Looking at Nintendo hardware of the past, I think they are unlike other consoles. Since it's less powerful, they probably cut even near the beginning of the life of the console and then start making more and more money during it's lifetime as component prices drop.
Although I don't disagree with your point about branching out, it would perhaps expand their audience. But one counterpoint is that with shipping a console, they can always decide to try to make another sucessful franchise of the pack-in game that comes with it. They have done this with a lot of their successful franchises. They would lose that power once they no longer make hardware and probably also have to bid for that slot.
Well, looking at the size of the size of the VR controller, it does lead one to ask why didn't they make it a purely autonomous unit at that point (connectable to a TV of coure)....
I guess they didn't want to confuse people with their 3DS line up....
Al Gore's wife in the 90s and Hillary Clinton in the 00s also wanted some type of ban on violent video games "for the children". Republicans do suck on a lot of things but the Democrats take the cake here as well.
I got a few registered packages from Hong Kong. I don't remember French on them, just Chinese Characters. The guy tried scanning it in and it wouldn't scan. I ended up signing for it another way, and I'm pretty sure the sender wouldn't have been able to track it if I chose to be dishonest.
Also lost more than a few registered intl packages (domestic registered is rock solid). They definitely need more cooperation and improvement. The fact that they have coverage on the domestic registered package up to $25K and on international registered (depending on country) of $45.23 (IIRC) speaks of the varying confidence levels in this area.
1. Be more proactive with the blue boxes. I have to literally drive 3 miles out of my way to get to the closest ones in my well to do suburb town. None of the major new shopping malls have one. And looking at the internet there is a huge pocket of none although demographically it makes no sense. The closest one is in a aging, dying stripmall in front of an empty supermarket that closed 5 years ago. In the last 10 years, 5 huge strip malls opened in the area, each one bigger than the last, and literally none have one. The only other two in the area are like 1/2 mile from the USPO itself, located 20 feet from each other diagonally on street corners not particurly trafficked. A braindead person much have coordinated this.
2. Have more self serve kiosks, particularly in locations that should close but the unions block it. (No clue how to overcome that.)
Oh please. If this was 25 years ago and involved a kid sharing music via cassette tapes, no one would have batted an eyelash. The only stupid thing is that it gets take to court now because 1 kid among literally millions gets caught and has to be made the scapegoat for the rest of society. Total and utter bullshit.
1. Cut delivery in most areas, definitely the rural ones to every other day. M-W-F and T-Th-Sa. This will cut number of mail carriers and fuel and vehicles needed, as 1 carrier now will get two routes. Express mail has it's own carrier so that will be unaffected for the people that pay for it.
2. Offer to take UPS and FedEx packages at the post office. People who want package for stuff they don't want delivered at home (theft, gifts, adult purchases, etc) have to rent a box at UPS or Fedex location at exorbinant rates. Let them rent a cheaper USPS box, get their mail and packages in one spot, come in, and bring some more business.
3. Consider offering an electronic mail service, where you can send certified/registered mail or even purchase money orders and send them right off online - and have USPS print them out and deliver them like normal letters. Premium services without ever going to the counter. Lawyer offices rejoice?
4. Call an international Postal Office congress. Get a cheap international tracking number and while at it, standardize all customs forms and registered form and other forms the world over with symbols. Too many packages get lost, too many registered packages with funny foreign postal languages go unheeded and the cheapest tracking number (unreliable) is with Express mail or Fedex/UPS with around $150 minimum ridiculousness, less for a business but still). Domestic tracking is like 0.75 cents. Even if they charge $5 for intl tracking, would be way cheaper than what's out there now and an untapped market. Especially for eBay sellers and the like.
5. On the eBay sellers front, try to break down customs barriers, especially with the EU. It's ridiculous.
Sorry, but some of are secure in our manhood enough to not make our cars an extension of our dicks.
I always wanted a decent small car. Never saw the need for anything bigger, or pay for a motor that can go 200+ mph when I do 80mph in my area max and 35-45 mph on avg.
I was taught that America is free market in school.
But in reality a ton of the laws I see on every level is just written by corps to protect their rackets. Hell, the arguments in the summary sound awfully similiar to the RIAA/MPAA everytime they run to Congress for yet another copyright extension.
