"Anyways I think people aren't "just" waking up to Windows being insecure, unstable etc. It's just that they are willing to live with it rather than investigate alternate OS"
That and both points are heavily sensationalized over here. I run XP and 2K across several different computers. The general assumption here is that I spend hours a week dealing with viruses. I don't. I haven't been exploited in months. And, the one time I did, it was because I had a fresh install of XP out on the net sans firewall or a service pack. Doh.
The other assumption is that I spend lots of time rebooting. Nope. My machines get rebooted once every two weeks or so. This is laughable compared to Linux, but virtually nothing in terms of practical time used. Back in the Windows 95/98 days, this was a legit complaint. (3 or 4 reboots a DAY) Today, though, it's just not enough time to notice. I'm 'living with it' about as disturbingly as living with wrong number phonecalls.
So, by relieving myself of those problems with Linux, I'm not gaining a whole hell of a lot. I would, however, rack up a bunch of Google time trying to figure out how to make everything work. Linux is just going to have to do better than that to get people to switch. This has nothing to do with people having mixed up priorities.
"i ignored the stylus because i honestly hate the fucking things, my PDA has one and at any chance i can get id rather use my damn finger,"
Uh yeah, the DS lets you do that, too. The PSP does not.
" as for a 6" screen in my pocket, i've never put my SP in my pocket, i keep it in my backpack, i don't care about putting it in my pocket"
It's still a ding against Sony. The DS gets a good deal more screen real-estate while maintaining its portableness.
"cartidriges are a plague of the handheld gaming world, i'd rather them use pretty much anything else, good for you if you want your backwards compatability, but i have and SP already, i'd rather have innovation"
Cartridges are what makes the portable gaming world work. I'd rather not have easy to damage discs, low battery life, long loading times, and skipping.
"as for the wireless part, maybe you missed why i added it twice, the PSP and DS are both 802.11 wireless, and the PSP also has infra-red. i gave them a tie because of that fact."
I saw that you added it twice, it didn't negate the point you made. Both the DS and the PSP will have multiplayer options never before seen on a portable gaming device. It will change how they're played. The DS with its stylus interface will fare even better. We all know how much fun it is to use a D-pad to enter your character's name. Heh.
"as for your last point: yes, i'd like longer battery life, but i'll probably spend most of my play time within reach of a power supply anyways save for the 1h/day on the bus."
Maybe. That will get old REAL fast, though.
"Once again, for the stylus, just another thing to lose"
Actually, it is an input device, and they're quite handy when dealing with RPGs etc. Extra screens are handy with RPGs as well. No more pausing to look at a map or your inventory. Etc. The DS would be a MUCH better RPG machine than the PSP.
"1: the Dual Screens is a gimmick that, IMO, will become merely a neato thing, i'd rather have a single screen and have better games"
Too bad a 6" screen wouldn't fit well in your pocket. Also, you've conveniently ignored the stylus aspect of it.
"2: wireless isn't exactly that new in the handheld world, hell, cell phones have been doing it for more than a decade, and PDAs have been doing it for a few years too. now that a gaming machine has it, all of a sudden its innovative? its not pushing technology forwards, its merely riding piggyback on an established technology."
So how many portable games have you played wirelessly? Maybe it's not 'innovative', but it's still important.
"3: cart gaming? since when was a Cartridge innovative, i've had them for my Atari 2600 for 20 years, at least sony its gutsy enough to try something like not using a cartidge."
Nobody called cart gaming innovative. It is, however, battery efficient, rugged, and allows for backwards compatibility with the GBA. On the PSP, it's a development nightmare, hence the purpose of this article.
"4: nintendo and its unpaid promoters(ie. Fanboys) are so wrapped up in the idea that handhelds are only good for short games that they've forgotten that some people actaully want to play a long epic scale game from a portable,"
So, you'd agree then that long battery life and a stronger interface (such as a stylus?) would come in handy, right?
"No it wouldn't, since it would've cost $100 more and had half the battery life."
Na, the battery life was virtually the same. At last the one I had was. Plus it would have played all Genesis games, and it would have been a much better gaming experience than the GB.
However, I think the Turbo Express nastily defeats my point, so I withdraw it. I do feel, though, that more people would have been tolerant if it had 16-bit processing power.
"Remember the Game Gear? It was lightyears ahead of the original Game Boy. Color, backlit screen, processing power..."
That's not 'light-years'. Except for the color screen, there was little the GG could do the GB couldn't in terms of games. If the original Game Gear was like the Nomad, then yes, it would have been 'light years', and it would have been vastly more successful.
Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP. However, I think I'm missing the point of why this article is as negative about it as it is. It's not like Sony can put an optical drive in this thing and magically make it work forever on batteries. If Sony's trying to say "look, don't piss off our customers" I say more power to them. (no pun intended.)
"Speech recognition is one of the worst means of input there is for a computer. Keyboards work so much better."
This statement is far too general to be true. The keyboard is only faster if you know what the command is you're trying to enter AND how to spell it. Voice recognition, used correctly, is much more intuitive. Maybe it's not so hot for dictation, but imagine if an app you're using didn't have to have a bunch of hard-to-sift-through menus. Just say 'Italic!' or "Bold!'
SR is much more interesting on simplified devices, though. I have a TabletPC. In Tablet mode, the kb is tucked under the screen. I have stylus buttons for copy/paste etc, but the voice recognition works better. (Although, as with your cubicle comment, my gf found that annoying.)
It's a lot easier to find problems with something than it is to find good aspects of it. I dunno why this comment was modded 'intresting'.
"If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS...something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
I can just see someone writing a virus that forcibly installs a miniature Linux distro on your DS and propagates. "
Umm, seeing as how the DS doesn't have any storage for this sort of thing, how does this really rate as an insightful comment?
"Without "Star Wars", would "Star Trek: TMP" have been possible?"
Yes. TMP was originally 'Star Trek: Phase II', a new series that they started building sets for. When the change was made to TMP, it was still well before SW had come out. ST was coming whether SW was there or not.
A better question would be "Was STII a result of Star Wars?" I personally believe the answer is still no, as nothing in the first movie indicated there would be any sort of SW's action. But, still, I imagine somebody has an interesting alternative point of view.
"So we're looking at a machine that does a lot of things but does none of them very well?"
I'm going to swallow my anti-Sony bias here and defend them on this point. The PSP looks like a solid game machine. I'm reasonably certain that will come to pass. As for playing movies, that is simply software. It's not like it'll play movies at 10fps or something. The one thing that the PSP may NOT do well on is getting interesting movies on the thing.
Still, the $350 price tag (which just reeks of RUMOR) is way too high. I'd rather make 350 trips to the nudie bar.
"I wouldn't say that's a forgone conclusion. The Playstation consoles have major brand-name recognition and a considerable following, consisting heavily of the 18-25 gamers who criticize Nintendo for having mostly kids' games. Rather than being the next N-Gage, I think we have the next Game Gear here: It'll do moderately good, but it's too far undersold by a competitor that was already wildly successful when they came along."good games. Would a game company put all that effort into a game they will make significantly less on? Ports are one thing, and this system would lend itself to those... but I dunno.
I'm going to be honest, I'm a Nintendo zealot. And yes, I heard that from Nintendo. But it's an interesting point. I hope for Sony's sake that those discs are considerably cheaper than the DS's cartridges.
"Are you serious? Of course Slashdot covered those stories too."
Yeah, but the attitude was different. "This just more proof how great the OSS Community is!" Whereas in MS's case, it was "This is further proof that nobody should ever use Windows!!!"
"I have to ask, what has MS done that is actually useful since Windows 2000?"
The image viewer that comes with XP is very nice. (Especially for us pr0n freaks.) You can log in as another user without logging out the previous user. (We use that at work fairly frequently.) CD burning is built in to explorer. Startup and shutdown are considerably faster. You can actually lock the taskbar, although MS should have added that when they first put it in. I've noticed fewer restarts after installing some stuff, but it's been a long time since I've done that so I can't be more specific. Etc etc etc.
To sum it up: I have a 2k workstation at home and an XP workstation at work, and boy do I feel the dfference. I can still do my work just fine on 2K (i.e. I'm not excatly running out and buying the upgrade) but I am glad I have it at work and on my laptop. XP isn't total garbage compared to 2K.
"Congrats, microsoft, for making just about every filetype unsafe."
The silver lining is that Microsoft only needed to fix it once. I didn't have to go download a fix for explorer, iexplorer, image viewer, Outlook, Word...
" They charge you more per download than if you were to go to a store to rent it."
Yes. And though that sucks, you're still not spending 20 minutes or so getting the movie and returning it.
" Second the view period is usually only 24 hours."
Yes, but it's also 'on demand'. >24 hours makes more sense when you have store hours and your own schedule to worry about.
