Ah! Just wanted to let you know I appreciate your question, most people come to some bizarre extreme instead of finding out what I meant. Heh. I'm serious here, I appreciate you asking even if you come to disagree with me.:)
The reason the Robocop project happened was because ED-209 was pretty badly designed. ED-209 was supposed to be an automated law enforcement droid, but it had serious design flaws that strangely reflect the way Windows works today. OCP didn't really care that it worked or not, they just wanted to get that ever fruitful gov't contract. When ED-209 failed at a board meeting (to put it mildly...) an up and coming exec leapt in and proposed his pitch for the Robocop project that would solve all of these problems.
So that's where the MS reference comes in. In the presentation video that announced ED-209, they made a reference to "investing in areas that weren't originally profitable." with clips of artificial hearts (and a commercial for an 'athletic heart'..heh) and space exploration and so on. OCP had a viral approach to snapping up any market they could and becoming the leader. As for Boddicker's involvement, I personally thought that OCP wasn't in on that. To me, that felt like it was just Dick Jones trying to grab a few extra $$$. Basically, OCP was trying to set up a legal monopoly in a self contained area. This was emphasized in Robocop 2 when OCP intentionally set up the city with a loan and forced them to default on it so they could take over city property. Heh. Pretty aggresive, wouldn't you say?
Their grande plan was to buy Old Detroid and erect 'Delta City', where presumably they could keep everybody out, including competitors and the government. It wouldn't be long before they could have their own nicely contained economy where they rule. Your equality was measured in stock. The more you bought, the more decision making power you have. (Making OCP rich in the process...) And so on...
The Robocop reference I made was a playful poke at the idea that MS would try to pull the stunt OCP (fictionally) attempted to. I think people get ideas that MS is trying to do more than it really is. I have no doubt they've done some really shitty things to get where they are today, but I seriously doubt that they're interested in going to the extremes that people say they are. For example, MS allegedly paying $2 billion (inflated # btw...) to get the XBOX out in order to wipe out OpenGL and so on. This is ridiculous. What's really happening is that the Playstation became a rather profitable item for Sony, so MS thought they'd try their hand at it.
At least that's my view on it. I've followed MS for quite a while, I've also followed the game market for quite a while. MS is not doing anything unsual there other than not including Word or IE with their machine. Heh.
As I said above, I appreciate you asking me to clarify. It is so rare these days.
"PS2 had to recoup the huge research and development costs, but the hardware was never sold at a loss."
Yes, it was. They were $450 machines sold at $300.
"Come on, the only thing that keeps the XBox alive is a) massive infusion of cash by Microsoft and b) hardcore-gamers that jerk off by having the latest-greatest."
No argument there. They really need some AAA games, and I don't know how they're going about acquiring them.
"When the PS3 hits the market, there will be not a single reason to buy a XBox anymore..."
Heh that's an amusing comment. Let me explain to you a couple of things:
1.) You phrase that as if I'm an XBOX zealot. I am not. I don't have an XBOX. I don't want an XBOX. I am actually a GameCube zealot.
2.) Nobody gives a shit about the PS3. If the PS2 is any indication (and it very well might be because Sony is arrogant as hell, even worse than MS), then it'll easily be outpowered by Nintendo a year or so later.
3.) Playstation 3 is only as good as it's games. Which means that it won't have much of an edge on XBOX if the XBOX manages to get better game support. (That's unlikely, though.)
4.) The Playstation 3 will be out no earlier than 2005. MS will more than likely have a new XBOX down the road by then. Nintendo will have a new system, and so on. The funny thing is, the successor to the XBOX will probably be able to play the original XBOX games. That'd be interesting.
Heh. So yeah, your comment was pretty silly. Funny thing is, it really doesn't even matter. You play games on a game machine, not have pissing contests over it's power.
"Could you justify the statement "Running OS X, it takes about double the clock on the Mac side to equal the speed of Windows 2000 on a PC"?"
I didn't write it, but I can justify it:
OSX throws up a lot of unnecessary graphical animated garbage. Windows 2000 is pretty simplistic and nowhere near as animated. OSX uses up a lot more clock cycles while your mouse is running than Win2k. So Win2k requires less CPU power.
