The politician used a rule to have the site shut down. How many other sites with incomplete or anonymous registration info did he request to have shut down? None? Just the one critical of him? That sounds like censorship to me...
There are three parts of censorship. Part one is having an agenda of some sort. Part two is becoming empowered by the state to carry out that agenda through censorship. Part three is to find items and have them removed from circulation on the grounds that they violate that agenda.
It doesn't sound like part two or the second half of part three has been carried out here. He was not authorized by a government body to further this agenda. He did it of his own accord. What was taken down was not done so because it violated the agenda, but simply because it violated something else.
Again, the actions are morally reprehensible on the part of this politician, but does not qualify as censorship by the government of Canada.
I just wanted to stress that there are (or, at least, will be) four "new" systems (i.e. ones which will have new games coming out for the forseable future): PC, 360, and the yet-to-be-released Wii and PS3.
Not to be too pedantic, but there is also the DS, GBA, PSP, PS2 (still active development going on, probably for the next 4 years or so), browser (different environment than PC), Symbian J2ME Flash Lite BREW Pocket PC Mobile phone development, and the various arcade systems, amusement park attractions, etc. Possibly the XGP / 32X2 as well.
There is a lot of options out there. And as the market evolves, and consumer devices become more powerful, it looks like more and more will spring up.
There is just no need. Whatever little present in Animal Crossing, or whatever little "neato" thing they are going to download is going to only take a few seconds at most; could probably be done while the thing is booting up and we wouldn't even notice.
My Wii won't be connected 24/7, because I refuse to leave my Internet on that much. I flip the switch on the cable modem at night to cut it off, and turn it on in the AM.... I know wireless is all the rage among certain people, but why do wireless when I already have ethernet cable available in every room?
I'm not saying you're wrong. But I would guess you're in the minority. Most people leave their always-on internet connections... on. There is really no reason to turn them off. Your cable modem hasn't been a bastion of worms and security holes in a while, and the cable / DSL company knows the instant any of the firmware changes, and can change it back. Don't believe me? Try uncapping it, and see how long your hack goes unnoticed. Now try uncapping it or hacking it through the provider's network. Basically impossible.
Most people also don't have ethernet in every room, and the prevalance of ethernet seems on the wane. There is a reason every laptop ships with wireless as a standard feature. Now explain to someone that they need to run 50' of cat 5 from a compatible router (not switch or hub) inserted between their modem and PC, out to their living room, and you'll see why WiFi is catching on. Security settings will need to be finessed from a software side, but even then it shouldn't be too bad. And wireless security these days is great, with WPA. Even WEP wasn't bad, as a good WEP key takes about 20 hours of sniffing around high-traffic areas to crack. A home WEP network with moderate traffic takes weeks or months. And on a modern router cracking into the wireless portion gets you... internet surfing, posing little risk to the internal network if you have anything but the default administrator password. And even if you get that, you still need to get by that computer's firewalls and virus scanners.
A DS Demo size is capped at 4MB (the primary RAM), so you'll probably see 2MB demos in practice... Maybe a minute if the connection is dirty. But it would also probably not be the sort of thing you'd want to sit around for. It just makes sense to do it when the player isn't doing anything else. And maybe they want to upload a free play of Sonic 3 that evening. Yeah, you don't need it, but if you want to try it's already downloaded, saving you time, or it's automatically deleted, costing you nothing. As long as they're not abnoxious about it, this would be a nice little bonus. The only bad thing about Xbox Live Arcade is the actual tedious download of demos, and this seems to alleviate that.
And if you can figure out a way to make it download games while still booting the OS, by all means go right ahead. I'd love to see that code.
Who knows how long ago theysaw the opportunity? But they've got a big chunk of the market all to themselves, and everything Nintendo says earns them fans. MS and Sony are hurtling off down the high-inertia major-loss-leader path while Nintendo picks up their rice bowl and has a nice lunch.
You realize he's talking about Xbox Live Arcade, right?
I now see in my grocery store "organic milk", it is priced twice as expensive as the gallon of regular milk. The same thing is in produce, they have organic vegitables. What is this? 20 years ago everything was organic, now only the rich can get normal food. The rest of us must eat crap that has been genetically modified.