"Will it play on a Mac, Linux? Probably not. I think this sums of the situation quite nicely:"
You caaaaaan't alwaaaaaaaaaays haaaaaaaaaaaave what you waaaaaaaaaant. Seriously, though, have you ever tried to serve video over the web? It's not so easy to support everybody under the sun. Let's not forget that they feel they need to lock up everything. Granted, we all have issues with that, but they're the ones making it available in the end. Frankly, I think it sucks when a company makes a game I want for the Playstation but not the GameCube I have. Can I really complain about it, though? They have to make money. (Damn I wanna play San Andreas.)
"They are probably using some weird activeX components to launch a movie playing applicaiton."
I'm not claiming I know how their service works, afterall I'm not a customer, but I can make a few guesses:
1.) They need some sort of auto install capability.
2.) If they're using WMP, it's possible that they only allow IE to access the video because MS says that's the way to do it. Otherwise, it's possible they're trying to cut down on people intercepting and re-broadcasting the movie.
3.) I used another service that make the video full screen with controls right through the browser. Maybe they didn't feel comfortable enough making something like that work with all browsers.
Again, I'm operating under ignorance with these guesses. However, I have been involved with a company trying to come up with a video technology for streaming on the net, and you wouldn't believe all the lock downs and simplifications the customers wanted. We HAD to support IE and all its fancy shit. We HAD to make sure plugin install was automatic. We HAD to have content lock controls. Etc.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that some of the "but it only runs on Windows" complaints aren't addressed with either a dual-boot machine or a cheapy 500mhz machine running Windows. I'm sorry the Linux users out there can't do everything they wantbecause of an inconsiderate decision by a company providing a service, but life's like that all over the place.
Slashdot Mirror
"Dang, and me without points to mod this up (+1, Funny)."
For you Windows users out there who don't understand why this is funny, to us it's sort of like saying "Linux is ready for the desktop!"
"Anyways I think people aren't "just" waking up to Windows being insecure, unstable etc. It's just that they are willing to live with it rather than investigate alternate OS"
That and both points are heavily sensationalized over here. I run XP and 2K across several different computers. The general assumption here is that I spend hours a week dealing with viruses. I don't. I haven't been exploited in months. And, the one time I did, it was because I had a fresh install of XP out on the net sans firewall or a service pack. Doh.
The other assumption is that I spend lots of time rebooting. Nope. My machines get rebooted once every two weeks or so. This is laughable compared to Linux, but virtually nothing in terms of practical time used. Back in the Windows 95/98 days, this was a legit complaint. (3 or 4 reboots a DAY) Today, though, it's just not enough time to notice. I'm 'living with it' about as disturbingly as living with wrong number phonecalls.
So, by relieving myself of those problems with Linux, I'm not gaining a whole hell of a lot. I would, however, rack up a bunch of Google time trying to figure out how to make everything work. Linux is just going to have to do better than that to get people to switch. This has nothing to do with people having mixed up priorities.
"i ignored the stylus because i honestly hate the fucking things, my PDA has one and at any chance i can get id rather use my damn finger,"
Uh yeah, the DS lets you do that, too. The PSP does not.
" as for a 6" screen in my pocket, i've never put my SP in my pocket, i keep it in my backpack, i don't care about putting it in my pocket"
It's still a ding against Sony. The DS gets a good deal more screen real-estate while maintaining its portableness.
"cartidriges are a plague of the handheld gaming world, i'd rather them use pretty much anything else, good for you if you want your backwards compatability, but i have and SP already, i'd rather have innovation"
Cartridges are what makes the portable gaming world work. I'd rather not have easy to damage discs, low battery life, long loading times, and skipping.
"as for the wireless part, maybe you missed why i added it twice, the PSP and DS are both 802.11 wireless, and the PSP also has infra-red. i gave them a tie because of that fact."
I saw that you added it twice, it didn't negate the point you made. Both the DS and the PSP will have multiplayer options never before seen on a portable gaming device. It will change how they're played. The DS with its stylus interface will fare even better. We all know how much fun it is to use a D-pad to enter your character's name. Heh.
"as for your last point: yes, i'd like longer battery life, but i'll probably spend most of my play time within reach of a power supply anyways save for the 1h/day on the bus."
Maybe. That will get old REAL fast, though.
"Once again, for the stylus, just another thing to lose"
Actually, it is an input device, and they're quite handy when dealing with RPGs etc. Extra screens are handy with RPGs as well. No more pausing to look at a map or your inventory. Etc. The DS would be a MUCH better RPG machine than the PSP.
"1: the Dual Screens is a gimmick that, IMO, will become merely a neato thing, i'd rather have a single screen and have better games"
Too bad a 6" screen wouldn't fit well in your pocket. Also, you've conveniently ignored the stylus aspect of it.
