"How often does one play a portable system for more than four hours at a time?"
Depends on the game. If there aren't any games that would make you want to play like that, why would you want the system to begin with? Or at least one with such a price tag?
"The PSP also plays MP3s. The cost of a DS and an MP3 may cost more."
People who want an MP3 player have one already (I believe they're called "iPods"). How many people outside of Japan bought a PS2 because they wanted the DVD player?
(Better still, should we expect the same kind of quality in the PSP's MP3 player as we've come to expect from the PS2's DVD player?)
(Better better yet, you could save even more money and get an Ngage, which has an MP3 player and cell phone capabilities.)
"Otherwise you'd know the discs the PSP uses come in a protective case"
Read carefully: he was referring to the drive mechanism and the skipping and stuttering they're known to do if you don't massively buffer the thing (physically and logically). The laser doesn't get jarred in a chip-based system.
"one thing that really held me back from getting a DS thus far is my large collection of classic Gameboy games"
WTF? Do you have a ceremonial hammer you smash your old consoles with whenever you get a new one? Is your SP going to vanish into thin air the moment you get your receipt for your DS from the store clerk? Or do people actually go through those "Trade in your old system and save $0.02!" deals at EB?
The DS isn't supposed to replace or compete with the GBA, it's supposed to be "something else."
"By contrast, when American federalization occured, there was already well established and popular trans-state political movements and proto-parties, such as Federalists, etc."
Actually, no. In fact, institutions like the US Senate and Electoral College were designed and intended to hinder interstate political efforts, using proxy elections to remove the direct decision of office-holders from the people at large in the hopes that a smaller electoral body would be less likely to be swayed by party politics. We only see national parties truly gain a foothold in the federal government outside the House of Representatives a few election cycles later, when the national parties figure out how to short-circuit the Electoral College with candidates for each running on the sole platform of "Vote for me and I'll vote for $party!" instead of their own merits. The also used the same idea to a lesser extent with state legislature candidates who would later decide on US Senators, at least until the Seventeenth Amendment got rid of the middlemen altogether.
(Of course, with the wonders of modern statistics allowing gerrymandering on a block-by-block scale, it's now the House seats that the state legislatures decide every ten years.)
At any rate, these institutions were proposed for the US Constitution to soothe those people who wanted more a federation and less a republic, with the original resulting document compromising with a little bit of both. It's probably sentiments like that which inspired the creation of the Council of Ministers to begin with. Personally, speaking from the US, I'd rather go back to a form of government that hinders interstate political movements. Care to trade?
"Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL."
To throw up a red flag if it looks like some individuals voted more than once.
"Why you would have something like a memory contraint AT ALL in these days of cheaper-than-dirt storage."
Lowest bidder.
"Why you would have either or both of A and B if you wanted a fair election."
It's not a fair election they're after, it's the appearance of a fair election that really counts. After Florida 2000, electronic voting appeared to be more fair, so viola.
"D'you think it's because North Carolina was John Edwards' home state, mebbe"
And this has what exactly to do with a state office? Besides, North Carolina is a Southern state and nobody should be surprised by the ~30% margin Bush/Cheney won. Sure, it's not quite South Carolina, but it sure as hell ain't Massachusetts either.
"but rather to create an Explorer plug-in that will install itself through the security holes that Microsoft has so thoughtfully installed in their software"
Proprietary only in the sense that they had different pinouts on their ROM chips. In many ways it's not much different than trying to draw a line between the media of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. What Sony is trying to do with the PSP, on the other hand, is pretty far removed from all other iterations of optical media: you're not going to be able to toss it in your DVD+/-RW drive and expect to be able to read it.
"he was confrontational about it and suggested that his work contradicted Catholicism and the Bible. "
No, he didn't contradict anything in the Bible, only the "work" of Aristotle, work that, for some reason, the Vatican accepted as part of Catholicism outside of the Bible.
Not to mention that he was supporting the findings of Copernicus, someone who did not take a "confrontational" view with the Church (being a member of the clergy himself and publishing only on his deathbed). After all, Galileo specifically got in trouble because he was supporting Copernicus' model.