Last year I had a flat tire a few towns away from home. A tow truck guy was nice enough to stop. Said he could help me change the tire or make a call, but could not tow me as the township required a special permit for thaht thaht they only gave to one (well connected) company. Although it shouldn't have applied as I was coming from a state highway onto a ramp of the interstate, he wouldn't risk a fine. Guess what, I had to wait 4 hours for a lousy overpriced tow.
That's all it's about, business interests restricting customer choice for their own gain, with the help of the government.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Yeah, great, a google wall to extract $50 a year from me. Soon, no other search engine but google will be allowed to index via their robots.txt.
And if you don't think that's possible, Google made their formerly free froogle/Google Shopping indexing service utterly worthless (to me) by making merchants to pay to be included in the first place.
I like many of the things google does, but they are gaining too much power, and to being to pay them a yearly subscription is not something I'm clamoring for.
Maybe the screen quality is better on the new ones.
Personally, I just print out and hang the photos I like (dye sub, not horrible inkjet, store quality would suffice as well). Much less energy use in the long run. Plus just playing with it won't erase the wanted image from it.
My girlfriend uses her iPad as a photo frame some of the time (obviously not all), much more easily updated with new stuff without going out of the way to only just that, and the (slide to unlock) makes it automatic. The screen is much nicer than most $100 frames that I saw in the past. She obviously only puts it out as such at special occasions and not all of the time.
If they have wifi built in, and a new small OS can be flashed onto it, maybe some cool uses can be had. Or maybe a school can use it, give it as a donation.
What I don't understand is why ISPs do this. I mean, a monthly paying customer is great, they pay a ton up front to snag new one, and iirc, as long as they act as a dumb pipe, they're not liable.
You shouldn't have to agree to a contract after you bought the item, not even as an adult. Even in a minimally protective society, it should mean that if you don't agree, you get to return the product for a full refund - which in this case is a 6 year old Xbox.
That's one thing I'm so sick of in Apple's case, everytime I buy an app, it starts d/l it and then it's like "Oops, we have to stop because there's a new EULA!" I thought Apple was supposed to be user friendly at the least - fuck off with your goddamn EULAs.
And that's becoming the case with so many other products. It's why I stopped buying DVDs. Companies thinking they can abuse the customer once they buy the product, and then complain when they pirate a superior product off the net without all the bullshit.
People have lives, and if they can't sell mainstream products without them reading 50 pages of nonsense, they shouldn't sell it at all.
Soon only google will be allowed to do these things with these agreements while other competitor will be shut out. A nonruling on this matter will leave the landscape fragmented and behind the curve for decades. Which is a shame, I found way more books via google books than any other way. Usually doing research. Without the content search, I would never have found the books or bothered buying them - afterall my budget is only so large and I cannot chase after every book that might or might not have what I need.
Books publishers, even more than music publishers, despite the later arrival of mainstream ebooks, see where things are heading and are absolutely shitting themselves. Middlemen in a world of a rapidly shrinking middle. Google, otoh, has no problem monopolizing this new avenue, sign a few deals, and keeping competitors with less resources permanently out by assuring these companies a place for at least a little while longer.
It's too bad our government is so owned, because no matter which companies win, there is absolutely no representation for the public and public domain and fair use, and we all lose.
But no, we would absolutely not have floppy drives or serial connectors. And we would still have touchscreen UIs. And rounded corners.
You say the first part but can you prove it? I remember the uproar when Apple came out with a computer without a floppy drive. Was it the original iMac? Anyway, from what I recall, Apple introducing the usb port coincided with them withholding the floppy.
The main complaint from people here, while acknowledging that it was absolutely past it's time in terms of data storage, was about the all powerful emergency boot disk. A lot of equipment still such as industrial robots or things like music synthesizers still use this. There was no USB drives around at the time and it was one of those circular problems - we can't get rid of the floppy because of this need, we don't want to spend time making another way to fulfill this need since the ubiquitous floppy fulfills it. When I looked just, like, 5 years ago, serial ports were still on a lot of the notebooks. Not so anymore. And the parallel port also had a particularly long life on desktops - way past it's prime.
That was the nature of the PC industry. It's why Microsoft was backwards compatible to the point of being painful for an extremely long time. It comes down from established user base and was manifested when things like the iPad announcement when a huge percentage of posts here predicted its demise simply because they couldn't see using one, and thus unable to look past themselves, thought it was the same with everyone. The PC industry is rife with examples like that and to an extent the tail wags the dog - people sometime don't know what they want until they have it and most companies go by the consumer focus group approach which would have yielded very dissimilar results.
