It makes it better for the student as he dosen't get into trouble and still is nutrured for technology.
It also makes it better for you, as now you have someone who can run around and setup teacher's PC's for you, or help setup a lab, etc. Get a bright enough one, and they can setup the firewall, servers, and basically everything you can do (sorry, it's true).
So, now you have someone to help lighten the workload, and you will likely have earned the trust of a lot of your co-workers along the way.
Bring the thing back, and say it has battery problems. A: They'll be required to return it, as battery problems are a valid reason to exchange a PSP, and B: It takes too bloody long to test, so nobody tests them.
I don't think anyone is happy selling a substandard screen, especially not with the hype around how super the screen is. Just tell the people at the store that the battery doesn't hold a charge, and that you'd like another one. Try to get one you can test first "just to make sure." Used PSP's are great for this, if the store has any.
(and I don't mean by walling them in with no potty)
The sims, like sim city was born from the drive and originality of Maxis' lead, Will Wright. Of course, it also was born from the dedication and sleepless nights of countless programmers, designers, and artists. It was successful because it was freeform, fun, original, emotionally engaging, etc, etc.
However, with the success of the sims came expansion after expansion. Since the Sims success caught on, there hasn't been a single original title released by Maxis, just an amazing eight expansion packs and two very similar sequals, with a few platform ports thrown in.
Not much truly original has entered the sim's world recently. Gameplay wise, The Urbs is the same as the Subbies. This seems somehow the anthesis of a franchise, and a company, that has made it's name on amazingly original gameplay. Can the sims survive as a franchise with such oversaturation? Is the Sims destined to be the next Sim City, or the next Myst or 7th Guest?
And yes the die-hard fans will complain about liberties being taken... But the die-hards are never happy. The superhero genre relies more on the casual fan, those who used to read the books when they were kids, or those who just like superhero movies... And there are a lot more of these people than the die-hards.
The die-hard fans who are complaining have already seen the movie and given their 10 bucks. I'm not dissing the casual market, but I'm guessing all of the Daredevil fans out there that considered the movie "sacrelige" did so after boosting the opening weekend gross quite nicely.
But come on, there's no heart and soul in Marvel's assembly line. A Marvel comic might have a talented artist or writer pass through every now and again, but that's all they're doing-- passing through.
The listed titles are: Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi. There is a lot of entertaining backstory there to pilfer, certainly enough in each one to make a movie (maybe not Hawkeye). None of what is listed is Sin City, but then again a lot of what is listed is on par with Batman or Spider Man. Which is, to say, a great director can never be undervalued. Unless he goes and directs The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D.
The thing I'm worried about with this is that Marvel is flooding their own market. Sure, there is demand for some superhero movies. Sure, great superhero movies will always make money. But the public's tastes are fickle. Make a super hero movie every few years, and you can really spark the public's imagination. Pump out bad superhero movie after bad superhero movie and suddenly everyone is interested in the slasher revival, or really great pulp action movies, or (gasp) well written dialog with deep characters. After 10 movies, won't people want to see something... else?
not able to resell your CDs legally (not law yet, just wait...)
If you believe that the future of music is iTunes, then thanks to the DMCA basically whatever the record companies want has the force of law. You won't need to be able to resell your CD's: your entire music collection will be digital and locked to your computer.
Of course it is apparent that the future of music is MP3, and therefore the future of music is inherintly illegal. Kind of scary, that.
You could actually do a game like this, if you were willing to blur lines a bit. The Zelda line has ruled Hyrule for centuries unopposed. But their line has grown fat and lazy, refusing to respond to help while people lay starving in the streets. Enter a young boy by the name of Greg Gannondorf. Born with a strange power he doesn't understand, Greg finds himself unwillingly thrust into the position of reigniting the fires that makes countries strong. History has chosen him to burn down the old so that the country can be reborn, but the path he takes to get there is of his own design. Which path will he choose? Which path will be his destiny?
Games made for a control style are going to be best on that control style, whether that's racing wheels, a keyboard and mouse, a dual-shock analog controller, or the Nintendo DS touch screen.
I worked in a bike shop where you would work with customers, stock shelves, organize clutter, sweep floors, work the till, and fix bikes. If you're doing landscaping, sometimes you're mowing lawns, tilling soil, digging post holes, weeding, bug spraying, examining plants for damage, etc. The person who is sweeping your factory could be sweeping, cleaning machines, taking stuff out to the laundry, dusting, painting, etc. When you wait tables you have to juggle customers, remember orders, clean tables, fill certain orders, fill special customer requests, and work the till.
