"This generation of console wars is over as far as first place is concerned. The number one system is always going to attract developers and have plenty of good games."
If you looked at the console shipping figures of 1992 (a year after the release of the SNES in North America), you'd be saying that the 16-bit console wars are "over," with Sega being the clear winner.
GameCube numbers may be down in North America and Japan, but they are growing quickly. More quickly than Sony's numbers. They may catch up to Sony this year.
Mega Man 6 and I believe 5 were both released for the NES well after the launch of the (non-backwards-compatable) SNES. IIRC, there were a number of other high-profile games released for the NES during the SNES' life-cycle.
"Bah, for years us gamers have been asking for a backlit system like the Gamegear"
Maybe you have, but I haven't. I've actually used a Game Gear and I remember how it gobbled up batteries because of its backlight. By comparison, it made the battery life on the original 4xAA Game Boy look like the life from a GBA.
"It's taken Nintendo what, 6 years to answer this simple request?"
It's taken "6 years" (Game Boys have been around for a little longer than that) for the prices of Li-ion batteries to come down. Consider how expensive they were when the first Game Boy came out.
That, and waiting until the device had acceptably low power requirements had something to do with it as well.
"it's the same price as the GBA was when it was origionally released"
The MSRP is ~$100. IIRC, the original GBA came out at around $90 (I want to say $80).
"I do wonder if this thing will accept the "backup" cartridges floating around, or if they've built in copy protection of some sort... any thoughts?"
At worst, you'll have to get a new accesory for your Flash Advance Linker.
Except that, with Final Fantasy VIII and neither of those two options selected, I still got graphical glitches. Some battles with screwy colors, some with no textures, and one or two points in the game had invisible text in the text boxes. I've seen PC-based emulators with fewer problems.
And God damn it, I want PSX backwards compatability to be what it could have been!
I was sorely disappointed with the performance of PSX games on the PS2. I've seen Bleem. I know what new hardware can do with PSX software. But Sony knew that their publishers would be edgy about $20 PSX games looking as good as the $50 PS2 games (at least if the coders are lazy).
I got the PS2 for Final Fantasy X (and only Final Fantas X). After I realized that I no longer liked the Final Fantasy series (strayed too far from their roots), I then had a system for which I no longer had any games to justify its purchase (yes, there are good PS2 games out there, but IMO none are good enough to go out and spend money on the hardware for). So I sold it and haven't looked back.
I could have kept it. It still played my PSX games. But there was no noticable positive difference between playing the game on my PS2 and my old PSX. If anything, they looked worse (graphical glitches and all). I could have waited until the Linux kit came out and hope I could run a Linux-based PSX emulator, but that would have meant spending even more money on the system. And besides, I already have a PC.
If PSX games still look the same on the PS3, I'm just not going to buy the damned thing on principle (good games or no).
From the looks of it, other than the new look, it's still just a GBA. The difference between this and the old GBA are like the differences between the original Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket. Shiny new shell, slightly different button layout, a light, but nothing terribly exciting beyond that. No new color capabilities, no new polygon-pushing hardware, just the same ol' same ol'.
I'm going to save my money for the GBA Player for GCN instead. The GCN controller fits more comfortably in my hand (I miss the size of the original Game Boy), and my TV screen is over 20 inches.
"You have the right to speak your mind on any sidewalk, park lawn, etc."
Not if you block right-of-ways while doing it.
"You also have the right to speak your mind in any apartment that you live in but do not own,"
I'm sure my landlord will be amused to hear that he can go to the federal government to collect his rent check. I'm sure we'll both be laughing when he gives me the eviction notice.
Oh, and by the way, my landlord can restrict my "free speech." Try speaking through a megaphone at 2 in the morning and see how far your "rights" get you.
Heck, you even have restrictions on property you own. Most deed restrictions have something to say about posting signs in your yard.
"government courthouse"
Yeah, and I suppose I'm also allowed to carry a gun into a courthouse, what with the second amendment and all.
"I have shown that you have the right to speak freely on my property,"
Only as far as you let me.
"why do you try to show that you have the right to usurp my rights?"
Because, if it's on my property, the rights being usurped are my own. You do not have the right to place a billboard in my front yard without my permission.
"Add $500 against the advertized entity (not just the sender) and it may be a much better deal."
