I got to see one last Friday when the nice boys from Eidos came to my office, and I can say it is a lot more impressive than the GBA.
Height- and width-wise, it's about the same, but it feels a lot slimmer, which was a surprise to me as I'd been expecting something like Nokia's ill-fated 5510. It also seemed pretty light.
It also has a very nice high-res back-lit screen. It sure blew my GBA away.
Now, this doesn't mean it'll win the handheld console war. There is the question of price: can it compete with a $100 GBA? And then there are game; Eidos, THQ, Sega and Activision are (reasonably) big names, but they are not Nintendo.
That said, it will be useful indeed to see the Big N get some competition.
...but the way that the entire video game industry works right now.
This is the model: you have a few (maybe 15 with $200m+ sales) publishers, and you have maybe 2,000 independent developers. (There are also in-house development teams, like Core Design, but we're going to ignore them.)
The independent developers come up with a game idea. But because these firms are (usually) hideously under-capitalised they then need to go flog their idea to a publisher. The publisher then agrees to fund development of the game - subject to milestones - and and negotiates a pitiful royalty rate, which the developer will never (unless they are exremely lucky) see.
In addition, the publisher usually gets all IP such as brand names. (So, when MegaHunterKiller II is developed, there is no gurantee that the original developer will be asked to make it. A classic example of this is StarFox on the SNES which was originally developed by Argonaut...)
Oh yes; the publisher can usually pull the plug on the game at any time, leaving the developer high and dry.
Because advances usually only barely cover the cost of developing the game (and not all the inevitable overheads of running a business), the independent developers lead a nasty hand-to-mouth existence.
Oh yes, and because the publishers are usually publicly quoted companies that need to make quarterly sales and earnings "numbers" they like to rush games out before they are finished so they can keep their shareholders happy. (Never mind whether that's best for the developer, the publisher or the gameplayer longer-term... lets think of the stock options.) For an example of a stupidly rushed out game, think Turok; ahhh what three months more development could have done to that game...
No wonder developers want to find another way to finance and get their games to market.
Self-publishing is one option, but this doesn't solve the problem of finance.
What I would like to see (as a finance person, closely involved with the video game industry) is a number of private equity houses that finance games independent of publishers. Then, developers could complete (or nearly complete) games before they sold them onto publishers.
These private equity houses would manage a portfolio of projects, and so wouldn't worry too much about whether a game came out on March 31, or April 20.
Anyway, just my 2c
I've done some investigation
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And discovered that most of the ads for porn sites are genuine.
I've also discovered that I could increase the size of my... you know what... for only $49. Who says spam's not useful?
Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.
I'd be suspicious about the alleged speed of writing code. (That's thousands of lines a day!) It seems to be like this is just a browser which loads up links ahead of displaying them. Which, amazingly enough, is what all those "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized!!!" programs do.
How doing this faster can make the computer crash is a bit of a mystery to me. (I can't think of a single program with a speed dial, and above a certain speed, the computer crashes...;-))
It made this wonderful 'click' sound when you pressed a key, and it felt beautiufully made. I used it as my main typing keyboard for ages (although I needed a connector for using it with those pesky PS/2 ports we have these days...)
Best of all it was beautiful to use. If only the 's' key hasn't gone.
The funny bit is, I never missed the 'Windows' key.
(If anyone has a WORKING IBM keyboard like this, please, please reply as I would love to get a hold of another...)
When AT&T Wireless first rolled out digital cellular they went with TDMA, the logical 3Gish extension to which is Rx1TT (as used in Korea).
Then, about two years ago they announced they were migrating their network (building an overlay) to GSM, the logical 3G extension to which is WCDMA (European version).
Now they look like they are going down the Japanese WCDMA route, which is based on an earlier standard tham European WCDMA (although it does actually work, which is a plus!)
It seems to me that they really need to sit down and decide exactly what system they want to use. There are numerous issues with cell planning, roaming, etc. affected by their choices. If they continue to mess around like this, who knows when a decent 3G service will be available to Americans.
"Just finding it is useful information. From this, physicists can map its path and start to make observations of what space is actually like out there. They have used the some sparse readings in the past to investigate everything from cosmic rays to gravitational mechanics. "
You obviously didn't study quantum mechanics. We can either know where it is, or where it's going. We can't know both.
Indeed, even by discovering where it is, we have changed where it's going. It might even now be headed on a collision course for earth, and every measurement of its position just sends it faster and faster in the direction of Slashdot's servers...
If you read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, he blame's the trials of OS/2 on IBM's unwillingness to embrace the development community.
