consoles to sell any games to. And this gets used as evidence that there will be a transition drought. See the circular logic?
The Genesis and Playstation both had some of their best games (and best-selling games) after their successors had come out. There is some life in the old systems yet.
Furthermore, old franchises are penciled in as fading out, which makes sense given how much people have been milking them these days. However, no new games are penciled in to be the big surprise hit. Because you can't plan for the surprise hits as an analyst. But the surprise hits are what keep publishers afloat... they're the new franchises that will be milked to death mercilessly. But none of these appear in the analysts numbers, because they can't be predicted, only expected.
All of these little biases add up to a terrible, terrible year where all gaming companies everywhere will go out of business. Just like last year. And the year before. And 2000...
And if you look at history, pretty much all systems launch at about 400 dollars, adjusted for inflation.
This may sound odd, but Blu-Ray isn't that expensive once manufacturing is set up. Basically if Sony is willing to take a one-time hit to setup the manufacturing lines, and ignore sunk development costs, Blu-Ray shouldn't cost them much more than a standard DVD drive. However, those were costs Sony was planning on eating anyway to get Blu-Ray to be a popular standard, so it is really costing them nothing extra. Of course, Sony also plans to ship the PS3 will ship sans a HDD, which would be an extra 50 or so in material costs to put towards any special Blu-Ray manufacturing. (the article incorrectly claims the PS3 ships with a HDD, unless they know something we don't).
Chip fabs are also a sunk cost: it costs a stupid amount of money to setup a chip plant, but once you do the new ones cost about the same as the old ones. As Sony has been planning on making this chip standard in all of their electronics, that cost can also be counted against all of Sony's product lines once, and as such shouldn't cost the gaming division a bundle.
Sony has the advantage over Microsoft in this case in that they do a lot of consumer electronics manufacturing, and don't need to contract that out... they eat tooling costs once and can churn these things out cheaply. Microsoft has to pay for someone else to manufacture their stuff, and as such has tooling cost and profit added to each and every one of these that gets made for them.
In the article's defense it does say that analysts really don't know, and poses the theory that Sony may be faking everyone out and ship at a much lower price. Again, history has shown that the price will probably be about 400. Irrespective of manufacturing costs, Sony will find a way to make it about the same. Even if it were cheaper, Sony would probably sell it for about the same. That's the nature of console sales. Only Nintendo lowballs, and it doesn't seem to pay off for them anywhere but handhelds, as it destroys the illusion of value.
As a side note, I do wish that people would stop relying upon "analysts," as for the past few years analysts has been synnonymous with idiots. Those who can, do. Those who can't, analyze.
If you look at the keys, they're 32x32 icons. That's not very high-rez, and those are the concept pictures: the real thing may use 16x16 or less.
Likewise, my understanding was that the larger the display, the more expensive it becomes. This, like chips, is because of the increasing fragility and the increasing likelyhood of a manufacturing defect sending it all to pot. But these are postage-stamp size screens, and as such should be much cheaper.
And except for the red background in one of the pictures, the normal keys are all black and white. They'll probably dump the red and go with B&W images on the regular keyboard keys, further driving down cost.
A bunch of low-rez postage-stamp sized color screens, and about 90 low-rez black-and-white keys? And about a million miles of tiny little wires? Should be do-able in 300 bucks. If they needed to drive costs down further, go traditional LCD on all of the normal keys with one big glowing backlight... that I could see coming in at 100 or less, though looking pretty crappy.
On the other hand, realistically they're probably not launching on Feb 1st. That's probably when they will make the announcement about the release date, or even announce the date they will announce the release date.
Seemed to work at E3.
While in Orlando, we attended another 4 hour presentation to get free tickets for Disney. Disney is nice, but it's not worth the $55+ per person per day, but it was worth 4 hours of my time which included a nice lunch buffet.
If I'm doing the math correctly, that's 11$ per hour for 4 hours of your vacation time. That doesn't sound like a great deal to me. 7 days Daytona and Orlando for 99 sounds better, but the Disney one doesn't help your case.
I agree that it is a valid question. The CPU is just one part of a computer, and depending on what you do it may not even be the most important.
I have a ATI 9600 / 128. It was about $120 dollars when I bought it, which seemed reasonable at the time. High-end graphics cards go for $400 dollars, and can be doubled up for an $800 gaming graphics system. I haven't seen quads, but they must be right around the corner.
Oddly enough the one bottleneck that kept coming up during developing the one PC game I've worked on was RAM. If you ever ran out of RAM, your system went through the floor. If you could speed up your RAM bus, your game performance went up in almost direct proportion. There is just so much data in modern games (real or superfluous), that faster and better can be really helpful, and if you ever fall below a certain threshold (my game was about 512MB) your performance is screwed.
