I would hope Microsoft does if they ever intend to break even from this financial nightmare. We're not talking about a boat trailer here; games that rely too heavily on a system add-on will be doomed to the same fate as Sega CD games, and the last thing they need is to have their sales hampered by geography as well as lackluster sales.
"I'd hazard a guess that most people that encode with ogg-vorbis do a better ripping and encoding job, though."
Only because right now you'd have to know a thing or two about the intricacies of digital music to have ever heard the phrase "ogg vorbis." If a big on-line music player were to standardize on this format instead of MP3 and it too becomes the common man's format, you can be sure the quality of ogg files will go down just as well.
"I don't know about letters, but it costs a lot to ship freight to Guam"
I specifically said "letters" instead of "parcels." Their monopoly only applies to non-expedited letter delivery (although their Express Mail rates are also flat). If it weighs more than a pound, price varies with destination.
"And just who <COUGH!>CBDTPA</COUGH!> will oversee <COUGH!>DMCA</COUGH!> the legislature? <COUGH!>SBCTEA</COUGH!>"
Why, the fine media companies that have kept us abreast of the members of Congress they've paid for instead of feeding us more American Idle, of couse!
"but since I've still not taken the required math classes to make use of one..."
While most do what can be done by a $20 scientific calculator (logarithms, trigonometric functions, etc), at their heart sliderules are for multiplication and division.
"If you're one of the 8% or so of people out there in the US with no job, that's the only kind of federal tax cut you should be looking for, because it's the only kind that's likely to have any chance of helping you."
While I generally agree with you, I'd like to play devil's advocate here and say two words: Herbert Hoover.
Learning how to use a sliderule gives you a much better grasp of logarithms and what you can do with them. Knowing how to use a sliderule (or at least how one works) will help you with higher math classes. Now if there were only such an easy way to learn the trigonometric identities...
Cursive, on the other hand, is... cursive. It's designed to help people write faster (for those that can do it neatly), but it's not like it gives you any insight to the English language.
"(Not that I would defend this particular Senator, but he didn't write the rules that gave away the store to the incumbants)"
For the kind of money he earns (not even counting his "pension" if/when he leaves or gets kicked out), he damned well should! After all, he's the one voting on it.
"and rural telephone companies (45 percent), which might otherwise end up paying more for telephone service than city dwellers."
That's all well and good on paper, but you forget who we're talking about here: The Baby Bells. Part of giving the Baby Bells their existing local monopolies was with the promise that rural customers would have the same services as urban dwellers. It's the same philosophy behind the USPS' monopoly on first class letter delivery: their monopoly generates enough income to let them charge the same low price to deliver a letter to someone in Guam as they do to someone in Manhattan.
The Baby Bells already have more than enough government incentive to improve rural (and urban!) telephone service. They have local monopolies and they have telephone use taxes to help them. But they still piss and moan about their "lack" of money simply because they want more money (gotta keep them stockholders happy, donchaknow). So they get their boys Billy Tauzin and Michael Powell to push this crap through, because politicians are cheaper than capitalism.
Dammit, I wouldn't have a problem with President Bush if it weren't for some of his appointees. And I'm not impressed with the Democrat hopefuls and my knee doesn't jerk enough for most third parties (yes, that includes the Libertarians).
"Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
They got it backwards. I'll be 26 in July, and I got started with kebyards because I've never had neat handwriting and still don't seem to be able to hold a pen or pencil "correctly," no matter how much various teachers tried. Hell, I even remember the silly wire guide one of my teachers had me put my pencil into to teach me how to do it "properly." To this day my hand cramps up if I have to write for more than a minute or two. I knew that, if I ever wanted to communicate on paper clearly, I should use the typewriter and later the computer.
So I've never been a big fan of pen or pencil. It's not for a lack of manual dexterity, because I can type around 70 WPM (80+ on some days). And my poor handwriting was about the only thing my English teachers had to complain about. I'd be more concerned with avoiding sentence fragments and improper comma use than I am with the "dying" art of penmanship. Sure, I probably have one or two grammatical errors in this post, but it's easier to read "1337" than my handwriting.