You're probably thinking about 120 years ago, and back then only the rich could get any food. Remember, grapes used to be an expensive luxury of the wealthy.
20 years ago was 1986, and food was crap back then too. In that time, milk went from about 2.20 per gallon, to 2.50 in 2006. Adjusted for inflation, that 2.20 rounds up to about 4 dollars. 4 dollars will get you healthy organic milk made from vegetarian cows without growth hormones or superdoses of antibiotics, something that couldn't be said about the 1986 milk. If I remember correctly the most popular food sources in 1986 were Pepsi, McDonalds, and Pop Rocks.
The average quality of food people buy is still crap, but if you're willing to spend the same proportion of your budget on food now as you did a few years ago, you get much, much better food.
Yes, but PC games have been able to do these sorts of resolutions for years and they barely fill up a single DVD.
I can assure you, had we the space available 3 years ago, we would have filled it.
3 out of the 5 projects I've been on have had to cut potential features or (more painfully) existing content to fit on a single sided DVD. This is not at all uncommon.
Needed a silent server for a friend's house that took up no additional room. Built out a P3 underneath his monitor stand using nothing but screws, rubber bands, and paper / tape for ducting. It was utterly silent and even relatively safe. And it only took up room that he wasn't accessing anyway.
Needed to re-wire a computer, but the lighting in the room was bad for peering inside of cases, and the flashlight was out of batteries. So I disconnected the power supply from the motherboard, wired the 5v rail to the flashlight, and turned the PSU on.
Someone at an old ISP I used to work for had a server that simply had no power button. We had to bridge the pins with a screwdriver to get the thing on. This was quite nerve-wracking the first time, as nobody had the schematics for the mobo anymore and were quite sure what was supposed to attach where.
Not strictly computer related, but I had an old Nokia whose batteries had worn out, and I wasn't happy with the charges for the possible replacements. So I cut the battery in half, and removed the old, dead cells. Then I soldered an array of 16 AA NiMH batteries in a combination of serial and parallel (to get the voltage right) onto the old charging circutry, and taped that to the back of the phone with black electrical tape. Talk time was about 24 hour straight, and you could go for about 2 weeks without recharging. On the down side, you get stopped at every airport security terminal.
And not at all related to me, though I wish it was, is the great Jargon File story about the magic MIT switch.
...and this is where you missed the boat. What we need to accept, in reality, is that being 1) willing and 2) able does not make you 3) ready.
The fact is that teens 1) Wanna and 2) Gonna so we had better darn well make them 3) ready.
Our options are not stopping them from having sex or not, it's making them prepared for when they have it.
On the one hand you're arguing that teenagers are too immature to have sex. On the other hand, you're arguing that they should be mature enough to know not to have sex. Huh? They're KIDS. They're raging balls of insecurity glued together by drunken hormones and a throbbing fire in their loins. That's why they do incredibly stupid, dangerous, and mind-blowingly weird things. That's why they're not mature enough to have sex. That's why they're not mature enough to refrain from having sex. So that's why the way we protect them is by teaching them how to have sex responsibly, not to pretend that they won't until some point in the unknown future when they're magically "ready".
And women should be taught how to put a condom on a guy. Maybe the person they're with isn't mature enough to know how. And if they're not mature enough to know how to put on a condom, they're certainly not mature enough to exhibit the self-restraint to keep it in their pants. A girl should know how to put a condom on a guy every bit as much as a guy should know what schedule the girl is on for her birth control pills. And they should feel not just compelled but also responsible for the decision. At the risk of sounding corny, a condom isn't effective because it goes on one person, it's effective because it goes between two people. Sure, the guy should be responsible enough to put one on. And if they're not, the woman should put one on for him, while teaching him proper technique and taunting him for his inexperience and lack of maturity.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It doesn't matter what kids "should" and "shouldn't" do. Just be safe. And keep them safe. And teach them to be safe.
I think the goal is that future pyrotechnicians won't just start lighting off fireworks and saying, "eh, it's someone else's job to worry about fire safety, not mine". Hopefully the first question out of the pyro's mouth to the club owner will be, "is this place up to code, cause my ass isn't spending 4 years in the state pen if it isn't?"
Not killing everyone in the audience should be sufficient motivation, far more than jail time.