"2: wireless isn't exactly that new in the handheld world, hell, cell phones have been doing it for more than a decade, and PDAs have been doing it for a few years too. now that a gaming machine has it, all of a sudden its innovative? its not pushing technology forwards, its merely riding piggyback on an established technology."
So how many portable games have you played wirelessly? Maybe it's not 'innovative', but it's still important.
"3: cart gaming? since when was a Cartridge innovative, i've had them for my Atari 2600 for 20 years, at least sony its gutsy enough to try something like not using a cartidge."
Nobody called cart gaming innovative. It is, however, battery efficient, rugged, and allows for backwards compatibility with the GBA. On the PSP, it's a development nightmare, hence the purpose of this article.
"4: nintendo and its unpaid promoters(ie. Fanboys) are so wrapped up in the idea that handhelds are only good for short games that they've forgotten that some people actaully want to play a long epic scale game from a portable,"
So, you'd agree then that long battery life and a stronger interface (such as a stylus?) would come in handy, right?
"winner: Sony - 3/4"
I count 1/4.
"No it wouldn't, since it would've cost $100 more and had half the battery life."
Na, the battery life was virtually the same. At last the one I had was. Plus it would have played all Genesis games, and it would have been a much better gaming experience than the GB.
However, I think the Turbo Express nastily defeats my point, so I withdraw it. I do feel, though, that more people would have been tolerant if it had 16-bit processing power.
"Remember the Game Gear? It was lightyears ahead of the original Game Boy. Color, backlit screen, processing power..."
That's not 'light-years'. Except for the color screen, there was little the GG could do the GB couldn't in terms of games. If the original Game Gear was like the Nomad, then yes, it would have been 'light years', and it would have been vastly more successful.
Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP. However, I think I'm missing the point of why this article is as negative about it as it is. It's not like Sony can put an optical drive in this thing and magically make it work forever on batteries. If Sony's trying to say "look, don't piss off our customers" I say more power to them. (no pun intended.)
"hey, felt a 6.0 today, in California. mod me offtopic."
I would but I'm worried they're connected.
Stupid 10.4 movie. >:I
"Speech recognition is one of the worst means of input there is for a computer. Keyboards work so much better."
This statement is far too general to be true. The keyboard is only faster if you know what the command is you're trying to enter AND how to spell it. Voice recognition, used correctly, is much more intuitive. Maybe it's not so hot for dictation, but imagine if an app you're using didn't have to have a bunch of hard-to-sift-through menus. Just say 'Italic!' or "Bold!'
SR is much more interesting on simplified devices, though. I have a TabletPC. In Tablet mode, the kb is tucked under the screen. I have stylus buttons for copy/paste etc, but the voice recognition works better. (Although, as with your cubicle comment, my gf found that annoying.)
It's a lot easier to find problems with something than it is to find good aspects of it. I dunno why this comment was modded 'intresting'.
Huh. I kind of expected it to be provided in sheetmusic format.
"If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS...something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
I can just see someone writing a virus that forcibly installs a miniature Linux distro on your DS and propagates.
"
Umm, seeing as how the DS doesn't have any storage for this sort of thing, how does this really rate as an insightful comment?
"Let's be serious for a minute. What can the PSP offer me that is worth it's (expected) retail price?"
An exceptional game you can't get on PS2?
"Without "Star Wars", would "Star Trek: TMP" have been possible?"
Yes. TMP was originally 'Star Trek: Phase II', a new series that they started building sets for. When the change was made to TMP, it was still well before SW had come out. ST was coming whether SW was there or not.
A better question would be "Was STII a result of Star Wars?" I personally believe the answer is still no, as nothing in the first movie indicated there would be any sort of SW's action. But, still, I imagine somebody has an interesting alternative point of view.
"So we're looking at a machine that does a lot of things but does none of them very well?"
I'm going to swallow my anti-Sony bias here and defend them on this point. The PSP looks like a solid game machine. I'm reasonably certain that will come to pass. As for playing movies, that is simply software. It's not like it'll play movies at 10fps or something. The one thing that the PSP may NOT do well on is getting interesting movies on the thing.
Still, the $350 price tag (which just reeks of RUMOR) is way too high. I'd rather make 350 trips to the nudie bar.