Always take the time to slightly over train your workers. It generally doesn't take much to teach someone to do something else, and even if they don't do it directly it will pay off. Cogs in a machine need to know what the other cogs around them do to work effectively. Plus, as studies have shown, if you engage your workers intellectually you get better work out of them. Workers generally aren't as dumb as the average CEO thinks they are.
If anything, short of assembly line worker (rotate them through posts!) the stuck-at-a-desk-processing-TP-reports jobs are the ones with the most repetitive tasks and the easiest to burn out on.
I generally find that time spent bonding with co-workers comes back in intangible ways. It opens lines of communication so that people feel comfortable when real issues arise. It makes people feel more comfortable reporting blockages in their workflow.
Likewise, studies have shown that workers produce the most when they spend a full 20% of their time off-task. That means roughly two hours of their day should be spent doing something else as recovery time to produce the most overall. People burn out if they focus too much, and 2 hours sounds about right based on the studies I've seen.
Employers should grab the above and run. Never give an employee one thing to do... always have several things they can rotate between when they're tired. Give them little projects with other people that can open lines of communication, rather than just one daily grind task.
Remember, FFXII has to be carefully architectured to not make the player swap back and forth between disks. What about a game like a theoretical Grand Theft Auto 4, where the developers may go for photorealism everywhere, using huge multipass textures with burned in effects, etc... On the Playstation 3 it may look awesome and fit all on one disk. But because of the non-linear gameplay, the developers wouldn't have the option of putting such a beast onto 2 or 3 DVD's, and would just need to cut content.
With competing console features it is never a question of "can we use the size," it's a question of "can we stuff something that big back down to the lower of the two platforms?" In this case I'm guessing it will be a bit of a pain.
I'll try not to be too confrontational in my response.
Your claim that "sci-fi isn't about sci-fi" is a nonsensical statement. Perhaps you meant to say "science fiction isn't about science", which is a popular quote but I doubt Asimov said it, because it would be the direct opposite of his actual opinion.
If it seems nonsensical to you, re-read it. Sci-fi isn't about Sci-fi any more than writing is about writing. If you forget that, you lose the essence of good writing.
I don't remember exactly where he said that. It might have been in the intro to I, Robot, or somewhere else. Honestly, I've read too much of his stuff to know exactly where any one quote came from.
Nightfall, arguably one of Asimov's best short stories / novels, could easily have been set in a fantasy world,
Funny that you should say that. Asimov always responded harshly to people who claimed that Nightfall was his best story. He didn't rank it even in his top three.
That's why it's arguable. For a while in his life he did rank it as his third. The last question, BTW, was rather superficial, and he didn't rank it as #1 until later in his life... probably when he was facing his own mortality.
I'm sorry. You had me flabbergasted when you praised Battlestar Galactica, but I burst out laughing when you compared Rama to that B-grade schlock The Cube.
In case you haven't noticed, Rama was b-grade schlock too. The point wasn't that it was the same quality, but the same story.
If you can't see the value in the new Battlestar Galactica, I can't really help you. It's a good series. It's well written, the characters have depth, there are multiple layers of conflicting emotions, the cinematography uses techniques hardly ever applied to television or sci-fi, and the progression is hardly ever cliched. The only thing bad that can be said about it is that the writers obviously know every trick in the book to make a story gripping, but they use the techniques of their craft well enough that very few people will ever see them as techniques. If you can't enjoy Battlestar Galactica, I'm curious as to what you can have enjoyed on television in the past 20 years.
If you want to be one of those purists that argue the difference between Sci-Fi and Science Fiction and Science Fiction / Fantasy and SFF, go right ahead. Honestly, the whole debate is as stupid as arguing that "Nude Descending a Staircase" isn't great art because it doesn't fit the mid 16-th century definition of a representational painting. If you want to say that great stories set in a science fiction setting aren't actually sci-fi unless they exploit the setting in a way that couldn't be done in any other setting, fine. That's as silly as saying that Dangerous Liasons wasn't a historical piece because it didn't intimately involve the setting in a way that wouldn't be possible in any other setting. But it is your opinion, and I've found that people who hold that opinion do so like a priest holds his religion.
Me, I'd rather have good writing, good stories, and good, if you'll pardon the abused term, art (and / or entertainment) wherever it may occur. Whether that means the setting is intimate with the human drama, or the setting is secondary to the human drama unfolding in front of it, I could really care less.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy what you would consider "sci-fi": I own about 250 of Asimov's books, and have a host of Heinlen, Clarke, Stephenson (eww), Card, and many, many others. But I'm not a snob about whether they were writing a Childhood's End or an On The Shore.