It's hard enough to find the spammer beyond a reasonable doubt. You won't be able to prove involvement by the advertised company unless you're able to find a cancelled check from them with the spammer's name on it. Until then, they can always claim it was a smear campaign by one of their competitors.
At any rate, the spammers themselves will probably be the ones to get that $500, anyway. I'm sure there's a clause in their advertising contracts that say that the client in question is liable for any other related fees.
"I pay taxes that support your rights to free speech."
And how do any of your federal, state or local taxes pay for my "free speech?" Is there a law that says I get a free billboard on the interstate that I don't know about?
"It is those that wish to shut up the speech of others into properly controlled "free speech zones""
Your right to free speech ends where my property begins. Just becuase Congress and the states are barred from abridging your right to speech doesn't mean I don't have the right to prevent you from using my property without my permission.
"Instead, make it illegal to sell a product using spam ads"
"Us? Advertise with spam? No, we didn't pay for it! It must be a smear campaign by our competitors!"
The chance of a spam advertisement being easily traced to the people who paid for it is up there with the chance of a spam being easily traced to the sender.
"Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists!"
And this is a good thing?
Let me modify a few of the nouns in your rant and see if you still agree with it.
Killing US citizens is the solution, not the problem. If we didn't punish these ignorant civilians they would continue supporting Israel. Every citizen of an Israel-friendly country is voting with their silence - for persecution. The US government has proven that they will not act against Israel until they are threatened, and the only way to do that is to kill civillians to the point that they start losing votes. Collateral damage IS the point of terrorism - otherwise its useless.
The ends do not justify the means. Innocent until proven guilty unless spam is involved? No thanks.
(Do I think RBLs are a form of terrorism? No. But I do not accept the idea that collateral damage is OK.)
"He simply refuses to understand that we are quickly entering into an age where either all information will be controlled or all information will be free."
Your assumption is based on the idea that nobody cares about copyright laws and will do anything they want no matter what. We're all born kleptomaniacs. But if that were true, the entire CD industry should have vanished the night Napster fist came on-line. KaZaa should be making serious dents in movie ticket sales. But neither you nor Valenti and Rosen can come up with information that supports your argument.
"He reminds me of the people who thought that the free states could peacefully get along with the slave states, but in the information age."
And you and those who hold similar opinions to yours remind me a little too much of John Brown for comfort.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with free speech. As I said, the First Amendment lets you say what you want, but it doesn't give you the right to use somebody else's soapbox.
"There are several very good ideas floating around out there that don't require an office of homeland spam in the whitehouse."
What amazing reflexes you have in your knee-jerk reactions. You could have a future in television news. Just because there is a federal law passed on something doesn't mean there will have to be federal enforcement of that law.
Consider federal anti-junk-fax laws. If you get an unsolicited advertisement on your fax machine, the sender owes you $500, collectable through your local small claims court/justice of the peace/etc (if need be). Essentially, all this law does is explicitly spell out the rights of the owner of the receiving equipment and make it easier for the recipient to claim damages without having to carefully explain how junk faxing is essentially trespassing each and every time.
The FCC doesn't enforce this law. The FBI doesn't enforce this law. You enforce this law.
I personally think the idea of expanding the existing junk fax law to include spam would be easier to enact (add three or four words to existing law) and easier to enforce (track down spammers for a guranteed $500 instead of just a chance at $10,000), but I'm obviously biased.
"even though my phone number has been listed with the Texas No Call list for months"
No Call lists and the like don't work if you already have a pre-existing business relationship.
Solution? Dump them, then tell them to stop calling. If that doesn't work, take them to small claims court and get the $500 federal law entitles you to (as well as any legal fees)
There's your problem. From IE 4.0 onwards, there's only one way to exit IE: You shut down Windows. Just ask the attorneys that testified before Judge Jackson.
"i've ran Netscape 4.1 on my pentium 133 with a 28.8 kps modem"
You must be that poor bastard all those broadband commercials are referencing, then. I've always wondered why they always advertised as "x times faster than a 28.8 modem!" I mean, who uses them nowadays for something other than a doorstop?
Now that you've upgraded, I hope we can now have commercials with more meaningful information.
"Essentially Microsoft is rewriting TCP to make it UDP-like by sacrificing TCP's guaranteed delivery for a speed boost."
