Iraq's infrastructure was completely in the dumps long before 2003. You do realize they had been under going economic sanctions and occasional aerial bombardment since the first desert storm. The status of Iraq circa 2003 was the consequence of the decades of economic and military warfare. You should also realize the US spearheaded those measures.
Yes I suppose my view of copyright law has been distorted by actually *reading* the law! By all means please tell me how copying Prince's music into her home video is "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" (17 USC 107). Only for one of those uses do you get to use the other arguments (about commercial vs. nonprofit, nature, substantiality, effect on value). "Me wanty" is not a legally valid justification to infringe on copyrights. Listen, I totally agree that current copyright law has been skewed ridiculously to favor the Disney company & cronies. I can't think of any good reason why the term should be more than 20 years -- if an IP creator hasn't made a decent profit by then, the IP can't have been worth much in the first place, and the whole point of publishing in the first place is to contribute the work to our culture. But that doesn't mean there's no limit. IP creators deserve to be paid for their work just like anyone else. (OK I'm a programmer and my entire livelihood comes from customers giving me money for solving their problems, so I'm biased.) I'm so sick of spoiled whiny brats who think that it's the natural way of the universe that weenies like you can take whatever IP you want and the person who created it is a jerk for thinking you'd ever do anything in return. See, it's their duty to work for free because weenie society has conveniently defined any job that creates IP as being inherently worthless. Meanwhile of course, no one better forget to give you *your* paycheck! Because your work actually matters. I bow down in your saintly presence oh master. Some one else already responded and addressed how this would qualify as fair use. I too have read the laws and they are being pushed farther and farther away from what they originally were. Your interpretation may be correct very soon however fair use is still broad enough that this woman has done nothing ethically wrong and likely nothing legally wrong. Prince may want his cut, and if the recording was a legitimate CD or radio he already received it. At the moment that is all he legally can command.
IP creators do indeed deserve to be compensated however there are limits. Copyright is a recent invention meant to open up society and enable creators to receive something. The system worked as well when the creator got worked under patronage (most classical music and art was commissioned). The current system is a gigantic strain on society. The artists get much less then 10% back on all sales the consumer has to be careful not to tread on fairly arcane laws and their ownership of anything is in dispute. This system isn't working so well. The only ones winning are lawyers, and the middlemen.
Contrary to how you wish to paint me I buy all my media. Games, movies, music. I object to someone telling where and when I can use this media. Thankfully i live in Canada which to date has a saner approach to copyright. Fair use is broader, Technical protection measures such as DRM is perfectly legal to circumvent for non-infringing purposes and non-infringing is semi-well defined. I hope dearly and work hard towards ensuring Canada doesn't sign the WIPO treaty and doesn't become like America, who ironically built their industry on patents stolen from europe.
If she is using someone else's copyrighted material and anyone is earning money off of it besides the creators without their permission, then she is infringing.
I'm sorry but I think those all apply here.
Written in 1984, it is only 24 years old- so even by the original jeffersonian copyright rules which I prefer & support the song should have another four years to go. It's not so cut and dry... you know there are so many one noted replies that seem like "golly the bad lady hurt the poor starving artist. clearly she needs ot be punished". Either the US has given up on asserting fair use and has rolled over and let the corprate interests rape them, or there is a significant number of astroturfers on slashdot.
A copyright grants a limited monopoly on distribution on certain content. Fair use exempts certain forms of distribution as allowable. The idea is that a artist/creator/agent there of is enable to collect fees in some circumstances and has control. However not all forms of distribution violate copyright. In fact the media studios have been extremely over zealous in their pursuit of their fair share. This case is likely within fair use regaurdless of what you say.
