So tell me, how does a band suing because they think they deserve to be paid for their (heh heh) art "put the big chill on free software?" Free software and open source are about VOLUNTARY cooperation, not piracy. Honestly. This article did make some pretty good points -- particularly "Ownership of ideas is no longer a simple, black-or-white issue," which you seem to steamroll over in your vast generalizations of big evil Metallica versus the good, free Internet, and the geeks who run it who've come to see their free music as an integral part of their lives. Hey, I stole a car, but the more I started using it the more it became an integral part of my life. I get to keep it, right? (Flawed analogy, I know. My stealing a car denies someone out there a car. No one's losing their Metallica because of me, since it's a copy.)
Don't get me wrong, I hate the music industry. I think it for the most part stomps on creativity, and (unless they happen to fit the flavor of the month in popular music) talented musicians tend to fall by the wayside. I also resent paying fifteen dollars for a CD that I know costs about two cents to produce, and that the artist is getting, easily, a dollar out of my purchase. Fifteen dollars of attractive packaging? I kinda doubt it. Remember those false promises of how real soon, CDs would be cheaper than tapes? They are -- for the music industry.
So why not touch on those areas, where the industry actually is screwing people over? Metallica is welcome to sue over their pseudo-heavy-metal crap -- they're suing the wrong people, and I think if the people they're suing have decent lawyers, the courts will agree with that. I don't find the Metallica suit to be very important. Remember, you don't have a really strong right to your university's bandwidth, either. It's theirs entirely, and frankly, if Lars Ulrich and a squad of CIA cyber ninjas kicked down my door and threatened to kill me because my students were using their Internet link to grab illegal music, I think I'd "fold" too. That bandwidth is for education in any case.
The real issue here is that the music industry is finding itself obsolete, and rather than adapt, they're attempting to plug the holes in their ship -- which isn't even close to sinking, as $15 billion in profits shows. Their loss. What ought to happen -- to your credit, you did spend about half a sentence on this -- is we ought to support the current models out there for MP3s you can pay fifty cents a pop to download -- eMusic perhaps? Please don't make this out to be a big struggle for open source software ideals. MP3 hoarding and open source hacking are two different mindsets, with some similarities.
And when it comes to "intellectual property," remember there is a huge difference between ideas -- patent #THX-1138 on Amazon affiliates or some such bosh -- and creative works-- Sir Gluffaron goes on a heroic quest to save the music industry. If an artist thinks I should pay just to see their creative work, they have a right to it -- ideas are a different thing altogether, as it can hurt technology greatly to have one big entity control an entire concept, like one-click shopping. Metallica charging for Master of Puppets is a bit less harmful.
Let me wrap this up here (thank god!): Malice or stupidity? I think it's the latter. Right now, suing people over MP3s probably costs a band much more than they lose to MP3s. A lot of them are clueless about this whole Internet thing. If we educate people on what's really going on here -- namely, we've finally found the Holy Grail of digital music distribution and no way to charge for it -- we can work out a solution. Hell, there are already some out there, it's just a matter of supporting them.
Since six idiots probably won't have enough genetic diversity to repopulate the species, not to mention a lack of energy, the human race will most likely perish in flames and we won't have to deal with the New World Top 40 Pantheon being crammed down our throats.
You know what REALLY desensitized me to violence, until recently? The news, where pretty anchormen and women reporting on a death regularly just casually slip it in -- watch CNN Headline News, and wait for a mention of death. It's really kind of creepy how little the loss of a human life can seem to mean to people.
But then I played Unreal. I didn't think much about it at the time, but after blowing off something's legs and having it claw its way after me, hearing people scream in pain as their lives are needlessly wasted in a hail of rockets -- watching the news turns my stomach.
And what do people against violence in the media often suggest? Make the violence less explicit and just generally prettier. Now I think the notion of people -- children in particular, when I was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a child it all flew over my head, I just thought Raphael was cool -- taking subliminal moral lessons from entertainment is bullshit, but if things are that way, which would you rather have your children believe -- that Wile E. Coyote can escape a mallet, anvil, and bowling ball on the head unharmed to concoct another scheme? That it might be okay to hurt someone if you're angry with them? Or that when you hurt people, they're hurt?
I think when people want to sugar-coat violence they're running from having to face the real consequences of what happens when you hurt someone, and there could be many reasons for this. To see the desensitization to the consequences of violence -- not to violence itself -- you have to look no further than the heroic way we looked at Kosovo and its ilk, and ignored the fact that we destroyed hundreds of lives that had nothing to do with our conflicts.