I wouldn't have bought Oblivion if it hadn't been moddable, but that's because I knew from experience that I don't like a lot of Bethesda's game design choices."
Logistically that statement makes sense, but there just seems something wrong about it. Why would you buy a game from a maker whose design choices you don't like?
Some of the non-WoW are actually doing rather well. RuneScape, for example, a MMPORPG that people thought was dead and buried, is actually on the upswing. Final Fantasy XI was going up as of July 05. Heck, Final Fantasy is now bigger than Everquest. Everquest one and two basically leveled off and stayed there, instead of dropping into nothing. Eve Online, another "dead 'n buried" one is on the upswing and headed towards OK. Asheron's Call 1's numbers are much lower than I had expected, but Turbine must be keeping it around for some reason.
For tiny ones, Dofus is off to a good start, as is Toontown, Second Life, and Tibia.
I'd love to see what non-subscriber numbers Puzzle Pirates is pulling in. The developers once said they had several million dollars in unspent Doubloons (in-game money bought with real money), and as such must have a good income going outside of the subscriber system.
When growing up I used to wrestle with other kids. Frequently the match would end when someone scraped up an arm, or hit their head hard enough to make them dizzy, or one of the big guys rolled over the leg of one of the little guys. In college, we sparred quite a few times. I distinctly remember one match where a thai kickboxing friend kicked me in the thigh muscle lengthwise... I couldn't walk for about 4 days. Since graduating I've fought with friends who are a lot more experienced and controlled, and so clear winners could be declared without them necessarily breaking something. Or who didn't know anything, and I could take them down without issue.
The two biggest injuries I've seen coming out of martial arts schools were a Tae Kwon Do instructor who hyperextended both of her knees and could never walk again, and a Iaido instructor who put her sword away a little too quickly and severed all of the nerves in her hand. Both wounds were functionally self-inflicted.
In my particular circle martial arts have died down, but in others they go strong. The need for human beings to fight, and especially the need for men to fight, is strong. There is nothing unnatural about that. There is nothing wrong with that. Just be a little careful.
Nokia's strengths are in the cellphone chain. In traditional gaming, the gatekeepers are the EB's, Walmarts, and IGN's of the world, which Nokia has no experience with. On the other hand, the gatekeepers of the cellphone world are the phone companies, whom Nokia already has established relations with (however lopsided).
Downloadable games seem like the future. Creating a great downloadable games service would encourage cellphone providers to push Nokia phones, in order to get a piece of that secondary revenue stream. They stop competing in the retail space they've done so poorly at, and start competing in the phone space they know so well. They stop pushing a single phone and start pushing their entire lineup.
And everyone knows what "NGage" is. It's a very recognizable mark. It's generally easier to move a mark from an abandoned service to a new one than it is to create a new one from scratch. The NGage wasn't a mark of death, like Enron might be, but rather a reasonably noble failure. It should be recoverable. And the years and years of exposure in the press is priceless.
This makes sense for Nokia, and I'm glad they're doing it. Of course they need to design all of their handsets with gaming in mind from now on, but they should have been doing that anyway.
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware. But worst case scenario is that the market is evenly split between Sony, MS and Nintendo, and only Sony is shipping next gen DVD. Every one else will have to pay $400 for an HD DVD player. This does not seem to be an irrational move on the part of Sony
That's actually the best-case scenario from the standpoint of an end-user. You'll get the most original, most polished games that way.
The worst case scenario would be for one console to gain complete dominance, then sit on their haunches while raking in dough until the market nearly collapses. This happened twice in the 80's.
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware.
I believe this is what consumers of the hardware are complaining about.
Nobody gets success in the console market through nepotism, through name, or through marketing dollars. It has to be earned. It has to be fought for tooth and nail. All blemishes and balances are major. Every flaw, a killer. This is the way it has been for many years, and this is the way it will continue to be for the forseeable future. To launch at such a flawed price is huge. We'll see if they can pull it out, or if it costs them the game.
Re:Pasting for the PS3 because it invents not copi
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
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Again... because its technology is too cutting edge and too new and therefore too expensive, would have been much better to go with cheap commodity stuff rather than daring to push the boundaries and actually put some THOUGHT into the product.
Daring to push the boundaries? By... tacking on motion control in a bog-standard dual-shock?
