To expand on this, I've tried putting a PS2 dual-shock into the hands of new players, like my girlfriend and my mother. "What's this?" they inevitably ask. It's an intimidatingly big mass of buttons, switches, diodes, etc. Add a "Wii-like" tilt sensor, and you just make something even LESS accessible.
Compare that to the Wii. It's a remote control that points. Everyone can play wii bowling. Everyone can navigate the metagame without wondering if they should use the d-pad or the left or right analog sticks. It's intuitive. You don't have to think as much about it. You can just get on with the business of playing games.
In addition to inexpensive, easy to develop for, unique, and short-time period experiences, the Wii also provides the instant accessibility that is sorely lacking in today's systems. Learning to play Rockstar's Table Tennis on the 360 takes about 1/2 hour. Learning to play Tennis on the Wii takes about 10 seconds. That's a huge difference if you're just trying to relax for a moment between sending the kids off to school and leaving for work yourself.
No method of content protection is foolproof, and that's not saying it's bad because it might not prevent all leeching, but because you can have false positives. So besides the extra effort of erecting porous walls to prevent content theft, you have the customer service issues with all your legitimate users who generate false positives.
Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately. They've gone from requesting information IN EXACTLY THE WAY THAT THE INTERNET AND YOUR SERVER HAVE BEEN SETUP TO DO, to outright lying in order to gain access.
Basically, you need to put up a small fence around your property that lets people know what you want them to be able and not able to do with content that you're serving to the world. If you put stuff up on a server that anyone can access, but want to restrict how it is being used, the way to do it properly is to teach your server what you do and don't want it to do. Otherwise, your server is acting in your stead to serve up files to anyone who asks. YOU are giving files to anyone who asks. At least put up a symbolic fence around your property before you start throwing lawsuits around.
You pay through the nose for the non-standard charger when you have to replace it in a few years, generally between 30 and 50 dollars for a part with a materials cost of at most a dollar.
You pay for it in phones that get thrown out because the non-standard charger tax in a few years makes it more feasable to dump the phone than replace the hideously unstandard wall-wart. Hence, more landfill costs, more materials costs, and a depressed to non-existant secondary market.
You pay for it in electricity, in the trickle costs of the many, many different chargers plugged in but idle in any given household.
You pay for it in brainspace, trying to keep everything clear in your head. Those times you fail to take the proper charger with you on a trip and you have to buy another one when you get there.
And on the other end of the spectrum, all of this is because the hardware companies want to bury hidden costs in the device to make a higher profit. There is no benefit to the end consumer at all. The manufacturers are just trying to raise the barrier of entry of selling replacement parts to keep those prices artifically high.
Well, guess what? The consumer does have a voice in making things fair. It's called the government. That's why you elect them. It doesn't always work, but that's what it's for. And in this case, the free market has had years to fix the problem, and it has only gotten worse. The amount of cheering on this thread is evidence of the animosity towards this purely profit-taking process.
This is people, seeing a problem and taking an action to improve the end-consumer experience and reduce overall costs. And good for them. It's nice to see a government that isn't kow-towing to every exploitive commercial process within its borders.
Not to re-cover grounds that my brother post covered so well but...
If you're currently writing stories and making no money at it, then money is not your motivating factor. It's a limiting one, but not a motivating one.
Not to sound too perverted, but money does not encourage the creative arts. It facilitates them. Every creative person that I know of would be doing exactly the same thing if money were no issue.
Why do you need excuses for what you're charging a consumer? In this case, they charge whatever the market will bear. This is especially true in an entertainment medium that has low or no media cost... you can get VHS tapes for much LESS than DVD's, even though the material and shipping costs are much higher.
Since when does price justification come into the equation?
Of course, there are lots of mitigating factors... they're tiny, low-development projects. Most of the code must have already existed in Blitz's back catalog. And you have to go into the store to get them, so it's not only advertising, they're a lure.
Other games may have advertising budgets that go back into the general fund. I suspect ad revenue from Splinter Cell basically goes into the general fund and out into development costs on new games. Anarchy Online is completely ad-supported, as are several other niche titles. America's Army is a free ad.
And with live arcade games being as popular as they are, you'll probably see average game prices going down quite a bit. And, most importantly to consumers, the discount curve should lower. I.E. a game will launch at 50, but will drop to 30 more quickly.
The money goes somewhere, even if not directly back to you.
And that's for the 'hardcore' coders who want to know the mechanics. Everyone else can just download/buy a game engine and make function calls.