(A little clarification here -- "showing children what violence really accomplishes" doesn't mean showing Halloween to three-year-olds. In my mind, it means letting seven-year-olds see, say, Dragon Ball Z -- where the protagonist recognizes the consequences of fighting and avoids it even at his own peril, and the villains really hurt people, and not just physically.)
Generally, what gets put on the air in the US gets heavily censored and dumbed down, dubbed with poor voice acting, shown out of order, and with several episodes missing (like with Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Ronin Warriors, and some earlier stuff). The only Anime on TV that I've ever seen with competent voice acting is Pokemon, which is just kind of a goofy little show anyway and doesn't have a particularly engaging plot to preserve (Not that it's a bad show).
The best stuff I've ever seen is either (nudge-nudge-wink-wink-grin-grin) illegal or hard-to-find -- and is never aired on television. While excluding those who don't appreciate Anime from the human race is drastic, it should be noted that what we get on this side of the ocean on TV is poor quality judgment material, and the good subtitled Anime is far too expensive (Makes sense, doesn't it? You spend less money on voice talent, generally less on localization and down-dumbing, and charge twice as much...).
There's better stuff out there, somewhere -- it's just too expensive and takes just a bit too much effort to find.
I resent Microsoft sticking their hands in the honey pot but I really doubt they have any idea what they're doing. Console gaming differs significantly from PC gaming in that when Jack and Joe American go out and buy their console they want it to work out of the box, without downloading all sorts of patches.
Console gaming is also more or less a Japanese-based industry. In the situation that Microsoft can turn out a powerful console and a strong first-party line-up (Which I doubt, but that could just be Linux snobbery kicking in) they still have the problem that Japanese companies make games for Japanese gamers -- Microsoft is not as big a name in the East, if I recall. There just might not be enough American/Canadian developers for Microsoft to lean on for third-party support.
There are also some technical issues. I mean, an Intel chip? I'm going to guess it'll be a P2/P3 type architecture -- which is barely (If at all) different from the x86 architecture (I think there are small differences, but I could be wrong). I suppose including nVidia's GeForce will balance this out, but it could also significantly raise the price point (Remember what price did to the NeoGeo and Saturn?).
And one last thing -- Microsoft partnered with Sega for the Dreamcast, as I'm sure you know. Now, the Dreamcast looks to be a huge success -- and after playing Power Stone, I really regret not having one on preorder -- but Sega has a nice track record of failures like the Sega-CD, 32X, and Saturn. Like I said, the Dreamcast looks like a success -- but mostly because of its marketing, price point, and lack of "next generation" competition within the next year. I really doubt Microsoft learned much of anything from this partnership, except under which conditions to release a console.
All of you fellow console gamers out there who are declaring the death of video games as we know them: I wouldn't worry about it. Microsoft may have managed to dominate in a market with which they're fairly familiar, but that doesn't mean they can just charge into such a fiercely competitive and fundamentally different one and expect everyone to bow and scrape.
Went to their Web page and gave them my personal info -- WITHOUT noticing that they claimed to be giving away a million iMacs -- that's like a billion dollars -- and they didn't seem to be affiliated with any company of any kind. I think I just got harvested for junk-mail... stupid me.
More often than not, these stories are about kids being beaten up for how they dress or where they are on the social (or sports) ladder. So how is that immature and childish? I'm not sure I agree with the Hellmouth thing on the whole, but where are you getting "Immature and childish?"
I'm sick of hearing people spout this crap. Jon Katz hasn't written seriously about Columbine for MONTHS, except in passing -- he's been writing about how much Amazon sucks, and how movie theaters are full of crap. This isn't even HIS web site. If anyone's "milking" this, it's not him.
"Censorship" is technically the wrong word. However, "your mommy" shouldn't be required to sit with you for a movie she doesn't want to see if she gives permission. Theaters imposing age limits penalizes many parents out there because a few can't keep their kids in control and want someone else to do it for them.
Yes, it is. Mine arrived, broken, over two months after I won it -- two of the pins connecting the power supply to the motherboard were slightly bent. I think I fixed this, but the CMOS battery seems to be dead (Which isn't their fault -- that's common for Multias) and I don't have any true parity RAM. I've never bought anything from The Linux Store, but I'd imagine prizes usually take a long time to ship, seeing as they're not making any money to cover the shipping costs. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
Mes amis, y'all have forgotten a critical point: the best technology doesn't necessarily win. Beta didn't win, the Mac didn't win (back when it was better), Netscape didn't win (I liked Netscape a lot more than Explorer), Java has been mostly replaced online by ActiveX, etc.