They're making a stronger PS2, with more storage. The cell is an interesting processor architecture, designed to be surprisingly scalable (both up and down), but MS is shipping multiple cores in a PPC architecture too. And theirs is relatively easy to program for.
More thought definitely would have been appreciated.
But what got me most was this
Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format.
If the PS3 gets reasonable marketshare then this could be considered its master stroke in 2 years time. While the XBox 360 will need a revision to support HD discs, the PS3 won't.
Very true, assuming the XBox 360 ever supports HD disks (my money is on "no"). However, that doesn't change the fact that Sony went with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD because they wanted to create another Memory Stick / UMD standard that they control and make royalties off of. The Memory Stick has probably Pi@@$#* off enough consumers that there is a degree of backlash against proprietary Sony standards at this point. And if there wasn't before, there is now with the utter failure of the UMD movie standard.
Its a sad state of affairs when Slashdot articles don't even celebrate the invention and the investment, but bitch just about the price and want LESS gadgets in the box, and when the MS supported standard is implicitly suggested to be a more "open" option.
What part is the invention part again? Including the movie hardware standard that their electronics division is pushing? Copying the Wii's controller design? Claiming to copy every feature of Xbox Live, without actually showing anything?
Say what you will about Microsoft, they've really pushed the online thing forward in great ways. Say what you will about their naming people, but Nintendo is really trying something original with the Wii. Say what you will about Sony's behavior as a corporation, but the PS3 brings... what exactly is it bringing new to the plate?
Sony is not leading at this point. They're following.
Sony seems out of touch, both with what the market wants and with reality in general. For example, the 500 dollar version of the system would be perfectly fine if if weren't for the lack of HDMI "protection" that they have been forcing on people. A protection that they say they may not include on disks anyway, making the expensive upgrade useless. It's difficult and confusing to see which way the consumer is going to get screwed. But they're going to get screwed one way or the other due to Sony's lack of clear vision and forced standards. And 600 dollars is way above what the average person is willing to pay for a console.
CF / SD / MS slots? Why would we need all of that? Cut the crap, and give us what we want for what we can afford to pay. Bells and whistles may be nifty, but if nobody buys the system they don't really help.
Weren't we JOKING about them making Halo 3 Vista-only to boost sales? Now they're gonna do this with freaking Halo 2?
Halo is Microsoft's new mythical moneymaker. When their games division needs a boost to help their rather terrible margins, or they need to push a new system, they'll lean on Bungee to release whatever it is they have and call it the next Halo.
It's kind of sad, really. Halo is a great series and Bungee is a great developer, but they're almost commodotizing Halo. Not finishing 2? It's like the Legacy of Kain... an amazing game that really hurt the series because they released it unfinished. At least Halo 2's multiplayer was solid.
MS is going to find that you can't milk a series too much before it simply goes dry. If you don't earn each and every sale, you can coast for one or two iterations but then it all goes away.
God only knows how they claim to have gotten this figure. For example, 98% of the software on the machine I'm using right now is open-source, and the other 2% is free-as-in-beer stuff like the linux version of Acrobat Reader. How the heck would the BSA have known about the existence of hundreds of pieces of open-source software on this machine?
They wouldn't: they're only talking about boxed software. I'm guessing most of your OSS is not shipped in a box.
I remember having a conversation with someone at Adobe once. They were glad that students and parents were pirating Photoshop. That meant that when they went out into the business world, they knew of no other photo manipulation software besides Photoshop. And while they're not paying Adobe anything for the time they're pirating it, they're also not paying Adobe's competitors anything either. The piracy maintains the hegemony.
If people really had to use The Gimp or pay Adobe 500 dollars, you can bet The Gimp would quickly become a lot better an application than it is.
I would add, however, that it has been beaten to the market by a few years by the wheelman, a kick-ass austrailian motorcycle board where you stand inside the wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
The politician used a rule to have the site shut down. How many other sites with incomplete or anonymous registration info did he request to have shut down? None? Just the one critical of him? That sounds like censorship to me...
There are three parts of censorship. Part one is having an agenda of some sort. Part two is becoming empowered by the state to carry out that agenda through censorship. Part three is to find items and have them removed from circulation on the grounds that they violate that agenda.