Asimov also said that good sci-fi isn't about sci-fi: good sci-fi is about people.
Battlestar Galactica is a WW2 soap opera pretending to be sci-fi, and is one of the best shows to come out in years. Firefly was an old western serial pretending to be sci-fi, and was also one of the best shows of it's time. They're about the human condition, exploring what it means to be a person under duress. Nightfall, arguably one of Asimov's best short stories / novels, could easily have been set in a fantasy world, or a modern day world in a different culture. The Ender's series was a classic coming-of-age tale. Rendezvous with Rama wasn't about technology, but how different people react when their world is turned upside-down. It is the same story, basically, that was told in the movie "Cube," though with less blood. Hell, you can't get more human than I, Robot (the book).
Star Wars was an excellent example of sci-fi. It wasn't about technology, it was about people. It really was the personified hero story, a tale that has been told for thousands upon thousands of years. That it had poor writing and moments of Shatner-level acting yet became one of the most popular movies of all time just prove how much the story resonated with people. Just because it was a story older than Jesus, and exactly the same story as told in the Matrix, doesn't make it any less appealing to us as human beings, or any less important to our culture.
50 years later, we're still the same human beings.
Tell that to Kodak, Albertsons, Google, Cisco, Viagra, etc.
It's not the name... It's the lack of exposure. If someone is familiar with a name, they will have positive feelings about it and will feel more comfortable with the application / company. But most companies spend as much on advertising as they do on development. When was the last time you saw a 20-person open source development team with 20 full-time promoters?
Pick a dumb name, stick to it, and batter people with it like there is no tomorrow. They'll make the connections on their own.
Get a copy of Dekart Private disk. Create a new private disk. Install Opera onto the disk, set it's cache, etc to the private disk, and set opera to launch automatically when unencrypting the disk.
Surf to your heart's content, knowing that anyone will actually need your password to unencrypt it.
To make it harder to spot, Rename it something like "pagefile.bak," and make the drive file invisible. Set a scheduled event to unmount all disks if there is 1/2 hour of inactivity.
I haven't tried TrueCrypt... I'll have to check it out.
The simple fact is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are going to be very large busts. Sure the dedicated fanboy will spring for a $1000+ system but the average person is not.
The PS2 and Xbox both launched in the 300-400 dollar range, and came down in price relatively quickly. Neither of them were large busts. The Game Cube launched cheaper, and the 3DO launched much higher. Having the PS3 and Xbox 360 launch in the 300-400 dollar range is about the safest bet they could have made.
On top of these massive costs, the games are going to be more expensive and long gone are the days of $20 older popular titles.
Can you provide any info to back this up? The reason why prices have remained stable for a very long time (despite inflation) is because the number of users has been growing. Being software, the simplified equation is Amount Spent on Development must be less than or equal to the Expected Num Users times the Per User Price. The installed user base, and number of titles sold has been growing steadily, and as such so has the available development resources. People expect this trend to continue with the next generation of system, and as such the titles are being budgeted and sold accordingly.
Sure, the next generation might see a 10 dollar price increase... but except for the crash and dump of 2600 games in '84, full-price games have never been 20 dollars.
With astonishingly high production costs and timetables almost double that of other consoles, developers are simply not going to be pumping out many titles
I'm not seeing this. The thing is, for a triple A title this would necessarily be true. But actual triple A titles are few and far between, and have always taken 3-5 years to produce. To produce a game of today's quality, however, development costs will go *down*. Not having to optimize for the GC's limited ram, or the PS2's more limited processor means enough texture memory and processor speeds to skip a large chunk of your optimizing passes... Maybe few people will be able to afford to push the PS3 to it's technological limits, but if that is true the market will find a balance between the cost of development and the resultant game. Personally, if that's the case, I'm happy to have hardware out of the equation. Nintendo didn't have to shatter the Game Cube to make Animal Crossing an engrossing game, and neither should fun games on the next gen platforms necessarily take advantage of all of the console's supposed power.
I'm not saying this won't necessarily lead to developer upheaval, but there is always developer upheaval. What I am saying is that having more power on a system does not mean that everyone must fill that system to it's max. You can't say that nobody can afford to spend as much on development as everybody else, and therefore everybody is going to go bankrupt.
So except for FPS, Sports, and safe RPG's/MMO's and crap movie/TV/whatever licensed games there will be little else. I don't even believe many puzzle games or niche titles will be seen.