Yeah, you've got a point, but I don't think we should focus on Linux toppling Microsoft here. We should instead focus on open source toppling Microsoft. The real reason Linux already has as much grassroots support as it does right now isn't wholly technological superiority -- it's about that to which Linux owes its technological superiority, the open source development model. Sure, Microsoft can spout bullshit -- or even true -- benchmarks placing Windows ahead of Linux -- but they CAN'T go out and prove somehow that their development teams work faster and better than the thousands of people who contribute to open source software worldwide -- regardless of whether or not it's true, it's just impossible to prove scientifically.
Microsoft has deep pockets, Bill Gates rules the world, and most people are too stupid to figure out that MS software is bloated drek. Good example: Office 95 is faster than Office 98, and has the same features (mostly). But people upgraded...why? It seems to return to that "people are stupid" thing again. If you think that the public will ever abandon the simplicity and crappiness of Windows for the unknown Linux, you're nuts.
I don't think people upgraded Office because they're stupid, honestly -- it's just that they aren't computer experts and Microsoft can lie about all sorts of great improvements that go into their software. If they don't want to spend time looking for themselves, and a big company with lots of money -tells- them it's better, it might seem logical to believe it. This is ignorance, not stupidity. Stupidity is frying your hand taking the Pop Tarts out of the toaster because you decided you didn't want them after all. If people KNOW there's an alternative to the "simplicity and crappiness" of Windows, then we don't have the problem of Linux being "unknown." All that remains is to shout loud enough for people to hear.
A popular name for the Microsoft system is "the cathedral." Look deeper into the metaphor: we're atheists, hoping that the faithful will abandon the corrupt church. Maybe we can introduce doubt into the minds of the educated and intelligent, but the idiot masses will stick with the established thing.
I don't think it's such a great idea to extend that analogy beyond its intentions and risk alienating Christians...
The entire concept of AOL owning everything on the Windows desktop (What do they need now, Winzip and GameSpy?) really creeps me out, especially after the keynote the AOL employee gave at the Linux Expo. It sounded like a stock investor speech with "Oh yeah, Linux is good too! Embedded systems!" tacked on. He went over all the brands AOL owns and said, essentially, why AOL would be making money off of everything you do on the Net, and why you should like that. "AOL Anywhere" as opposed to "Microsoft Everywhere." On the other hand, they haven't done anything too terribly brutal to the companies they've acquired just yet. ICQ, as far as I know, has gone virtually unchanged, and so has Netscape, but I don't want to fire up WinAmp (I do have to use Windows from time to time -- gah) and see an ad for barnesandnoble.com in the browser window, and something tells me they wouldn't have a problem with selling companies an audience this way. In the short term, I think this will probably be good for MP3s in general -- AOL's a pretty wealthy company, the RIAA might just back off. But I'm not sure we're not gearing up for another massive corporation controlling all we see and do -- especially after that keynote, which had more to do with total domination than Linux.
And the issue is whether or not the PSX2 is really going to be a gaming console. Personally, I think it will be capable of topping all of the PCs currently out there, however, the fact that it is produced by Sony Computer Entertainment (And if it's actually really called the PlayStation 2, is it?) people's minds will instantly draw a link to the first PlayStation, which was, without a doubt, a gaming console -- and thus, by common logic, a toy. If they gave the PSX2 a name that in no way revealed its link to the PlayStation gaming console, and marketed it as a PC, the PlayStation 2 might make it as a high-end computer -- but then they would risk losing a hefty portion of the console gaming market, the casual gamers, who would barely be aware the thing was a good gaming device as they don't really spend all that much time checking out the ins and outs before buying -- a lot of my friends have just asked me "Which should I buy, PlayStation or N64? You know this stuff." It seems like Sony cannot conquer both markets very well by marketing the same device to both groups.
Sony has a Good Thing(tm) going here. What they should do is release the PlayStation 2 gaming console and use the Emotion Engine to power seperate personal computer products, perhaps pulling talent away from their in-house game developers (I've never really played an in-house Sony game I liked anyway, it would be no big loss) to develop applications and such for the system -- maybe even make it Linux-based, but that's a long shot.:) Of course, by the time they got all of this done, their Emotion Engine chip would probably be pretty average in terms of CPU balls.
So I have no clue what I'm talking about.