... it *was* copyright violation. Plain and simple. This doesn't come close to fitting the criteria for fair use (a lot of/.ers think anything short of selling it for cash is "fair use" but that's not true at all, not by US law anyway). They didn't sue her, they didn't threaten her (she just assumed that part), they just made her stop distributing Prince's IP. She's totally wrong, she got off with a warning, and now *she's* complaining? ahh very clearly the Record companies have won in what ever area you live in. As the US LAW does allow for Fair use and derivative works(a short clip of music in the background is fair use). It is exactly what fair use is. They issues a DMCA take down. She responded as the DMCA outlines. She's trying to secure her rights while you have a very distorted view of what copyright law is. It's not how Media positions it, as "creators graciously allowing you to use their works." but it's "society graciously allowing artists/middlemen to seek compensation for their work and providing a legal framework to do so and a temporary monopoly."
this stretches the meaning of fair use beyond anything a judge is likely to find credible. there is a very real risk that fair use will be much more stringently defined if the EFF takes cases like these into court and loses. You sure about that? Fair use is one side, derivative works are another. Thank god I live in canada where the minority gov is too chicken shit to try to sign the WIPO into law or to bow to US pressure to revise our fair use provisions.
Not that it's right for the companies to go around forcing takedowns of harmless uses of their copyrights, but it also says something that nobody even tries to secure permission before putting soundtracks in their youtube videos. The thing is you ought not have to, to use a clip. In most places in the west except the US you don't have to. In fact it's most likely the same in the US. A clip is fair use and a clip in a another work is derivative works. The GP is basically teaching them the law as the records companies dearly want. Not the law as it is. So the GP is in effect either being ironic or teaching his/her child to give up rights. The common view of copyright is severely skewed. Copyright is not the content creator graciously granting us the right to us it but society gracious granting the content creator or agent there of a temporary control on distribution.
She's not using the whole song, it's a 29 second clip. And the audio quality is awful. Nobody wold find that video an adequate substitute for the real deal. That's doesn't necessarily make it legal though. A clip would count as fair use. It would in fact make it legal.
There's some truth to that, but how exactly are the music moguls harming her child by not allowing her to publish copyright music without a license? Because copyright doesn't extend that far. A baby video with music would qualify as fair use/ derivative work.
One thing that has always bugged me about closed source software. Society grants a copyright "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". However, if the source code isn't published, then society has no means by which to benefit from the software once copyright expires. Society has granted the temporary monopoly, but doesn't get the use of the work once the monopoly expires.
Closed source software is sort of like how the state of technology was before patents. The secrets of their workings died with the family/company/person who invented it. Patents may be a way to save them. I prefer Open source but the only saving grace to patents is that they do preserve knowledge. If only they weren't used in the way they are and didn't last as long.
New processor, new graphics chip, state of the art MEMS motion sensor is "fairly old tech"? Just because something is built to optimize something other than speed doesn't mean it isn't new technology. Would you call a Prius "old tech" because it doesn't have the same power output as a V8? The CPU is a 90nm PPC with a lot of the branch prediction removed and some gaming specific instruction loaded. Commonly believed to be a direct decedent of the GEKKO GC CPU. Basically shrunk, clocked higher, and snazzed up a little. The GPU is also rumored to be a direct decedent of Flipper form the GC just higher clocked and snazzed up. Thus the easy Backwards computability because both the GPU and CPU are just higher clock version with the an expanded instruction set. The mems sensor is indeed new and is a cheap and efficient way to get fairly decent motion sensing.
Back to unwieldy car analogies.
the GC is the 2000 ford focus(~110 hp) The wii is like a 2008 ford focus(~130 hp). New trim, slightly more horses under the hood, and a fairly throughly redesigned but still lower end of the consumer car market. Except it's got some zany extra control scheme. So imagine if ford invented a alternate steering mechanism thats both fun, new, easy to learn, and safe.
The xbox is like 2000 Nissan 300zx (~160hp), sporty, quick, but not that exceptional. Except this 300zx sported some massive cargo space, liek 50 cubic meters via some weird dimension bending ala the tardis (it was first with a standard HD). It's follow up the xbox 360 lost the dimensional trunk but it's a 2008 350z GT-3 weighing in at 382 hp it's a monster. Easy to use, and lets say it's a dream to make soft^b^b^b^b accessories for. all of it is nice but straightforward tech but a very nice looking, performing, and driving car.
The PS2 is like 1984 Mazda RX7 only 100 hp but due to some odd engine mechanics (that rotary engine was a engineering marvel) you could actually get a lot of juice our of it. Not as snazzy as the xbox/300zx but in some ways superior to the GC it lasts virtually forever. Did i mention the engine a freaking mess to actually repair or change. The PS3 is different, we have to break the pattern of using the same car manufacturer. The PS3 is a Lexus IS-F ringing in at about 416 hp. The difference is unlike the IS-f it is in production, costs only slightly less and for some reason the engine is really weird and finicky and unless your very skilled you'll never get anywhere near 416hp. Otherwise it's a very very nice full featured luxury car.