"Second, the Catholic Church admits that it is not an expert or authority on science"
Except when it comes to contraception and/or preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease? If the Church doesn't think its an expert or authority on science, where exactly does it get off telling us that condoms don't prevent the spread of AIDS?
"Third, the Church did not teach or hold pre-Gallilean notions until 1992."
"An atheist just believes in one less god than you do."
Note you used the word "believes." Atheism still requires an act of faith, because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of any diety.
"If the cost of fusion just stays constant, fusion will eventually win out."
It doesn't work that way. Fusion electricity isn't competing with other sources of electricity, it is competing with the price of running the plant. As it stands now, a controlled fusion reaction generally requires more power than it produces, a net energy loss. Simply increasing the price of other forms of electricity doens't magically make the efficiency of a fusion reactor climb above 0.
"they tend to get raplaced by newer models within a year or so that don't play any of your old games."
The Game Boy Color plays four-color Game Boy games.
The Game Boy Advance plays Game Boy Color and four-color Game Boy games.
The Game Boy Advance SP isn't even a new system per se.
The Nintendo DS plays Game Boy Advance games, but does not play Game Boy Color or four-color Game Boy games. But this is because Nintendo has repeatedly stated that the DS is not intended to replace the Game Boy Advance, referring to the DS as their "third pillar." The idea seems to be to try doing something new in handhelds without sacrificing Nintendo's bread-and-butter that is the Game Boy line. After all, this is the "Nintendo DS," not the "Nintendo Game Boy DS."
Personally, at this point I don't think even Nintendo themselves could unseat the Game Boy line as the top of the food chain, but it seems their intent is to not even try to.
The thing that confuses me about your comment, though, is that the Game Boy is really the only handheld console that has been around long enough for a new hardware iteration to come out. The Lynx, Game Gear, Tiger.com, NeoGeo Pocket Color (among others) all died in their first generation. The only other handheld I can think of that made it into a second iteration was the WonderSwan, and even then the WonderSwan Color played older b/w WonderSwan games. So where are you finding this "tendancy" you're talking about?
"but unlike a handheld the new one still plays your old games"
You sound like someone who doesn't know the joys of getting XP to play a DOS game well, let alone the tricker problem of some of the really old games (I never had to install an app to slow down my GBA's processor to play Metroid II).
"with one excaption, sony's handheld plays all those old ps1 games that you already have,"
As others have pointed out, no, it doesn't. Sony is trying their hand at making a new proprietary format for their PSP (as if they didn't learn anything from the MiniDisc), which means the PSP will only be able to read PSP software, and the PSP will be the only device able to read PSP software (unless they include that functionality in the PS3).
With Sony paying for a new, proprietary media and Nintendo using an older standard that may end up being less expensive to produce, it's almost as if we're about to see a reverse of what happened back when the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation were competing with each other.
"now it might be worth it with such a large and *inexpensive* game base, unlike nintendo"
New GBA cartridges tend to be $30. DS cartridges seem to be starting between $30 and $40, but I don't think it will be long before they too are consistently around $30 (after all, Nintendo has been working on cartridge technology for a very long time now). PlayStation 2 games, using relatively inexpensive and widely-available media like CDs and DVDs, usually sell new between $40 and $50. Sony seems to expect to get similar performance out of a PSP as they get out of a PS2 (if not equal), but they will not be using such off-the-shelf media technologies like CDs or DVDs or even ROM chips. At this point, I don't think Sony will be able to publish and sell PSP games at the same price as DS games without taking a loss, at least not until this new media catches on, which would require the PSP catching on. So will they be taking losses on both hardware and software at the same time?
"Jesus fuck, people, would it kill you to stick "Nintendo" somewhere in the summary text?"
I wonder if you complained when they stopped mentioning Apple in every story about the iPod...
"The hell makes you think that "DS" is to special and unique a term that even an average slashdot reader would immediately know what it is?"
Um... perhaps the subject of the article? The fact that these things are selling like hotcakes, something that doesn't happen if people don't know anything about it? One would think that your hypothetical slashdot reader should know more than, say, your average Wal-Mart electronics employee, who by now is sick of being asked about when they'll get the next shipment.