Puzzle titles are cheap and can pay off royally. There will always be publishers looking for the next Tetris.
The industry has been moving solidly towards more and more sequals. However, I distinctly remember during the 2600, NES, Genesis, SNES, and Playstation 1 days that people were complaining that innovation in gaming was dead, and all that came out anymore were me-too platformers. Remember THQ's wonderful movie platformer lineup? I honestly don't think the state of gaming today is any worse than it was 15 years ago... unless you're looking through rose colored glasses, the past was pretty bad too.
It is going to be very frustrating for gamers, look how the comparatively cheap (while still way expensive) to produce for PSP is doing... If the Revolution can come in at $199-$249
Production price isn't everything, and I would hardly call the PSP "way expensive." One to two million should get you a respectable PSP game, and that's pretty cheap by today's standards.
I agree with all of your points. I do feel compelled to point out though that specialty retailers don't make much on the hardware either, and only sell it in order to sell more titles. If they sell 1/4th the systems that they otherwise would have, but sell 4 times the amount of software per system, they've more than broken even. Add in the silly profit margins on controllers and memory cards, and you've got quite an incentive to not care about what the market wants.
I won't be buying a 360 until it has at least three titles that I would regret for the rest of my life not playing. This should happen somewhere in the middle of the third year, if they're doing well.
Remember how the SNES Zelda shipped late? Or how FF3 slipped and slipped? Remember how late the original Metroid was? Or how late Warcraft 3 shipped? The Sims?
Once it's released, people will forget the delay. As long as the game is good and doesn't ship like buggy junk, bygones will be bygones. Nintendo has a solid track record in this respects, so more than likely in 6 months we will be cooing about how awesome the new Metroid is, and will have forgotten the delays. It's better to have a legendary title tomorrow than a half-baked good game today.
That's not a microsoft decision. That's a decision of the retailers trying to milk the game-buying public for all they are worth. EB seems to repeatedly be the worst in this regard, which is ironic considering they're theoretically trying to stop people from just buying their system at Target.
The X360 itself is only 400 dollars, which seems within the realm of what the PS2 and PS1 launched at. Don't worry, that price will come down soon. I wouldn't be surprised if it fell 50 - 100 dollars in it's first year out.
Of course, it is totally a hacker system, at a high price. You can't just buy games for it. But what is the fun of a retro console if you don't get your hands a little dirty to play it?
Don't make the mistake of assuming is a PDA is a simple data keeper. As the cliche' goes... it is how you use it that matters.
There are adaptors for TI Calculators that turn them into serial port terminals. Most digital cameras run some variant of DOS under the hood, and can be programmed to run any script that you would want. GB USB flash drives are small enough to be hidden basically anywhere these days. And anything with bluetooth is 0wnable and can be used to control other devices.
An in-your-network attack can come from basically anywhere these days. If security for your facility means only allowing approved devices into your building, you're screwed. You'll have to ban all digital devices to achieve any kind of security, and that tends to be inefficient.
On the other hand, from the article it sounds like the government just wants a PDA mobile that doesn't suck... a program I can certainly get behind.
The question is whether it makes sense to them to release a system like this at all. They're basically saying "you can't watch our videos if you don't spend a lot more money on hardware." From the perspective of people who can't or won't "upgrade" their monitors, why spend 20 dollars to buy a video that is intentionally downsampled to exactly the same bitrate as a pirated version? The idea is that you would be paying them for quality, but the reality for a lot of people is that it will just degrade their experience.
Time and time again, DRM systems have been shown to hurt paying customers. Apple's DRM is probably the most widely accepted because it is the least restrictive and doesn't pull stupid requirements on the end-user like this. DVD's DRM is accepted because it is invisible. Divx, however, required players to "phone home," and lasted in the market just a few months before being killed off by lack of interest. I think we'll find that if people have to replace their TV sets to play Blu-ray disks, they're just going to stick with DVD's.
I'm not opposed to DRM... my livelyhood to some degree depends on it. But putting restrictions on the end-user like this will alienate a lot of potential buyers. Why spend 200 dollars for a player that doesn't provide any advantage over the current standard if you don't invest hundreds more in your monitor / television?
DRM should be invisible, or it shouldn't be on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes it better for the student as he dosen't get into trouble and still is nutrured for technology.
It also makes it better for you, as now you have someone who can run around and setup teacher's PC's for you, or help setup a lab, etc. Get a bright enough one, and they can setup the firewall, servers, and basically everything you can do (sorry, it's true).
