At the risk of beating a dead horse, The tradeoff that I've seen in racing games falls to would the user benefit from a higher-pixel count, or an increased draw distance. Invariably, the draw distance is more useful, as draw distance craps out long before you get to the single-pixel distance. Would the user benefit from believeable AI, or from AI that can't think it's way around a pole when the environment changes?
Not all digital broadcasts will be in HDTV. It appears that currently, not many of them will be, as broadcasters are wisely using the extra bandwidth for more content rather than higher-rez content.
Games can always use more pixels, but it is a question of balance. Do you up resolution that helps 5% of your users, or do you up texture density which helps 100% of your users?
Don't get me wrong, I want HD to catch on. But is has a ways to go before everyone has one. Personally, I think the time for ubiquitous HD should be the generation after the current, once the standard has broken 50% installed userbase.
Currently while we still billboard enemies, trees, while we still have static sky boxes, while we still have environmental objects that are nondestructable static superthings, upping the resolution to help 5-10% of users seems unnecessary.
If it were free, I'd totally say do it. But game development is a series of balancing choices, and this would be one that should fall on the side of the average user.
Now, to be fair, some game development studios do this in a way that harms nobody but takes a long time to do, creating the optimum normal - rez experience, then reducing textures, effects, and draw distance for a higher-rez version. This works, but is a tremendous timesink.
P.S. I have watched movies on a plasma screen. SEGA had one.
Sorry, was distracted before finishing my thought.
DVD's look great currently. While Videogame - like, everything in The Fifth Element DVD just looks significantly better than what you would see in a videogame. Or The Clone Wars, The Matrix, or any other movie you care to name. They just use the pixels they have more effectively.
Games don't need more pixels. They need to use the pixels they have better. Once we're there, we can talk about higher-rez.
BTW, one of the reasons you need higher-rez on computers is because computer monitors weren't built for low-rez applications. Because of this, even DVD's look bad on computer monitors.
Which is optimized for the output of the screen, to take full advantage of a decidedly non-analog medium. TV's, however, bleed pixels in a very natural way to make lower-rez images look better.
Plus, quite frankly, we're still not doing relative light levels, ubiquitous normal mappings, or even 3D crowd members at sporting events. The floating heads in Doom looked terrible and jagged around the edges. Realistic fire and esp smoke are still a pipe dream.
Don't forget that extra pixels come at the expense of image quality. If these systems have enough power to do all of the tricks that developers want you will be OK. If, however, higher-rez causes lower texture quality, reduced normal mapping, reduced environment lighting, or any of the other tricks, then it may not be worth it in terms of overall image quality.
Microsoft scored with the HD on the Xbox because a lot of Xbox games are ports of PS2 titles... hence developers can use the extra power to put out extra pixels, and call it a day. But if you're starting from scratch and trying to push 4x the pixels onto the screen for 10% of your users and giving up atmospheric effects for it, it seems somewhat unnecessary.
I'm not convinced the next generation of systems will be powerful enough to take "full" advantage of the pixels available to them currently, let alone 4x that many. And the majority of people who own HDtv's, don't realize that the normal signal is still at normal resolution. It's nice, but tough for the average person to see the difference. Nintendo going with a single image output standard is probably a good move overall, and I support their decision. Plus it will make my job easier, which is a nice bonus.
On the other hand, as a feature checklist, this will be a minus in most people's books. But most people who own HDTV's still play normal DVD's on them and somehow think they're running in High Density.
If you have an HDTV enabled game, you must optimize your game to look best in HDTV, and people with normal TV's just have wasted cycles that could be used for effects, etc. If you have a normal game, you optimize your game to look best on normal televisions, and while HDTV's potential goes underutilized, you still have the same great looking game as on normal TV's.
I admit, "Rail Guns" have become common shorthand for all electromagnetic accelerator guns, but it's still taking an existing name in common usage and using it for something completely different. You can't just call a Building to Building weapon a B2Bomber, or an armored 18 wheeler a "battle-ship."
Get a new name. The one you want was taken in WW2.
I'd rather pay 5 or six bucks to play certain great games ad-free. Metroid springs to mind, as does Secret of Mana and Axelay. Unfortunately, Nintendo has consistently priced their classics far higher than this threshold... with old NES games on the GBA going for 20 dollars or so. 5 dollars is probably a pipe dream.
However, would you buy Milon's Secret Castle if it was 5 - 20 dollars? How about if it didn't cost you anything, just some annoying ads? Would you try Solomon's Key, 3D World Runner, Darious Twin, Anticipation, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit if all it cost were to watch some ads? Would you be willing to venture the cost of a movie to try a game that has a very high chance of being garbage? Super Glove Ball, anyone?
None of the above mentioned games are worth the cash, but all could be quite entertaining to try if you had an hour to kill on the weekend. It's the TV vs Pay-Per-View model. Give people mildly entertaining crap that is readily available and free, and they'll be entertained. Charge them anything, and the thresholds go up significantly.
I'd love to see fully ad-supported console gaming. It's one of the few models that haven't been tried, and it has the potential to really open the market to the casual gamer. We may even see a lifespan progression of games from retail to discount bin to ad-supported. Either way it has the potential to change gaming in interesting ways.