It doesn't sound like part two or the second half of part three has been carried out here. He was not authorized by a government body to further this agenda. He did it of his own accord. What was taken down was not done so because it violated the agenda, but simply because it violated something else.
Again, the actions are morally reprehensible on the part of this politician, but does not qualify as censorship by the government of Canada.
No problem. Wii understand.
I just wanted to stress that there are (or, at least, will be) four "new" systems (i.e. ones which will have new games coming out for the forseable future): PC, 360, and the yet-to-be-released Wii and PS3.
Not to be too pedantic, but there is also the DS, GBA, PSP, PS2 (still active development going on, probably for the next 4 years or so), browser (different environment than PC), Symbian J2ME Flash Lite BREW Pocket PC Mobile phone development, and the various arcade systems, amusement park attractions, etc. Possibly the XGP / 32X2 as well.
There is a lot of options out there. And as the market evolves, and consumer devices become more powerful, it looks like more and more will spring up.
Where would Xbox be without Halo and Halo 2?
With 15% less of the market?
There is just no need. Whatever little present in Animal Crossing, or whatever little "neato" thing they are going to download is going to only take a few seconds at most; could probably be done while the thing is booting up and we wouldn't even notice.
My Wii won't be connected 24/7, because I refuse to leave my Internet on that much. I flip the switch on the cable modem at night to cut it off, and turn it on in the AM.... I know wireless is all the rage among certain people, but why do wireless when I already have ethernet cable available in every room?
I'm not saying you're wrong. But I would guess you're in the minority. Most people leave their always-on internet connections... on. There is really no reason to turn them off. Your cable modem hasn't been a bastion of worms and security holes in a while, and the cable / DSL company knows the instant any of the firmware changes, and can change it back. Don't believe me? Try uncapping it, and see how long your hack goes unnoticed. Now try uncapping it or hacking it through the provider's network. Basically impossible.
Most people also don't have ethernet in every room, and the prevalance of ethernet seems on the wane. There is a reason every laptop ships with wireless as a standard feature. Now explain to someone that they need to run 50' of cat 5 from a compatible router (not switch or hub) inserted between their modem and PC, out to their living room, and you'll see why WiFi is catching on. Security settings will need to be finessed from a software side, but even then it shouldn't be too bad. And wireless security these days is great, with WPA. Even WEP wasn't bad, as a good WEP key takes about 20 hours of sniffing around high-traffic areas to crack. A home WEP network with moderate traffic takes weeks or months. And on a modern router cracking into the wireless portion gets you... internet surfing, posing little risk to the internal network if you have anything but the default administrator password. And even if you get that, you still need to get by that computer's firewalls and virus scanners.
A DS Demo size is capped at 4MB (the primary RAM), so you'll probably see 2MB demos in practice... Maybe a minute if the connection is dirty. But it would also probably not be the sort of thing you'd want to sit around for. It just makes sense to do it when the player isn't doing anything else. And maybe they want to upload a free play of Sonic 3 that evening. Yeah, you don't need it, but if you want to try it's already downloaded, saving you time, or it's automatically deleted, costing you nothing. As long as they're not abnoxious about it, this would be a nice little bonus. The only bad thing about Xbox Live Arcade is the actual tedious download of demos, and this seems to alleviate that.
And if you can figure out a way to make it download games while still booting the OS, by all means go right ahead. I'd love to see that code.
Who knows how long ago theysaw the opportunity? But they've got a big chunk of the market all to themselves, and everything Nintendo says earns them fans. MS and Sony are hurtling off down the high-inertia major-loss-leader path while Nintendo picks up their rice bowl and has a nice lunch.
You realize he's talking about Xbox Live Arcade, right?
I now see in my grocery store "organic milk", it is priced twice as expensive as the gallon of regular milk. The same thing is in produce, they have organic vegitables. What is this? 20 years ago everything was organic, now only the rich can get normal food. The rest of us must eat crap that has been genetically modified.
You're probably thinking about 120 years ago, and back then only the rich could get any food. Remember, grapes used to be an expensive luxury of the wealthy.
20 years ago was 1986, and food was crap back then too. In that time, milk went from about 2.20 per gallon, to 2.50 in 2006. Adjusted for inflation, that 2.20 rounds up to about 4 dollars. 4 dollars will get you healthy organic milk made from vegetarian cows without growth hormones or superdoses of antibiotics, something that couldn't be said about the 1986 milk. If I remember correctly the most popular food sources in 1986 were Pepsi, McDonalds, and Pop Rocks.
