The majority of the/. crowd screams when they have to identify themsevles online - you want anonymity. Except when it's others - you want the reviewers to have to identify themselves. Nice double standard.
Repeat with me: technology can be used for good OR evil. The same applies to any innovation, even book reviews.
I read this book review on the internet, so it MUST be true.
Kids buy (through their parents) pokemon games. Parents have TV. Parents won't let kids use TV all the time, so parents get kid(s) a GBA. Kids are happy.
Seriously, most kids are competing for television (and thus console) time with their family, but GBA's are always ready to go.
Sniffing from a compromised machine on a switched network segment just won't work. Most cable modems filter traffic by IP address, and DSL modems only spit down what they are directly responsible for. In short, you'd have to
a) compromise an end-host on the same (or closer-to-source) non-switched network segment, or b) compromise a switch or router in the network
Not saying it isn't possible, but it does raise the bar considerably.
I won't claim this is the first example of backward-compatible consoles, but try these on for size. TurboGrafx16 TurboDuo
The Duo could play three kinds of games:
TG16 Hu-Card games (just at/before Genesis)
TG16 CD-games (btw, first CD-based console, I believe)
Duo-only SuperCD games (this about the same time as SegaCD)
New Mario Kart same as the old? What game are you playing, and where can I get it?
MarioKart 64 was by far the better game of the two. Crashing actually set you back a lot, and it took skill to hit enemies with items other than a red shell or a star. DoubleDash is party friendly, and newbie-friendly.
Which obviously makes it a better game for non-gamers to get into. But in my mind, not as much fun as Kart64 was and still is.
From their perspective, it's more profitable to sell you can electronic copy at a much lower price a year down the road. Imagine things like Sony's 'Greatest Hits' titles, or Nintendo's 'Player's Choice', only electronically delivered.
That said, I don't know of any publisher that is doing this.
I can see why people would go for multiple consoles in-the-home. You've got plenty of space there. I don't think many people would be willing to own two (or more) handheld consoles. If I can only carry one or want to carry only one, then I would probably go for the one with the biggest library. Also, the casual gamers buy a handheld to occupy time, not to play specific games. One is enough, and it need not be the best one.
That's just me though. I wonder if Sony is betting on the folks that haven't bought a GBA yet, because I don't see a lot of overlap unless they put some must-have games ONLY on the PSP. That's what it will take to get me to buy one. That, or the ability to run some kick-ass emulation on it. If it can run a SNES emulator, I am there.
"If everyone has it, then it's stupid for the developers not to support it."
This is a really good point, and is pretty well-exhibited by xbox. The addition of a NIC and HD to the console as stock features was a great idea. Every game can count on them to be there, and it means that more developers are likely to use them (and for the HD, I mean beyond the purpose of a memory card - like saving large replays/data sets). Whereas with Sony/Nintendo, comparatively few games do online support, largely only first-party games.
Let's assume that some games play better with a specific gamepad than with a mouse/keyboard. I think this is a safe assumption. In fact, you could argue that knowing what the gamepad will look like is useful in and of itself - you can build on-screen help images, similar to what nintendo did in Zelda64, ZeldaGCN, and Metroid:Prime. Nintendo has always done a great job of making control schemes match the controller perfectly, and vice-versa. So, I would argue that those Zelda games would have been less-accessible on a PC, namely because they couldn't flash graphically-simple suggestions to you not knowing the gamepad/keyboard layout.
Now, let's assume that we took such a game and released it for PC. We'd either have to ship it with the gamepad (more cost), require the user to buy it separately (smaller potential customer base), or dilute the control scheme to the smallest common denominator. Odds are that the third one would prevail.
All the consoles now have two analog sticks and force-feedback. Can a keyboard/mouse simulate this? They can't, to my knowledge. For example, FPS's use a mouse that fulfills the role of one stick, but then they use 4 keys to replace the other stick. What if I want to introduce a game feature that only conveys in force feedback? It would be great for multiplayer games on the same display - it can signal player1 about something without clueing in player2.
Yes, consoles evolve slower than PC's. However, because of this, developers can focus more on gameplay and less on disparate hardware, driver compatibilities, and still achieve adequate flash and eye candy because they are building for a well-known platform. The publishers probably spend less on tech support too. Hell, they might even QA the thing before they publish, because patching would be harder.
Have you played Warcraft3 or Starcraft online? To be sure, there are tons of 'fuckwits' on battle.net.
Any on-line competitive game is going to draw people who are there just to piss you off. You'll get backstabbers, hackers, quitters, racists, homophobes, name-callers.