This is actually starting to sound a lot like the Phantom console, except well thought-out. Fully polished and professional releases would be full price, available in stores. Smaller teams, who would still have to submit to some form of format QA, would be able to sell smaller titles cheaply the same way that cell phone game companies do. Gamers could go to the store and buy the new Zelda for 50 dollars, or on impulse in the living room could buy the original Zelda for 5. Or they could run out and buy Alien Hominid for 40 dollars, or download a Revolution version of the webgame at the cost of watching some ads. Maybe all of Nintendo's old games are available at the cost of watching a few ads while you play... between levels or at various other times. Perhaps any indie development firm will be able to setup such an arrangement, with Nintendo's traditional profit/risk sharing model.
If any of the above speculation is true, it sounds like Nintendo has finally embraced the network in a major way... perhaps even more so than Microsoft has, and certainly differently.
This generation of consoles is going to be interesting indeed. Controllers are wireless, consoles are wired.
IMO, the details shouldn't be in the public. The general theory or usage should be, but a defendant has no right no know the details of a listening device (for a mobster or terrorist suspect), a radar gun, or a breathalizer. That would just give them the ability to thwart it.
If giving someone knowledge of how your breathalizer detects alcohol in your breath allows you to thwart it, your breathalizer should have no place in law enforcement. Same thing with radar guns. They both do very simple things, that once past the general theory phase just let you know whether or not it was built well enough to actually judge what it is claiming to judge. And sometimes the answer is "no." Of course it is possible to thwart the above... by slowing down or not drinking, but then you need to know when they are coming up.
Even listening devices / wiretaps etc are trivial. If the CIA installs a keylogger between your keyboard and PC, what does it help you to know how the keylogger functions? Or if there is a bug in their room, what harm does it do if during the trial the frequency used comes up? You should be rotating frequencies anyway, and the mobsters should be jamming all frequencies around them like embassies do.
Most law enforcement tools work not because they are rock solid, but because people don't know when they will be used. Once someone finds out that there is a bug in their room, the bug becomes useless, even if the person doesn't know where or what it is. Once someone knows there is a portion of the highway designated a speed trap, the speed trap won't catch them. You don't need details to know that. You do need details to know that you were actually going the speed the machine says you were going, or that your blood alcohol levels were what it says they were.
Yes, but the best thing in the world would be a Mac you could run windows on. Think of the number of people who buy iBooks to run Linux on. Now think of the number of people who would buy a shiny new Powerbook to run windows, or the number of companies that would buy iMacs to be store window displays if they ran their POS NT software. I'm still doubtful, but this could be quite interesting.
The article is light on facts, but the way that I've heard it is that they're researching ways using eye tracking cameras and a layer of LCD light deflectors to "aim" images at individual eyes. You don't need glasses or a head tracking beacon, as all of that is done automatically. You can walk around the front of the screen and get the right perspective. If you really needed to walk all the way around something you could put three or four of these back-to-back.
Supposedly it works, but that the tech is too slow for consumer-grade apps currently and it only works for one person at a time, with a multi-person version in the works. Again, the limitation isn't in the design, but how fast you can update the LCD adjusters and the image.
I can't tell the number of times I've had a spec open in one monitor, and whatever it was I was working on open in the other. Glancing back and forth between screens is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, clicking on the taskbar icon, absorbing as much as possible, clicking back, and repositioning your cursor.
In my particular field, this lets you have the game you're working on open in one monitor, and an editor open in the other, so that you can change values / setups on the fly and see how that effects gameplay. Sure, I could click over, but this is much, much faster. For Midi work I've had the current detail window open in one monitor, and a broad overview of where you are in the song and detail on the vocals you are trying to sync to in the other. For web work, it's great to have Dreamweaver open in one monitor and either a spec or the actual rendered HTML in the other, set to a 1 second refresh. Or a Word Doc open in one monitor, and an Excel Spreadsheet open in the other. Anywhere you have to compare data, a dual-setup is much, much nicer. I'd even like to get a 3rd monitor as basically a dedicated chat/e-mail window, as most of the communication at my company happens over that medium.
Old CRT's are so plentiful these days that it doesn't make sense not to. I've found 4 free monitors in the past 2 weeks without even looking. If something is going to speed up your workflow, there is no reason not to do it.
If you've never used a dual-monitor setup, I can see how it would look frivilous. But nearly everyone who uses it loves it, and finds it helps them in their daily tasks. And with monitors basically free and all video cards shipping with two outputs anyway, it doesn't cost a thing to try it out.
Most people who develop games no longer have the time to play through them. If you're working 10 hours a day at a job, then come home to spend some time with your wife or husband and kids, you just don't have more than a few minutes to pick up a game between the time that you put the potroast in the oven and the time to pick up kids from soccer practice. Game development makes this even harder, as you're surrounded by them all day long anyway. Your need to game is at least somewhat satisfied, but your need to see your family, read a book, or pay your bills goes wanting all day.
Working people need games that are short, intense, save-anywhere, and highly intuitive. The ability to play with your family is also a plus.
People said that we had addictions to communication when everyone started carrying a cell phone around. Yes, I could be interrupted at any moment in the day to have my girlfriend tell me about a great band that's coming to my town to play, and such a thing was considered compulsive at the time. Working with an open IM window used to be considered an addiction, and now it's totally normal.