No offence, as I have the highest regard for what atari's early programmers were capable of pulling off. But do you really think that all a modern game developer does is buy an engine and make function calls?
Pretty much every house out there right now is scrambling to describe and create custom shaders, full-screen filters, revolutionary netcode, etc etc. These range from photographic negative chemical bath filters, to dynamic HDR, to object-specific exaggerated motion blur, burned but dynamic soft self-shadowing, non-branching AI... heck for that matter multithreaded gaming in general. And if you thought the 2600 was a quirky piece of hardware, you should see the 360 or PS3 dev boards sometime.
Sure, on the 2600 you had to write your own code for blitting 8x8 sprites. But I'd take that any day over spaghetti code draw order management on complex scenes. Or predictive netcode with parallel server-side logic and minimum packet size in MMO's.
There are more resources available to coders in 2006, and a lot more about coding is known. But I see these guys pulling off amazing and new code tricks every day. And that's no small feat on a team of so many people.
Notice that this all relates to property. Now this is a very important word, as interpreted in the strictest sense, virtual items are not property. They're not a tangible asset that is owned. In the most important sense, all MMO developers retain ownership of everything. You do not own your +4 Sword of Dwarven Disembowling in World of Warcraft, Blizzard does. If Blizzard decides that your sword is overpowered and nerfs it, you have no legal recompense for compensation. If you decide to leave WoW, you can't take your items with you. You can't sell the items for real cash. If you're bad, they can take it away from you. You really have no rights over that item above and beyond how Blizzard is feeling that day. It's not yours.
You don't OWN anything at all in virtual worlds. The developers do. They allow you to use anything they deem fit by the rules setup governing the world, but none of it is yours.
Basically, it's the equivalent of paying 15 dollars a month to use a library with a complicated checkout system, then being taxed by the IRS as if the entire library was yours.
The fact that this got modded up is proof that the groupthink meme has been accepted by the group. The cry against groupthink is getting REALLY old. Instead of attacking ideas that people don't agree with, it has become acceptable to shout "groupthink!" and consider that an adequate counter argument.
Quite frankly, the way to get a story accepted is simple... Pique the interest of about 5 or 6 editors. Wonder why stories all cover similar topics? Because this is a news agregation blog that filters technology stories to what that small group of people finds interesting. This group of people includes open source advocates, free-speech fundies, and anti-MS administrators. It is full of inflamatory stories that get discussions happening. That's not groupthink. That's what happens whenever you have a small group making decisions.
But comments are largely much better. You'll notice Microsoft's defenders have been modded up in this discussion as well. Five years ago, you couldn't say "Hey, the Xbox is a neat system" without going straight down to -1. Now lots of people defend MS's software and practices and get modded up. Sure, there are groups of people who still think Microsoft's company policies are monopolistic, directly conflict with orders made by governments, and are largely overbuilt, poorly made POS's. And they're right. Just try looking at a Word document with pictures on a computer with multiple monitors, and you'll see what I mean.
What I'm saying is just because there is a group of people who have come to the same opinion does not mean that there is groupthink going on. This is especially true if there are other groups who have come to different conculsions, and who are also valuable parts of the community.
Your voucher won't cover the cost of a private school, and the poor, who need education more than anybody, would be left out.
And many more people won't have any skills to hold down a job, let alone being exposed to the possibility of going to college, and will necessarily turn to crime. With reduced availability of skilled labor, jobs will go overseas, and the ones that do remain will have such a high labor cost as to make successful businesses rare. Low end labor will be even less successful. That guy who makes you coffee in the morning? Yeah, he won't be able to read the menu.
Yes, nothing says "guilty as hell" as giving weapons inspectors a carte blanche to run a thorough investigation inside of your country and getting a perfectly clean bill of health.
Don't forget that what you're listening to will also determine whether or not you can hear the compression artifacts. The latest Beck release will probably sound great on a 192kbps MP3. For Lamb of God, you could probably go straight down to 128k. For that symphonic recording of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, you'd probalby want better than CD recording quality.
Recording mediums are both created to fit and subsequently heavily influence the music of the time. Records were made to fit classical music, capturing the warm, rumbly, slowly melodic tones well. Jazz was created in this world, fitting that sound capturing style well. Rock was raised in a higher-fidelity record era, where you still didn't want too many audio spikes but you could spread out a warm, changing, and more complicated sound much better. By the cassette era, you had a sound that is crisper, less warm, and more metallic. Sharp, as it were, but that degrades well for electro. Then you get to CD's, which theoretically can capture sound better than any format before, but are really well suited to sharp transitions, high spikage, and far more electronic noise. MP3's, having been created on the backs of the CD world, were created to best approximate this type of sound.