This is a valid complaint. The responsiveness of your interface is vastly more important than how fast it can actually handle stuff. People will see a window updating very slowly and assume their computer is just really slow. It doesn't occur to them that the machine is swapping. From what I've seen on a friend's iBook, it doesn't take much to make the interface in OSX chug along, thus making him feel he needs a faster processor. Never mind that all the underlying stuff is running just fine.
Nobody cares if it can encode an MPEG file in 1 minute or 3, it still is dog slow if it doesnt' respond well to clicks.
"This says absolutely nothing about how fast Mac hardware is, only that OS X is harder on system resources then Win2k."
Who cares how fast it is? The only thing that matters about your machine is how you use it. SETI benchmarks are WORTHLESS if you don't run SETI, or worse, you don't care how fast SETI runs.
Your machine needs to be able to work well with what you do. Lightwave animator? Get one that scores well with Lightwave, don't pay attention to how fast browsers render.
You really shouldn't worry so much about the potential of your system and worry about the usefulness of it. It's great if you can run Q3 at 200fps, but only if you play Q3, and only if you can see the difference between 100 and 200 fps.
"It's not, and you are either a fool or a idiot if you think the Xbox is. "
Graphically, numbnuts! Didn't you read the context?
"The XBox is literally just a low end PC (by today's standard) with a hot graphics card"
I was responding to this, you might have seen it if you had actually READ my post. I did quote him! I was saying the graphics on the XBOX are on par or well above PS2 or GC. I did not say: 'The XBOX has a large market!' I did not say 'It poses a threat to the PS2 and the GameCube market because it is in the same market!' and I am definitely not the idiot here.
It's amazing how heated people can get in a video game debate. It's also amazing how they read a line in a magazine and act like they're an expert all the sudden.
Didn't you read the part where I said "This is hypothetical, spare me real world examples."?
On the flip side, I worked for a company that leased servers from IBM. One server blew up in a bright flash, and 4 hours later we had an IBM rep with a new motherboard.
It did NOT start out that way. It started out exactly as XBOX did until they refined the hardware to more tolerable levels. Unfortunately, because of the price drops, MS was forced to drop their price as well. If they were to continue at $300 for a while, they could have made up more. But the market shifted.
"And when you look at XBox-live costing an additional 2 billion $, you would need (at 50$/year) about 40 million subscriber years to reach break even, which is ridiculous. "
You sure that was 2 billion? Either way, that may not have been very smart. Don't confuse incompetance with attempts to take over the world. Trust me, XBOX would be very different if it was. Geez you guys should follow MS products more.
"Not quite the same as Sony. At least the Playstation was a somewhat original, innovative platform in its day. The XBox is literally just a low end PC (by today's standard) with a hot graphics card, albeit with a restrictive BIOS/firmware."
If that's true, how come it is having such an easy time competing with the PS2 or GameCube?
Sorry but I'm just not buying this whole 'internet appliance' story. There is no web browser with the XBOX. There is no mouse and keyboard. There is no XBOX version of Office. Wanna know why? It's because it's a game machine. They're not going to extend their monopoly with it. They're going to make money off it by selling games.
The only reason people think this is because they watched Robocop one too many times.
I can relate to that. I recently rewrote the core of my company's website using PHP (we were using.ASP.. blah) and there's a few features that I didn't have to add.
I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying about MS being a monopolist. However, that does not automatically make XBOX some strange attempt to enforce that monopoly. MS invested in a new market the same way Sony did, and it could really pay off for them. However, it's really not clear how using Direct3D instead of OpenGL could possibly have a bigger benefit to them than a successful game machine like Playstation.
Take off your "I hate MS" T-shirt for a minute and think about it.
Let's say that Database package A is made by a huge corp and package B is like MySQL, free, open source, etc.. Now, let's say that functionally they're similar and that any given company could use one or the other without aching too much.
If there is a bug in package A, the corp would have monetary incentive + engineers to fix it. (This is hypothetical, so spare me real world scenarios...) If there's a bug in package B, what exactly is the incentive to get it fixed in a timely manner?