I use e-mail at work, and have the inbox open all day. Mail comes in and pops up like chat messages. Does that count as a check? Am I checking my mail 20 times a day, because I get 20 messages? Or am I checking my mail every 5 minutes, as that's how often the machine is set to query the server? And how, exactly, is this unhealthy?
I check my e-mail on vacation too. I also check my voice messages. While there is a clear separation between "vacation" and "work," there is also a clear separation between being pestered about small things and having someone mail you that a childhood friend died, or that you've forgotten to pay your bills this month and your phone is about to get canceled.
None of this can be defined as an addiction. When I go without checking my mail for a week I feel very nervous. I also feel nervous when I leave the keys in the outside of the door of my house. Is that compulsive? We check our mail 5 times a day. We're also on call at a moment's notice to our cell phones. Is that compulsive? We spend an hour responding to mail every day. If anything, the importance that shows in the smooth functioning of our daily lives shows that the frequent checking is not a compulsion.
What is a compulsion is for think tanks to release reports with rediculous, inflamatory titles designed to get people's attention and funding. Attacking e-mail in this way is just plain silly.
Others have questioned those numbers, but I'd like to point out that the numbers in question are sell-through (selling to end users), but Sony has to manufacture for sell-in (units sent to retailers). If Walmart wants 30 units in every story, Walmart gets 30 units in every store, no matter how well they are selling. Most retailers don't like selling out, and will keep a cushion around. As it doesn't look like the PSP will die as a platform any time soon, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone wanted a few month's stock for cushion. Add to that impending launch in new territories and the short-term boom that goes with that, and it's plausable that they're not just outsourcing to save money. They may just need to placate retailers that they can produce in quantity, and they may need the extra handhelds to move into new territories.
Of course, they may just be trying to save a few bucks by moving away from their Tokyo production plant. Se La Vie.
Actually, this has gone round and round for years.
The Xbox was going to be the ultimate conversion device, that brought gaming and networked communication to a head, with possible movie and music delivery services. The PS2 was the same. Nintendo stayed away. Going Back a generation, The Dreamcast and Saturn were both convergent devices, with modems and browsers. The Playstation talked a good talk about becoming the center of you digital universe, but didn't do anything about it. Nintendo also stayed away. In the generation before, the Genesis had a modem and console-to-console communication services, as well as being one of the first devices to support a cable modem of sorts. By the end of it's life, it was going to become the center of your multimedia universe, to compete with 3DO, CDI, Pippin, Turbo Duo, and everyone else time forgot. Nintendo promised a modem and a CD player (the playstation, oddly enough), but didn't deliver. During the previous generation, the NES had the odd distinction of being the first console you could legally gamble upon, with a modem connection to a state lottery. It also had knitting machines and a whole host of useless accessories in Japan to help it become the Family Computer (FamiCom) it was named after. They also used ROB in the US to sell the machine as "more than a game machine," then promptly dumped the adorable useless thing. I don't recall any moves on the Mastersystem's part during this time, though remember that the mastersystem had games on both cards and cartridges, and nobody really discovered what they had planned for that expandability.
Before the NES, the line between consoles and computers was extremely blurry, with ATARI computers competing with ATARI consoles and Intellivisions competing with Colecovisions. Ok, I was too young to remember much of anything but Bullwinkle cartoons. But remember, back then these things basically were computers, with keyboards and recipe programs and typing applications. They were basically all omni machines, and if they weren't they promised the functionality that they could become one.
In other words, everyone is offering the omni machine. Everyone. It's marketing. Everyone knows that the PSP is about as useful as a movie player as your watch, but still they hype the possibility to sell more PSP's. Your living room monitor is a crappy screen to read text from, but people still like to hear that their console will connect to the internet and let them read their mail.
The FLOPS issue is not as big as you would think. Supercomputers are expensive primarily because they're custom, and use extra hardy equipment, not because there is a particular ops to cost ratio. Plus the PS3 is optimized to push as many FLOPS as quickly as possible through, for maximum graphics throughput, with really no eye to what to do with them. 8 chips on die with really long multiple pipelines working in tandem? Basically if this thing had to think out of order, that efficiency will quickly come crashing down, and I doubt it has a lot of registers, but on linear datasets with no dependencies this puppy will scream. My PC rates as 3 GigaFLOPS for the main CPU, and it's a few years old. And it can actually think. Add in clock cycles for the graphics processor and the other chips onboard, and I could see a modern computer with a modern graphics card ranking as 20 GigaFLOPS. Now with a few years yet to be released, and a development cycle designed almost exclusively to do ridiculous amounts of mechanical transformations to fixed data pipelines, and I could see 2 TeraFLOPS being possible. Much like Intel pushing the P4 MHz rating artificially high, this would be high for basically artificially engineered reasons, but it's definitely possible. By the time this ships, Blue Gene should have passed the PetaFLOP barrier. And as both of these are IBM's babies, they should have the technical knowhow.
When Nintendo teamed with SGI to create Project Reality, the specs they announced were truly insane. By the time they actually shipped that machine, the N64, the specs were still the same but because of the elapsed time they were just generally good.
First of all, only terrorists use jabber, so you better get rid of that. That e-mail client with encryption? Gone. SSH? SSee you in Jail, perv. Zip it? Better trash it.
On the other hand, he was convicted because a minor said he attempted to solicit her, and he had kiddie searches in his browser history. While the idea that having an encryption program can be seen as supporting evidence, I can understand why it would be relevant in this case. Encryption isn't a smoking gun, but it isn't as ubiquitous as a kitchen knife. I can't really argue with the ruling.