But MP3's are actually bad at doing solid sheets of warm, rich noise. This is in exactly the same way that lots of modern video compression codecs can do wonders with noisy full motion live-action movies, but when faced with simpler solid colors of cartoons they fall down. So put in the hands of music lovers, and most will choose to play classical music on a record player. It's not a two-hundred-dollar-gold-plated-cable thing, it's actually a comment on the audio styles the playback medium was designed for.
Props go to Zoom for their bubble wrap. I bought a bluetooth adaptor from them. The adaptor came in a standard-looking bubble package. When I got it home, I collected a pair of scissors, a pair of chicken cutters, and an X-acto knife in preparation for opening.
Then I realized there was a little tab on the back. After pulling on the tab, a section of the back of the packaging opened up. Once open, there was another plastic tab (if I'm remembering correctly) and then the cardboard insert which had to be removed.
The thing was, opening this thing was basically effortless, but it still took enough time that a theif would be significantly slowed down.
Accolades to the intelligent packaging designer who created this thing.
Not to sound like a fanboy or antifanboy, but "cutting edge games AND BlueRay movies" is quite a stretch. Right now, their best game is, Resistance: Fall of Man, which unfortunately won't blow away anyone familiar with normal PC FPS's. The rest of their lineup are either ports from existing 360 games (EA Sports), or minor updates of existing games (Ridge Racer 6 to 6.1... I mean 7).
Which is not to say that as a launch lineup the PS3 is terrible. All systems launch with a terrible lineup. The 360's best game at launch was Geometry Wars, a 5 dollar download. The PS3 may not seem more powerful than 360's lineup NOW, but in a year once people have learned to harness the hardware and the development tools are more mature, I have no doubt that the PS3 will be stronger. But for now, Gears of War just seems more impressive than resistance.
Sony was aiming to conclusively knock one out of the park, and they failed to do that in a very big way. The launch lineup has no killer app. Blu-Ray movies are far from a DVD killer. They wanted to be all-pervasive, but only managed to get MAYBE 400,000 units out there, and now it looks like they actually sold 200,000. Their Xbox-live killing online service has basically failed to materialize. The Sixaxis is too laggy to be a primary input, and is no Wii killer. The extra texture space afforded by blu-ray so far appears to have gone to... umm... The renderers seem to all be very low-contrast, and so aliased as to destroy detail. If your nice-but-cheap 1080i or 1080p system won't go down to 720p, the PS3 will render at a low-rez 480. And lots of other growing pains keep the system from being all that was promised.
Play the system at a friend's house. Or if not, play it at a Best Buy. It's nice, but it's not earthshattering. Certainly, it's not 1,000 dollars-on-ebay great.
Contrast this with Sony's brash bragging about being so great that people will want to get a second job to afford one, and you see why they are considered "in trouble." The game is definitely not over, but they did not come out nearly as strongly as they have been promoting. They didn't come out anywhere near strongly enough to clinch things, and arguably they have stumbled repeatedly.
The iGo gets expensive quickly, but it has some major advantages. Once you buy the base unit, adding another tip is easy. It's much easier to keep track of where one power adapter is plugged in rather than five or six, and most of your devices don't need to charge at the same time.
The iPod tips are fidgety, though... the cheaper wallpower8 wall wart doesn't seem to have enough juice to wake certain iPod models up to the idea that they're being charged. You'll want to spend the extra 30 bucks for the more expensive everwhere 15.
Oh, and be absolutely sure where you plan on keeping your tips. They get lost easily.
Apple pushed on the Newton for quite some time. It did OK, but they were a little too expensive for the time, and a little too bulky for a normal pants pocket.
Unfortunately, things really took off with the Palm Pilot... which dumped functionality for a form that was actually convenient and fit in a pocket. Sound familiar? I say unfortunately, because 3Com / Palm clearly hasn't had the legs to keep running with it. Now the pure PDA are has the Palm Pilot on the low end, MS's Pocket PC on the high end, and a gamut of random stuff like Psions in the middle. And it looks like the market is shrinking.
Personally, I've had many PDA's, and liked them all. They were replaced by a Treo, until the shoddy build quality dragged that phone into nothingness. Since the Treo, I've used a standard phone with a unlimited use network plan. Now when I need to make an appointment, I just go to calendar.yahoo.com. Text input with the phone pad is worse than with the Treo's excellent keyboard, but typing in appointments at my normal computer works perfectly.