It's works much the same way in the gaming console industry, with Nintendo playing the role of Apple.
Now, while you can point at me and yell Apple fanboi, I think an Apple dominated world would have been disastrous (app store being the norm by the late 90s, total lockdown, anyone?), unless you have some concrete counterargument, I think I can leave now.
The PC and Bill Gates will be remembered for making the computer cheap enough to turn the masses into geeks. (And of course, Bill's massive generosity.)
Steve Jobs will be remembered for making the computer, the MP3 player, and smartphone mainstream friendly and fashionable enough that it was no longer geeky to have a digital lifestyle - that alone massively growing the industry and driving mobile computing innovation (for instance, ARM chips being a lot more advanced now than it would have been absent these fashion trends). He'll also be known for dragging exterior computer design out of the hands of penny pinching accountants and out of the boxy era of the 8-bit Nintendo controller. While he wasn't first for industrial design in electronic gadgets, the computing realm and the gadgets around it always seemed particularly resistant to mainstream reform - relegating any company that did otherwise to the cost and exclusivity of a Bang & Olufsen with little impact on the average person.
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks. Hell, a lot of them still pretty much look like the plastic pieces of shit from the 90s but things have improved.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at Nintendo hardware of the past, I think they are unlike other consoles. Since it's less powerful, they probably cut even near the beginning of the life of the console and then start making more and more money during it's lifetime as component prices drop.
Although I don't disagree with your point about branching out, it would perhaps expand their audience. But one counterpoint is that with shipping a console, they can always decide to try to make another sucessful franchise of the pack-in game that comes with it. They have done this with a lot of their successful franchises. They would lose that power once they no longer make hardware and probably also have to bid for that slot.
Well, looking at the size of the size of the VR controller, it does lead one to ask why didn't they make it a purely autonomous unit at that point (connectable to a TV of coure)....
I guess they didn't want to confuse people with their 3DS line up....
My first thought looking at that thing is the controllers look too big (heavy) and expensive, that it was another Game Boy VR.
Idk about the sales numbers but I hope I'm wrong. We definitely need more than just 2 console makers, one of whom also spearheads PCs.
Indeed, it's through Biden that the RIAA/MPAA infiltrated the Justice Dept with their lawyers:
http://gizmodo.com/5146966/riaa-and-bsas-favorite-lawyers-taking-top-department-of-justice-posts
And also I believe it is under Obama that I saw the first domains "seized by government" screens but not 100% sure:
http://www.domainnamenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Screen-shot-2010-07-02-at-4.11.43-PM.png
Al Gore's wife in the 90s and Hillary Clinton in the 00s also wanted some type of ban on violent video games "for the children". Republicans do suck on a lot of things but the Democrats take the cake here as well.
I got a few registered packages from Hong Kong. I don't remember French on them, just Chinese Characters. The guy tried scanning it in and it wouldn't scan. I ended up signing for it another way, and I'm pretty sure the sender wouldn't have been able to track it if I chose to be dishonest.
Also lost more than a few registered intl packages (domestic registered is rock solid). They definitely need more cooperation and improvement. The fact that they have coverage on the domestic registered package up to $25K and on international registered (depending on country) of $45.23 (IIRC) speaks of the varying confidence levels in this area.
To add a few more:
1. Be more proactive with the blue boxes. I have to literally drive 3 miles out of my way to get to the closest ones in my well to do suburb town. None of the major new shopping malls have one. And looking at the internet there is a huge pocket of none although demographically it makes no sense. The closest one is in a aging, dying stripmall in front of an empty supermarket that closed 5 years ago. In the last 10 years, 5 huge strip malls opened in the area, each one bigger than the last, and literally none have one. The only other two in the area are like 1/2 mile from the USPO itself, located 20 feet from each other diagonally on street corners not particurly trafficked. A braindead person much have coordinated this.
2. Have more self serve kiosks, particularly in locations that should close but the unions block it. (No clue how to overcome that.)
Oh please. If this was 25 years ago and involved a kid sharing music via cassette tapes, no one would have batted an eyelash. The only stupid thing is that it gets take to court now because 1 kid among literally millions gets caught and has to be made the scapegoat for the rest of society. Total and utter bullshit.
GEMA should go fuck itself.
1. Cut delivery in most areas, definitely the rural ones to every other day. M-W-F and T-Th-Sa. This will cut number of mail carriers and fuel and vehicles needed, as 1 carrier now will get two routes. Express mail has it's own carrier so that will be unaffected for the people that pay for it.