The average quality of food people buy is still crap, but if you're willing to spend the same proportion of your budget on food now as you did a few years ago, you get much, much better food.
Yes, but PC games have been able to do these sorts of resolutions for years and they barely fill up a single DVD.
I can assure you, had we the space available 3 years ago, we would have filled it.
3 out of the 5 projects I've been on have had to cut potential features or (more painfully) existing content to fit on a single sided DVD. This is not at all uncommon.
Logically, then, the solution is to do DVD only.
Favorite hacks (none as good as that story)
Needed a silent server for a friend's house that took up no additional room. Built out a P3 underneath his monitor stand using nothing but screws, rubber bands, and paper / tape for ducting. It was utterly silent and even relatively safe. And it only took up room that he wasn't accessing anyway.
Needed to re-wire a computer, but the lighting in the room was bad for peering inside of cases, and the flashlight was out of batteries. So I disconnected the power supply from the motherboard, wired the 5v rail to the flashlight, and turned the PSU on.
Someone at an old ISP I used to work for had a server that simply had no power button. We had to bridge the pins with a screwdriver to get the thing on. This was quite nerve-wracking the first time, as nobody had the schematics for the mobo anymore and were quite sure what was supposed to attach where.
Not strictly computer related, but I had an old Nokia whose batteries had worn out, and I wasn't happy with the charges for the possible replacements. So I cut the battery in half, and removed the old, dead cells. Then I soldered an array of 16 AA NiMH batteries in a combination of serial and parallel (to get the voltage right) onto the old charging circutry, and taped that to the back of the phone with black electrical tape. Talk time was about 24 hour straight, and you could go for about 2 weeks without recharging. On the down side, you get stopped at every airport security terminal.
And not at all related to me, though I wish it was, is the great Jargon File story about the magic MIT switch.
...and this is where you missed the boat. What we need to accept, in reality, is that being 1) willing and 2) able does not make you 3) ready.
The fact is that teens 1) Wanna and 2) Gonna so we had better darn well make them 3) ready.
Our options are not stopping them from having sex or not, it's making them prepared for when they have it.
On the one hand you're arguing that teenagers are too immature to have sex. On the other hand, you're arguing that they should be mature enough to know not to have sex. Huh? They're KIDS. They're raging balls of insecurity glued together by drunken hormones and a throbbing fire in their loins. That's why they do incredibly stupid, dangerous, and mind-blowingly weird things. That's why they're not mature enough to have sex. That's why they're not mature enough to refrain from having sex. So that's why the way we protect them is by teaching them how to have sex responsibly, not to pretend that they won't until some point in the unknown future when they're magically "ready".
And women should be taught how to put a condom on a guy. Maybe the person they're with isn't mature enough to know how. And if they're not mature enough to know how to put on a condom, they're certainly not mature enough to exhibit the self-restraint to keep it in their pants. A girl should know how to put a condom on a guy every bit as much as a guy should know what schedule the girl is on for her birth control pills. And they should feel not just compelled but also responsible for the decision. At the risk of sounding corny, a condom isn't effective because it goes on one person, it's effective because it goes between two people. Sure, the guy should be responsible enough to put one on. And if they're not, the woman should put one on for him, while teaching him proper technique and taunting him for his inexperience and lack of maturity.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It doesn't matter what kids "should" and "shouldn't" do. Just be safe. And keep them safe. And teach them to be safe.
In Australia there are laws stating that you can't be, for example, kicked out of a restaurant because you're breastfeeding.
I tried it once. I was kicked out of the resturant anyway, and the woman is suing.
I think the goal is that future pyrotechnicians won't just start lighting off fireworks and saying, "eh, it's someone else's job to worry about fire safety, not mine". Hopefully the first question out of the pyro's mouth to the club owner will be, "is this place up to code, cause my ass isn't spending 4 years in the state pen if it isn't?"
Not killing everyone in the audience should be sufficient motivation, far more than jail time.
I wouldn't have bought Oblivion if it hadn't been moddable, but that's because I knew from experience that I don't like a lot of Bethesda's game design choices."