At any rate, these cursive Nazis ("script kiddies?") should be happy with the popluartity of QWERTY and ten-key. While only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art, only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art. Think of what Kodak has done for the world of painting, both weeding out most of the disinterested amatures and letting those still in the art to explore new ideas, letting the camera take over the grunt work. And I'm sure most domestic horses live a happier life now that more riders want to ride instead of need to ride. Keyboards aren't turning handwriting into a dying art, they're turning into an art.
Crystal Chronicles will still require you to look at the screen from time to time. IMO, the better solution is as a controller for the GCN Game Boy Player.
"This is called an incentive- yes, an incentive to get you to spend your money on XBox Live."
But you're lumping the people who won't spend the money on Xbox Live with the people who can't spend money on Xbox Live. Why should the people who happen to live too far away from their ISP be marginalized?
"If you make unlockables, you should make a way for people w/o X-Box live (like those w/o broadband) to get them."
I'm a little torn myself. One of their competitors (and my personal favorite), Nintendo, has games with "unlockables" that involve plugging in a Game Boy Advance, sometimes with an associated GBA game. While I of course have a GBA, I'm sure there are people out there that have a GCN but no GBA (probably similar to the number of people who own a Virtual Boy, but bear with me) that aren't able to, say, play the original Metroid game in Metroid Prime. The packaging doesn't announce this (simply a vague reference to "links to Metroid Fusion"), and so it's also possible to buy Metroid Prime without knowing this, but should Nintendo really make it possible to unlock GCN game features without a GBA?
Part of me wants to say that the customer more or less knew what he was getting into when he bought the product. And the game is complete and useable in and of itself without this "bonus" map. Should the publishers be obligated to their customers that don't spend the extra money on other products to unlock these features? Should Devastator only have been sold as a set instead of six individual Constructicons with an "unlockable feature?"
Right now I'm leaning towards letting Xbox players have this without broadband, but only because there's a difference between being able to buy a GBA/Transformers/etc. and being able to buy broadband.
"If an election were to be held for the president today, and Ms.Clinton sided with the P2P sentiments, she's assured of atleast 43 million American votes!"
"If they don't sell a game in one market, they still make the money off that game,"
But if that market is Europe, you need to include VAT. Europeans importing games from North America generally don't pay that VAT, but with the way things worth with the EU, Nintendo themselves will be blamed for it. The EU itself is already seriously considering holding on-line merchants outside of the EU accountable for collecting VAT (!), so how much longer do you think it will be before the EU starts holding NOE accountable for VAT on unauthorized imports? And that's just one of the ways that the cost of doing business (at least with video games) in Europe is higher than in either Japan or North America. There's also the money spent on making localized versions of games that don't violate local anti-speech laws (another area in which Europe may hold foreign publishers accountable for the actions of their own citizens).
Nintendo doesn't strike me as being all that concerned about import games. If they were, they'd have meaningful regional lock-outs in their games, which is something I don't believe they've ever done (short of NTSC/PAL incompatabilities). Notice mention of the lack of regional lock-outs in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. This isn't about import games in general, this is about import games in Europe in particular.
Slashdot Mirror
"In other words, who cares?"
I would hope Microsoft does if they ever intend to break even from this financial nightmare. We're not talking about a boat trailer here; games that rely too heavily on a system add-on will be doomed to the same fate as Sega CD games, and the last thing they need is to have their sales hampered by geography as well as lackluster sales.
"I'd hazard a guess that most people that encode with ogg-vorbis do a better ripping and encoding job, though."
Only because right now you'd have to know a thing or two about the intricacies of digital music to have ever heard the phrase "ogg vorbis." If a big on-line music player were to standardize on this format instead of MP3 and it too becomes the common man's format, you can be sure the quality of ogg files will go down just as well.