Just to be clear, I am not criticizing free software. I'm genuinely curious because I'm not fully educated on the topic.
This is an important question because larger companies are willing to pay the money for the 'package A' scenario, but only because they have a sense that spending th1e money put into it means problems are quickly correctable. (I know, reality is a different story, don't beat me up for that point.) With package B, if something's missing, they don't have much alternative other than to go ahead and use package A. Package B is free, but if they already adopted it there's time/money/effort already invested. This could prove embarrasing. It seems like it'd be hard for a company with enough money to buy and support package A would ever be interested in package B. So how does one go about convincing them?
I'd really like to understand that aspect of Open Source before I recommend MySQL or something like that to my boss.
"i heard that it will be available for ps2 but gfx wont be as good as on pc/xbox because ps2 isnt powerful enough..."
I'm going to have to defend Mr Emir here. What he said is not flamebait, it's the truth. The pS2 has bottlenecks that render it impossible to achieve the same visual quality as the XBOX with this game. It's too RAM heavy. It's widely known that the PS2's texture buffer is very slim compared to XBOX or even GameCube. The fact that it doesn't have texture compression doesn't help it either.
The PS2 could get a version of it, but it'll definitely be noticably worse than the XBOX version. Call it flamebait if ya like, but I find it ridiculous to believe that anybody'd disagree with me. The PS2 wasn't built for that!
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad they won't supply my demand for music in MP3 format.
I said it before, I'll say it again: When I was talking about the XBOX holding it's own against GC or PS2, I was talking about processing power.
"The allies had their hands on Enigma for several years before they came up with a cryptanalytic method (kudos to the Poles!)..."
Must...resist...politically incorrect joke........about polish people... and how many it takes.... to say something nobody understands.... argh!
Ah! Just wanted to let you know I appreciate your question, most people come to some bizarre extreme instead of finding out what I meant. Heh. I'm serious here, I appreciate you asking even if you come to disagree with me. :)
The reason the Robocop project happened was because ED-209 was pretty badly designed. ED-209 was supposed to be an automated law enforcement droid, but it had serious design flaws that strangely reflect the way Windows works today. OCP didn't really care that it worked or not, they just wanted to get that ever fruitful gov't contract. When ED-209 failed at a board meeting (to put it mildly...) an up and coming exec leapt in and proposed his pitch for the Robocop project that would solve all of these problems.
So that's where the MS reference comes in. In the presentation video that announced ED-209, they made a reference to "investing in areas that weren't originally profitable." with clips of artificial hearts (and a commercial for an 'athletic heart'..heh) and space exploration and so on. OCP had a viral approach to snapping up any market they could and becoming the leader. As for Boddicker's involvement, I personally thought that OCP wasn't in on that. To me, that felt like it was just Dick Jones trying to grab a few extra $$$. Basically, OCP was trying to set up a legal monopoly in a self contained area. This was emphasized in Robocop 2 when OCP intentionally set up the city with a loan and forced them to default on it so they could take over city property. Heh. Pretty aggresive, wouldn't you say?
Their grande plan was to buy Old Detroid and erect 'Delta City', where presumably they could keep everybody out, including competitors and the government. It wouldn't be long before they could have their own nicely contained economy where they rule. Your equality was measured in stock. The more you bought, the more decision making power you have. (Making OCP rich in the process...) And so on...
The Robocop reference I made was a playful poke at the idea that MS would try to pull the stunt OCP (fictionally) attempted to. I think people get ideas that MS is trying to do more than it really is. I have no doubt they've done some really shitty things to get where they are today, but I seriously doubt that they're interested in going to the extremes that people say they are. For example, MS allegedly paying $2 billion (inflated # btw...) to get the XBOX out in order to wipe out OpenGL and so on. This is ridiculous. What's really happening is that the Playstation became a rather profitable item for Sony, so MS thought they'd try their hand at it.
At least that's my view on it. I've followed MS for quite a while, I've also followed the game market for quite a while. MS is not doing anything unsual there other than not including Word or IE with their machine. Heh.
As I said above, I appreciate you asking me to clarify. It is so rare these days.
I just bought one of their cards like two months ago!