2. Offer to take UPS and FedEx packages at the post office. People who want package for stuff they don't want delivered at home (theft, gifts, adult purchases, etc) have to rent a box at UPS or Fedex location at exorbinant rates. Let them rent a cheaper USPS box, get their mail and packages in one spot, come in, and bring some more business.
3. Consider offering an electronic mail service, where you can send certified/registered mail or even purchase money orders and send them right off online - and have USPS print them out and deliver them like normal letters. Premium services without ever going to the counter. Lawyer offices rejoice?
4. Call an international Postal Office congress. Get a cheap international tracking number and while at it, standardize all customs forms and registered form and other forms the world over with symbols. Too many packages get lost, too many registered packages with funny foreign postal languages go unheeded and the cheapest tracking number (unreliable) is with Express mail or Fedex/UPS with around $150 minimum ridiculousness, less for a business but still). Domestic tracking is like 0.75 cents. Even if they charge $5 for intl tracking, would be way cheaper than what's out there now and an untapped market. Especially for eBay sellers and the like.
5. On the eBay sellers front, try to break down customs barriers, especially with the EU. It's ridiculous.
Warren Buffett and Ross Perot are the answer to that:)
Of course, if you're wealth comes from fashions, in one sense or another, I suppose it can be helpful.
Sorry, but some of are secure in our manhood enough to not make our cars an extension of our dicks.
I always wanted a decent small car. Never saw the need for anything bigger, or pay for a motor that can go 200+ mph when I do 80mph in my area max and 35-45 mph on avg.
I don't like 3 wheelers. 4 wheels is much more stable, no matter how you look at it. Consider it a bit of necessary redundancy on a plane.
Um, so?
I was taught that America is free market in school.
But in reality a ton of the laws I see on every level is just written by corps to protect their rackets. Hell, the arguments in the summary sound awfully similiar to the RIAA/MPAA everytime they run to Congress for yet another copyright extension.
Last year I had a flat tire a few towns away from home. A tow truck guy was nice enough to stop. Said he could help me change the tire or make a call, but could not tow me as the township required a special permit for thaht thaht they only gave to one (well connected) company. Although it shouldn't have applied as I was coming from a state highway onto a ramp of the interstate, he wouldn't risk a fine. Guess what, I had to wait 4 hours for a lousy overpriced tow.
That's all it's about, business interests restricting customer choice for their own gain, with the help of the government.
It's already been here since last year:
http://slashdot.org/story/06/09/26/1937237/intel-pledges-80-core-processor-in-5-years
Oops, that was just Intel's promise in 2006. Nvm, carry on.
Yeah, great, a google wall to extract $50 a year from me. Soon, no other search engine but google will be allowed to index via their robots.txt.
And if you don't think that's possible, Google made their formerly free froogle/Google Shopping indexing service utterly worthless (to me) by making merchants to pay to be included in the first place.
I like many of the things google does, but they are gaining too much power, and to being to pay them a yearly subscription is not something I'm clamoring for.
Because the system doesn't come with a progressive dumbell set to help lift that controller.
Something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Bowflex-SelectTech-Adjustable-Dumbbells-Pair/dp/B001ARYU58
Apple/Jobs has a history of shitting on concepts that they are simultaneously developing.
OTOH, MS/Ballmer has a history of mocking things as well while lagging behing in the market.
Time will tell what type of CEO Cook will be. Hopefully his hubris is just a smokescreen to mask moves and not arrogance for its own sake.
Maybe the screen quality is better on the new ones.
Personally, I just print out and hang the photos I like (dye sub, not horrible inkjet, store quality would suffice as well). Much less energy use in the long run. Plus just playing with it won't erase the wanted image from it.
My girlfriend uses her iPad as a photo frame some of the time (obviously not all), much more easily updated with new stuff without going out of the way to only just that, and the (slide to unlock) makes it automatic. The screen is much nicer than most $100 frames that I saw in the past. She obviously only puts it out as such at special occasions and not all of the time.
If they have wifi built in, and a new small OS can be flashed onto it, maybe some cool uses can be had. Or maybe a school can use it, give it as a donation.
Wait, to confuse customers who know nothing? Me thinks you are mad at the wrong party here...
Apple is doing what's right for them as a company, seeling to people.
This seems to be yet another case of geeks getting mad they aren't being first and foremost courted in the electronics arena.