Basically, I've just decided to stay off-line or only game with my personal friends. For the amount of time I have to give to gaming, and the number of good games out there to play, I find I'd rather spend my time w/o idiotic childish types ruining my day.
That totally depends on why you aren't buying CDs. Some folks don't want to line the pockets of the RIAA (which is a fine reason), and others just don't like the format (rather buy songs than albums). I bet there's even a group that just finds buying online easier.
For the second group above, online music buying is pretty attractive, as they can buy individual songs w/o paying 5$ for a CD single.
Personally, I'm all about CD albums - I like the physical product, and I like being able to encode it to match my own preferences. I use iTMS to buy songs occasionally to see if I like a band/album by example, or to get 'that song' that I like from that artist that I could care less about. It means I don't have to boot up the PC, run Kazaa, hunt through dupes, and get rid of incompletes.
Now, if you're into a band and can buy their music at the concert, or directly from the band, DO SO. They'll get a bigger cut. It won't show up in Billboard (via SoundScan, the aggravating labels that are on top of the jewel cases), but the artist gets more money, and the RIAA gets less.
Finally, for an example of a band that has said 'screw the labels' and gone their own road, there is Marillion. They got their fans to front the cost of the last album (and the next one, which is due out next year) many months in advance of shipping, without even hearing a thing. To have a band that is that in tune with it's fans is an amazing thing. With the exception of electronic delivery, this is the revolution in music authoring and distribution that was supposed to happen.
The most compelling reason to have an iPod is that you can use it to listen to music anywhere, anytime, and still have your smart playlists, tracking of songs played/ratings, anywhere you go. That's the reason I use my iPod at work, the gym, on my home stereo, and in the car. I charge about every 2 days. That's going to have my battery dead in about 2.5 years.
Side note: bought mine at Best Buy with the 4 year warranty which covers battery. If it dies, I get an equal-or-better replacement.
There are so many good games out right now that by the time I can _get_ to the next great game I'm going to play, it's in the budget bin. There are also tons of BAD games, which compete for the low-price sales.
Maybe it's because we have THREE top-notch consoles now, instead of two? The console companies are splitting three ways right now, moreso now that Xbox sales have tapered off and GCN sales have jumped a lot recently. Compare to three years ago, when it was just Nintendo and Sony with Sega as a failing and distant third.
And finally, emulation andn classic games are really good now. I play a lot of classic games on PSX that I pick up in bargain bins, as well as emulated SNES/NES games. They're cheap, they're good, and I can play some of them on my GBA, others on my PS2. Contrast this to SNES/early PSX era, when emulation was still young and most people didn't have broadband.
I'd really like for the market to bear 3 console vendors, but I'm afraid someone will get driven out or be forced into a niche (hello, Nintendo!). I'd be happy to buy into that niche if it were Nintendo.
What you describe is true for the casual music listener. But some people are into bands that produce quality song after quality song - and those are called albums. They come with artwork and liner notes.
There's still plenty of artists recording that can make 10+ good songs and ship them to you as a CD, some with killer artwork to boot. And for some artists, each album has it's own mood as well.
Why won't Search Inside the Book let me see more pages from a specific book?
Our Search Inside the Book feature is designed to help our customers discover new books and ensure that they'll be satisfied with their purchases. To be fair to the publishers and authors who participate in our program, we only allow Search Inside the Book users to read a portion of the book.
So, you can only see some % of the books pages as a unique customer (with a unique associated credit card).
Yes, it was expensive. Yes, i ate batteries like no tomorrow (6 AA's, I think - 4 at least). But it was a great (not-so) little hand-held system. It had a display to rival the GBA, and enough power to rival the SNES. It was even comfortable to hold, unlike the just-too-small GBA's.
All the things the parent poster says are true; it was huge, a TG16 in a portable casing, and ate batteries like no tomorrow. And I wish I hadn't sold mine - it's a beautiful machine.
Slashdot Mirror
What do other Slashdot readers do to make 'bad luck' (or bad employer choices) look less bad on their resume, and sound less bad in interviews?
Why should they want to hire you if you have a history of bad employer choices? Maybe you're bad luck!
There's more than Google. How about Amazon ? They're profitable as of the last year, and publicly traded as well.
The majority of the /. crowd screams when they have to identify themsevles online - you want anonymity. Except when it's others - you want the reviewers to have to identify themselves. Nice double standard.
Repeat with me: technology can be used for good OR evil. The same applies to any innovation, even book reviews.
I read this book review on the internet, so it MUST be true.
Kids buy (through their parents) pokemon games. Parents have TV. Parents won't let kids use TV all the time, so parents get kid(s) a GBA. Kids are happy.