The WSJ does have an excellent reputation, but remember what it says... "Chips." Nowhere does it say x86. This could be an agreement for Intel to get into the PPC business, which would be a great supplier coup for Apple, or it could be an agreement to switch to cheaper Intel wireless networking chips. Maybe Intel will build Apple's ROMs. There are a lot more chips in a computer than the main processor, and nowhere does it say they're thinking about switching suppliers for that or the base architecture for that.
And maybe they won't be used at all. The WSJ says they are in talks that "could" lead to using Intel chips. It's known that at least one version of Apple's OS was up and running on an x86 chip, in the same way that Microsoft had Windows up and running on a PPC architecture. It's also known that Apple talks a lot.
I'd say the chance of a complete platform shift is slight, as backwards compatibility from x86 to PPC would be a nightmare. But Intel supplying PPC chips to Apple, after the years of languishing Apple went through before IBM could deliver a G5? That's a lot more likely.
Game demos, movie trailers, home movies, shareware applications... pretty much everything these days is either distributed over bittorrent or will be shortly. It's like FTP in that it is destined to become a completely integrated standard into the web's existence. It allows for the transfer of large files at one hundredth the bandwidth cost of a standard file server. It won't be long until system updates, etc are all using the technology.
I'll reiterate this again. Bittorrent isn't a file sharing application like Napster. Bittorrent is a file transfer protocol, dozens of times better and cheaper than existing file transfer protocols. If you want to transfer a hollywood blockbuster, Bittorrent is your best protocol. If you want to download a video from CBS News, Bittorrent is still the best protocol. If you want to download the latest terrestrial maps the terramapping project of the US government, bittorrent is still the best protocol. It's just the best protocol for any kinds of large file downloading that you may do.
Just looking over my bittorrent logs, I've recently downloaded the new FF7 advent children trailer, a copy of the Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Demo, 3 Gigs worth of open-licensed video game music, the interviews from "OutFoxed" (legally), and the Natural Selection mod to Half Life. All of these are legal, appropriate uses of Bittorrent, and are far more common than searching a P2P network for legal content. Even the centralized structure of the bittorrent network requires the kind of source-signatures that would discourage illegal uses. It's just a great protocol for transfering large files. It's a pity it's also a pretty good protocol for transfering large illegal files, as there are clear legal uses.
"There is no better example of how to dim the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding the dialog and directing of Revenge of the Sith."
The rare gem (i.e. 6 movies with the "Star Wars" theme) is treasured. The commonplace grains (i.e. weekly episodes of "Star Wars") of sand is just banal crap. If Lucas wants to produce any more "Star Wars" film, then he should focus only on the movies.
Oddly enough the 15 minute cartoons on the cartoon network were significantly better than the two movies that preceeded them. Spinning these out into a full series wouldn't do more damage to the franchise than, say, the Episodes 1 and 2.
And on top of that, Lucas isn't known for television and will likely neither write nor direct the TV series. This is a big win here, a Star Wars franchise with other writers and directors. It's what we've been screaming for since he lathered episode one in Jar Jar poodoo.
All good things come to an end. Zoro was a cultural phenomenon 50 years ago, and now it's a cute forgotton myth. The Lone Ranger, Karlov vs Lugosi... all major cultural phenomenons come to an end. Star Trek came to an end. The fire burned bright, and now it's just a dim glow of what it once was. Enjoy the glow, enjoy the memories, and let it go. There is still some enjoyment to be had, but the fire will never burn as brightly again.
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
On the one hand, you have a point. People came down harder on Microsoft than was justified by the quite reasonable specs they announced, with the system setup that looked pretty darned good.
On the other hand, that special was in many ways just plain insulting. It really gave The Wizard a run for it's money. Lucas would be proud.
It looks like neither of the two (Sorry Nintendo) major players have slipped up. Both are using sleek 'n sexy wireless controllers that may actually justify the cost of 1st party controllers. They both have detachable HDD options (remember kiddies, so did the PS2 and look where that went). Microsoft sensibly put their memory card ports back onto their machines, and Sony now appears to be supporting actual real memory cards. The PS3 also happens to look lickably good, whereas the Microsoft console looks much better than the Xbox (though kind of resembles a blob of ice cream).
On the other hands, both systems have achilles heels. They both are going to be a pain to develop for, what with multiple memory speeds, multiple processors, etc etc. One word: ouch. The 360 has all sorts of "Live" functionality requirements that will drive development costs up a bit, but more than that will drive developers up walls. The PS3's 8 processors-on-a-die looks like it's going to continue the PS2's legendary ease-of-programming and development [/scarcasm]. Backwards compatibility of the PS3 is a good trend, though it probably won't make or break the system. And not that I'm partial or anything, but I really wish the cameras had come standard with the consoles. It has to come standard if it's going to get used.
It looks like both systems are pretty easily matched. I eagerly await Nintendo's announcement.
Full Disclosure - I'll probably buy a PS3. If it comes out in a year and a half, that will be about the time that my latest PS2 craps out.
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At the risk of beating a dead horse, The tradeoff that I've seen in racing games falls to would the user benefit from a higher-pixel count, or an increased draw distance. Invariably, the draw distance is more useful, as draw distance craps out long before you get to the single-pixel distance. Would the user benefit from believeable AI, or from AI that can't think it's way around a pole when the environment changes?