You know, I think I'd prefer it if they kept in the console business and didn't take a stupid risk trying to topple Wintel, just so the console gamers would get the ultra-badass games the console could produce. Granted, it may have seemed stupid to try to tackle Nintendo years ago, and look where they are -- they all but own the Japanese gaming market, and they've got a good hunk of the other markets. Still, I'm skeptical.
I'm going to put up my maxed out Mewtwo, Zapdos, Blastoise, Moltres, Articuno, Hitmonchan and Raichu at a minimum bid of 100 dollars. Hey, kids are already selling their Pokemon for like ten bucks on the playground, why don't I knock it up a notch, eh? Seriously, though, this is only kind of new. Magic: The Gathering is just a game, but people are willing to shell out a great deal of dough on the Moxen and the Black Lotus (Or they were before I quit)... I'm for it, though, my parents won't let me get a job so I pretty much have to sit around playing video games and stuff all day, but maybe I can pay for that Ibanez 7-String guitar this way.:)
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me, how does a band suing because they think they deserve to be paid for their (heh heh) art "put the big chill on free software?" Free software and open source are about VOLUNTARY cooperation, not piracy. Honestly. This article did make some pretty good points -- particularly "Ownership of ideas is no longer a simple, black-or-white issue," which you seem to steamroll over in your vast generalizations of big evil Metallica versus the good, free Internet, and the geeks who run it who've come to see their free music as an integral part of their lives. Hey, I stole a car, but the more I started using it the more it became an integral part of my life. I get to keep it, right? (Flawed analogy, I know. My stealing a car denies someone out there a car. No one's losing their Metallica because of me, since it's a copy.)
Don't get me wrong, I hate the music industry. I think it for the most part stomps on creativity, and (unless they happen to fit the flavor of the month in popular music) talented musicians tend to fall by the wayside. I also resent paying fifteen dollars for a CD that I know costs about two cents to produce, and that the artist is getting, easily, a dollar out of my purchase. Fifteen dollars of attractive packaging? I kinda doubt it. Remember those false promises of how real soon, CDs would be cheaper than tapes? They are -- for the music industry.
So why not touch on those areas, where the industry actually is screwing people over? Metallica is welcome to sue over their pseudo-heavy-metal crap -- they're suing the wrong people, and I think if the people they're suing have decent lawyers, the courts will agree with that. I don't find the Metallica suit to be very important. Remember, you don't have a really strong right to your university's bandwidth, either. It's theirs entirely, and frankly, if Lars Ulrich and a squad of CIA cyber ninjas kicked down my door and threatened to kill me because my students were using their Internet link to grab illegal music, I think I'd "fold" too. That bandwidth is for education in any case.
The real issue here is that the music industry is finding itself obsolete, and rather than adapt, they're attempting to plug the holes in their ship -- which isn't even close to sinking, as $15 billion in profits shows. Their loss. What ought to happen -- to your credit, you did spend about half a sentence on this -- is we ought to support the current models out there for MP3s you can pay fifty cents a pop to download -- eMusic perhaps? Please don't make this out to be a big struggle for open source software ideals. MP3 hoarding and open source hacking are two different mindsets, with some similarities.
And when it comes to "intellectual property," remember there is a huge difference between ideas -- patent #THX-1138 on Amazon affiliates or some such bosh -- and creative works-- Sir Gluffaron goes on a heroic quest to save the music industry. If an artist thinks I should pay just to see their creative work, they have a right to it -- ideas are a different thing altogether, as it can hurt technology greatly to have one big entity control an entire concept, like one-click shopping. Metallica charging for Master of Puppets is a bit less harmful.
Let me wrap this up here (thank god!): Malice or stupidity? I think it's the latter. Right now, suing people over MP3s probably costs a band much more than they lose to MP3s. A lot of them are clueless about this whole Internet thing. If we educate people on what's really going on here -- namely, we've finally found the Holy Grail of digital music distribution and no way to charge for it -- we can work out a solution. Hell, there are already some out there, it's just a matter of supporting them.
Bow to Britney Spears, god of deception!
But then I played Unreal. I didn't think much about it at the time, but after blowing off something's legs and having it claw its way after me, hearing people scream in pain as their lives are needlessly wasted in a hail of rockets -- watching the news turns my stomach.
And what do people against violence in the media often suggest? Make the violence less explicit and just generally prettier. Now I think the notion of people -- children in particular, when I was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a child it all flew over my head, I just thought Raphael was cool -- taking subliminal moral lessons from entertainment is bullshit, but if things are that way, which would you rather have your children believe -- that Wile E. Coyote can escape a mallet, anvil, and bowling ball on the head unharmed to concoct another scheme? That it might be okay to hurt someone if you're angry with them? Or that when you hurt people, they're hurt?