All European cell-phones have removable SIM cards. Many, although most users don't realise it, have built in modems.
The Nokia 7xxx and 8xxx, plus the Ericsson R520, T28 and T68. By using either IR or Bluetooth, you can attach these phones to a laptop, and can then use an anonymous Internet account (like Freeserve in the UK.)
Indeed, I have been using this method (except for the Freeserve bit) for about four years now to access the web when I am travelling. It's not quick, but it's super useful.
Contrary to this posters' opinion, most criminals won't use stolen cell phones for Internet access. It's slow and clunky, and there are still ways to find who posted the hypothetical email message...
(1) Trace email message to ISP. (2) Dredge ISP log to find phone number and time, duration of call. (3) Contact cell phone company that carried the call, discover IMEI number of the cell-phone.
Now if anyone uses that cell phone again... you will know. You can track which cell they are in, etc. Complicated, but theoretically possible to catch the person you want.
It is actually largely because it was the better product.
Remember, Lotus 1-2-3 had a monopoly in the DOS world. MSFT begged them to develop it for Windows 1... it begged them to develop it for Windows 2...
Lotus went and developed 1-2-3 for OS/2
Microsoft ported its (moderately sucessful) Apple spreadsheet Excel to Windows. Da dah!
Windows becomes the de facto GUI for PCs; Excel the de facto spreadsheet.
In this case, it won because it was the best product on the most popular platform. By the time Lotus got a product out (and what a dog it was) it was too late.
If what you said was true, then Europe would be poverty stricken and starving. In fact, despite crippling taxes, stupidly inflexible labour laws, and crazy unions, Europe is doing OK. (No, I don't mean *well*, I mean OK.) No-one is starving, and these countries have had these same, largely idiotic, rules and laws for 45 years. Sure, they mean higher unemployment and lower secular growth than the US, but they didn't stop Europe from dragging itself to prosperity after WW2.
The IT industry has always suffered periodic booms and busts. In the early 1990s people assumed the market for PCs had gone ex-growth. Whoops.
In the UK in the early 1970s, the country went decimal. There was a huge boom as early computer systems were changed to deal with modern pounds rather than with the ungainly mix of guineas, pounds, shilling and pence. It was the original Y2K problem, and demand soared. Only to decline, and then stagnate for years.
Now it's my turn to temporise. About two years ago I read in Wired a story of the Microsoft trial; this was published after the trial came to an end.
However, I think it did contain interviews with Jackson from *before* the trial, where he was very uncomplimentary about Microsoft.
Now, this Wired article was written by someone (I think) who went on to write a book about the trial. Again I think, this contained interviews from before and at the beginning of the trial.
Neither Microsoft, nor the Judge, can look back on the trial and think that they behaved fittingly.
Microsoft bribed and bullied witnesses (such as AMD's CEO) to give evidence. They lied about how easy it was to take IE out of Windows, and they played a FUD game like the best of them.
By these standards, Jackson behaved admirably. The only problem is: he's the Judge, he's supposed to be impartial. If, prior to the trial beginning, he has expressed in interviews (albeit unpublished ones) a strong view about one of the parties then he is not going into the trial as an unbiased Judge.
This perception of bias, rather than the speaking to journalists per se, is why Jackson was struck down so.
And, for all Jackson's arguments about the right of Judges to speak out, I have to agree with the appeals court.
Ummm... if you look at the EBITDA earnings of the Europeans (and ex-out the idiotic sums paid for 3G licenses) then the Europeans are in significantly better health than the US players.
Fundamentally, almost all European wireless operators are cash positive to some extent.
(That they have a choice of infrastructure vendors to buy from sure helps.)
Slashdot Mirror
I got to see one last Friday when the nice boys from Eidos came to my office, and I can say it is a lot more impressive than the GBA.
Height- and width-wise, it's about the same, but it feels a lot slimmer, which was a surprise to me as I'd been expecting something like Nokia's ill-fated 5510. It also seemed pretty light.
It also has a very nice high-res back-lit screen. It sure blew my GBA away.
Now, this doesn't mean it'll win the handheld console war. There is the question of price: can it compete with a $100 GBA? And then there are game; Eidos, THQ, Sega and Activision are (reasonably) big names, but they are not Nintendo.
That said, it will be useful indeed to see the Big N get some competition.
Pointing out that it's a 3 1/2 inch drive and a 5 1/4 inch drive will win me no karma points and no friends.
But I'm a pedant. Sorry.
Reliability and capacity are largely interchangeable. That's what RAID is for...