What I don't understand is why ISPs do this. I mean, a monthly paying customer is great, they pay a ton up front to snag new one, and iirc, as long as they act as a dumb pipe, they're not liable.
Is it spending money in growth (investments) or are they in several low-margin businesses? Two different things.
You shouldn't have to agree to a contract after you bought the item, not even as an adult. Even in a minimally protective society, it should mean that if you don't agree, you get to return the product for a full refund - which in this case is a 6 year old Xbox.
That's one thing I'm so sick of in Apple's case, everytime I buy an app, it starts d/l it and then it's like "Oops, we have to stop because there's a new EULA!" I thought Apple was supposed to be user friendly at the least - fuck off with your goddamn EULAs.
And that's becoming the case with so many other products. It's why I stopped buying DVDs. Companies thinking they can abuse the customer once they buy the product, and then complain when they pirate a superior product off the net without all the bullshit.
People have lives, and if they can't sell mainstream products without them reading 50 pages of nonsense, they shouldn't sell it at all.
Tesla is not a very good model of low resource usage. Aptera would have been...
But SUVs, really?
Soon only google will be allowed to do these things with these agreements while other competitor will be shut out. A nonruling on this matter will leave the landscape fragmented and behind the curve for decades. Which is a shame, I found way more books via google books than any other way. Usually doing research. Without the content search, I would never have found the books or bothered buying them - afterall my budget is only so large and I cannot chase after every book that might or might not have what I need.
Books publishers, even more than music publishers, despite the later arrival of mainstream ebooks, see where things are heading and are absolutely shitting themselves. Middlemen in a world of a rapidly shrinking middle. Google, otoh, has no problem monopolizing this new avenue, sign a few deals, and keeping competitors with less resources permanently out by assuring these companies a place for at least a little while longer.
It's too bad our government is so owned, because no matter which companies win, there is absolutely no representation for the public and public domain and fair use, and we all lose.
You say the first part but can you prove it? I remember the uproar when Apple came out with a computer without a floppy drive. Was it the original iMac? Anyway, from what I recall, Apple introducing the usb port coincided with them withholding the floppy.
The main complaint from people here, while acknowledging that it was absolutely past it's time in terms of data storage, was about the all powerful emergency boot disk. A lot of equipment still such as industrial robots or things like music synthesizers still use this. There was no USB drives around at the time and it was one of those circular problems - we can't get rid of the floppy because of this need, we don't want to spend time making another way to fulfill this need since the ubiquitous floppy fulfills it. When I looked just, like, 5 years ago, serial ports were still on a lot of the notebooks. Not so anymore. And the parallel port also had a particularly long life on desktops - way past it's prime.
That was the nature of the PC industry. It's why Microsoft was backwards compatible to the point of being painful for an extremely long time. It comes down from established user base and was manifested when things like the iPad announcement when a huge percentage of posts here predicted its demise simply because they couldn't see using one, and thus unable to look past themselves, thought it was the same with everyone. The PC industry is rife with examples like that and to an extent the tail wags the dog - people sometime don't know what they want until they have it and most companies go by the consumer focus group approach which would have yielded very dissimilar results.
It's works much the same way in the gaming console industry, with Nintendo playing the role of Apple.
Now, while you can point at me and yell Apple fanboi, I think an Apple dominated world would have been disastrous (app store being the norm by the late 90s, total lockdown, anyone?), unless you have some concrete counterargument, I think I can leave now.
The legacy of Steve Jobs will be simple.
The PC and Bill Gates will be remembered for making the computer cheap enough to turn the masses into geeks. (And of course, Bill's massive generosity.)
Steve Jobs will be remembered for making the computer, the MP3 player, and smartphone mainstream friendly and fashionable enough that it was no longer geeky to have a digital lifestyle - that alone massively growing the industry and driving mobile computing innovation (for instance, ARM chips being a lot more advanced now than it would have been absent these fashion trends). He'll also be known for dragging exterior computer design out of the hands of penny pinching accountants and out of the boxy era of the 8-bit Nintendo controller. While he wasn't first for industrial design in electronic gadgets, the computing realm and the gadgets around it always seemed particularly resistant to mainstream reform - relegating any company that did otherwise to the cost and exclusivity of a Bang & Olufsen with little impact on the average person.
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks. Hell, a lot of them still pretty much look like the plastic pieces of shit from the 90s but things have improved.