I suspect that apple is working on something WRT the iPhone. It would make perfect sense for an iPhone to sync automatically with iCal. It could be more of an Apple Communicator or something like that, with phone functionality relegated the same status as text messaging, calendar functions, and purchasing music from iTunes.
The main problem with Sony's service is that it isn't really a service. It's a gateway. With Xbox Live, as a developer you can make a couple of system calls, add one or two icons, and you have an achievements system. Sony "lets" developers handle achievements any way they want to, which means developers have to implement and debug whatever title-specific system they want. All of the matchmaking intelligence is handled server-side by Microsoft. All of the multiplayer server stuff is managed and handled by Microsoft. Leaderboards... Basically everything that makes up the Xbox Live experience is uniform because Microsoft handles all of the ugly, complicated bits.
Sony, by comparison, has taken a hands-off approach. If you want to run a server for a game, you run your own server farm and pay through the nose. If you want an achievements system, create your own. Feel like having friends stuff in your game? Integrate 3rd party API's as well as you can. On the one hand, this gives more freedom to the developer. EA convinced MS to create a teired level of live suport specifically for companies that want to run their own server farms. But on the other hand, this shifts a lot of the burden of development and maintenence onto the developers. Most of the small-to-midsize developers out there don't have the resources to both create a fully polished game and flesh out the details of an online community.
And don't get me started about the rumor of Sony passing their demo download costs onto the developers. I wouldn't be at all suprised if this happened, as people are wondering how Sony plans to support their service. Eat their cut of game sales? Unlikely. Pass costs onto developers? Now you're talking.
BTW, don't bother with 1080P. Go 720P. While all of the systems claim to support 1080P, they pretty much all just render to 720P and up-rez the rest. Plus the quality difference is basically indistinguishable between a native 720P screen running in 720p and a native 1080p screen running in 1080p. Some PS3 games, like Resistance, ask you to down-rez back to 720P, which looks worse on a 1080 screen than it would on a native 720p one. Save your cash for some more games.
Live Arcade doesn't just limit "retro and party" games to 50MB... Live Arcade is the game download service for Xbox 360, which is why they're all retro and party games. This has the effect of allowing anyone with a memory card to download and play games... which is kind of dumb, considering it would take a full 50 dollar memory card to store one 10 dollar downloadable game.
Sony is allowing things beyond "retro and party" games by allowing for larger download sizes. This will probably make games more expensive (more development budget, more bandwidth) but hopefully better looking and better fleshed out. Remember, of course, this STILL is 1/10th the size of a modern DVD, and about 1/40th the size of a blu-ray disk... so you're still looking at something about the size of a PS1 game. But at least it will be big enough to hold more than one music track.
On the other hand, this is an artificial software limit and not a hardware one. If Microsoft or Sony thought it was important to raise this limit, they could do it in one software update. One development cycle later, they could be 1 GB, or 4 GB, or 40 GB.
Eyetoy-based gaming. They almost never require finger movement. *plug* Like Eyetoy:Antigrav *plug*
DDR. No fingers required.
Light-gun games. Use one hand to aim and the other to pull the trigger.
RPG's. Most menu-based games play fine with feet controllers, or without fine motor movements.
Point-n-click adventure games like The Longest Journey.
Singstar.
As for last games suggestions it would really depend upon what kinds of things you enjoy playing. I'd go Ikaruga on the GC (not Dreamcast), and Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn. I'd plug Guitar Hero, but it's usually enough to induce arthritis in most people. Katamari Damacy (PS2). Ore no Ryouri (PS1). Bionic Commando (NES). I'd get some interested friends together and throw some Saturn Bomberman parties.
Really, what you should do is grab your gaming friends, have them bring over their NES / Atari / whatever old systems they have around, and just play as many different things as possible one night a week every week. By the time your hands go, you'll have played through a slice of history, and you'll have some very close friends.
Slashdot Mirror
To expand on this, I've tried putting a PS2 dual-shock into the hands of new players, like my girlfriend and my mother. "What's this?" they inevitably ask. It's an intimidatingly big mass of buttons, switches, diodes, etc. Add a "Wii-like" tilt sensor, and you just make something even LESS accessible.
Compare that to the Wii. It's a remote control that points. Everyone can play wii bowling. Everyone can navigate the metagame without wondering if they should use the d-pad or the left or right analog sticks. It's intuitive. You don't have to think as much about it. You can just get on with the business of playing games.