I think when people want to sugar-coat violence they're running from having to face the real consequences of what happens when you hurt someone, and there could be many reasons for this. To see the desensitization to the consequences of violence -- not to violence itself -- you have to look no further than the heroic way we looked at Kosovo and its ilk, and ignored the fact that we destroyed hundreds of lives that had nothing to do with our conflicts.
(A little clarification here -- "showing children what violence really accomplishes" doesn't mean showing Halloween to three-year-olds. In my mind, it means letting seven-year-olds see, say, Dragon Ball Z -- where the protagonist recognizes the consequences of fighting and avoids it even at his own peril, and the villains really hurt people, and not just physically.)
The best stuff I've ever seen is either (nudge-nudge-wink-wink-grin-grin) illegal or hard-to-find -- and is never aired on television. While excluding those who don't appreciate Anime from the human race is drastic, it should be noted that what we get on this side of the ocean on TV is poor quality judgment material, and the good subtitled Anime is far too expensive (Makes sense, doesn't it? You spend less money on voice talent, generally less on localization and down-dumbing, and charge twice as much...).
There's better stuff out there, somewhere -- it's just too expensive and takes just a bit too much effort to find.
Console gaming is also more or less a Japanese-based industry. In the situation that Microsoft can turn out a powerful console and a strong first-party line-up (Which I doubt, but that could just be Linux snobbery kicking in) they still have the problem that Japanese companies make games for Japanese gamers -- Microsoft is not as big a name in the East, if I recall. There just might not be enough American/Canadian developers for Microsoft to lean on for third-party support.
There are also some technical issues. I mean, an Intel chip? I'm going to guess it'll be a P2/P3 type architecture -- which is barely (If at all) different from the x86 architecture (I think there are small differences, but I could be wrong). I suppose including nVidia's GeForce will balance this out, but it could also significantly raise the price point (Remember what price did to the NeoGeo and Saturn?).
And one last thing -- Microsoft partnered with Sega for the Dreamcast, as I'm sure you know. Now, the Dreamcast looks to be a huge success -- and after playing Power Stone, I really regret not having one on preorder -- but Sega has a nice track record of failures like the Sega-CD, 32X, and Saturn. Like I said, the Dreamcast looks like a success -- but mostly because of its marketing, price point, and lack of "next generation" competition within the next year. I really doubt Microsoft learned much of anything from this partnership, except under which conditions to release a console.
All of you fellow console gamers out there who are declaring the death of video games as we know them: I wouldn't worry about it. Microsoft may have managed to dominate in a market with which they're fairly familiar, but that doesn't mean they can just charge into such a fiercely competitive and fundamentally different one and expect everyone to bow and scrape.
--SA
Went to their Web page and gave them my personal info -- WITHOUT noticing that they claimed to be giving away a million iMacs -- that's like a billion dollars -- and they didn't seem to be affiliated with any company of any kind. I think I just got harvested for junk-mail... stupid me.
More often than not, these stories are about kids being beaten up for how they dress or where they are on the social (or sports) ladder. So how is that immature and childish?
I'm not sure I agree with the Hellmouth thing on the whole, but where are you getting "Immature and childish?"
I'm sick of hearing people spout this crap. Jon Katz hasn't written seriously about Columbine for MONTHS, except in passing -- he's been writing about how much Amazon sucks, and how movie theaters are full of crap. This isn't even HIS web site. If anyone's "milking" this, it's not him.
"Censorship" is technically the wrong word. However, "your mommy" shouldn't be required to sit with you for a movie she doesn't want to see if she gives permission. Theaters imposing age limits penalizes many parents out there because a few can't keep their kids in control and want someone else to do it for them.
Yes, it is. Mine arrived, broken, over two months after I won it -- two of the pins connecting the power supply to the motherboard were slightly bent. I think I fixed this, but the CMOS battery seems to be dead (Which isn't their fault -- that's common for Multias) and I don't have any true parity RAM.
I've never bought anything from The Linux Store, but I'd imagine prizes usually take a long time to ship, seeing as they're not making any money to cover the shipping costs. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
SA
Mes amis, y'all have forgotten a critical point: the best technology doesn't necessarily win. Beta didn't win, the Mac didn't win (back when it was better), Netscape didn't win (I liked Netscape a lot more than Explorer), Java has been mostly replaced online by ActiveX, etc.