Yeah, that's right... reworking a connection-oriented transport protocol so that it functions more like a connectionless protocol. Instead of just... say... using UDP to begin with.
Yeah, ingenious. In a "Rue Goldberg reinvents the wheel" kind of way.
Seriously, instead sending a TCP REQ segment first, why not see if UDP:80 can be used first instead? Microsoft could then rig IIS to respond on UDP:80 requests and, not only would they have the "faster" load times they're looking for, they wouldn't be breaking the internet for other people as well. Unless that's their goal...
"Citizens of the EU have been free to work and live in any other country of the union for many years."
That's all well and good while the EU is an exclusive club of rich Western European countries. From the looks of things, that will no longer be true when/if former Communist Bloc countries are allowed membership (with the western countries being more equal than the rest). And I haven't even mentioned Turkey yet.
But even without that hypocricy, EU members already have extremely strict immigration laws as compared to the US, and many Europeans seem to have a more exclusionary, nationalistic view towards immigration than even most Americans.
Before September 11, 2001, the big immigration-related news in the US was Mexican president Vicente Fox addressing US Congress on the need for new immigration policies more fair to Mexican migrants. In the Europe, the big immigration-related news was how much support Joerg Haider was getting in his country and his continent.
Slashdot Mirror
"This generation of console wars is over as far as first place is concerned. The number one system is always going to attract developers and have plenty of good games."
If you looked at the console shipping figures of 1992 (a year after the release of the SNES in North America), you'd be saying that the 16-bit console wars are "over," with Sega being the clear winner.
GameCube numbers may be down in North America and Japan, but they are growing quickly. More quickly than Sony's numbers. They may catch up to Sony this year.
From 2001:
"Not surprisingly, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance hardware took 76% of video game unit sales during its launch week, while Sony's PlayStation 2 was pushed to second place, capturing only 10% of hardware unit share, compared to 37% one week prior to the GBA launch."
"Redmond, WA (June 18, 2001) - The best selling video game platform in history is selling better than ever. Nintendo's Game Boy® Advance sold through half a million units during its first week on the market, making it America's fastest selling game system ever."
From 2002:
"With sell through of 1.3 million units, Game Boy Advance was as popular in November as Playstation 2. Game Boy represents 33% of the total hardware market."
Also, "Nintendo held 46% of the total hardware share for the month of November." Simple math tells us that the GCN holds 13% market share. 13% < 33%
"By all reports (of which I can't find any public ones)..."
"...wish I could turn up more public info on the dismal GBA sales..."
Ever stop to think maybe there's a reason why you can't?
Mega Man 6 and I believe 5 were both released for the NES well after the launch of the (non-backwards-compatable) SNES. IIRC, there were a number of other high-profile games released for the NES during the SNES' life-cycle.
"but there are link cables for Gameboy Advances to allow them interconnectivity with Cellphones in Japan."
l
Actually, that's a Game Boy Color accessory. Its flagship game was Pokemon Crystal.
http://pocket.ign.com/articles/089/089273p1.htm
"Bah, for years us gamers have been asking for a backlit system like the Gamegear"
Maybe you have, but I haven't. I've actually used a Game Gear and I remember how it gobbled up batteries because of its backlight. By comparison, it made the battery life on the original 4xAA Game Boy look like the life from a GBA.
"It's taken Nintendo what, 6 years to answer this simple request?"
It's taken "6 years" (Game Boys have been around for a little longer than that) for the prices of Li-ion batteries to come down. Consider how expensive they were when the first Game Boy came out.
That, and waiting until the device had acceptably low power requirements had something to do with it as well.
"it's the same price as the GBA was when it was origionally released"
The MSRP is ~$100. IIRC, the original GBA came out at around $90 (I want to say $80).
"I do wonder if this thing will accept the "backup" cartridges floating around, or if they've built in copy protection of some sort... any thoughts?"
At worst, you'll have to get a new accesory for your Flash Advance Linker.
Except that, with Final Fantasy VIII and neither of those two options selected, I still got graphical glitches. Some battles with screwy colors, some with no textures, and one or two points in the game had invisible text in the text boxes. I've seen PC-based emulators with fewer problems.
"1. Backwards compatible with the PSOne and PS2."