If you don't know more about electronics than the average retail wage slave, you're at the wrong website.
"I'm sure there's a subset of nintendo geeks who will find this instantly obvious, but could you please make things clear to the rest of it?"
Again, look at the article. If it was just "Nintendo geeks," the DS would be selling like the GameCube, not the Game Boy Advance.
"It'd really streamline my process of not caring."
"As technology increases and people become more tech-savvy, i think people start to lose more brand loyalty and start going to the items that have the features they want."
Then explain the continued profits of AOL.
At any rate, we're not talking about PCs or even palmtops, these are game consoles. People don't look for features, they look for games. The entire purpose of the device is to play games and, no matter what bells and whistles a device comes with, if it doesn't play the games people want to play then people simply won't buy it.
No, it stands for "DS." The box says "Nintendo DS," the software says "for use on the Nitnendo DS," Nintendo's website has information on the "Nintendo DS." How and why Nintendo came to choose those two particular letters doesn't really matter any more because the name is the two letters, much like the "real" name of the Game Boy Advance SP really is "Game Boy Advance SP" with no explaination of "SP" offered or warranted.
Think of it like "KFC," only moreso. Or the fact that I subscribe to "DirecTV" and not "DirecTelevion."
Slashdot Mirror
And what's the DS's pack-in game again?
"Now watch this post get modded down to -5 a$$hole."
More like "-5 Republican." Gotta love party politics.
"Game cards (Who wants to spend extra money on a memory card, and who wants to carry a bunch of disks in their pocket?"
Am I the only one who's gotten by just fine on one save card per system?
Still, it'd be nice if the console came with some memory built-in, like the Sega CD...
"How often does one play a portable system for more than four hours at a time?"
Depends on the game. If there aren't any games that would make you want to play like that, why would you want the system to begin with? Or at least one with such a price tag?
"The PSP also plays MP3s. The cost of a DS and an MP3 may cost more."
People who want an MP3 player have one already (I believe they're called "iPods"). How many people outside of Japan bought a PS2 because they wanted the DVD player?
(Better still, should we expect the same kind of quality in the PSP's MP3 player as we've come to expect from the PS2's DVD player?)
(Better better yet, you could save even more money and get an Ngage, which has an MP3 player and cell phone capabilities.)
"Otherwise you'd know the discs the PSP uses come in a protective case"
Read carefully: he was referring to the drive mechanism and the skipping and stuttering they're known to do if you don't massively buffer the thing (physically and logically). The laser doesn't get jarred in a chip-based system.
"one thing that really held me back from getting a DS thus far is my large collection of classic Gameboy games"
WTF? Do you have a ceremonial hammer you smash your old consoles with whenever you get a new one? Is your SP going to vanish into thin air the moment you get your receipt for your DS from the store clerk? Or do people actually go through those "Trade in your old system and save $0.02!" deals at EB?
The DS isn't supposed to replace or compete with the GBA, it's supposed to be "something else."
"bandwidth costs money."
:)
Bah, it's only those funny-looking euro notes. It's not like it's real money or anything...
"By contrast, when American federalization occured, there was already well established and popular trans-state political movements and proto-parties, such as Federalists, etc."
Actually, no. In fact, institutions like the US Senate and Electoral College were designed and intended to hinder interstate political efforts, using proxy elections to remove the direct decision of office-holders from the people at large in the hopes that a smaller electoral body would be less likely to be swayed by party politics. We only see national parties truly gain a foothold in the federal government outside the House of Representatives a few election cycles later, when the national parties figure out how to short-circuit the Electoral College with candidates for each running on the sole platform of "Vote for me and I'll vote for $party!" instead of their own merits. The also used the same idea to a lesser extent with state legislature candidates who would later decide on US Senators, at least until the Seventeenth Amendment got rid of the middlemen altogether.
(Of course, with the wonders of modern statistics allowing gerrymandering on a block-by-block scale, it's now the House seats that the state legislatures decide every ten years.)