Logistically that statement makes sense, but there just seems something wrong about it. Why would you buy a game from a maker whose design choices you don't like?
Some of the non-WoW are actually doing rather well. RuneScape, for example, a MMPORPG that people thought was dead and buried, is actually on the upswing. Final Fantasy XI was going up as of July 05. Heck, Final Fantasy is now bigger than Everquest. Everquest one and two basically leveled off and stayed there, instead of dropping into nothing. Eve Online, another "dead 'n buried" one is on the upswing and headed towards OK. Asheron's Call 1's numbers are much lower than I had expected, but Turbine must be keeping it around for some reason.
For tiny ones, Dofus is off to a good start, as is Toontown, Second Life, and Tibia.
I'd love to see what non-subscriber numbers Puzzle Pirates is pulling in. The developers once said they had several million dollars in unspent Doubloons (in-game money bought with real money), and as such must have a good income going outside of the subscriber system.
When growing up I used to wrestle with other kids. Frequently the match would end when someone scraped up an arm, or hit their head hard enough to make them dizzy, or one of the big guys rolled over the leg of one of the little guys. In college, we sparred quite a few times. I distinctly remember one match where a thai kickboxing friend kicked me in the thigh muscle lengthwise... I couldn't walk for about 4 days. Since graduating I've fought with friends who are a lot more experienced and controlled, and so clear winners could be declared without them necessarily breaking something. Or who didn't know anything, and I could take them down without issue.
The two biggest injuries I've seen coming out of martial arts schools were a Tae Kwon Do instructor who hyperextended both of her knees and could never walk again, and a Iaido instructor who put her sword away a little too quickly and severed all of the nerves in her hand. Both wounds were functionally self-inflicted.
In my particular circle martial arts have died down, but in others they go strong. The need for human beings to fight, and especially the need for men to fight, is strong. There is nothing unnatural about that. There is nothing wrong with that. Just be a little careful.
Nokia's strengths are in the cellphone chain. In traditional gaming, the gatekeepers are the EB's, Walmarts, and IGN's of the world, which Nokia has no experience with. On the other hand, the gatekeepers of the cellphone world are the phone companies, whom Nokia already has established relations with (however lopsided).
Downloadable games seem like the future. Creating a great downloadable games service would encourage cellphone providers to push Nokia phones, in order to get a piece of that secondary revenue stream. They stop competing in the retail space they've done so poorly at, and start competing in the phone space they know so well. They stop pushing a single phone and start pushing their entire lineup.
And everyone knows what "NGage" is. It's a very recognizable mark. It's generally easier to move a mark from an abandoned service to a new one than it is to create a new one from scratch. The NGage wasn't a mark of death, like Enron might be, but rather a reasonably noble failure. It should be recoverable. And the years and years of exposure in the press is priceless.
This makes sense for Nokia, and I'm glad they're doing it. Of course they need to design all of their handsets with gaming in mind from now on, but they should have been doing that anyway.
"where do we get chicks from?"
B.U.
These are the Schadenfreude Interactive guys.
I'll let you come to your own conclusions about Mr. Hasselhoff's schedule keeping abilities.
It's too bad. I really wanted to license that German Deathmetal song.
Ja! Ja! I eat vermin
Yeah! Yeah! Taste them squirmin'
All alone or on a cracker
I am a maggotsnacker
Die! Die! Die! Die!
Ja! Ja! Ja! Ja! etc.
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware. But worst case scenario is that the market is evenly split between Sony, MS and Nintendo, and only Sony is shipping next gen DVD. Every one else will have to pay $400 for an HD DVD player. This does not seem to be an irrational move on the part of Sony
That's actually the best-case scenario from the standpoint of an end-user. You'll get the most original, most polished games that way.
The worst case scenario would be for one console to gain complete dominance, then sit on their haunches while raking in dough until the market nearly collapses. This happened twice in the 80's.
So yes, Sony is trying to push it's content and that is hurting the consumers of the hardware.
I believe this is what consumers of the hardware are complaining about.
Nobody gets success in the console market through nepotism, through name, or through marketing dollars. It has to be earned. It has to be fought for tooth and nail. All blemishes and balances are major. Every flaw, a killer. This is the way it has been for many years, and this is the way it will continue to be for the forseeable future. To launch at such a flawed price is huge. We'll see if they can pull it out, or if it costs them the game.