So, now you have someone to help lighten the workload, and you will likely have earned the trust of a lot of your co-workers along the way.
I heard this from a helpful EB employee.
Bring the thing back, and say it has battery problems. A: They'll be required to return it, as battery problems are a valid reason to exchange a PSP, and B: It takes too bloody long to test, so nobody tests them.
I don't think anyone is happy selling a substandard screen, especially not with the hype around how super the screen is. Just tell the people at the store that the battery doesn't hold a charge, and that you'd like another one. Try to get one you can test first "just to make sure." Used PSP's are great for this, if the store has any.
(and I don't mean by walling them in with no potty)
The sims, like sim city was born from the drive and originality of Maxis' lead, Will Wright. Of course, it also was born from the dedication and sleepless nights of countless programmers, designers, and artists. It was successful because it was freeform, fun, original, emotionally engaging, etc, etc.
However, with the success of the sims came expansion after expansion. Since the Sims success caught on, there hasn't been a single original title released by Maxis, just an amazing eight expansion packs and two very similar sequals, with a few platform ports thrown in.
Not much truly original has entered the sim's world recently. Gameplay wise, The Urbs is the same as the Subbies. This seems somehow the anthesis of a franchise, and a company, that has made it's name on amazingly original gameplay. Can the sims survive as a franchise with such oversaturation? Is the Sims destined to be the next Sim City, or the next Myst or 7th Guest?
And yes the die-hard fans will complain about liberties being taken... But the die-hards are never happy. The superhero genre relies more on the casual fan, those who used to read the books when they were kids, or those who just like superhero movies... And there are a lot more of these people than the die-hards.
The die-hard fans who are complaining have already seen the movie and given their 10 bucks. I'm not dissing the casual market, but I'm guessing all of the Daredevil fans out there that considered the movie "sacrelige" did so after boosting the opening weekend gross quite nicely.
But come on, there's no heart and soul in Marvel's assembly line. A Marvel comic might have a talented artist or writer pass through every now and again, but that's all they're doing-- passing through.
The listed titles are: Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi. There is a lot of entertaining backstory there to pilfer, certainly enough in each one to make a movie (maybe not Hawkeye). None of what is listed is Sin City, but then again a lot of what is listed is on par with Batman or Spider Man. Which is, to say, a great director can never be undervalued. Unless he goes and directs The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D.
The thing I'm worried about with this is that Marvel is flooding their own market. Sure, there is demand for some superhero movies. Sure, great superhero movies will always make money. But the public's tastes are fickle. Make a super hero movie every few years, and you can really spark the public's imagination. Pump out bad superhero movie after bad superhero movie and suddenly everyone is interested in the slasher revival, or really great pulp action movies, or (gasp) well written dialog with deep characters. After 10 movies, won't people want to see something... else?
not able to resell your CDs legally (not law yet, just wait...)
If you believe that the future of music is iTunes, then thanks to the DMCA basically whatever the record companies want has the force of law. You won't need to be able to resell your CD's: your entire music collection will be digital and locked to your computer.
Of course it is apparent that the future of music is MP3, and therefore the future of music is inherintly illegal. Kind of scary, that.
You could actually do a game like this, if you were willing to blur lines a bit. The Zelda line has ruled Hyrule for centuries unopposed. But their line has grown fat and lazy, refusing to respond to help while people lay starving in the streets. Enter a young boy by the name of Greg Gannondorf. Born with a strange power he doesn't understand, Greg finds himself unwillingly thrust into the position of reigniting the fires that makes countries strong. History has chosen him to burn down the old so that the country can be reborn, but the path he takes to get there is of his own design. Which path will he choose? Which path will be his destiny?
Ever tried to play Street Fighter on a keyboard?
Games made for a control style are going to be best on that control style, whether that's racing wheels, a keyboard and mouse, a dual-shock analog controller, or the Nintendo DS touch screen.
I worked in a bike shop where you would work with customers, stock shelves, organize clutter, sweep floors, work the till, and fix bikes. If you're doing landscaping, sometimes you're mowing lawns, tilling soil, digging post holes, weeding, bug spraying, examining plants for damage, etc. The person who is sweeping your factory could be sweeping, cleaning machines, taking stuff out to the laundry, dusting, painting, etc. When you wait tables you have to juggle customers, remember orders, clean tables, fill certain orders, fill special customer requests, and work the till.