Not all digital broadcasts will be in HDTV. It appears that currently, not many of them will be, as broadcasters are wisely using the extra bandwidth for more content rather than higher-rez content.
Games can always use more pixels, but it is a question of balance. Do you up resolution that helps 5% of your users, or do you up texture density which helps 100% of your users?
Don't get me wrong, I want HD to catch on. But is has a ways to go before everyone has one. Personally, I think the time for ubiquitous HD should be the generation after the current, once the standard has broken 50% installed userbase.
Currently while we still billboard enemies, trees, while we still have static sky boxes, while we still have environmental objects that are nondestructable static superthings, upping the resolution to help 5-10% of users seems unnecessary.
If it were free, I'd totally say do it. But game development is a series of balancing choices, and this would be one that should fall on the side of the average user.
Now, to be fair, some game development studios do this in a way that harms nobody but takes a long time to do, creating the optimum normal - rez experience, then reducing textures, effects, and draw distance for a higher-rez version. This works, but is a tremendous timesink.
P.S. I have watched movies on a plasma screen. SEGA had one.
Sorry, was distracted before finishing my thought.
DVD's look great currently. While Videogame - like, everything in The Fifth Element DVD just looks significantly better than what you would see in a videogame. Or The Clone Wars, The Matrix, or any other movie you care to name. They just use the pixels they have more effectively.
Games don't need more pixels. They need to use the pixels they have better. Once we're there, we can talk about higher-rez.
BTW, one of the reasons you need higher-rez on computers is because computer monitors weren't built for low-rez applications. Because of this, even DVD's look bad on computer monitors.
Which is optimized for the output of the screen, to take full advantage of a decidedly non-analog medium. TV's, however, bleed pixels in a very natural way to make lower-rez images look better.
Plus, quite frankly, we're still not doing relative light levels, ubiquitous normal mappings, or even 3D crowd members at sporting events. The floating heads in Doom looked terrible and jagged around the edges. Realistic fire and esp smoke are still a pipe dream.
Don't forget that extra pixels come at the expense of image quality. If these systems have enough power to do all of the tricks that developers want you will be OK. If, however, higher-rez causes lower texture quality, reduced normal mapping, reduced environment lighting, or any of the other tricks, then it may not be worth it in terms of overall image quality.
Microsoft scored with the HD on the Xbox because a lot of Xbox games are ports of PS2 titles... hence developers can use the extra power to put out extra pixels, and call it a day. But if you're starting from scratch and trying to push 4x the pixels onto the screen for 10% of your users and giving up atmospheric effects for it, it seems somewhat unnecessary.
I'm not convinced the next generation of systems will be powerful enough to take "full" advantage of the pixels available to them currently, let alone 4x that many. And the majority of people who own HDtv's, don't realize that the normal signal is still at normal resolution. It's nice, but tough for the average person to see the difference. Nintendo going with a single image output standard is probably a good move overall, and I support their decision. Plus it will make my job easier, which is a nice bonus.
On the other hand, as a feature checklist, this will be a minus in most people's books. But most people who own HDTV's still play normal DVD's on them and somehow think they're running in High Density.
If you have an HDTV enabled game, you must optimize your game to look best in HDTV, and people with normal TV's just have wasted cycles that could be used for effects, etc. If you have a normal game, you optimize your game to look best on normal televisions, and while HDTV's potential goes underutilized, you still have the same great looking game as on normal TV's.
That's a question we've been asking about the green leader since we saw The Phantom Menace.
http://members.cox.net/johnahamill/armorodd.html
I admit, "Rail Guns" have become common shorthand for all electromagnetic accelerator guns, but it's still taking an existing name in common usage and using it for something completely different. You can't just call a Building to Building weapon a B2Bomber, or an armored 18 wheeler a "battle-ship."
Get a new name. The one you want was taken in WW2.
I'd rather pay 5 or six bucks to play certain great games ad-free. Metroid springs to mind, as does Secret of Mana and Axelay. Unfortunately, Nintendo has consistently priced their classics far higher than this threshold... with old NES games on the GBA going for 20 dollars or so. 5 dollars is probably a pipe dream.
However, would you buy Milon's Secret Castle if it was 5 - 20 dollars? How about if it didn't cost you anything, just some annoying ads? Would you try Solomon's Key, 3D World Runner, Darious Twin, Anticipation, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit if all it cost were to watch some ads? Would you be willing to venture the cost of a movie to try a game that has a very high chance of being garbage? Super Glove Ball, anyone?
None of the above mentioned games are worth the cash, but all could be quite entertaining to try if you had an hour to kill on the weekend. It's the TV vs Pay-Per-View model. Give people mildly entertaining crap that is readily available and free, and they'll be entertained. Charge them anything, and the thresholds go up significantly.
I'd love to see fully ad-supported console gaming. It's one of the few models that haven't been tried, and it has the potential to really open the market to the casual gamer. We may even see a lifespan progression of games from retail to discount bin to ad-supported. Either way it has the potential to change gaming in interesting ways.