Again... because its technology is too cutting edge and too new and therefore too expensive, would have been much better to go with cheap commodity stuff rather than daring to push the boundaries and actually put some THOUGHT into the product.
Daring to push the boundaries? By... tacking on motion control in a bog-standard dual-shock?
They're making a stronger PS2, with more storage. The cell is an interesting processor architecture, designed to be surprisingly scalable (both up and down), but MS is shipping multiple cores in a PPC architecture too. And theirs is relatively easy to program for.
More thought definitely would have been appreciated.
But what got me most was this
Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format.
If the PS3 gets reasonable marketshare then this could be considered its master stroke in 2 years time. While the XBox 360 will need a revision to support HD discs, the PS3 won't.
Very true, assuming the XBox 360 ever supports HD disks (my money is on "no"). However, that doesn't change the fact that Sony went with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD because they wanted to create another Memory Stick / UMD standard that they control and make royalties off of. The Memory Stick has probably Pi@@$#* off enough consumers that there is a degree of backlash against proprietary Sony standards at this point. And if there wasn't before, there is now with the utter failure of the UMD movie standard.
Its a sad state of affairs when Slashdot articles don't even celebrate the invention and the investment, but bitch just about the price and want LESS gadgets in the box, and when the MS supported standard is implicitly suggested to be a more "open" option.
What part is the invention part again? Including the movie hardware standard that their electronics division is pushing? Copying the Wii's controller design? Claiming to copy every feature of Xbox Live, without actually showing anything?
Say what you will about Microsoft, they've really pushed the online thing forward in great ways. Say what you will about their naming people, but Nintendo is really trying something original with the Wii. Say what you will about Sony's behavior as a corporation, but the PS3 brings... what exactly is it bringing new to the plate?
Sony is not leading at this point. They're following.
Sony seems out of touch, both with what the market wants and with reality in general. For example, the 500 dollar version of the system would be perfectly fine if if weren't for the lack of HDMI "protection" that they have been forcing on people. A protection that they say they may not include on disks anyway, making the expensive upgrade useless. It's difficult and confusing to see which way the consumer is going to get screwed. But they're going to get screwed one way or the other due to Sony's lack of clear vision and forced standards. And 600 dollars is way above what the average person is willing to pay for a console.
CF / SD / MS slots? Why would we need all of that? Cut the crap, and give us what we want for what we can afford to pay. Bells and whistles may be nifty, but if nobody buys the system they don't really help.
Weren't we JOKING about them making Halo 3 Vista-only to boost sales? Now they're gonna do this with freaking Halo 2?
Halo is Microsoft's new mythical moneymaker. When their games division needs a boost to help their rather terrible margins, or they need to push a new system, they'll lean on Bungee to release whatever it is they have and call it the next Halo.
It's kind of sad, really. Halo is a great series and Bungee is a great developer, but they're almost commodotizing Halo. Not finishing 2? It's like the Legacy of Kain... an amazing game that really hurt the series because they released it unfinished. At least Halo 2's multiplayer was solid.
MS is going to find that you can't milk a series too much before it simply goes dry. If you don't earn each and every sale, you can coast for one or two iterations but then it all goes away.
I didn't.
God only knows how they claim to have gotten this figure. For example, 98% of the software on the machine I'm using right now is open-source, and the other 2% is free-as-in-beer stuff like the linux version of Acrobat Reader. How the heck would the BSA have known about the existence of hundreds of pieces of open-source software on this machine?
They wouldn't: they're only talking about boxed software. I'm guessing most of your OSS is not shipped in a box.
I remember having a conversation with someone at Adobe once. They were glad that students and parents were pirating Photoshop. That meant that when they went out into the business world, they knew of no other photo manipulation software besides Photoshop. And while they're not paying Adobe anything for the time they're pirating it, they're also not paying Adobe's competitors anything either. The piracy maintains the hegemony.
If people really had to use The Gimp or pay Adobe 500 dollars, you can bet The Gimp would quickly become a lot better an application than it is.
The Scarpar is almost flying.
I would add, however, that it has been beaten to the market by a few years by the wheelman, a kick-ass austrailian motorcycle board where you stand inside the wheels.