Seriously, most kids are competing for television (and thus console) time with their family, but GBA's are always ready to go.
Also ridiculous in that game:
QB Eagles (aka Randall Cunningham). Pick a pass play, QB sneak/draw and run it for 80 yards.
Jerry Rice - he would catch ANYTHING you threw at him. Anything.
Christian Okoye - the running back that couldn't be tackled. Defensive players bounced off of him.
Barry Sanders - a close second at the RB position to Bo Jackson. Barry had some speed in that game.
Sniffing from a compromised machine on a switched network segment just won't work. Most cable modems filter traffic by IP address, and DSL modems only spit down what they are directly responsible for. In short, you'd have to
a) compromise an end-host on the same (or closer-to-source) non-switched network segment, or
b) compromise a switch or router in the network
Not saying it isn't possible, but it does raise the bar considerably.
I won't claim this is the first example of backward-compatible consoles, but try these on for size.
TurboGrafx16
TurboDuo
The Duo could play three kinds of games:
TG16 Hu-Card games (just at/before Genesis)
TG16 CD-games (btw, first CD-based console, I believe)
Duo-only SuperCD games (this about the same time as SegaCD)
Is that Point-of-Sale, or Piece-of-....
New Mario Kart same as the old? What game are you playing, and where can I get it?
MarioKart 64 was by far the better game of the two. Crashing actually set you back a lot, and it took skill to hit enemies with items other than a red shell or a star. DoubleDash is party friendly, and newbie-friendly.
Which obviously makes it a better game for non-gamers to get into. But in my mind, not as much fun as Kart64 was and still is.
From their perspective, it's more profitable to sell you can electronic copy at a much lower price a year down the road. Imagine things like Sony's 'Greatest Hits' titles, or Nintendo's 'Player's Choice', only electronically delivered.
That said, I don't know of any publisher that is doing this.
I called them, they want to know where you are. What should I tell them?
"Yeah, he's on Slashdot. It seems like some kind of pro-terrorism site."
FBI agent 1: You say you found the terrorists' marking symbol, that identified their safe houses?
Agent 2: Yeah, it was on the guys computer. I tried to print it out, but it wouldn't work.
Agent 1: What did it look like?
Agent 2: I can't remember.
They can just run the matching algorithm on the printer instead of in the driver. Then you can use any driver you want, open-source or otherwise.
I can see why people would go for multiple consoles in-the-home. You've got plenty of space there. I don't think many people would be willing to own two (or more) handheld consoles. If I can only carry one or want to carry only one, then I would probably go for the one with the biggest library. Also, the casual gamers buy a handheld to occupy time, not to play specific games. One is enough, and it need not be the best one.
That's just me though. I wonder if Sony is betting on the folks that haven't bought a GBA yet, because I don't see a lot of overlap unless they put some must-have games ONLY on the PSP. That's what it will take to get me to buy one. That, or the ability to run some kick-ass emulation on it. If it can run a SNES emulator, I am there.
"If everyone has it, then it's stupid for the developers not to support it."
This is a really good point, and is pretty well-exhibited by xbox. The addition of a NIC and HD to the console as stock features was a great idea. Every game can count on them to be there, and it means that more developers are likely to use them (and for the HD, I mean beyond the purpose of a memory card - like saving large replays/data sets). Whereas with Sony/Nintendo, comparatively few games do online support, largely only first-party games.
Let's assume that some games play better with a specific gamepad than with a mouse/keyboard. I think this is a safe assumption. In fact, you could argue that knowing what the gamepad will look like is useful in and of itself - you can build on-screen help images, similar to what nintendo did in Zelda64, ZeldaGCN, and Metroid:Prime. Nintendo has always done a great job of making control schemes match the controller perfectly, and vice-versa. So, I would argue that those Zelda games would have been less-accessible on a PC, namely because they couldn't flash graphically-simple suggestions to you not knowing the gamepad/keyboard layout.
Now, let's assume that we took such a game and released it for PC. We'd either have to ship it with the gamepad (more cost), require the user to buy it separately (smaller potential customer base), or dilute the control scheme to the smallest common denominator. Odds are that the third one would prevail.
All the consoles now have two analog sticks and force-feedback. Can a keyboard/mouse simulate this? They can't, to my knowledge. For example, FPS's use a mouse that fulfills the role of one stick, but then they use 4 keys to replace the other stick. What if I want to introduce a game feature that only conveys in force feedback? It would be great for multiplayer games on the same display - it can signal player1 about something without clueing in player2.
Yes, consoles evolve slower than PC's. However, because of this, developers can focus more on gameplay and less on disparate hardware, driver compatibilities, and still achieve adequate flash and eye candy because they are building for a well-known platform. The publishers probably spend less on tech support too. Hell, they might even QA the thing before they publish, because patching would be harder.