"I don't know about letters, but it costs a lot to ship freight to Guam"
I specifically said "letters" instead of "parcels." Their monopoly only applies to non-expedited letter delivery (although their Express Mail rates are also flat). If it weighs more than a pound, price varies with destination.
You forget:
3. Cooling fans don't work in a vacuum
4. Heat dissipation and radiation shielding don't marry well.
"The loss of a 'common law' would not be disastrous with citizen input, without it a legal hell."
Have you looked at voter turn-out lately? Especially in state and local elections?
"And just who <COUGH!>CBDTPA</COUGH!> will oversee <COUGH!>DMCA</COUGH!> the legislature? <COUGH!>SBCTEA</COUGH!>"
Why, the fine media companies that have kept us abreast of the members of Congress they've paid for instead of feeding us more American Idle, of couse!
(spelling pun intended)
"but since I've still not taken the required math classes to make use of one..."
While most do what can be done by a $20 scientific calculator (logarithms, trigonometric functions, etc), at their heart sliderules are for multiplication and division.
So exactly what math classes have you taken?
"If you're one of the 8% or so of people out there in the US with no job, that's the only kind of federal tax cut you should be looking for, because it's the only kind that's likely to have any chance of helping you."
While I generally agree with you, I'd like to play devil's advocate here and say two words: Herbert Hoover.
Learning how to use a sliderule gives you a much better grasp of logarithms and what you can do with them. Knowing how to use a sliderule (or at least how one works) will help you with higher math classes. Now if there were only such an easy way to learn the trigonometric identities...
Cursive, on the other hand, is... cursive. It's designed to help people write faster (for those that can do it neatly), but it's not like it gives you any insight to the English language.
"(Not that I would defend this particular Senator, but he didn't write the rules that gave away the store to the incumbants)"
For the kind of money he earns (not even counting his "pension" if/when he leaves or gets kicked out), he damned well should! After all, he's the one voting on it.
"and rural telephone companies (45 percent), which might otherwise end up paying more for telephone service than city dwellers."
That's all well and good on paper, but you forget who we're talking about here: The Baby Bells. Part of giving the Baby Bells their existing local monopolies was with the promise that rural customers would have the same services as urban dwellers. It's the same philosophy behind the USPS' monopoly on first class letter delivery: their monopoly generates enough income to let them charge the same low price to deliver a letter to someone in Guam as they do to someone in Manhattan.
The Baby Bells already have more than enough government incentive to improve rural (and urban!) telephone service. They have local monopolies and they have telephone use taxes to help them. But they still piss and moan about their "lack" of money simply because they want more money (gotta keep them stockholders happy, donchaknow). So they get their boys Billy Tauzin and Michael Powell to push this crap through, because politicians are cheaper than capitalism.
Dammit, I wouldn't have a problem with President Bush if it weren't for some of his appointees. And I'm not impressed with the Democrat hopefuls and my knee doesn't jerk enough for most third parties (yes, that includes the Libertarians).
"Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
They got it backwards. I'll be 26 in July, and I got started with kebyards because I've never had neat handwriting and still don't seem to be able to hold a pen or pencil "correctly," no matter how much various teachers tried. Hell, I even remember the silly wire guide one of my teachers had me put my pencil into to teach me how to do it "properly." To this day my hand cramps up if I have to write for more than a minute or two. I knew that, if I ever wanted to communicate on paper clearly, I should use the typewriter and later the computer.
So I've never been a big fan of pen or pencil. It's not for a lack of manual dexterity, because I can type around 70 WPM (80+ on some days). And my poor handwriting was about the only thing my English teachers had to complain about. I'd be more concerned with avoiding sentence fragments and improper comma use than I am with the "dying" art of penmanship. Sure, I probably have one or two grammatical errors in this post, but it's easier to read "1337" than my handwriting.