Always take the time to slightly over train your workers. It generally doesn't take much to teach someone to do something else, and even if they don't do it directly it will pay off. Cogs in a machine need to know what the other cogs around them do to work effectively. Plus, as studies have shown, if you engage your workers intellectually you get better work out of them. Workers generally aren't as dumb as the average CEO thinks they are.
If anything, short of assembly line worker (rotate them through posts!) the stuck-at-a-desk-processing-TP-reports jobs are the ones with the most repetitive tasks and the easiest to burn out on.
I generally find that time spent bonding with co-workers comes back in intangible ways. It opens lines of communication so that people feel comfortable when real issues arise. It makes people feel more comfortable reporting blockages in their workflow.
Likewise, studies have shown that workers produce the most when they spend a full 20% of their time off-task. That means roughly two hours of their day should be spent doing something else as recovery time to produce the most overall. People burn out if they focus too much, and 2 hours sounds about right based on the studies I've seen.
Employers should grab the above and run. Never give an employee one thing to do... always have several things they can rotate between when they're tired. Give them little projects with other people that can open lines of communication, rather than just one daily grind task.
Remember, FFXII has to be carefully architectured to not make the player swap back and forth between disks. What about a game like a theoretical Grand Theft Auto 4, where the developers may go for photorealism everywhere, using huge multipass textures with burned in effects, etc... On the Playstation 3 it may look awesome and fit all on one disk. But because of the non-linear gameplay, the developers wouldn't have the option of putting such a beast onto 2 or 3 DVD's, and would just need to cut content.
With competing console features it is never a question of "can we use the size," it's a question of "can we stuff something that big back down to the lower of the two platforms?" In this case I'm guessing it will be a bit of a pain.
I'll try not to be too confrontational in my response.
Your claim that "sci-fi isn't about sci-fi" is a nonsensical statement. Perhaps you meant to say "science fiction isn't about science", which is a popular quote but I doubt Asimov said it, because it would be the direct opposite of his actual opinion.
If it seems nonsensical to you, re-read it. Sci-fi isn't about Sci-fi any more than writing is about writing. If you forget that, you lose the essence of good writing.
I don't remember exactly where he said that. It might have been in the intro to I, Robot, or somewhere else. Honestly, I've read too much of his stuff to know exactly where any one quote came from.
Nightfall, arguably one of Asimov's best short stories / novels, could easily have been set in a fantasy world,
Funny that you should say that. Asimov always responded harshly to people who claimed that Nightfall was his best story. He didn't rank it even in his top three.
That's why it's arguable. For a while in his life he did rank it as his third. The last question, BTW, was rather superficial, and he didn't rank it as #1 until later in his life... probably when he was facing his own mortality.
I'm sorry. You had me flabbergasted when you praised Battlestar Galactica, but I burst out laughing when you compared Rama to that B-grade schlock The Cube.
In case you haven't noticed, Rama was b-grade schlock too. The point wasn't that it was the same quality, but the same story.
If you can't see the value in the new Battlestar Galactica, I can't really help you. It's a good series. It's well written, the characters have depth, there are multiple layers of conflicting emotions, the cinematography uses techniques hardly ever applied to television or sci-fi, and the progression is hardly ever cliched. The only thing bad that can be said about it is that the writers obviously know every trick in the book to make a story gripping, but they use the techniques of their craft well enough that very few people will ever see them as techniques. If you can't enjoy Battlestar Galactica, I'm curious as to what you can have enjoyed on television in the past 20 years.
If you want to be one of those purists that argue the difference between Sci-Fi and Science Fiction and Science Fiction / Fantasy and SFF, go right ahead. Honestly, the whole debate is as stupid as arguing that "Nude Descending a Staircase" isn't great art because it doesn't fit the mid 16-th century definition of a representational painting. If you want to say that great stories set in a science fiction setting aren't actually sci-fi unless they exploit the setting in a way that couldn't be done in any other setting, fine. That's as silly as saying that Dangerous Liasons wasn't a historical piece because it didn't intimately involve the setting in a way that wouldn't be possible in any other setting. But it is your opinion, and I've found that people who hold that opinion do so like a priest holds his religion.
Me, I'd rather have good writing, good stories, and good, if you'll pardon the abused term, art (and / or entertainment) wherever it may occur. Whether that means the setting is intimate with the human drama, or the setting is secondary to the human drama unfolding in front of it, I could really care less.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy what you would consider "sci-fi": I own about 250 of Asimov's books, and have a host of Heinlen, Clarke, Stephenson (eww), Card, and many, many others. But I'm not a snob about whether they were writing a Childhood's End or an On The Shore.