Yeah, you've got a point, but I don't think we should focus on Linux toppling Microsoft here. We should instead focus on open source toppling Microsoft. The real reason Linux already has as much grassroots support as it does right now isn't wholly technological superiority -- it's about that to which Linux owes its technological superiority, the open source development model. Sure, Microsoft can spout bullshit -- or even true -- benchmarks placing Windows ahead of Linux -- but they CAN'T go out and prove somehow that their development teams work faster and better than the thousands of people who contribute to open source software worldwide -- regardless of whether or not it's true, it's just impossible to prove scientifically.
Microsoft has deep pockets, Bill Gates rules the world, and most people are too stupid to figure out that MS software is bloated drek. Good example: Office 95 is faster than Office 98, and has the same features (mostly). But people upgraded...why? It seems to return to that "people are stupid" thing again. If you think that the public will ever abandon the simplicity and crappiness of Windows for the unknown Linux, you're nuts.
I don't think people upgraded Office because they're stupid, honestly -- it's just that they aren't computer experts and Microsoft can lie about all sorts of great improvements that go into their software. If they don't want to spend time looking for themselves, and a big company with lots of money -tells- them it's better, it might seem logical to believe it. This is ignorance, not stupidity. Stupidity is frying your hand taking the Pop Tarts out of the toaster because you decided you didn't want them after all. If people KNOW there's an alternative to the "simplicity and crappiness" of Windows, then we don't have the problem of Linux being "unknown." All that remains is to shout loud enough for people to hear.
A popular name for the Microsoft system is "the cathedral." Look deeper into the metaphor: we're atheists, hoping that the faithful will abandon the corrupt church. Maybe we can introduce doubt into the minds of the educated and intelligent, but the idiot masses will stick with the established thing.
I don't think it's such a great idea to extend that analogy beyond its intentions and risk alienating Christians...
The entire concept of AOL owning everything on the Windows desktop (What do they need now, Winzip and GameSpy?) really creeps me out, especially after the keynote the AOL employee gave at the Linux Expo. It sounded like a stock investor speech with "Oh yeah, Linux is good too! Embedded systems!" tacked on. He went over all the brands AOL owns and said, essentially, why AOL would be making money off of everything you do on the Net, and why you should like that. "AOL Anywhere" as opposed to "Microsoft Everywhere."
On the other hand, they haven't done anything too terribly brutal to the companies they've acquired just yet. ICQ, as far as I know, has gone virtually unchanged, and so has Netscape, but I don't want to fire up WinAmp (I do have to use Windows from time to time -- gah) and see an ad for barnesandnoble.com in the browser window, and something tells me they wouldn't have a problem with selling companies an audience this way.
In the short term, I think this will probably be good for MP3s in general -- AOL's a pretty wealthy company, the RIAA might just back off. But I'm not sure we're not gearing up for another massive corporation controlling all we see and do -- especially after that keynote, which had more to do with total domination than Linux.
--Slack
Sony has a Good Thing(tm) going here. What they should do is release the PlayStation 2 gaming console and use the Emotion Engine to power seperate personal computer products, perhaps pulling talent away from their in-house game developers (I've never really played an in-house Sony game I liked anyway, it would be no big loss) to develop applications and such for the system -- maybe even make it Linux-based, but that's a long shot. :) Of course, by the time they got all of this done, their Emotion Engine chip would probably be pretty average in terms of CPU balls.
So I have no clue what I'm talking about.
You know, I think I'd prefer it if they kept in the console business and didn't take a stupid risk trying to topple Wintel, just so the console gamers would get the ultra-badass games the console could produce. Granted, it may have seemed stupid to try to tackle Nintendo years ago, and look where they are -- they all but own the Japanese gaming market, and they've got a good hunk of the other markets. Still, I'm skeptical.
--Slack
I'm going to put up my maxed out Mewtwo, Zapdos, Blastoise, Moltres, Articuno, Hitmonchan and Raichu at a minimum bid of 100 dollars. Hey, kids are already selling their Pokemon for like ten bucks on the playground, why don't I knock it up a notch, eh? :)
Seriously, though, this is only kind of new. Magic: The Gathering is just a game, but people are willing to shell out a great deal of dough on the Moxen and the Black Lotus (Or they were before I quit)... I'm for it, though, my parents won't let me get a job so I pretty much have to sit around playing video games and stuff all day, but maybe I can pay for that Ibanez 7-String guitar this way.