In addition to inexpensive, easy to develop for, unique, and short-time period experiences, the Wii also provides the instant accessibility that is sorely lacking in today's systems. Learning to play Rockstar's Table Tennis on the 360 takes about 1/2 hour. Learning to play Tennis on the Wii takes about 10 seconds. That's a huge difference if you're just trying to relax for a moment between sending the kids off to school and leaving for work yourself.
No method of content protection is foolproof, and that's not saying it's bad because it might not prevent all leeching, but because you can have false positives. So besides the extra effort of erecting porous walls to prevent content theft, you have the customer service issues with all your legitimate users who generate false positives.
Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately. They've gone from requesting information IN EXACTLY THE WAY THAT THE INTERNET AND YOUR SERVER HAVE BEEN SETUP TO DO, to outright lying in order to gain access.
Basically, you need to put up a small fence around your property that lets people know what you want them to be able and not able to do with content that you're serving to the world. If you put stuff up on a server that anyone can access, but want to restrict how it is being used, the way to do it properly is to teach your server what you do and don't want it to do. Otherwise, your server is acting in your stead to serve up files to anyone who asks. YOU are giving files to anyone who asks. At least put up a symbolic fence around your property before you start throwing lawsuits around.
You pay through the nose for the non-standard charger when you have to replace it in a few years, generally between 30 and 50 dollars for a part with a materials cost of at most a dollar.
You pay for it in phones that get thrown out because the non-standard charger tax in a few years makes it more feasable to dump the phone than replace the hideously unstandard wall-wart. Hence, more landfill costs, more materials costs, and a depressed to non-existant secondary market.
You pay for it in electricity, in the trickle costs of the many, many different chargers plugged in but idle in any given household.
You pay for it in brainspace, trying to keep everything clear in your head. Those times you fail to take the proper charger with you on a trip and you have to buy another one when you get there.
And on the other end of the spectrum, all of this is because the hardware companies want to bury hidden costs in the device to make a higher profit. There is no benefit to the end consumer at all. The manufacturers are just trying to raise the barrier of entry of selling replacement parts to keep those prices artifically high.
Well, guess what? The consumer does have a voice in making things fair. It's called the government. That's why you elect them. It doesn't always work, but that's what it's for. And in this case, the free market has had years to fix the problem, and it has only gotten worse. The amount of cheering on this thread is evidence of the animosity towards this purely profit-taking process.
This is people, seeing a problem and taking an action to improve the end-consumer experience and reduce overall costs. And good for them. It's nice to see a government that isn't kow-towing to every exploitive commercial process within its borders.
Not to re-cover grounds that my brother post covered so well but...
If you're currently writing stories and making no money at it, then money is not your motivating factor. It's a limiting one, but not a motivating one.
Not to sound too perverted, but money does not encourage the creative arts. It facilitates them. Every creative person that I know of would be doing exactly the same thing if money were no issue.
Why do you need excuses for what you're charging a consumer? In this case, they charge whatever the market will bear. This is especially true in an entertainment medium that has low or no media cost... you can get VHS tapes for much LESS than DVD's, even though the material and shipping costs are much higher.
Since when does price justification come into the equation?
Sounds poor to me.
The Burger King 360 games are lower price... 3.99.
Of course, there are lots of mitigating factors... they're tiny, low-development projects. Most of the code must have already existed in Blitz's back catalog. And you have to go into the store to get them, so it's not only advertising, they're a lure.
Other games may have advertising budgets that go back into the general fund. I suspect ad revenue from Splinter Cell basically goes into the general fund and out into development costs on new games. Anarchy Online is completely ad-supported, as are several other niche titles. America's Army is a free ad.
And with live arcade games being as popular as they are, you'll probably see average game prices going down quite a bit. And, most importantly to consumers, the discount curve should lower. I.E. a game will launch at 50, but will drop to 30 more quickly.
The money goes somewhere, even if not directly back to you.
And that's for the 'hardcore' coders who want to know the mechanics. Everyone else can just download/buy a game engine and make function calls.
No offence, as I have the highest regard for what atari's early programmers were capable of pulling off. But do you really think that all a modern game developer does is buy an engine and make function calls?
Pretty much every house out there right now is scrambling to describe and create custom shaders, full-screen filters, revolutionary netcode, etc etc. These range from photographic negative chemical bath filters, to dynamic HDR, to object-specific exaggerated motion blur, burned but dynamic soft self-shadowing, non-branching AI... heck for that matter multithreaded gaming in general. And if you thought the 2600 was a quirky piece of hardware, you should see the 360 or PS3 dev boards sometime.