And God damn it, I want PSX backwards compatability to be what it could have been!
I was sorely disappointed with the performance of PSX games on the PS2. I've seen Bleem. I know what new hardware can do with PSX software. But Sony knew that their publishers would be edgy about $20 PSX games looking as good as the $50 PS2 games (at least if the coders are lazy).
I got the PS2 for Final Fantasy X (and only Final Fantas X). After I realized that I no longer liked the Final Fantasy series (strayed too far from their roots), I then had a system for which I no longer had any games to justify its purchase (yes, there are good PS2 games out there, but IMO none are good enough to go out and spend money on the hardware for). So I sold it and haven't looked back.
I could have kept it. It still played my PSX games. But there was no noticable positive difference between playing the game on my PS2 and my old PSX. If anything, they looked worse (graphical glitches and all). I could have waited until the Linux kit came out and hope I could run a Linux-based PSX emulator, but that would have meant spending even more money on the system. And besides, I already have a PC.
If PSX games still look the same on the PS3, I'm just not going to buy the damned thing on principle (good games or no).
From the looks of it, other than the new look, it's still just a GBA. The difference between this and the old GBA are like the differences between the original Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket. Shiny new shell, slightly different button layout, a light, but nothing terribly exciting beyond that. No new color capabilities, no new polygon-pushing hardware, just the same ol' same ol'.
I'm going to save my money for the GBA Player for GCN instead. The GCN controller fits more comfortably in my hand (I miss the size of the original Game Boy), and my TV screen is over 20 inches.
"You have the right to speak your mind on any sidewalk, park lawn, etc."
Not if you block right-of-ways while doing it.
"You also have the right to speak your mind in any apartment that you live in but do not own,"
I'm sure my landlord will be amused to hear that he can go to the federal government to collect his rent check. I'm sure we'll both be laughing when he gives me the eviction notice.
Oh, and by the way, my landlord can restrict my "free speech." Try speaking through a megaphone at 2 in the morning and see how far your "rights" get you.
Heck, you even have restrictions on property you own. Most deed restrictions have something to say about posting signs in your yard.
"government courthouse"
Yeah, and I suppose I'm also allowed to carry a gun into a courthouse, what with the second amendment and all.
"I have shown that you have the right to speak freely on my property,"
Only as far as you let me.
"why do you try to show that you have the right to usurp my rights?"
Because, if it's on my property, the rights being usurped are my own. You do not have the right to place a billboard in my front yard without my permission.
"Add $500 against the advertized entity (not just the sender) and it may be a much better deal."
It's hard enough to find the spammer beyond a reasonable doubt. You won't be able to prove involvement by the advertised company unless you're able to find a cancelled check from them with the spammer's name on it. Until then, they can always claim it was a smear campaign by one of their competitors.
At any rate, the spammers themselves will probably be the ones to get that $500, anyway. I'm sure there's a clause in their advertising contracts that say that the client in question is liable for any other related fees.
"I pay taxes that support your rights to free speech."
And how do any of your federal, state or local taxes pay for my "free speech?" Is there a law that says I get a free billboard on the interstate that I don't know about?
"It is those that wish to shut up the speech of others into properly controlled "free speech zones""
Your right to free speech ends where my property begins. Just becuase Congress and the states are barred from abridging your right to speech doesn't mean I don't have the right to prevent you from using my property without my permission.
"Instead, make it illegal to sell a product using spam ads"
"Us? Advertise with spam? No, we didn't pay for it! It must be a smear campaign by our competitors!"
The chance of a spam advertisement being easily traced to the people who paid for it is up there with the chance of a spam being easily traced to the sender.
"Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists!"
And this is a good thing?
Let me modify a few of the nouns in your rant and see if you still agree with it.
Killing US citizens is the solution, not the problem. If we didn't punish these ignorant civilians they would continue supporting Israel. Every citizen of an Israel-friendly country is voting with their silence - for persecution. The US government has proven that they will not act against Israel until they are threatened, and the only way to do that is to kill civillians to the point that they start losing votes. Collateral damage IS the point of terrorism - otherwise its useless.
The ends do not justify the means. Innocent until proven guilty unless spam is involved? No thanks.
(Do I think RBLs are a form of terrorism? No. But I do not accept the idea that collateral damage is OK.)