This is actually starting to sound a lot like the Phantom console, except well thought-out. Fully polished and professional releases would be full price, available in stores. Smaller teams, who would still have to submit to some form of format QA, would be able to sell smaller titles cheaply the same way that cell phone game companies do. Gamers could go to the store and buy the new Zelda for 50 dollars, or on impulse in the living room could buy the original Zelda for 5. Or they could run out and buy Alien Hominid for 40 dollars, or download a Revolution version of the webgame at the cost of watching some ads. Maybe all of Nintendo's old games are available at the cost of watching a few ads while you play... between levels or at various other times. Perhaps any indie development firm will be able to setup such an arrangement, with Nintendo's traditional profit/risk sharing model.
If any of the above speculation is true, it sounds like Nintendo has finally embraced the network in a major way... perhaps even more so than Microsoft has, and certainly differently.
This generation of consoles is going to be interesting indeed. Controllers are wireless, consoles are wired.
IMO, the details shouldn't be in the public. The general theory or usage should be, but a defendant has no right no know the details of a listening device (for a mobster or terrorist suspect), a radar gun, or a breathalizer. That would just give them the ability to thwart it.
If giving someone knowledge of how your breathalizer detects alcohol in your breath allows you to thwart it, your breathalizer should have no place in law enforcement. Same thing with radar guns. They both do very simple things, that once past the general theory phase just let you know whether or not it was built well enough to actually judge what it is claiming to judge. And sometimes the answer is "no." Of course it is possible to thwart the above... by slowing down or not drinking, but then you need to know when they are coming up.
Even listening devices / wiretaps etc are trivial. If the CIA installs a keylogger between your keyboard and PC, what does it help you to know how the keylogger functions? Or if there is a bug in their room, what harm does it do if during the trial the frequency used comes up? You should be rotating frequencies anyway, and the mobsters should be jamming all frequencies around them like embassies do.
Most law enforcement tools work not because they are rock solid, but because people don't know when they will be used. Once someone finds out that there is a bug in their room, the bug becomes useless, even if the person doesn't know where or what it is. Once someone knows there is a portion of the highway designated a speed trap, the speed trap won't catch them. You don't need details to know that. You do need details to know that you were actually going the speed the machine says you were going, or that your blood alcohol levels were what it says they were.
Yes, but the best thing in the world would be a Mac you could run windows on. Think of the number of people who buy iBooks to run Linux on. Now think of the number of people who would buy a shiny new Powerbook to run windows, or the number of companies that would buy iMacs to be store window displays if they ran their POS NT software.
I'm still doubtful, but this could be quite interesting.
MIT is working on something much cooler0 0.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115975,
The article is light on facts, but the way that I've heard it is that they're researching ways using eye tracking cameras and a layer of LCD light deflectors to "aim" images at individual eyes. You don't need glasses or a head tracking beacon, as all of that is done automatically. You can walk around the front of the screen and get the right perspective. If you really needed to walk all the way around something you could put three or four of these back-to-back.
Supposedly it works, but that the tech is too slow for consumer-grade apps currently and it only works for one person at a time, with a multi-person version in the works. Again, the limitation isn't in the design, but how fast you can update the LCD adjusters and the image.
It's great for pretty much any office work.
I can't tell the number of times I've had a spec open in one monitor, and whatever it was I was working on open in the other. Glancing back and forth between screens is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, clicking on the taskbar icon, absorbing as much as possible, clicking back, and repositioning your cursor.
In my particular field, this lets you have the game you're working on open in one monitor, and an editor open in the other, so that you can change values / setups on the fly and see how that effects gameplay. Sure, I could click over, but this is much, much faster. For Midi work I've had the current detail window open in one monitor, and a broad overview of where you are in the song and detail on the vocals you are trying to sync to in the other. For web work, it's great to have Dreamweaver open in one monitor and either a spec or the actual rendered HTML in the other, set to a 1 second refresh. Or a Word Doc open in one monitor, and an Excel Spreadsheet open in the other. Anywhere you have to compare data, a dual-setup is much, much nicer. I'd even like to get a 3rd monitor as basically a dedicated chat/e-mail window, as most of the communication at my company happens over that medium.
Old CRT's are so plentiful these days that it doesn't make sense not to. I've found 4 free monitors in the past 2 weeks without even looking. If something is going to speed up your workflow, there is no reason not to do it.
If you've never used a dual-monitor setup, I can see how it would look frivilous. But nearly everyone who uses it loves it, and finds it helps them in their daily tasks. And with monitors basically free and all video cards shipping with two outputs anyway, it doesn't cost a thing to try it out.
Most people who develop games no longer have the time to play through them. If you're working 10 hours a day at a job, then come home to spend some time with your wife or husband and kids, you just don't have more than a few minutes to pick up a game between the time that you put the potroast in the oven and the time to pick up kids from soccer practice. Game development makes this even harder, as you're surrounded by them all day long anyway. Your need to game is at least somewhat satisfied, but your need to see your family, read a book, or pay your bills goes wanting all day.
Working people need games that are short, intense, save-anywhere, and highly intuitive. The ability to play with your family is also a plus.
People said that we had addictions to communication when everyone started carrying a cell phone around. Yes, I could be interrupted at any moment in the day to have my girlfriend tell me about a great band that's coming to my town to play, and such a thing was considered compulsive at the time. Working with an open IM window used to be considered an addiction, and now it's totally normal.