Sure, on the 2600 you had to write your own code for blitting 8x8 sprites. But I'd take that any day over spaghetti code draw order management on complex scenes. Or predictive netcode with parallel server-side logic and minimum packet size in MMO's.
There are more resources available to coders in 2006, and a lot more about coding is known. But I see these guys pulling off amazing and new code tricks every day. And that's no small feat on a team of so many people.
Credit where due, today's coders do amazing work.
Notice that this all relates to property. Now this is a very important word, as interpreted in the strictest sense, virtual items are not property. They're not a tangible asset that is owned. In the most important sense, all MMO developers retain ownership of everything. You do not own your +4 Sword of Dwarven Disembowling in World of Warcraft, Blizzard does. If Blizzard decides that your sword is overpowered and nerfs it, you have no legal recompense for compensation. If you decide to leave WoW, you can't take your items with you. You can't sell the items for real cash. If you're bad, they can take it away from you. You really have no rights over that item above and beyond how Blizzard is feeling that day. It's not yours.
You don't OWN anything at all in virtual worlds. The developers do. They allow you to use anything they deem fit by the rules setup governing the world, but none of it is yours.
Basically, it's the equivalent of paying 15 dollars a month to use a library with a complicated checkout system, then being taxed by the IRS as if the entire library was yours.
The fact that this got modded up is proof that the groupthink meme has been accepted by the group. The cry against groupthink is getting REALLY old. Instead of attacking ideas that people don't agree with, it has become acceptable to shout "groupthink!" and consider that an adequate counter argument.
Quite frankly, the way to get a story accepted is simple... Pique the interest of about 5 or 6 editors. Wonder why stories all cover similar topics? Because this is a news agregation blog that filters technology stories to what that small group of people finds interesting. This group of people includes open source advocates, free-speech fundies, and anti-MS administrators. It is full of inflamatory stories that get discussions happening. That's not groupthink. That's what happens whenever you have a small group making decisions.
But comments are largely much better. You'll notice Microsoft's defenders have been modded up in this discussion as well. Five years ago, you couldn't say "Hey, the Xbox is a neat system" without going straight down to -1. Now lots of people defend MS's software and practices and get modded up. Sure, there are groups of people who still think Microsoft's company policies are monopolistic, directly conflict with orders made by governments, and are largely overbuilt, poorly made POS's. And they're right. Just try looking at a Word document with pictures on a computer with multiple monitors, and you'll see what I mean.
What I'm saying is just because there is a group of people who have come to the same opinion does not mean that there is groupthink going on. This is especially true if there are other groups who have come to different conculsions, and who are also valuable parts of the community.
Your voucher won't cover the cost of a private school, and the poor, who need education more than anybody, would be left out.
And many more people won't have any skills to hold down a job, let alone being exposed to the possibility of going to college, and will necessarily turn to crime. With reduced availability of skilled labor, jobs will go overseas, and the ones that do remain will have such a high labor cost as to make successful businesses rare. Low end labor will be even less successful. That guy who makes you coffee in the morning? Yeah, he won't be able to read the menu.
Yes, nothing says "guilty as hell" as giving weapons inspectors a carte blanche to run a thorough investigation inside of your country and getting a perfectly clean bill of health.
Oh god, where is he hiding them?
Don't forget that what you're listening to will also determine whether or not you can hear the compression artifacts. The latest Beck release will probably sound great on a 192kbps MP3. For Lamb of God, you could probably go straight down to 128k. For that symphonic recording of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, you'd probalby want better than CD recording quality.
Recording mediums are both created to fit and subsequently heavily influence the music of the time. Records were made to fit classical music, capturing the warm, rumbly, slowly melodic tones well. Jazz was created in this world, fitting that sound capturing style well. Rock was raised in a higher-fidelity record era, where you still didn't want too many audio spikes but you could spread out a warm, changing, and more complicated sound much better. By the cassette era, you had a sound that is crisper, less warm, and more metallic. Sharp, as it were, but that degrades well for electro. Then you get to CD's, which theoretically can capture sound better than any format before, but are really well suited to sharp transitions, high spikage, and far more electronic noise. MP3's, having been created on the backs of the CD world, were created to best approximate this type of sound.