What's an M-80?
...but the way that the entire video game industry works right now.
This is the model: you have a few (maybe 15 with $200m+ sales) publishers, and you have maybe 2,000 independent developers. (There are also in-house development teams, like Core Design, but we're going to ignore them.)
The independent developers come up with a game idea. But because these firms are (usually) hideously under-capitalised they then need to go flog their idea to a publisher. The publisher then agrees to fund development of the game - subject to milestones - and and negotiates a pitiful royalty rate, which the developer will never (unless they are exremely lucky) see.
In addition, the publisher usually gets all IP such as brand names. (So, when MegaHunterKiller II is developed, there is no gurantee that the original developer will be asked to make it. A classic example of this is StarFox on the SNES which was originally developed by Argonaut...)
Oh yes; the publisher can usually pull the plug on the game at any time, leaving the developer high and dry.
Because advances usually only barely cover the cost of developing the game (and not all the inevitable overheads of running a business), the independent developers lead a nasty hand-to-mouth existence.
Oh yes, and because the publishers are usually publicly quoted companies that need to make quarterly sales and earnings "numbers" they like to rush games out before they are finished so they can keep their shareholders happy. (Never mind whether that's best for the developer, the publisher or the gameplayer longer-term... lets think of the stock options.) For an example of a stupidly rushed out game, think Turok; ahhh what three months more development could have done to that game...
No wonder developers want to find another way to finance and get their games to market.
Self-publishing is one option, but this doesn't solve the problem of finance.
What I would like to see (as a finance person, closely involved with the video game industry) is a number of private equity houses that finance games independent of publishers. Then, developers could complete (or nearly complete) games before they sold them onto publishers.
These private equity houses would manage a portfolio of projects, and so wouldn't worry too much about whether a game came out on March 31, or April 20.
Anyway, just my 2c
And discovered that most of the ads for porn sites are genuine.
I've also discovered that I could increase the size of my... you know what... for only $49. Who says spam's not useful?
Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.
;-))
I'd be suspicious about the alleged speed of writing code. (That's thousands of lines a day!) It seems to be like this is just a browser which loads up links ahead of displaying them. Which, amazingly enough, is what all those "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized!!!" programs do.
How doing this faster can make the computer crash is a bit of a mystery to me. (I can't think of a single program with a speed dial, and above a certain speed, the computer crashes...
But even with all the hurricanes in the world, England would still fail to win. Maybe a drawn series is a possible...
It made this wonderful 'click' sound when you pressed a key, and it felt beautiufully made. I used it as my main typing keyboard for ages (although I needed a connector for using it with those pesky PS/2 ports we have these days...)
Best of all it was beautiful to use. If only the 's' key hasn't gone.
The funny bit is, I never missed the 'Windows' key.
(If anyone has a WORKING IBM keyboard like this, please, please reply as I would love to get a hold of another...)
When AT&T Wireless first rolled out digital cellular they went with TDMA, the logical 3Gish extension to which is Rx1TT (as used in Korea).
Then, about two years ago they announced they were migrating their network (building an overlay) to GSM, the logical 3G extension to which is WCDMA (European version).
Now they look like they are going down the Japanese WCDMA route, which is based on an earlier standard tham European WCDMA (although it does actually work, which is a plus!)
It seems to me that they really need to sit down and decide exactly what system they want to use. There are numerous issues with cell planning, roaming, etc. affected by their choices. If they continue to mess around like this, who knows when a decent 3G service will be available to Americans.
they usually want to know why I changed their root password...
and why their homepage has strangely changed to Slashdot...
and why all their friends recieved bizarre emails from them...
"Just finding it is useful information. From this, physicists can map its path and start to make observations of what space is actually like out there. They have used the some sparse readings in the past to investigate everything from cosmic rays to gravitational mechanics. "
You obviously didn't study quantum mechanics. We can either know where it is, or where it's going. We can't know both.
Indeed, even by discovering where it is, we have changed where it's going. It might even now be headed on a collision course for earth, and every measurement of its position just sends it faster and faster in the direction of Slashdot's servers...
No joke: it would be really great to see if someone could get MorphOS running on a TiVo.
Obviously, just to be able to say "well... I got tired of linux on my tivo, so i put morphos on" brings a certain amount of geek kudos.
Or should I go and get a life now?
If you read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, he blame's the trials of OS/2 on IBM's unwillingness to embrace the development community.
Am I being really stupid, but I don't understand all these "In Soviet Russia" comments.
Please please, can someone explain it. (I assume it is a reference to something.)
OK.