It may seem funny, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see digital TV's that only let you change channels during programming...
To play Divx movies?
Asimov also said that good sci-fi isn't about sci-fi: good sci-fi is about people.
Battlestar Galactica is a WW2 soap opera pretending to be sci-fi, and is one of the best shows to come out in years. Firefly was an old western serial pretending to be sci-fi, and was also one of the best shows of it's time. They're about the human condition, exploring what it means to be a person under duress. Nightfall, arguably one of Asimov's best short stories / novels, could easily have been set in a fantasy world, or a modern day world in a different culture. The Ender's series was a classic coming-of-age tale. Rendezvous with Rama wasn't about technology, but how different people react when their world is turned upside-down. It is the same story, basically, that was told in the movie "Cube," though with less blood. Hell, you can't get more human than I, Robot (the book).
Star Wars was an excellent example of sci-fi. It wasn't about technology, it was about people. It really was the personified hero story, a tale that has been told for thousands upon thousands of years. That it had poor writing and moments of Shatner-level acting yet became one of the most popular movies of all time just prove how much the story resonated with people. Just because it was a story older than Jesus, and exactly the same story as told in the Matrix, doesn't make it any less appealing to us as human beings, or any less important to our culture.
50 years later, we're still the same human beings.
Tell that to Kodak, Albertsons, Google, Cisco, Viagra, etc.
It's not the name... It's the lack of exposure. If someone is familiar with a name, they will have positive feelings about it and will feel more comfortable with the application / company. But most companies spend as much on advertising as they do on development. When was the last time you saw a 20-person open source development team with 20 full-time promoters?
Pick a dumb name, stick to it, and batter people with it like there is no tomorrow. They'll make the connections on their own.
Get a copy of Dekart Private disk. Create a new private disk. Install Opera onto the disk, set it's cache, etc to the private disk, and set opera to launch automatically when unencrypting the disk.
Surf to your heart's content, knowing that anyone will actually need your password to unencrypt it.
To make it harder to spot, Rename it something like "pagefile.bak," and make the drive file invisible. Set a scheduled event to unmount all disks if there is 1/2 hour of inactivity.
I haven't tried TrueCrypt... I'll have to check it out.
I'll try not to be too hard in my post.
The simple fact is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are going to be very large busts. Sure the dedicated fanboy will spring for a $1000+ system but the average person is not.
The PS2 and Xbox both launched in the 300-400 dollar range, and came down in price relatively quickly. Neither of them were large busts. The Game Cube launched cheaper, and the 3DO launched much higher. Having the PS3 and Xbox 360 launch in the 300-400 dollar range is about the safest bet they could have made.
On top of these massive costs, the games are going to be more expensive and long gone are the days of $20 older popular titles.
Can you provide any info to back this up? The reason why prices have remained stable for a very long time (despite inflation) is because the number of users has been growing. Being software, the simplified equation is Amount Spent on Development must be less than or equal to the Expected Num Users times the Per User Price. The installed user base, and number of titles sold has been growing steadily, and as such so has the available development resources. People expect this trend to continue with the next generation of system, and as such the titles are being budgeted and sold accordingly.
Sure, the next generation might see a 10 dollar price increase... but except for the crash and dump of 2600 games in '84, full-price games have never been 20 dollars.
With astonishingly high production costs and timetables almost double that of other consoles, developers are simply not going to be pumping out many titles
I'm not seeing this. The thing is, for a triple A title this would necessarily be true. But actual triple A titles are few and far between, and have always taken 3-5 years to produce. To produce a game of today's quality, however, development costs will go *down*. Not having to optimize for the GC's limited ram, or the PS2's more limited processor means enough texture memory and processor speeds to skip a large chunk of your optimizing passes... Maybe few people will be able to afford to push the PS3 to it's technological limits, but if that is true the market will find a balance between the cost of development and the resultant game. Personally, if that's the case, I'm happy to have hardware out of the equation. Nintendo didn't have to shatter the Game Cube to make Animal Crossing an engrossing game, and neither should fun games on the next gen platforms necessarily take advantage of all of the console's supposed power.
I'm not saying this won't necessarily lead to developer upheaval, but there is always developer upheaval. What I am saying is that having more power on a system does not mean that everyone must fill that system to it's max. You can't say that nobody can afford to spend as much on development as everybody else, and therefore everybody is going to go bankrupt.
So except for FPS, Sports, and safe RPG's/MMO's and crap movie/TV/whatever licensed games there will be little else. I don't even believe many puzzle games or niche titles will be seen.