Have we stretched this analogy enough. Bottom line, the wii isn't that amazing without the MEMS, it doesn't perform that well but it's fun; the 360 isn't amazing either but is well executed and easy to squeeze for performance; The PS3 is amazing but really hard to get top performance out of due to weird architecture, as well as being as expensive as a Lexus IS-F.
the RROD warranty was accounted for in the last quarter. It has no basis on the results for this quarter.
I'm not going to speculate as to whether or not the console itself is making money, since I don't have a clue (and neither does anyone else here for that matter) MS said per box they were. The RROD extension means this year will not be profitable yet.
I was at a Librarian IT conference and attended a seminar on copyright. They brought up a good point that if the modern restrictions on copyright had existed at the advent of the printing press or even at the advent of the book, we would not have libraries.
Preservation and access to information is the primary concern of society. Copyright is a temporary concession granted to creators to enable wider spread of information. It has morphed into a tool to protect a particular business model. DRM is insidious because it impeded archiving attempts and the DMCA is even worse because it makes such circumvention illegal. The expiry of a copyright should also expire any protection the DMCA grants and the copy right should expire in a more sensible term then 99 years.
"Thus, no one shall do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." -Lessig
It should be notable that most creative works build on top of existing works, like how Disney drew a lot of content and inspiration from the brothers grimm. So the current culture of copyright severely impeded creativity.
So if we wish to preserve content or if we wish for more creativity, it's important to place more meaningful limitations on copyright and to view copyright for what it is intended to be not what corporate interest want it to be.
I think it's interesting that they touted higher console sales. Aren't they still losing money on each console which, in turn, would mean it was software sales were able to cover up the hardware losses and make the quarter profitable? They were making money on each unit but the RROD warranty extension and high probability of unit failure wiped that out. They may make money next year with the advent of the new 65nm chips. Maybe, maybe not since the 65nm aren't out yet and we don't know if they have issues or not.
It might not have all the bells & whistles of the newer consoles, but the PS2 is still the best bang for your gaming buck.
*cough*Dreamcast*cough* DC: library of dozens of quality games, to be had used for ~$100 USD
PS2: A library of hundreds of quality games to had new for ~$130 USD
umm... I don't think the math works out in the DC's favor.
Slashdot User "njfuzzy" Hopes to Experience Threesome with Milla Jovovich, Angelina Jolie
How it is news that someone wants to do something extremely unlikely? Milla Jovovich I can see. But Ms. Jolie has not aged well. See any non-touched up no-make up pictures of her and you wonder if thats still human.
First of all that's just wrong. Central planning is MUCH less efficient than the distributed planning we have. In the old Soviet system a relatively small number of planners in Moscow planned everything. In the US meanwhile orders of magnitude more planners associated with every business in existence did OOM more planning.
Secondly, PARC discovered a LOT of stuff that's useful. The failure of PARC was in Xerox's failure to understand or capitalize on the discoveries. Read "Fumbling The Future" for an inside look. Again, massively tangential. Government funded research != centrally planned economy, or even centrally planned economy. PARC discovered interesting almost marketable things. They didn't do very much basic research. That example is entirely irrelevant. There are something private industry does very well (wealth creation, incremental innovation, production) and some things it does really poorly (basic research, unprofitable services, high risk low return ventures). Nothing you said has anything to do with this fact, nothing you said changes the reality that basic science research has been, is going to be, and ought to be funded by the government. The notion that government funding = centrally planned is "libertarian" propaganda. The government has a lot of say on what gets fundedbut they depend on the distributed network of academics to come up with the proposals.
Sure, you can keep in touch with lots of other people online, but when the (typical) user's entire social interaction is reduced to impassioned debates, downloading pr0n, FPS games, pissing off people on the other side of the planet with sophomoric trolling, and the whole time bullshitting about who you are and what you do in RL?