Why can't they let us know in advance when they're going to go out of business? I wouldn't have bought the card then!
One could bring up Goldeneeye for the N64 as well. My comment still stands.
B'sides, why play Doom III on your inferior Playstation when you've already got a PC to play it on? Heh
"Or you can plug in the usb keyboard and mouse you already own. Standard usb ports are there along with iLink... look before you leap man. "
I don't own a USB keyboard. And my mouse is staying on my computer cos I have to dig down behind it to grab it.
Practicality first.
"PS2 had to recoup the huge research and development costs, but the hardware was never sold at a loss."
Yes, it was. They were $450 machines sold at $300.
"Come on, the only thing that keeps the XBox alive is a) massive infusion of cash by Microsoft and b) hardcore-gamers that jerk off by having the latest-greatest."
No argument there. They really need some AAA games, and I don't know how they're going about acquiring them.
"When the PS3 hits the market, there will be not a single reason to buy a XBox anymore..."
Heh that's an amusing comment. Let me explain to you a couple of things:
1.) You phrase that as if I'm an XBOX zealot. I am not. I don't have an XBOX. I don't want an XBOX. I am actually a GameCube zealot.
2.) Nobody gives a shit about the PS3. If the PS2 is any indication (and it very well might be because Sony is arrogant as hell, even worse than MS), then it'll easily be outpowered by Nintendo a year or so later.
3.) Playstation 3 is only as good as it's games. Which means that it won't have much of an edge on XBOX if the XBOX manages to get better game support. (That's unlikely, though.)
4.) The Playstation 3 will be out no earlier than 2005. MS will more than likely have a new XBOX down the road by then. Nintendo will have a new system, and so on. The funny thing is, the successor to the XBOX will probably be able to play the original XBOX games. That'd be interesting.
Heh. So yeah, your comment was pretty silly. Funny thing is, it really doesn't even matter. You play games on a game machine, not have pissing contests over it's power.
I didn't write it, but I can justify it:
This is a valid complaint. The responsiveness of your interface is vastly more important than how fast it can actually handle stuff. People will see a window updating very slowly and assume their computer is just really slow. It doesn't occur to them that the machine is swapping. From what I've seen on a friend's iBook, it doesn't take much to make the interface in OSX chug along, thus making him feel he needs a faster processor. Never mind that all the underlying stuff is running just fine.
Nobody cares if it can encode an MPEG file in 1 minute or 3, it still is dog slow if it doesnt' respond well to clicks.
"This says absolutely nothing about how fast Mac hardware is, only that OS X is harder on system resources then Win2k."
Who cares how fast it is? The only thing that matters about your machine is how you use it. SETI benchmarks are WORTHLESS if you don't run SETI, or worse, you don't care how fast SETI runs.
Your machine needs to be able to work well with what you do. Lightwave animator? Get one that scores well with Lightwave, don't pay attention to how fast browsers render.
You really shouldn't worry so much about the potential of your system and worry about the usefulness of it. It's great if you can run Q3 at 200fps, but only if you play Q3, and only if you can see the difference between 100 and 200 fps.
I remember reading 56k ads as being 'blazing fast'. Heh.
"It's not, and you are either a fool or a idiot if you think the Xbox is. "
Graphically, numbnuts! Didn't you read the context?
"The XBox is literally just a low end PC (by today's standard) with a hot graphics card"
I was responding to this, you might have seen it if you had actually READ my post. I did quote him! I was saying the graphics on the XBOX are on par or well above PS2 or GC. I did not say: 'The XBOX has a large market!' I did not say 'It poses a threat to the PS2 and the GameCube market because it is in the same market!' and I am definitely not the idiot here.
It's amazing how heated people can get in a video game debate. It's also amazing how they read a line in a magazine and act like they're an expert all the sudden.
Oh don't be idiotic. The more money a company has, the more it wants. You don't have to hang around rich people for very long to see that.
Meanwhile, the XBOX still doesn't have Office, it still isn't a set top box, it still doesn't have a mouse and keyboard....
Sww why I wanted to avoid that? Yeesh.
"PS2-hardware is sold at a profit..."