But MP3's are actually bad at doing solid sheets of warm, rich noise. This is in exactly the same way that lots of modern video compression codecs can do wonders with noisy full motion live-action movies, but when faced with simpler solid colors of cartoons they fall down. So put in the hands of music lovers, and most will choose to play classical music on a record player. It's not a two-hundred-dollar-gold-plated-cable thing, it's actually a comment on the audio styles the playback medium was designed for.
1. Online career
2. More realistic career team management
3. Draft
4. Arms shouldn't pass through people's chests anymore
5. Commentary shouldn't be asinine
6. Consistent deep passes shouldn't be the best strategy.
7. Strategic decisions in the middle of the play. Need a hole opened? Ask for one.
8. A punting mechanic that isn't boring and gamey.
9. A passing game that isn't "press X to bring up a menu, press Y to pass to player Y."
Props go to Zoom for their bubble wrap. I bought a bluetooth adaptor from them. The adaptor came in a standard-looking bubble package. When I got it home, I collected a pair of scissors, a pair of chicken cutters, and an X-acto knife in preparation for opening.
Then I realized there was a little tab on the back. After pulling on the tab, a section of the back of the packaging opened up. Once open, there was another plastic tab (if I'm remembering correctly) and then the cardboard insert which had to be removed.
The thing was, opening this thing was basically effortless, but it still took enough time that a theif would be significantly slowed down.
Accolades to the intelligent packaging designer who created this thing.
Not to sound like a fanboy or antifanboy, but "cutting edge games AND BlueRay movies" is quite a stretch. Right now, their best game is, Resistance: Fall of Man, which unfortunately won't blow away anyone familiar with normal PC FPS's. The rest of their lineup are either ports from existing 360 games (EA Sports), or minor updates of existing games (Ridge Racer 6 to 6.1... I mean 7).
Which is not to say that as a launch lineup the PS3 is terrible. All systems launch with a terrible lineup. The 360's best game at launch was Geometry Wars, a 5 dollar download. The PS3 may not seem more powerful than 360's lineup NOW, but in a year once people have learned to harness the hardware and the development tools are more mature, I have no doubt that the PS3 will be stronger. But for now, Gears of War just seems more impressive than resistance.
Sony was aiming to conclusively knock one out of the park, and they failed to do that in a very big way. The launch lineup has no killer app. Blu-Ray movies are far from a DVD killer. They wanted to be all-pervasive, but only managed to get MAYBE 400,000 units out there, and now it looks like they actually sold 200,000. Their Xbox-live killing online service has basically failed to materialize. The Sixaxis is too laggy to be a primary input, and is no Wii killer. The extra texture space afforded by blu-ray so far appears to have gone to... umm... The renderers seem to all be very low-contrast, and so aliased as to destroy detail. If your nice-but-cheap 1080i or 1080p system won't go down to 720p, the PS3 will render at a low-rez 480. And lots of other growing pains keep the system from being all that was promised.
Play the system at a friend's house. Or if not, play it at a Best Buy. It's nice, but it's not earthshattering. Certainly, it's not 1,000 dollars-on-ebay great.
Contrast this with Sony's brash bragging about being so great that people will want to get a second job to afford one, and you see why they are considered "in trouble." The game is definitely not over, but they did not come out nearly as strongly as they have been promoting. They didn't come out anywhere near strongly enough to clinch things, and arguably they have stumbled repeatedly.
Thirded
The iGo gets expensive quickly, but it has some major advantages. Once you buy the base unit, adding another tip is easy. It's much easier to keep track of where one power adapter is plugged in rather than five or six, and most of your devices don't need to charge at the same time.
The iPod tips are fidgety, though... the cheaper wallpower8 wall wart doesn't seem to have enough juice to wake certain iPod models up to the idea that they're being charged. You'll want to spend the extra 30 bucks for the more expensive everwhere 15.
Oh, and be absolutely sure where you plan on keeping your tips. They get lost easily.
reimburse: V - to pay back for expenses incurred.
I do not believe reimburse is the proper term here.
Apple pushed on the Newton for quite some time. It did OK, but they were a little too expensive for the time, and a little too bulky for a normal pants pocket.
Unfortunately, things really took off with the Palm Pilot... which dumped functionality for a form that was actually convenient and fit in a pocket. Sound familiar? I say unfortunately, because 3Com / Palm clearly hasn't had the legs to keep running with it. Now the pure PDA are has the Palm Pilot on the low end, MS's Pocket PC on the high end, and a gamut of random stuff like Psions in the middle. And it looks like the market is shrinking.