But people trust your online qualification a lot less. thus you can say your a Nasa engineer but no one believes you. They'll judge you on what you say and how closely that lines up with what they believe and what they think a Nasa engineer should know.
It shifts the language too. Nuance that used to be conveyed through facial expression and body language will now be replaced by "lol" ":D" ";D" etc... Sure it isn't nearly as good but the next generation has adapted.
Ill start worrying about that when the industry starts producing deep or quality games with any regularity. -Atlus
ahh the irony of your name. I can't count the number of deep and quality games that came out for the ps2. Not legends like MGS, FF6 or Systemshock but good fun and deep games like disgea, Pucel Tactics or Ratchet and clank.
That seems a bit shortsighted. I don't know what they're basing their analysis on, but I know a lot of people who've bought Wiis recently, who probably would have told anyone who asked, "no, I don't play videogames and wouldn't be interested in buying one." And they believed it, too, until they saw a Wii and (like me), before they knew it they were standing in line at Best Buy.
They're manufacturing a market out of essentially nothing; out of people who have written off video games or have never been that interested before. I'm not sure how you quantify that market, except by churning out consoles as fast as you can and see how many of them you can sell.
Nintendo was never going to win the hardcore market anyway. They've never catered to that and I don't think that stuffing a lot more processing power in the Wii so it could render blades of grass more effectively was going to make it appeal more to the Gears of War / Halo 3 set. Given that premise, the Wii has been amazingly successful. More so if they profit off of the consoles themselves and don't need to depend too heavily on downstream game sales. Nintendo expanded the market by enticing people to spend their entertainment dollars on the wii. They didn't manufacturer it out of nothing, people have finite budgets. Money spent on a wii and game sis money not spend on other entertainment options. The wii attracted a lot of casual gamers and converted a lot of non gamers into casual gamers. NPD did studies and found casual gamers aren't willing to spend as much of their budget as hardcore gamers. In fact hardcore gamers spend so much that the total estimate dollar amount the non hardcore were willing to spend was dwarfed by what the hardcore was willing to spend. so if a hardcore is willing to spend 15x more then a casual gamer and there is less then 15 times as many casual gamers then the hardcore have more total buying power.
Nintendo always sell their consoles at a reasonable profit margin. Sony is willing to have a slimmer margin up front and Microsoft was perfectly willing to lose money.
Having an HD TV the gulf between how things look on a 360 and PS3 vs a Wii is significant. Not just more grass but a distinct shift in how detailed and open things feel. For instance in physics Zelda's collision boxes are big, boxy and noticeable compared to Halo 3 or Ratchet and Clank. This sort of breaks suspension of disbelief for me. It's notable to mention Zelda on the wii is actually a GC game ported to the Wii. Metroid may be better but I haven't had time ot pick it up. Other things are the number and intelligence of enemies, the size of levels, the complexity of the environments, the physics, the range of expression on faces, etc... More power doesn't just equal more shiny.
The Wii was a ballsy move for Nintendo, because it essentially lets Microsoft and Sony have the 'hardcore' market. But I think it's proving to be a smart one -- or at least a popular one -- judging from the sales figures. I see a lot of parallels between the Wii and the NES, including the pack-in game being one of the best (and in the long run, the defining) titles. According to NPD The hardcore market is worth more then all other market segments. So Nintendo let them have a lot.The wii is fairly old tech and thus isn't that expensive to create. Nintendo isn't in the same category as Microsoft regarding losing their shirts on consoles to attempt to make it up in software sales. In fact Sony isn't in that category either as they try to either not lose money or profit. Sega and Microsoft are the only two firms who are known to take a long term loss on console sales.
That's partially because the current generation of game developers aren't really trying to think outside the box. Instead, as you point out, they're just repackaging the same tired stuff that they've been doing since the 1980's.
What I'm looking forward to is going to be a FPS on the Wii that takes advantage of both the 'gun' and the Wii-fit board thingy. You'll aim & shoot with the gun, and move around by shifting your balance forward, back, or to the side. Or a boxing game where the hand positions are determined by the controller (and nunchuck) and the 'dance' is done via the Wii-fit board. It will be even cooler when things like impact vests let you feel when you get hit (and where you get hit) rather than just a flasing light or a change in your life bar.