Have you played Warcraft3 or Starcraft online? To be sure, there are tons of 'fuckwits' on battle.net.
Any on-line competitive game is going to draw people who are there just to piss you off. You'll get backstabbers, hackers, quitters, racists, homophobes, name-callers.
Basically, I've just decided to stay off-line or only game with my personal friends. For the amount of time I have to give to gaming, and the number of good games out there to play, I find I'd rather spend my time w/o idiotic childish types ruining my day.
That totally depends on why you aren't buying CDs. Some folks don't want to line the pockets of the RIAA (which is a fine reason), and others just don't like the format (rather buy songs than albums). I bet there's even a group that just finds buying online easier.
For the second group above, online music buying is pretty attractive, as they can buy individual songs w/o paying 5$ for a CD single.
Personally, I'm all about CD albums - I like the physical product, and I like being able to encode it to match my own preferences. I use iTMS to buy songs occasionally to see if I like a band/album by example, or to get 'that song' that I like from that artist that I could care less about. It means I don't have to boot up the PC, run Kazaa, hunt through dupes, and get rid of incompletes.
Now, if you're into a band and can buy their music at the concert, or directly from the band, DO SO. They'll get a bigger cut. It won't show up in Billboard (via SoundScan, the aggravating labels that are on top of the jewel cases), but the artist gets more money, and the RIAA gets less.
Finally, for an example of a band that has said 'screw the labels' and gone their own road, there is Marillion. They got their fans to front the cost of the last album (and the next one, which is due out next year) many months in advance of shipping, without even hearing a thing. To have a band that is that in tune with it's fans is an amazing thing. With the exception of electronic delivery, this is the revolution in music authoring and distribution that was supposed to happen.
The most compelling reason to have an iPod is that you can use it to listen to music anywhere, anytime, and still have your smart playlists, tracking of songs played/ratings, anywhere you go. That's the reason I use my iPod at work, the gym, on my home stereo, and in the car. I charge about every 2 days. That's going to have my battery dead in about 2.5 years.
Side note: bought mine at Best Buy with the 4 year warranty which covers battery. If it dies, I get an equal-or-better replacement.
There are so many good games out right now that by the time I can _get_ to the next great game I'm going to play, it's in the budget bin. There are also tons of BAD games, which compete for the low-price sales.
Maybe it's because we have THREE top-notch consoles now, instead of two? The console companies are splitting three ways right now, moreso now that Xbox sales have tapered off and GCN sales have jumped a lot recently. Compare to three years ago, when it was just Nintendo and Sony with Sega as a failing and distant third.
And finally, emulation andn classic games are really good now. I play a lot of classic games on PSX that I pick up in bargain bins, as well as emulated SNES/NES games. They're cheap, they're good, and I can play some of them on my GBA, others on my PS2. Contrast this to SNES/early PSX era, when emulation was still young and most people didn't have broadband.
I'd really like for the market to bear 3 console vendors, but I'm afraid someone will get driven out or be forced into a niche (hello, Nintendo!). I'd be happy to buy into that niche if it were Nintendo.
What you describe is true for the casual music listener. But some people are into bands that produce quality song after quality song - and those are called albums. They come with artwork and liner notes.
There's still plenty of artists recording that can make 10+ good songs and ship them to you as a CD, some with killer artwork to boot. And for some artists, each album has it's own mood as well.
The album isn't dead, it's just hiding.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/1019 7041/104-8011833-2636716
In particular:
Why won't Search Inside the Book let me see more pages from a specific book?
Our Search Inside the Book feature is designed to help our customers discover new books and ensure that they'll be satisfied with their purchases. To be fair to the publishers and authors who participate in our program, we only allow Search Inside the Book users to read a portion of the book.
So, you can only see some % of the books pages as a unique customer (with a unique associated credit card).
Scripting/Automating creation of new accounts: easy
Creating new, unique credit cards associated with those accounts: hard
Seems like a mechanism for keeping any one entity from being able to view all pages from a single book.
Sorry, I misread that. But they could be missing out on the lucrative Hebrew games market.
Yes, it was expensive. Yes, i ate batteries like no tomorrow (6 AA's, I think - 4 at least). But it was a great (not-so) little hand-held system. It had a display to rival the GBA, and enough power to rival the SNES. It was even comfortable to hold, unlike the just-too-small GBA's.
All the things the parent poster says are true; it was huge, a TG16 in a portable casing, and ate batteries like no tomorrow. And I wish I hadn't sold mine - it's a beautiful machine.