"He simply refuses to understand that we are quickly entering into an age where either all information will be controlled or all information will be free."
Your assumption is based on the idea that nobody cares about copyright laws and will do anything they want no matter what. We're all born kleptomaniacs. But if that were true, the entire CD industry should have vanished the night Napster fist came on-line. KaZaa should be making serious dents in movie ticket sales. But neither you nor Valenti and Rosen can come up with information that supports your argument.
"He reminds me of the people who thought that the free states could peacefully get along with the slave states, but in the information age."
And you and those who hold similar opinions to yours remind me a little too much of John Brown for comfort.
"Hell, there is nary a US provider that will carry a major spammer."
Then explain to me how this guy manages to make all his money. Or is Louisiana no longer part of the US?
Just because spam comes through off-shore relays doesn't mean it originated off-shore.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with free speech. As I said, the First Amendment lets you say what you want, but it doesn't give you the right to use somebody else's soapbox.
"There are several very good ideas floating around out there that don't require an office of homeland spam in the whitehouse."
What amazing reflexes you have in your knee-jerk reactions. You could have a future in television news. Just because there is a federal law passed on something doesn't mean there will have to be federal enforcement of that law.
Consider federal anti-junk-fax laws. If you get an unsolicited advertisement on your fax machine, the sender owes you $500, collectable through your local small claims court/justice of the peace/etc (if need be). Essentially, all this law does is explicitly spell out the rights of the owner of the receiving equipment and make it easier for the recipient to claim damages without having to carefully explain how junk faxing is essentially trespassing each and every time.
The FCC doesn't enforce this law. The FBI doesn't enforce this law. You enforce this law.
I personally think the idea of expanding the existing junk fax law to include spam would be easier to enact (add three or four words to existing law) and easier to enforce (track down spammers for a guranteed $500 instead of just a chance at $10,000), but I'm obviously biased.
Now calm down before you shatter your kneecap.
Then find out who handles small claims trials in your county and file against them.
What about the stars you saw revolving around your head as soon as those words crossed your lips?
Could be worse. The series could be called the "GNU/Open Source Series."
"even though my phone number has been listed with the Texas No Call list for months"
No Call lists and the like don't work if you already have a pre-existing business relationship.
Solution? Dump them, then tell them to stop calling. If that doesn't work, take them to small claims court and get the $500 federal law entitles you to (as well as any legal fees)
"even if you exit IE."
There's your problem. From IE 4.0 onwards, there's only one way to exit IE: You shut down Windows. Just ask the attorneys that testified before Judge Jackson.
"i've ran Netscape 4.1 on my pentium 133 with a 28.8 kps modem"
You must be that poor bastard all those broadband commercials are referencing, then. I've always wondered why they always advertised as "x times faster than a 28.8 modem!" I mean, who uses them nowadays for something other than a doorstop?
Now that you've upgraded, I hope we can now have commercials with more meaningful information.
Why have I suddenly burst into flames?
"Essentially Microsoft is rewriting TCP to make it UDP-like by sacrificing TCP's guaranteed delivery for a speed boost."
Yeah, that's right... reworking a connection-oriented transport protocol so that it functions more like a connectionless protocol. Instead of just... say... using UDP to begin with.
Yeah, ingenious. In a "Rue Goldberg reinvents the wheel" kind of way.
Seriously, instead sending a TCP REQ segment first, why not see if UDP:80 can be used first instead? Microsoft could then rig IIS to respond on UDP:80 requests and, not only would they have the "faster" load times they're looking for, they wouldn't be breaking the internet for other people as well. Unless that's their goal...
"Citizens of the EU have been free to work and live in any other country of the union for many years."
That's all well and good while the EU is an exclusive club of rich Western European countries. From the looks of things, that will no longer be true when/if former Communist Bloc countries are allowed membership (with the western countries being more equal than the rest). And I haven't even mentioned Turkey yet.
But even without that hypocricy, EU members already have extremely strict immigration laws as compared to the US, and many Europeans seem to have a more exclusionary, nationalistic view towards immigration than even most Americans.
Before September 11, 2001, the big immigration-related news in the US was Mexican president Vicente Fox addressing US Congress on the need for new immigration policies more fair to Mexican migrants. In the Europe, the big immigration-related news was how much support Joerg Haider was getting in his country and his continent.