I'm not saying that such a game has to be on the Wii, it's just that the Wii is the only console with an interface capable of such immersive games. Personally, I _hope_ that at least one of the two other consoles adds Wii-like controls. Oddly all yrou ideas have already been done. Metroid is the FPS, wii sports has that Boxing game, and there is a vest there exists a vest that takes the rumble signal from a console (PS2 or xbox or GC) to hit you with a rumble in the vest. They have a chair that does this too. The "movement" via wii board isn't around yet but many of the light gun namco games used a floor pedal to dodge. Actually it's not wii exclusive to have those things, but it's just neat peripherals. Like guitar hero or the games with the eye toy. Much of the "wii is revolutionary" is hype. the wii is just a bigger market now for the neat peripherals and comes with a neat peripheral by default.
Or perhaps it actually went and did something new instead of rehashing the same crap all over again this time slightly shinier. I'm just saying...
New like the power glove? Not new, but old idea done fairly well in a few titles (wii sports, zelda, metroid, mario party 8) and very poorly in others (almost every other title). The idea itself is an old one. and the 360 and ps3 brings things that aren't just "shiny".
Slashdot Mirror
IP creators do indeed deserve to be compensated however there are limits. Copyright is a recent invention meant to open up society and enable creators to receive something. The system worked as well when the creator got worked under patronage (most classical music and art was commissioned). The current system is a gigantic strain on society. The artists get much less then 10% back on all sales the consumer has to be careful not to tread on fairly arcane laws and their ownership of anything is in dispute. This system isn't working so well. The only ones winning are lawyers, and the middlemen.
Contrary to how you wish to paint me I buy all my media. Games, movies, music. I object to someone telling where and when I can use this media. Thankfully i live in Canada which to date has a saner approach to copyright. Fair use is broader, Technical protection measures such as DRM is perfectly legal to circumvent for non-infringing purposes and non-infringing is semi-well defined. I hope dearly and work hard towards ensuring Canada doesn't sign the WIPO treaty and doesn't become like America, who ironically built their industry on patents stolen from europe.
I'm sorry but I think those all apply here.
Written in 1984, it is only 24 years old- so even by the original jeffersonian copyright rules which I prefer & support the song should have another four years to go. It's not so cut and dry... you know there are so many one noted replies that seem like "golly the bad lady hurt the poor starving artist. clearly she needs ot be punished". Either the US has given up on asserting fair use and has rolled over and let the corprate interests rape them, or there is a significant number of astroturfers on slashdot.
A copyright grants a limited monopoly on distribution on certain content. Fair use exempts certain forms of distribution as allowable. The idea is that a artist/creator/agent there of is enable to collect fees in some circumstances and has control. However not all forms of distribution violate copyright. In fact the media studios have been extremely over zealous in their pursuit of their fair share. This case is likely within fair use regaurdless of what you say.
... it *was* copyright violation. Plain and simple. This doesn't come close to fitting the criteria for fair use (a lot ofFEMA: Making our president look good in comparison since 2000.
FEMA: Where bad decision make someones life better.. we hope.
FEMA: If you can't take the heat fake the press.
FEMA: When drinking becomes a profession.
FEMA: You still get more upside out of us then your executive branch.
FEMA: When disasters strikes.. ohh god your fucked.
FEMA: for great justice.
One thing that has always bugged me about closed source software. Society grants a copyright "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". However, if the source code isn't published, then society has no means by which to benefit from the software once copyright expires. Society has granted the temporary monopoly, but doesn't get the use of the work once the monopoly expires.
Closed source software is sort of like how the state of technology was before patents. The secrets of their workings died with the family/company/person who invented it. Patents may be a way to save them. I prefer Open source but the only saving grace to patents is that they do preserve knowledge. If only they weren't used in the way they are and didn't last as long.
Back to unwieldy car analogies.
the GC is the 2000 ford focus(~110 hp) The wii is like a 2008 ford focus(~130 hp). New trim, slightly more horses under the hood, and a fairly throughly redesigned but still lower end of the consumer car market. Except it's got some zany extra control scheme. So imagine if ford invented a alternate steering mechanism thats both fun, new, easy to learn, and safe.