It did NOT start out that way. It started out exactly as XBOX did until they refined the hardware to more tolerable levels. Unfortunately, because of the price drops, MS was forced to drop their price as well. If they were to continue at $300 for a while, they could have made up more. But the market shifted.
"And when you look at XBox-live costing an additional 2 billion $, you would need (at 50$/year) about 40 million subscriber years to reach break even, which is ridiculous. "
You sure that was 2 billion? Either way, that may not have been very smart. Don't confuse incompetance with attempts to take over the world. Trust me, XBOX would be very different if it was. Geez you guys should follow MS products more.
Yeah, if you want to go out and buy them. Heh.
Never said they were competent.
a.) They didn't release in Japan first. As a matter of fact, they totally failed to tap into the Japanese market. Oops.
b.) Every console loses money to start with. They dont just "blinG!" start off profitable
c.) Nothing you've said even puts a dent in my point.
"Not quite the same as Sony. At least the Playstation was a somewhat original, innovative platform in its day. The XBox is literally just a low end PC (by today's standard) with a hot graphics card, albeit with a restrictive BIOS/firmware."
If that's true, how come it is having such an easy time competing with the PS2 or GameCube?
Sorry but I'm just not buying this whole 'internet appliance' story. There is no web browser with the XBOX. There is no mouse and keyboard. There is no XBOX version of Office. Wanna know why? It's because it's a game machine. They're not going to extend their monopoly with it. They're going to make money off it by selling games.
The only reason people think this is because they watched Robocop one too many times.
If that happened here I'd have my cable disconnected. *Hopes somebody at AT&T is reading.*
I can relate to that. I recently rewrote the core of my company's website using PHP (we were using .ASP.. blah) and there's a few features that I didn't have to add.
:)
I understand what you're saying, thanks.
I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying about MS being a monopolist. However, that does not automatically make XBOX some strange attempt to enforce that monopoly. MS invested in a new market the same way Sony did, and it could really pay off for them. However, it's really not clear how using Direct3D instead of OpenGL could possibly have a bigger benefit to them than a successful game machine like Playstation.
Take off your "I hate MS" T-shirt for a minute and think about it.
Okay, I just have a real simple question:
Let's say that Database package A is made by a huge corp and package B is like MySQL, free, open source, etc.. Now, let's say that functionally they're similar and that any given company could use one or the other without aching too much.
If there is a bug in package A, the corp would have monetary incentive + engineers to fix it. (This is hypothetical, so spare me real world scenarios...) If there's a bug in package B, what exactly is the incentive to get it fixed in a timely manner?
Just to be clear, I am not criticizing free software. I'm genuinely curious because I'm not fully educated on the topic.
This is an important question because larger companies are willing to pay the money for the 'package A' scenario, but only because they have a sense that spending th1e money put into it means problems are quickly correctable. (I know, reality is a different story, don't beat me up for that point.) With package B, if something's missing, they don't have much alternative other than to go ahead and use package A. Package B is free, but if they already adopted it there's time/money/effort already invested. This could prove embarrasing. It seems like it'd be hard for a company with enough money to buy and support package A would ever be interested in package B. So how does one go about convincing them?
I'd really like to understand that aspect of Open Source before I recommend MySQL or something like that to my boss.
"If this show really puts you on the edge of your seat, I'd say you have been the victim of too many dramtic impacts--to the head."
Ummm okay. Your questionable taste in television shows has failed to deliver a dramatic impact to my point. Heh.
"i heard that it will be available for ps2 but gfx wont be as good as on pc/xbox because ps2 isnt powerful enough..."
I'm going to have to defend Mr Emir here. What he said is not flamebait, it's the truth. The pS2 has bottlenecks that render it impossible to achieve the same visual quality as the XBOX with this game. It's too RAM heavy. It's widely known that the PS2's texture buffer is very slim compared to XBOX or even GameCube. The fact that it doesn't have texture compression doesn't help it either.
The PS2 could get a version of it, but it'll definitely be noticably worse than the XBOX version. Call it flamebait if ya like, but I find it ridiculous to believe that anybody'd disagree with me. The PS2 wasn't built for that!