I use e-mail at work, and have the inbox open all day. Mail comes in and pops up like chat messages. Does that count as a check? Am I checking my mail 20 times a day, because I get 20 messages? Or am I checking my mail every 5 minutes, as that's how often the machine is set to query the server? And how, exactly, is this unhealthy?
I check my e-mail on vacation too. I also check my voice messages. While there is a clear separation between "vacation" and "work," there is also a clear separation between being pestered about small things and having someone mail you that a childhood friend died, or that you've forgotten to pay your bills this month and your phone is about to get canceled.
None of this can be defined as an addiction. When I go without checking my mail for a week I feel very nervous. I also feel nervous when I leave the keys in the outside of the door of my house. Is that compulsive? We check our mail 5 times a day. We're also on call at a moment's notice to our cell phones. Is that compulsive? We spend an hour responding to mail every day. If anything, the importance that shows in the smooth functioning of our daily lives shows that the frequent checking is not a compulsion.
What is a compulsion is for think tanks to release reports with rediculous, inflamatory titles designed to get people's attention and funding. Attacking e-mail in this way is just plain silly.
Others have questioned those numbers, but I'd like to point out that the numbers in question are sell-through (selling to end users), but Sony has to manufacture for sell-in (units sent to retailers). If Walmart wants 30 units in every story, Walmart gets 30 units in every store, no matter how well they are selling. Most retailers don't like selling out, and will keep a cushion around. As it doesn't look like the PSP will die as a platform any time soon, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone wanted a few month's stock for cushion. Add to that impending launch in new territories and the short-term boom that goes with that, and it's plausable that they're not just outsourcing to save money. They may just need to placate retailers that they can produce in quantity, and they may need the extra handhelds to move into new territories.
Of course, they may just be trying to save a few bucks by moving away from their Tokyo production plant. Se La Vie.
Actually, this has gone round and round for years.
The Xbox was going to be the ultimate conversion device, that brought gaming and networked communication to a head, with possible movie and music delivery services. The PS2 was the same. Nintendo stayed away. Going Back a generation, The Dreamcast and Saturn were both convergent devices, with modems and browsers. The Playstation talked a good talk about becoming the center of you digital universe, but didn't do anything about it. Nintendo also stayed away. In the generation before, the Genesis had a modem and console-to-console communication services, as well as being one of the first devices to support a cable modem of sorts. By the end of it's life, it was going to become the center of your multimedia universe, to compete with 3DO, CDI, Pippin, Turbo Duo, and everyone else time forgot. Nintendo promised a modem and a CD player (the playstation, oddly enough), but didn't deliver. During the previous generation, the NES had the odd distinction of being the first console you could legally gamble upon, with a modem connection to a state lottery. It also had knitting machines and a whole host of useless accessories in Japan to help it become the Family Computer (FamiCom) it was named after. They also used ROB in the US to sell the machine as "more than a game machine," then promptly dumped the adorable useless thing. I don't recall any moves on the Mastersystem's part during this time, though remember that the mastersystem had games on both cards and cartridges, and nobody really discovered what they had planned for that expandability.
Before the NES, the line between consoles and computers was extremely blurry, with ATARI computers competing with ATARI consoles and Intellivisions competing with Colecovisions. Ok, I was too young to remember much of anything but Bullwinkle cartoons. But remember, back then these things basically were computers, with keyboards and recipe programs and typing applications. They were basically all omni machines, and if they weren't they promised the functionality that they could become one.
In other words, everyone is offering the omni machine. Everyone. It's marketing. Everyone knows that the PSP is about as useful as a movie player as your watch, but still they hype the possibility to sell more PSP's. Your living room monitor is a crappy screen to read text from, but people still like to hear that their console will connect to the internet and let them read their mail.
The FLOPS issue is not as big as you would think. Supercomputers are expensive primarily because they're custom, and use extra hardy equipment, not because there is a particular ops to cost ratio. Plus the PS3 is optimized to push as many FLOPS as quickly as possible through, for maximum graphics throughput, with really no eye to what to do with them. 8 chips on die with really long multiple pipelines working in tandem? Basically if this thing had to think out of order, that efficiency will quickly come crashing down, and I doubt it has a lot of registers, but on linear datasets with no dependencies this puppy will scream. My PC rates as 3 GigaFLOPS for the main CPU, and it's a few years old. And it can actually think. Add in clock cycles for the graphics processor and the other chips onboard, and I could see a modern computer with a modern graphics card ranking as 20 GigaFLOPS. Now with a few years yet to be released, and a development cycle designed almost exclusively to do ridiculous amounts of mechanical transformations to fixed data pipelines, and I could see 2 TeraFLOPS being possible. Much like Intel pushing the P4 MHz rating artificially high, this would be high for basically artificially engineered reasons, but it's definitely possible. By the time this ships, Blue Gene should have passed the PetaFLOP barrier. And as both of these are IBM's babies, they should have the technical knowhow.
When Nintendo teamed with SGI to create Project Reality, the specs they announced were truly insane. By the time they actually shipped that machine, the N64, the specs were still the same but because of the elapsed time they were just generally good.
In general, Paramount has stated that they don't mind too much as long as no one is making money off of their trademarks.
Well, that explains Enterprise.
You do have to admit, though, it does accelerate crop growth.
First of all, only terrorists use jabber, so you better get rid of that. That e-mail client with encryption? Gone. SSH? SSee you in Jail, perv. Zip it? Better trash it.