At any rate, these institutions were proposed for the US Constitution to soothe those people who wanted more a federation and less a republic, with the original resulting document compromising with a little bit of both. It's probably sentiments like that which inspired the creation of the Council of Ministers to begin with. Personally, speaking from the US, I'd rather go back to a form of government that hinders interstate political movements. Care to trade?
"Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL."
To throw up a red flag if it looks like some individuals voted more than once.
"Why you would have something like a memory contraint AT ALL in these days of cheaper-than-dirt storage."
Lowest bidder.
"Why you would have either or both of A and B if you wanted a fair election."
It's not a fair election they're after, it's the appearance of a fair election that really counts. After Florida 2000, electronic voting appeared to be more fair, so viola.
"D'you think it's because North Carolina was John Edwards' home state, mebbe"
And this has what exactly to do with a state office? Besides, North Carolina is a Southern state and nobody should be surprised by the ~30% margin Bush/Cheney won. Sure, it's not quite South Carolina, but it sure as hell ain't Massachusetts either.
"Why don't they just burn money"
They have to do something with all the money they saved laying their employees...
"but rather to create an Explorer plug-in that will install itself through the security holes that Microsoft has so thoughtfully installed in their software"
A web-browser written entirely in ActiveX?
My head hurts.
"to begin a position as chancellor of Louisiana State University"
Only a short drive away from Michoud!
Let the conspiracy theorists chew on that one for a while.
No, this is a site for American nerds. 500.67 degrees Rankine.
Personally, I'd rather have a meteor shower than a hailstorm.
GOTO
Whether or not your optical drive can read it is an indiciation of how far removed from off-the-shelf standards the media is.
Proprietary only in the sense that they had different pinouts on their ROM chips. In many ways it's not much different than trying to draw a line between the media of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. What Sony is trying to do with the PSP, on the other hand, is pretty far removed from all other iterations of optical media: you're not going to be able to toss it in your DVD+/-RW drive and expect to be able to read it.
"How much effort do you expend in actively disbelieving the Tooth Fairy?"
The agnostic troll in me wants to point out that there's little empirical evidence catagorically disproving the existance of a tooth fairy.
"he was confrontational about it and suggested that his work contradicted Catholicism and the Bible. "
No, he didn't contradict anything in the Bible, only the "work" of Aristotle, work that, for some reason, the Vatican accepted as part of Catholicism outside of the Bible.
Not to mention that he was supporting the findings of Copernicus, someone who did not take a "confrontational" view with the Church (being a member of the clergy himself and publishing only on his deathbed). After all, Galileo specifically got in trouble because he was supporting Copernicus' model.
"Second, the Catholic Church admits that it is not an expert or authority on science"
Except when it comes to contraception and/or preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease? If the Church doesn't think its an expert or authority on science, where exactly does it get off telling us that condoms don't prevent the spread of AIDS?
"Third, the Church did not teach or hold pre-Gallilean notions until 1992."
So when did they stop?
"An atheist just believes in one less god than you do."
Note you used the word "believes." Atheism still requires an act of faith, because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of any diety.
"If the cost of fusion just stays constant, fusion will eventually win out."
It doesn't work that way. Fusion electricity isn't competing with other sources of electricity, it is competing with the price of running the plant. As it stands now, a controlled fusion reaction generally requires more power than it produces, a net energy loss. Simply increasing the price of other forms of electricity doens't magically make the efficiency of a fusion reactor climb above 0.
"they tend to get raplaced by newer models within a year or so that don't play any of your old games."
The Game Boy Color plays four-color Game Boy games.
The Game Boy Advance plays Game Boy Color and four-color Game Boy games.
The Game Boy Advance SP isn't even a new system per se.
The Nintendo DS plays Game Boy Advance games, but does not play Game Boy Color or four-color Game Boy games. But this is because Nintendo has repeatedly stated that the DS is not intended to replace the Game Boy Advance, referring to the DS as their "third pillar." The idea seems to be to try doing something new in handhelds without sacrificing Nintendo's bread-and-butter that is the Game Boy line. After all, this is the "Nintendo DS," not the "Nintendo Game Boy DS."