Puzzle titles are cheap and can pay off royally. There will always be publishers looking for the next Tetris.
The industry has been moving solidly towards more and more sequals. However, I distinctly remember during the 2600, NES, Genesis, SNES, and Playstation 1 days that people were complaining that innovation in gaming was dead, and all that came out anymore were me-too platformers. Remember THQ's wonderful movie platformer lineup? I honestly don't think the state of gaming today is any worse than it was 15 years ago... unless you're looking through rose colored glasses, the past was pretty bad too.
It is going to be very frustrating for gamers, look how the comparatively cheap (while still way expensive) to produce for PSP is doing... If the Revolution can come in at $199-$249
Production price isn't everything, and I would hardly call the PSP "way expensive." One to two million should get you a respectable PSP game, and that's pretty cheap by today's standards.
I agree with all of your points. I do feel compelled to point out though that specialty retailers don't make much on the hardware either, and only sell it in order to sell more titles. If they sell 1/4th the systems that they otherwise would have, but sell 4 times the amount of software per system, they've more than broken even. Add in the silly profit margins on controllers and memory cards, and you've got quite an incentive to not care about what the market wants.
I won't be buying a 360 until it has at least three titles that I would regret for the rest of my life not playing. This should happen somewhere in the middle of the third year, if they're doing well.
Remember how the SNES Zelda shipped late? Or how FF3 slipped and slipped? Remember how late the original Metroid was? Or how late Warcraft 3 shipped? The Sims?
Once it's released, people will forget the delay. As long as the game is good and doesn't ship like buggy junk, bygones will be bygones. Nintendo has a solid track record in this respects, so more than likely in 6 months we will be cooing about how awesome the new Metroid is, and will have forgotten the delays. It's better to have a legendary title tomorrow than a half-baked good game today.
That's not a microsoft decision. That's a decision of the retailers trying to milk the game-buying public for all they are worth. EB seems to repeatedly be the worst in this regard, which is ironic considering they're theoretically trying to stop people from just buying their system at Target.
The X360 itself is only 400 dollars, which seems within the realm of what the PS2 and PS1 launched at. Don't worry, that price will come down soon. I wouldn't be surprised if it fell 50 - 100 dollars in it's first year out.
http://www.xgamestation.com/
Of course, it is totally a hacker system, at a high price. You can't just buy games for it. But what is the fun of a retro console if you don't get your hands a little dirty to play it?
Lik-Sang is taking preorders for 60 US dollars.
Of course, that's with one wired controller and no hard drive...
Shipping date is set for the end of august.
The whole thing is a terribly simplistic view.
Don't make the mistake of assuming is a PDA is a simple data keeper. As the cliche' goes... it is how you use it that matters.
There are adaptors for TI Calculators that turn them into serial port terminals. Most digital cameras run some variant of DOS under the hood, and can be programmed to run any script that you would want. GB USB flash drives are small enough to be hidden basically anywhere these days. And anything with bluetooth is 0wnable and can be used to control other devices.
An in-your-network attack can come from basically anywhere these days. If security for your facility means only allowing approved devices into your building, you're screwed. You'll have to ban all digital devices to achieve any kind of security, and that tends to be inefficient.
On the other hand, from the article it sounds like the government just wants a PDA mobile that doesn't suck... a program I can certainly get behind.
What about a component of a Raid Array box? 4 raid cards attached to 4 HDD's each, can draw a lot of juice.
The question is whether it makes sense to them to release a system like this at all. They're basically saying "you can't watch our videos if you don't spend a lot more money on hardware." From the perspective of people who can't or won't "upgrade" their monitors, why spend 20 dollars to buy a video that is intentionally downsampled to exactly the same bitrate as a pirated version? The idea is that you would be paying them for quality, but the reality for a lot of people is that it will just degrade their experience.
Time and time again, DRM systems have been shown to hurt paying customers. Apple's DRM is probably the most widely accepted because it is the least restrictive and doesn't pull stupid requirements on the end-user like this. DVD's DRM is accepted because it is invisible. Divx, however, required players to "phone home," and lasted in the market just a few months before being killed off by lack of interest. I think we'll find that if people have to replace their TV sets to play Blu-ray disks, they're just going to stick with DVD's.
I'm not opposed to DRM... my livelyhood to some degree depends on it. But putting restrictions on the end-user like this will alienate a lot of potential buyers. Why spend 200 dollars for a player that doesn't provide any advantage over the current standard if you don't invest hundreds more in your monitor / television?
DRM should be invisible, or it shouldn't be on the market.