On the other hand, he was convicted because a minor said he attempted to solicit her, and he had kiddie searches in his browser history. While the idea that having an encryption program can be seen as supporting evidence, I can understand why it would be relevant in this case. Encryption isn't a smoking gun, but it isn't as ubiquitous as a kitchen knife. I can't really argue with the ruling.
The WSJ does have an excellent reputation, but remember what it says... "Chips." Nowhere does it say x86. This could be an agreement for Intel to get into the PPC business, which would be a great supplier coup for Apple, or it could be an agreement to switch to cheaper Intel wireless networking chips. Maybe Intel will build Apple's ROMs. There are a lot more chips in a computer than the main processor, and nowhere does it say they're thinking about switching suppliers for that or the base architecture for that.
And maybe they won't be used at all. The WSJ says they are in talks that "could" lead to using Intel chips. It's known that at least one version of Apple's OS was up and running on an x86 chip, in the same way that Microsoft had Windows up and running on a PPC architecture. It's also known that Apple talks a lot.
I'd say the chance of a complete platform shift is slight, as backwards compatibility from x86 to PPC would be a nightmare. But Intel supplying PPC chips to Apple, after the years of languishing Apple went through before IBM could deliver a G5? That's a lot more likely.
It's good for pretty much everyone.
Game demos, movie trailers, home movies, shareware applications... pretty much everything these days is either distributed over bittorrent or will be shortly. It's like FTP in that it is destined to become a completely integrated standard into the web's existence. It allows for the transfer of large files at one hundredth the bandwidth cost of a standard file server. It won't be long until system updates, etc are all using the technology.
I'll reiterate this again. Bittorrent isn't a file sharing application like Napster. Bittorrent is a file transfer protocol, dozens of times better and cheaper than existing file transfer protocols. If you want to transfer a hollywood blockbuster, Bittorrent is your best protocol. If you want to download a video from CBS News, Bittorrent is still the best protocol. If you want to download the latest terrestrial maps the terramapping project of the US government, bittorrent is still the best protocol. It's just the best protocol for any kinds of large file downloading that you may do.
Just looking over my bittorrent logs, I've recently downloaded the new FF7 advent children trailer, a copy of the Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Demo, 3 Gigs worth of open-licensed video game music, the interviews from "OutFoxed" (legally), and the Natural Selection mod to Half Life. All of these are legal, appropriate uses of Bittorrent, and are far more common than searching a P2P network for legal content. Even the centralized structure of the bittorrent network requires the kind of source-signatures that would discourage illegal uses. It's just a great protocol for transfering large files. It's a pity it's also a pretty good protocol for transfering large illegal files, as there are clear legal uses.
"There is no better example of how to dim the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding the dialog and directing of Revenge of the Sith."
The rare gem (i.e. 6 movies with the "Star Wars" theme) is treasured. The commonplace grains (i.e. weekly episodes of "Star Wars") of sand is just banal crap. If Lucas wants to produce any more "Star Wars" film, then he should focus only on the movies.
Oddly enough the 15 minute cartoons on the cartoon network were significantly better than the two movies that preceeded them. Spinning these out into a full series wouldn't do more damage to the franchise than, say, the Episodes 1 and 2.
And on top of that, Lucas isn't known for television and will likely neither write nor direct the TV series. This is a big win here, a Star Wars franchise with other writers and directors. It's what we've been screaming for since he lathered episode one in Jar Jar poodoo.
All good things come to an end. Zoro was a cultural phenomenon 50 years ago, and now it's a cute forgotton myth. The Lone Ranger, Karlov vs Lugosi... all major cultural phenomenons come to an end. Star Trek came to an end. The fire burned bright, and now it's just a dim glow of what it once was. Enjoy the glow, enjoy the memories, and let it go. There is still some enjoyment to be had, but the fire will never burn as brightly again.
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
On the one hand, you have a point. People came down harder on Microsoft than was justified by the quite reasonable specs they announced, with the system setup that looked pretty darned good.
On the other hand, that special was in many ways just plain insulting. It really gave The Wizard a run for it's money. Lucas would be proud.
It looks like neither of the two (Sorry Nintendo) major players have slipped up. Both are using sleek 'n sexy wireless controllers that may actually justify the cost of 1st party controllers. They both have detachable HDD options (remember kiddies, so did the PS2 and look where that went). Microsoft sensibly put their memory card ports back onto their machines, and Sony now appears to be supporting actual real memory cards. The PS3 also happens to look lickably good, whereas the Microsoft console looks much better than the Xbox (though kind of resembles a blob of ice cream).
On the other hands, both systems have achilles heels. They both are going to be a pain to develop for, what with multiple memory speeds, multiple processors, etc etc. One word: ouch. The 360 has all sorts of "Live" functionality requirements that will drive development costs up a bit, but more than that will drive developers up walls. The PS3's 8 processors-on-a-die looks like it's going to continue the PS2's legendary ease-of-programming and development [/scarcasm]. Backwards compatibility of the PS3 is a good trend, though it probably won't make or break the system. And not that I'm partial or anything, but I really wish the cameras had come standard with the consoles. It has to come standard if it's going to get used.
It looks like both systems are pretty easily matched. I eagerly await Nintendo's announcement.
Full Disclosure - I'll probably buy a PS3. If it comes out in a year and a half, that will be about the time that my latest PS2 craps out.