YMMV, but my gaming rig came in at about 700 dollars with specs that most people would be quite pleased with... 1GB RAM, 200GB silent HDD, a motherboard that didn't crap out in the first week, a 300W psu / "silent" antec sonata case, video capture card, 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives, a DVD+-RW dual layer drive... Basically, there is no need to spend more than 1,000 dollars to get a really solid home computer, including monitor. (If you're in the market for a server, you have special needs which may not be covered here)
like that's going to matter when you are buying a $1000 processor. i'd gladly pay the extra 3% for a cooler processor that performs, then my cooling solution could cost $30 less.
Or, as the processor is unlocked, overclock it until it runs at the same temperature. At that point it will be faster than the Intel.
No offense, but when did people start spending 1,000 dollars for just the processors in their gaming rigs?
People! Nothing takes advantage of that yet! And by the time things do, the processor will cost 1/8th of what it does today. I've been running an AMD 2400+ for a few years now, a simple 100$ processor, and I STILL haven't found a game that it can't run solidly.
Yeah, if you need a mission-critical server that you desperately need to be as fast as possible... distribute the load.
Basically the top end is for bragging rights and pure-profit silicon. Neither AMD nor Intel can claim bragging rights at the moment. And that's fine, they both should be working hard to push processor design further and further along, and a leadership question will only help that.
But no matter which is the faster processor, please don't buy one. If you really want the ultimate gaming experience, buy three gaming rigs for that price and invite some friends over. You'll be glad you did.
Educational software seems to be about the least educational software one can get... roughly the equivalent of afternoon children's programming on network television.
Genuinely educational software is only accidentally so. Microsoft Word probably exposes more educational possibilities than anything in the reader rabbit series. Your friendly GCC compiler (or even javascript) is far better at teaching math and logic than that stupid frog. And Photoshop / Maya 3D will give kids a far deeper understanding of images than any "art appreciation" flash tripe.
If you want really educational software, check out how well Gran Turismo players understand what the parts of a car are and how they interact with eachother. Or Sim City players understand budgeting issues and compromises. Or the abstraction skills of people who create their own web pages.
Educational software is a failure. It takes a superficial view of education, opting instead for flashy lights and animations. However, that doesn't mean that all software is a failure at educating people.
If there has been one constant in gaming, it is that analysts (especially Forrester analysts) constantly get it wrong. They don't always get it wrong the way people expect them to get it wrong, but they never get it right.
Let's pick this apart, shall we?
Although gaming is a huge industry, the report warned that turning a profit will become increasingly difficult... For players such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo the fact that the market is reaching saturation point coupled with the increasing costs of producing both games and consoles means profit margins may not be a big as they would like.
The report then goes on to claim that the market is reaching saturation point because almost half of everyone in the western world plays games. Honestly, for anyone making any product, that's a pretty good problem to have.
Likewise, consoles are the same price as always adjusted for inflation. The Genesis launched at 390, the Nes at 350, the Playstation at 370. Same Same.
Games are getting more expensive to produce, but only because people want better and better games, and capacity is making that possible. But it isn't required. The best game on the Xbox 360 is a downloadable vector-graphics game called Geometry Wars, and it is probably the most successful game of the 360 launch, despite being small enough to be made in a month with a team of three. Likewise, there is a lot of room for consolidation on teams... the proliferation of sub-quality clones was (and remains) a problem for many years, but consolidating those teams down to fewer bigger projects should produce better games overall, while letting smaller houses focus on the smaller, more experimental games.
Anyone who thinks there isn't any room for profit in gaming needs to expand their revenue streams a bit. Any team can keep their costs in line while still providing an amazing experience to the player and being rewarded with sales.
The report also warned that mobile phones and portable media players could supersede portable games consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
Analysts who believe the PSP and the DS will be replaced by mobile phones any time soon have obviously never used both the PSP and their mobile phone to play games. It is possible to play games on your phone, and it is even possible that someone will release a successful phone / game hybrid. But besides a shared battery there isn't a lot of point to a single, dedicated device. Heck, Phone PDA combos and phone MP3 combos have been in the works for years, and they're still terrible in a way that would be unacceptable in the console realm. Consoles require lots of dedicated single-use processing devices that don't make any sense for phones, and phones have all sorts of broadcast equipment that don't help out consoles at all. They're both small candy-bar shaped electronic devices, but there the similarities end.
"While gamers will increasingly use their new consoles for non-gaming activities, this functionality will not be enough to convince non-gamers that buying a console is the answer to their digital convergence dreams," he said.