Personally, I've had many PDA's, and liked them all. They were replaced by a Treo, until the shoddy build quality dragged that phone into nothingness. Since the Treo, I've used a standard phone with a unlimited use network plan. Now when I need to make an appointment, I just go to calendar.yahoo.com. Text input with the phone pad is worse than with the Treo's excellent keyboard, but typing in appointments at my normal computer works perfectly.
I suspect that apple is working on something WRT the iPhone. It would make perfect sense for an iPhone to sync automatically with iCal. It could be more of an Apple Communicator or something like that, with phone functionality relegated the same status as text messaging, calendar functions, and purchasing music from iTunes.
There isn't a lot of room left in the space between a dedicated PDA and an ultralight computer. Apple would need to go a different direction.
Newton was pretty big. It basically gave us the pen computing we have today.
It wasn't, say, Windows big. But it doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the Pippin.
The main problem with Sony's service is that it isn't really a service. It's a gateway. With Xbox Live, as a developer you can make a couple of system calls, add one or two icons, and you have an achievements system. Sony "lets" developers handle achievements any way they want to, which means developers have to implement and debug whatever title-specific system they want. All of the matchmaking intelligence is handled server-side by Microsoft. All of the multiplayer server stuff is managed and handled by Microsoft. Leaderboards... Basically everything that makes up the Xbox Live experience is uniform because Microsoft handles all of the ugly, complicated bits.
Sony, by comparison, has taken a hands-off approach. If you want to run a server for a game, you run your own server farm and pay through the nose. If you want an achievements system, create your own. Feel like having friends stuff in your game? Integrate 3rd party API's as well as you can. On the one hand, this gives more freedom to the developer. EA convinced MS to create a teired level of live suport specifically for companies that want to run their own server farms. But on the other hand, this shifts a lot of the burden of development and maintenence onto the developers. Most of the small-to-midsize developers out there don't have the resources to both create a fully polished game and flesh out the details of an online community.
And don't get me started about the rumor of Sony passing their demo download costs onto the developers. I wouldn't be at all suprised if this happened, as people are wondering how Sony plans to support their service. Eat their cut of game sales? Unlikely. Pass costs onto developers? Now you're talking.
BTW, don't bother with 1080P. Go 720P. While all of the systems claim to support 1080P, they pretty much all just render to 720P and up-rez the rest. Plus the quality difference is basically indistinguishable between a native 720P screen running in 720p and a native 1080p screen running in 1080p. Some PS3 games, like Resistance, ask you to down-rez back to 720P, which looks worse on a 1080 screen than it would on a native 720p one. Save your cash for some more games.
Live Arcade doesn't just limit "retro and party" games to 50MB... Live Arcade is the game download service for Xbox 360, which is why they're all retro and party games. This has the effect of allowing anyone with a memory card to download and play games... which is kind of dumb, considering it would take a full 50 dollar memory card to store one 10 dollar downloadable game.
Sony is allowing things beyond "retro and party" games by allowing for larger download sizes. This will probably make games more expensive (more development budget, more bandwidth) but hopefully better looking and better fleshed out. Remember, of course, this STILL is 1/10th the size of a modern DVD, and about 1/40th the size of a blu-ray disk... so you're still looking at something about the size of a PS1 game. But at least it will be big enough to hold more than one music track.
On the other hand, this is an artificial software limit and not a hardware one. If Microsoft or Sony thought it was important to raise this limit, they could do it in one software update. One development cycle later, they could be 1 GB, or 4 GB, or 40 GB.
Nottingham Trent... Is that near Ironforge?
Eyetoy-based gaming. They almost never require finger movement. *plug* Like Eyetoy:Antigrav *plug*
DDR. No fingers required.
Light-gun games. Use one hand to aim and the other to pull the trigger.
RPG's. Most menu-based games play fine with feet controllers, or without fine motor movements.
Point-n-click adventure games like The Longest Journey.
Singstar.
As for last games suggestions it would really depend upon what kinds of things you enjoy playing. I'd go Ikaruga on the GC (not Dreamcast), and Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn. I'd plug Guitar Hero, but it's usually enough to induce arthritis in most people. Katamari Damacy (PS2). Ore no Ryouri (PS1). Bionic Commando (NES). I'd get some interested friends together and throw some Saturn Bomberman parties.
Really, what you should do is grab your gaming friends, have them bring over their NES / Atari / whatever old systems they have around, and just play as many different things as possible one night a week every week. By the time your hands go, you'll have played through a slice of history, and you'll have some very close friends.