Personally, at this point I don't think even Nintendo themselves could unseat the Game Boy line as the top of the food chain, but it seems their intent is to not even try to.
The thing that confuses me about your comment, though, is that the Game Boy is really the only handheld console that has been around long enough for a new hardware iteration to come out. The Lynx, Game Gear, Tiger.com, NeoGeo Pocket Color (among others) all died in their first generation. The only other handheld I can think of that made it into a second iteration was the WonderSwan, and even then the WonderSwan Color played older b/w WonderSwan games. So where are you finding this "tendancy" you're talking about?
"but unlike a handheld the new one still plays your old games"
You sound like someone who doesn't know the joys of getting XP to play a DOS game well, let alone the tricker problem of some of the really old games (I never had to install an app to slow down my GBA's processor to play Metroid II).
"with one excaption, sony's handheld plays all those old ps1 games that you already have,"
As others have pointed out, no, it doesn't. Sony is trying their hand at making a new proprietary format for their PSP (as if they didn't learn anything from the MiniDisc), which means the PSP will only be able to read PSP software, and the PSP will be the only device able to read PSP software (unless they include that functionality in the PS3).
With Sony paying for a new, proprietary media and Nintendo using an older standard that may end up being less expensive to produce, it's almost as if we're about to see a reverse of what happened back when the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation were competing with each other.
"now it might be worth it with such a large and *inexpensive* game base, unlike nintendo"
New GBA cartridges tend to be $30. DS cartridges seem to be starting between $30 and $40, but I don't think it will be long before they too are consistently around $30 (after all, Nintendo has been working on cartridge technology for a very long time now). PlayStation 2 games, using relatively inexpensive and widely-available media like CDs and DVDs, usually sell new between $40 and $50. Sony seems to expect to get similar performance out of a PSP as they get out of a PS2 (if not equal), but they will not be using such off-the-shelf media technologies like CDs or DVDs or even ROM chips. At this point, I don't think Sony will be able to publish and sell PSP games at the same price as DS games without taking a loss, at least not until this new media catches on, which would require the PSP catching on. So will they be taking losses on both hardware and software at the same time?
"Jesus fuck, people, would it kill you to stick "Nintendo" somewhere in the summary text?"
I wonder if you complained when they stopped mentioning Apple in every story about the iPod...
"The hell makes you think that "DS" is to special and unique a term that even an average slashdot reader would immediately know what it is?"
Um... perhaps the subject of the article? The fact that these things are selling like hotcakes, something that doesn't happen if people don't know anything about it? One would think that your hypothetical slashdot reader should know more than, say, your average Wal-Mart electronics employee, who by now is sick of being asked about when they'll get the next shipment.
If you don't know more about electronics than the average retail wage slave, you're at the wrong website.
"I'm sure there's a subset of nintendo geeks who will find this instantly obvious, but could you please make things clear to the rest of it?"
Again, look at the article. If it was just "Nintendo geeks," the DS would be selling like the GameCube, not the Game Boy Advance.
"It'd really streamline my process of not caring."
The truly apathetic don't bother posting.
"Guess I missed that memo when it came out last week"
Actually, last week's memo stated that "only old people in Korea" was the new "In Soviet Russia."
I'm afraid to wonder what the new trolling favorite will be next week...
"As technology increases and people become more tech-savvy, i think people start to lose more brand loyalty and start going to the items that have the features they want."
Then explain the continued profits of AOL.
At any rate, we're not talking about PCs or even palmtops, these are game consoles. People don't look for features, they look for games. The entire purpose of the device is to play games and, no matter what bells and whistles a device comes with, if it doesn't play the games people want to play then people simply won't buy it.
No, it stands for "DS." The box says "Nintendo DS," the software says "for use on the Nitnendo DS," Nintendo's website has information on the "Nintendo DS." How and why Nintendo came to choose those two particular letters doesn't really matter any more because the name is the two letters, much like the "real" name of the Game Boy Advance SP really is "Game Boy Advance SP" with no explaination of "SP" offered or warranted.
Think of it like "KFC," only moreso. Or the fact that I subscribe to "DirecTV" and not "DirecTelevion."