The xbox is like 2000 Nissan 300zx (~160hp), sporty, quick, but not that exceptional. Except this 300zx sported some massive cargo space, liek 50 cubic meters via some weird dimension bending ala the tardis (it was first with a standard HD). It's follow up the xbox 360 lost the dimensional trunk but it's a 2008 350z GT-3 weighing in at 382 hp it's a monster. Easy to use, and lets say it's a dream to make soft^b^b^b^b accessories for. all of it is nice but straightforward tech but a very nice looking, performing, and driving car.
The PS2 is like 1984 Mazda RX7 only 100 hp but due to some odd engine mechanics (that rotary engine was a engineering marvel) you could actually get a lot of juice our of it. Not as snazzy as the xbox/300zx but in some ways superior to the GC it lasts virtually forever. Did i mention the engine a freaking mess to actually repair or change. The PS3 is different, we have to break the pattern of using the same car manufacturer. The PS3 is a Lexus IS-F ringing in at about 416 hp. The difference is unlike the IS-f it is in production, costs only slightly less and for some reason the engine is really weird and finicky and unless your very skilled you'll never get anywhere near 416hp. Otherwise it's a very very nice full featured luxury car.
Have we stretched this analogy enough. Bottom line, the wii isn't that amazing without the MEMS, it doesn't perform that well but it's fun; the 360 isn't amazing either but is well executed and easy to squeeze for performance; The PS3 is amazing but really hard to get top performance out of due to weird architecture, as well as being as expensive as a Lexus IS-F.
I'm not going to speculate as to whether or not the console itself is making money, since I don't have a clue (and neither does anyone else here for that matter) MS said per box they were. The RROD extension means this year will not be profitable yet.
I was at a Librarian IT conference and attended a seminar on copyright. They brought up a good point that if the modern restrictions on copyright had existed at the advent of the printing press or even at the advent of the book, we would not have libraries.
Preservation and access to information is the primary concern of society. Copyright is a temporary concession granted to creators to enable wider spread of information. It has morphed into a tool to protect a particular business model. DRM is insidious because it impeded archiving attempts and the DMCA is even worse because it makes such circumvention illegal. The expiry of a copyright should also expire any protection the DMCA grants and the copy right should expire in a more sensible term then 99 years.
"Thus, no one shall do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." -Lessig
It should be notable that most creative works build on top of existing works, like how Disney drew a lot of content and inspiration from the brothers grimm. So the current culture of copyright severely impeded creativity.
So if we wish to preserve content or if we wish for more creativity, it's important to place more meaningful limitations on copyright and to view copyright for what it is intended to be not what corporate interest want it to be.
Every Quarter Halo is released is profitable for that quarter. Still not profitable that year or over all yet. Maybe in 2008.
PS2: A library of hundreds of quality games to had new for ~$130 USD
umm... I don't think the math works out in the DC's favor.
How it is news that someone wants to do something extremely unlikely? Milla Jovovich I can see. But Ms. Jolie has not aged well. See any non-touched up no-make up pictures of her and you wonder if thats still human.
Secondly, PARC discovered a LOT of stuff that's useful. The failure of PARC was in Xerox's failure to understand or capitalize on the discoveries. Read "Fumbling The Future" for an inside look. Again, massively tangential. Government funded research != centrally planned economy, or even centrally planned economy. PARC discovered interesting almost marketable things. They didn't do very much basic research. That example is entirely irrelevant. There are something private industry does very well (wealth creation, incremental innovation, production) and some things it does really poorly (basic research, unprofitable services, high risk low return ventures). Nothing you said has anything to do with this fact, nothing you said changes the reality that basic science research has been, is going to be, and ought to be funded by the government. The notion that government funding = centrally planned is "libertarian" propaganda. The government has a lot of say on what gets fundedbut they depend on the distributed network of academics to come up with the proposals.
Problem is, it isn't face-to-face communication.
Sure, you can keep in touch with lots of other people online, but when the (typical) user's entire social interaction is reduced to impassioned debates, downloading pr0n, FPS games, pissing off people on the other side of the planet with sophomoric trolling, and the whole time bullshitting about who you are and what you do in RL?