Let me straighten this out for analysts: consoles play games and there is nothing wrong with that. Consoles sometimes play DVD's also, and that's cool too (though their interfaces are pretty bad). But in the same way that DVD players play DVDs, and televisions display television, consoles play videogames. That's what they do. They don't need to be digital Swiss Army Knives to justify their existence. In fact, pretty much every digital Swiss Army Knife console to come along has been terrible. They don't need to be PVR's. They just need to play the games that people desire to play, and that is it. Anything else is cream, and historically nothing else has been helpful. The
The reviewer does an inadequate job of describing the Leroy video. They're heading into basically a pit of death to get an item that Leroy needs, while Leroy himself is Away From Keyboard. So the crew spends a lot of time planning strategy, discussing timing, pulling out calculators to determine survival rates, and generally creating a rock solid, well-discussed, intricate plan of attack... That Leroy promptly ignores and charges in.
And they all get slaughtered. Not just killed, slaughtered. They get mauled like puppies in a lion's den. The plan falls apart completely, and so do they. Not only are there no survivors, they didn't take any of the millions of attackers out with them. It is a complete blow out.
To top it all off, over voice chat comes this little wimpering voice saying "It's... It's not my fault."
Perfect.
If you don't want someone on your website, you put a password on it. If you don't want someone on your wireless network, you put up some barrier. This has been the standard behavior on the network forever, and works pretty well. Open unless locked. Websites are like stores in downtown Manhattan, people assume you're open and try to walk in. If you're closed, you put a lock on the door so that people know what your policy is.
Why is it, then, that people who don't want deep linking on their sites don't simply use the Referer ID to determine where the person came from, and block out those who didn't come from the current site? Technologically speaking, it is a very simple trick that has been used for years on smaller sites here and there, and larger sites to prevent direct linking to images. From a scripting standpoint it is trivial to look at the referer id and redirect to the home page if it didn't originate on the serving site. It is as easy to do, as finding someone's IP address, yet the people who care don't seem to care enough to do it.
You don't solve a technological problem through legislation. You especially don't change standard network behaviors on a case-by-case basis through legislation. And quite frankly you don't voluntarily venture onto a network with certain standard behaviors and then complain to the feds about them. "Oh look, my mobile network line allows for incoming calls. Boo Hoo Hoo, Uncle Sam protect me."
I thought you didn't give a flying carp about video quality...
To draw a comparison - I suspect that MP3->WMA to my ears would be very much like replicated sushi to my palate (USS Enterprise - Captain Kirk era)
Welcome to Slashdot! Where molecularly reconstructed sushi on late 70's sci-fi is considered a baseline for comparisons.
I have a theory.
Apple's iPod is a not a music player. It is a detachment device. When the world gets to be too much, you whip out your little white world and detach into your own universe. Because of this, everything on the iPod, from the pure white face to the uncluttered interface, is straightforward, clean, and unnoisy. I've owned a lot of MP3 players over the years, and the iPod is the only one I would describe as "calming." The rest of them are cluttered with features and buttons, aesthetically noisy, and generally not what you want to turn to when you want to de-stress.
That's not to say the iPod is perfect... all of the ones that I've used have had problems ranging from easy scratching to not being able to forward between songs while using the scroll wheel to adjust a song's position. It also takes far too long to figure out how to turn off the blasted thing, a problem common with a surprising number of MP3 players. But it is the least crappy of all of the current crop.
As for the cost, there are more cost-effective player out there. But your goal is de-stressing, not maximum hdd per dollar. If something costs 20% less but makes you want to throw it across the room every time you use it, it isn't a savings towards your goal. If you can get a bigger hard drive in a bigger player that is so big you can't fit it in your pocket and therefore never take it with you... what have you gotten for your money?
I know lots of New Yorkers with iPods. They all have alternative headphones. The white cords are ubiquitous on Boston subways, however, as well as on Bart/Muni in San Fransisco.
And in Job's defense, he didn't create the iPod, but he has driven a heck of a lot of technology projects through to maturation. He drove the first really end-user-centric computer, his drive brought computers from geeky grey boxes to cool centerpieces of the living room, and he made online music sales a legitimate industry. No he didn't make these things himself, but without him these things wouldn't have been made (or would have taken a lot longer to get where they were). Remember: before the MAC, mice were rare and exotic.
4. exposure to music you don't own
That's why I bought the iPod in the first place.
On a disk or per dollar?
Dual-layer DVD+-R disks hold twice as much as the single-layer version, yet cost more than twice as much and haven't really taken off.
On the other hand, if all you really cared about was high capacity, why not buy a Hard Drive? For just 100 dollars you too could hold 260,000 MB in your hands.
HD-DVD's are lower capacity, but cheaper. Blu-Ray has a somewhat higher capacity, but is more expensive.
Either way we're not talking about Blu-Ray-RW yet, so how does capacity help?
Thanks. I'll let the guys know that you liked it.
We actually have a soft spot around the office for "Typing of Fury" mode. To this day it is the only dancing typing game we've managed to find.
- Chris