Lets look at the last financial statements for TiVo inc. Quarter to July 31, 2002.
Sales $23.9m, up about 6x. (Yep, c. 600%)
Gross profit $16.3m
Less R&D ($4.5m), Sales & Marketing ($5.6m & 3.4m), and General & Administrative ($1.1m).
Operating loss for the quarter, $1.1m, against $34.5m a year ago.
TiVo doomed? Do the math.
All European cell-phones have removable SIM cards. Many, although most users don't realise it, have built in modems.
The Nokia 7xxx and 8xxx, plus the Ericsson R520, T28 and T68. By using either IR or Bluetooth, you can attach these phones to a laptop, and can then use an anonymous Internet account (like Freeserve in the UK.)
Indeed, I have been using this method (except for the Freeserve bit) for about four years now to access the web when I am travelling. It's not quick, but it's super useful.
Contrary to this posters' opinion, most criminals won't use stolen cell phones for Internet access. It's slow and clunky, and there are still ways to find who posted the hypothetical email message...
(1) Trace email message to ISP.
(2) Dredge ISP log to find phone number and time, duration of call.
(3) Contact cell phone company that carried the call, discover IMEI number of the cell-phone.
Now if anyone uses that cell phone again... you will know. You can track which cell they are in, etc. Complicated, but theoretically possible to catch the person you want.
Thx,
Robert
The South-West passage. Just 'cause the poles have been flipped, doesn't mean East becomes West.
It is actually largely because it was the better product.
Remember, Lotus 1-2-3 had a monopoly in the DOS world. MSFT begged them to develop it for Windows 1... it begged them to develop it for Windows 2...
Lotus went and developed 1-2-3 for OS/2
Microsoft ported its (moderately sucessful) Apple spreadsheet Excel to Windows. Da dah!
Windows becomes the de facto GUI for PCs; Excel the de facto spreadsheet.
In this case, it won because it was the best product on the most popular platform. By the time Lotus got a product out (and what a dog it was) it was too late.
Jon,
If what you said was true, then Europe would be poverty stricken and starving. In fact, despite crippling taxes, stupidly inflexible labour laws, and crazy unions, Europe is doing OK. (No, I don't mean *well*, I mean OK.) No-one is starving, and these countries have had these same, largely idiotic, rules and laws for 45 years. Sure, they mean higher unemployment and lower secular growth than the US, but they didn't stop Europe from dragging itself to prosperity after WW2.
The IT industry has always suffered periodic booms and busts. In the early 1990s people assumed the market for PCs had gone ex-growth. Whoops.
In the UK in the early 1970s, the country went decimal. There was a huge boom as early computer systems were changed to deal with modern pounds rather than with the ungainly mix of guineas, pounds, shilling and pence. It was the original Y2K problem, and demand soared. Only to decline, and then stagnate for years.
Regards,
Robert
Simple: if you are winning at Counter Strike despite a ping of 1,000+, then you must be cheating.
I mean, duh...
Now it's my turn to temporise. About two years ago I read in Wired a story of the Microsoft trial; this was published after the trial came to an end.
However, I think it did contain interviews with Jackson from *before* the trial, where he was very uncomplimentary about Microsoft.
Now, this Wired article was written by someone (I think) who went on to write a book about the trial. Again I think, this contained interviews from before and at the beginning of the trial.
Neither Microsoft, nor the Judge, can look back on the trial and think that they behaved fittingly.
Microsoft bribed and bullied witnesses (such as AMD's CEO) to give evidence. They lied about how easy it was to take IE out of Windows, and they played a FUD game like the best of them.
By these standards, Jackson behaved admirably. The only problem is: he's the Judge, he's supposed to be impartial. If, prior to the trial beginning, he has expressed in interviews (albeit unpublished ones) a strong view about one of the parties then he is not going into the trial as an unbiased Judge.
This perception of bias, rather than the speaking to journalists per se, is why Jackson was struck down so.
And, for all Jackson's arguments about the right of Judges to speak out, I have to agree with the appeals court.
True but unfair.
The Swedish and Finnish telecoms regulators have mandated that 3G operators cover a minimum of 95% of the population within a few years of launch.
In other words, they will be forced to build (working) infrastructure over largely uninhabited areas of land.
Ummm... if you look at the EBITDA earnings of the Europeans (and ex-out the idiotic sums paid for 3G licenses) then the Europeans are in significantly better health than the US players.
Fundamentally, almost all European wireless operators are cash positive to some extent.
(That they have a choice of infrastructure vendors to buy from sure helps.)