"I wouldn't say that's a forgone conclusion. The Playstation consoles have major brand-name recognition and a considerable following, consisting heavily of the 18-25 gamers who criticize Nintendo for having mostly kids' games. Rather than being the next N-Gage, I think we have the next Game Gear here: It'll do moderately good, but it's too far undersold by a competitor that was already wildly successful when they came along."good games. Would a game company put all that effort into a game they will make significantly less on? Ports are one thing, and this system would lend itself to those... but I dunno.
I'm going to be honest, I'm a Nintendo zealot. And yes, I heard that from Nintendo. But it's an interesting point. I hope for Sony's sake that those discs are considerably cheaper than the DS's cartridges.
"did you have a point, or you just didnt like the discussion? either way, get over it and move on"
Yeah, I did actually. Did you miss it?
"Are you serious? Of course Slashdot covered those stories too."
Yeah, but the attitude was different. "This just more proof how great the OSS Community is!" Whereas in MS's case, it was "This is further proof that nobody should ever use Windows!!!"
"I have to ask, what has MS done that is actually useful since Windows 2000?"
The image viewer that comes with XP is very nice. (Especially for us pr0n freaks.) You can log in as another user without logging out the previous user. (We use that at work fairly frequently.) CD burning is built in to explorer. Startup and shutdown are considerably faster. You can actually lock the taskbar, although MS should have added that when they first put it in. I've noticed fewer restarts after installing some stuff, but it's been a long time since I've done that so I can't be more specific. Etc etc etc.
To sum it up: I have a 2k workstation at home and an XP workstation at work, and boy do I feel the dfference. I can still do my work just fine on 2K (i.e. I'm not excatly running out and buying the upgrade) but I am glad I have it at work and on my laptop. XP isn't total garbage compared to 2K.
"Congrats, microsoft, for making just about every filetype unsafe."
The silver lining is that Microsoft only needed to fix it once. I didn't have to go download a fix for explorer, iexplorer, image viewer, Outlook, Word...
...If the editors can dupe, why not the posters?
"I have an electric Delorean... rather a Neuclear-Powered electric Delorean!"
You'd be a lot cooler to us if you'd take off that damn life preserver.
"Yet another thing to lower my dwindling sperm count! Awesome!"
Well in your case that'd be sorta like it rotting your appendix away.
"For Duke Nukem Forever release..."
It can hold Longhorn! *Giggle giggle, snort snort* That joke never gets old!
Okay, back to work. Oh crap, I can't find my 5th RedHat disc...
"Upon hearing this, I raised my "Volcano Alert" level of my pants to "Code Brown""
"Forget red! Go all the way to BROWN!"
"But there's no such thing as brown alert!"
"You won't be saying that in a minute, and don't say I didn't alert you!"
" They charge you more per download than if you were to go to a store to rent it."
Yes. And though that sucks, you're still not spending 20 minutes or so getting the movie and returning it.
" Second the view period is usually only 24 hours."
Yes, but it's also 'on demand'. >24 hours makes more sense when you have store hours and your own schedule to worry about.
"Will it play on a Mac, Linux? Probably not. I think this sums of the situation quite nicely:"
You caaaaaan't alwaaaaaaaaaays haaaaaaaaaaaave what you waaaaaaaaaant. Seriously, though, have you ever tried to serve video over the web? It's not so easy to support everybody under the sun. Let's not forget that they feel they need to lock up everything. Granted, we all have issues with that, but they're the ones making it available in the end. Frankly, I think it sucks when a company makes a game I want for the Playstation but not the GameCube I have. Can I really complain about it, though? They have to make money. (Damn I wanna play San Andreas.)
"They are probably using some weird activeX components to launch a movie playing applicaiton."
I'm not claiming I know how their service works, afterall I'm not a customer, but I can make a few guesses:
1.) They need some sort of auto install capability.
2.) If they're using WMP, it's possible that they only allow IE to access the video because MS says that's the way to do it. Otherwise, it's possible they're trying to cut down on people intercepting and re-broadcasting the movie.
3.) I used another service that make the video full screen with controls right through the browser. Maybe they didn't feel comfortable enough making something like that work with all browsers.
Again, I'm operating under ignorance with these guesses. However, I have been involved with a company trying to come up with a video technology for streaming on the net, and you wouldn't believe all the lock downs and simplifications the customers wanted. We HAD to support IE and all its fancy shit. We HAD to make sure plugin install was automatic. We HAD to have content lock controls. Etc.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that some of the "but it only runs on Windows" complaints aren't addressed with either a dual-boot machine or a cheapy 500mhz machine running Windows. I'm sorry the Linux users out there can't do everything they wantbecause of an inconsiderate decision by a company providing a service, but life's like that all over the place.