At any rate, these cursive Nazis ("script kiddies?") should be happy with the popluartity of QWERTY and ten-key. While only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art, only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art. Think of what Kodak has done for the world of painting, both weeding out most of the disinterested amatures and letting those still in the art to explore new ideas, letting the camera take over the grunt work. And I'm sure most domestic horses live a happier life now that more riders want to ride instead of need to ride. Keyboards aren't turning handwriting into a dying art, they're turning into an art.
You also get to play Metroid Fusion months before stingy pessimists.
Crystal Chronicles will still require you to look at the screen from time to time. IMO, the better solution is as a controller for the GCN Game Boy Player.
I'd rather deal with people who don't know how to use a colon (outside of a DOS prompt) than those who don't know that numbers are not letters.
Why? It's not like there are more than six people who own a GCN but do not own a GBA. This ain't the Sega CD we're talking about.
I doubt Nintendo cares that much. A buck is a buck.
"Or you could recharge the SP's battery when it drains."
Kinda makes you wonder how he handles cordless phones...
"This is called an incentive- yes, an incentive to get you to spend your money on XBox Live."
But you're lumping the people who won't spend the money on Xbox Live with the people who can't spend money on Xbox Live. Why should the people who happen to live too far away from their ISP be marginalized?
"Agree about the $9.95 headphone jack--it should have been included, and is a bit awkward when plugged in."
Nintendo's argument was that a minority of players used it, so it didn't make sense wasting precious space on the plug.
On the other hand, I don't remember there being quite so many complaints when the original GBA was published without a DC in socket.
"If you make unlockables, you should make a way for people w/o X-Box live (like those w/o broadband) to get them."
I'm a little torn myself. One of their competitors (and my personal favorite), Nintendo, has games with "unlockables" that involve plugging in a Game Boy Advance, sometimes with an associated GBA game. While I of course have a GBA, I'm sure there are people out there that have a GCN but no GBA (probably similar to the number of people who own a Virtual Boy, but bear with me) that aren't able to, say, play the original Metroid game in Metroid Prime. The packaging doesn't announce this (simply a vague reference to "links to Metroid Fusion"), and so it's also possible to buy Metroid Prime without knowing this, but should Nintendo really make it possible to unlock GCN game features without a GBA?
Part of me wants to say that the customer more or less knew what he was getting into when he bought the product. And the game is complete and useable in and of itself without this "bonus" map. Should the publishers be obligated to their customers that don't spend the extra money on other products to unlock these features? Should Devastator only have been sold as a set instead of six individual Constructicons with an "unlockable feature?"
Right now I'm leaning towards letting Xbox players have this without broadband, but only because there's a difference between being able to buy a GBA/Transformers/etc. and being able to buy broadband.
You're assming that P2P users
- Are old enough to vote
- Are registered to vote
- Can be bothered to vote
I wouldn't hold my breath."Make sure that all your assets are actually owned by someone you trust (your SO, spouse, sibling, etc.).
Because if it weren't totally bass-ackwards, it wouldn't be Microsoft.
"Make sure that all your assets are actually owned by someone you trust (your SO, spouse, sibling, etc.)."
Except that, if a person is this shifty to begin with, how reliable can their family/friends be?
"If they don't sell a game in one market, they still make the money off that game,"
But if that market is Europe, you need to include VAT. Europeans importing games from North America generally don't pay that VAT, but with the way things worth with the EU, Nintendo themselves will be blamed for it. The EU itself is already seriously considering holding on-line merchants outside of the EU accountable for collecting VAT (!), so how much longer do you think it will be before the EU starts holding NOE accountable for VAT on unauthorized imports? And that's just one of the ways that the cost of doing business (at least with video games) in Europe is higher than in either Japan or North America. There's also the money spent on making localized versions of games that don't violate local anti-speech laws (another area in which Europe may hold foreign publishers accountable for the actions of their own citizens).
Nintendo doesn't strike me as being all that concerned about import games. If they were, they'd have meaningful regional lock-outs in their games, which is something I don't believe they've ever done (short of NTSC/PAL incompatabilities). Notice mention of the lack of regional lock-outs in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. This isn't about import games in general, this is about import games in Europe in particular.