But people trust your online qualification a lot less. thus you can say your a Nasa engineer but no one believes you. They'll judge you on what you say and how closely that lines up with what they believe and what they think a Nasa engineer should know.
It shifts the language too. Nuance that used to be conveyed through facial expression and body language will now be replaced by "lol" ":D" ";D" etc... Sure it isn't nearly as good but the next generation has adapted.
ahh the irony of your name. I can't count the number of deep and quality games that came out for the ps2. Not legends like MGS, FF6 or Systemshock but good fun and deep games like disgea, Pucel Tactics or Ratchet and clank.
They're manufacturing a market out of essentially nothing; out of people who have written off video games or have never been that interested before. I'm not sure how you quantify that market, except by churning out consoles as fast as you can and see how many of them you can sell.
Nintendo was never going to win the hardcore market anyway. They've never catered to that and I don't think that stuffing a lot more processing power in the Wii so it could render blades of grass more effectively was going to make it appeal more to the Gears of War / Halo 3 set. Given that premise, the Wii has been amazingly successful. More so if they profit off of the consoles themselves and don't need to depend too heavily on downstream game sales. Nintendo expanded the market by enticing people to spend their entertainment dollars on the wii. They didn't manufacturer it out of nothing, people have finite budgets. Money spent on a wii and game sis money not spend on other entertainment options. The wii attracted a lot of casual gamers and converted a lot of non gamers into casual gamers. NPD did studies and found casual gamers aren't willing to spend as much of their budget as hardcore gamers. In fact hardcore gamers spend so much that the total estimate dollar amount the non hardcore were willing to spend was dwarfed by what the hardcore was willing to spend. so if a hardcore is willing to spend 15x more then a casual gamer and there is less then 15 times as many casual gamers then the hardcore have more total buying power.
Nintendo always sell their consoles at a reasonable profit margin. Sony is willing to have a slimmer margin up front and Microsoft was perfectly willing to lose money.
Having an HD TV the gulf between how things look on a 360 and PS3 vs a Wii is significant. Not just more grass but a distinct shift in how detailed and open things feel. For instance in physics Zelda's collision boxes are big, boxy and noticeable compared to Halo 3 or Ratchet and Clank. This sort of breaks suspension of disbelief for me. It's notable to mention Zelda on the wii is actually a GC game ported to the Wii. Metroid may be better but I haven't had time ot pick it up. Other things are the number and intelligence of enemies, the size of levels, the complexity of the environments, the physics, the range of expression on faces, etc... More power doesn't just equal more shiny.
You're sure you weren't playing the Cube version of Zelda? The Cube version wasn't widescreen. The Wii version was.
I'm certain a standard sized disk with the wii logo printed on it isn't the GC version.
What I'm looking forward to is going to be a FPS on the Wii that takes advantage of both the 'gun' and the Wii-fit board thingy. You'll aim & shoot with the gun, and move around by shifting your balance forward, back, or to the side. Or a boxing game where the hand positions are determined by the controller (and nunchuck) and the 'dance' is done via the Wii-fit board. It will be even cooler when things like impact vests let you feel when you get hit (and where you get hit) rather than just a flasing light or a change in your life bar.
I'm not saying that such a game has to be on the Wii, it's just that the Wii is the only console with an interface capable of such immersive games. Personally, I _hope_ that at least one of the two other consoles adds Wii-like controls. Oddly all yrou ideas have already been done. Metroid is the FPS, wii sports has that Boxing game, and there is a vest there exists a vest that takes the rumble signal from a console (PS2 or xbox or GC) to hit you with a rumble in the vest. They have a chair that does this too. The "movement" via wii board isn't around yet but many of the light gun namco games used a floor pedal to dodge. Actually it's not wii exclusive to have those things, but it's just neat peripherals. Like guitar hero or the games with the eye toy. Much of the "wii is revolutionary" is hype. the wii is just a bigger market now for the neat peripherals and comes with a neat peripheral by default.
Or perhaps it actually went and did something new instead of rehashing the same crap all over again this time slightly shinier. I'm just saying...
New like the power glove? Not new, but old idea done fairly well in a few titles (wii sports, zelda, metroid, mario party 8) and very poorly in others (almost every other title). The idea itself is an old one. and the 360 and ps3 brings things that aren't just "shiny".