... it's easier to find a new DM than a new boss. Though unlike a boss, the Tinpot Dictator model of DM - the kind who doesn't listen to the players, who's "my way or the highway" with the rules, who tells you can always find another game if you don't like how he does things - is more likely to eventually change his tune if his players are unhappy.
(everyone who Knows Better will know I'm talking about most users, IT shops, etc - not the technical "merits")
Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.
Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.
XP is the new BSD. It'll be "dying" for the next five to ten years. It's going to take a massive paradigm shift* in computing to get rid of it.
* I don't mean quad cores or eight-way cores or 64 gigs of ram for a nickel. I mean something equivalent to a massive rendering farm running an OS with a pile of APIs that'll securely handle every windows (and mac, while we're fantasizing) application ever written, with a battery life measured in decades. Said hardware would be the size of an iPhone, even easier to use, and you'd be able to buy them in vending machines at bus stations for $1.25. I mean that kind of paradigm shift.
Politically unattractive is the idea of depending on the Soyuz to get to the ISS while we continue to develop a new launch vehicle that by any reasonable metric should be done by now.
I'm a huge fan of the Russian space program, but I also feel that it's a matter of national pride to have our own crew launch vehicle(s). If NASA is incapable and commercial interests can step up, then let's go with commercial interests - bidding out to American companies means it's still an American project; an American "win."
What's more attractive - sending US Astronauts into space on a SpaceX or Scaled Composites launch vehicle, or bidding for space on a Soyuz launch (at over $40 million a seat) while bureaucrats continue to insist Ares/Orion will work?
I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.
Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.
It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.
Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)
1. Every mini before the current revision has a single DVI port. The new machines can do dual displays - I'm thankful for that, even if it comes at a price. (wonky adapters)
2. If you're trying to use a dual-link display with the mini, you're obviously not the target market. Apple's gotta justify the price of the Power Mac somehow...
Apple is no stranger to the adapter boondoggle - DB-25, Applevision, the proprietary Apple Cinema Display connector, non-standardized "mini" monitor outputs across the iMac and laptop lines...
The Mini is there for people who need a desktop but lack the disposable income to buy the Power Mac. Pity the entire iMac (and laptop) lines sit between the two for price points.
Honestly, the Wii doesn't have anything that really interests me beyond the Virtual Console. The kind of gameplay I like caused me to move from the SNES to the Playstation (for FF7) and then back to Nintendo for the GBA and DS (for more Square remakes and ports). In the portable space it's hard to justify a PSP when the DS already has everything I like.... and in the console space, it's hard to justify a Wii when the DS already has everything I like...
Either way, nintendo got my money and a whiny developer whose game I wouldn't buy anyway gets to whine.:-)
I still play Quake 3 every so often - it's simple by today's standards but it also loads almost instantly. None of this Waiting Around that plagues more modern FPSsen.
We all know a game doesn't have to have OMG GRAPHIX!!!!!!! to be great. This developer didn't get the memo and instead chooses to piss and moan about draw distance.
And Rockstar, rather than piss and moan about DS capabilities, jammed Liberty City into a Nintendo DS cart. Mad points for them. Points off to the developer in the parent post for whining.
We did the Apollo thing not really to do it, but to rub the Soviet's nose in it. The the NASA manned program feels like it's been coasting on "hey, wasn't that AWESOME?!" for the last thirty years.
Don't get me wrong - I love the space program and think it's money well spent (overall - Ares/Orion is debatable, but look at the science we've gotten from Hubble and compare the cost of the maintenance flights against, say... the F-22 Raptor program). However, there's no competition in the manned arena and there hasn't been since the days of the Saturn V and the N-1 (or space stations, if you want to go there - We've fielded one and a fraction. The russians have done much, much more in that area).
And there won't be competition until China - who's been excluded from the ISS program - starts making some serious strides towards putting a man on the moon. Or mars. Or an asteroid or a comet or whatever.
So despite the setbacks they've faced, I'm all for the Chinese space program - eventually they'll catch up to NASA/Roscosmos and we won't have a choice - we'll have to get off our asses and start giving a shit about the manned program again, or lose the prestige forever.
NASA costs pennies compared to the black hole of the bailouts and massive defense boondoggles such as the recent USAF tanker fiasco or the Army's Future Combat Systems. Pennies - fractions of pennies - on the dollar, with REAL results.
It'll be the one thing we have in common, no matter what. However they conceptualize it, unless our first contact is some kind of space manatee that communicates in radio waves, whatever we make contact with will have to have developed transmission/reception capability. Language would be a big puzzle to crack, and probably a really frustrating one... but 2+2=4 everywhere you go.
The Nintendo DSi has the functionally equivalent DSiWare.
That's great. I have a Nintendo DS and a bunch of GBA games. The DSi has no GBA capability. Sure you can probably add it through a homebrew emulator, but that does nothing for my save files. Swapping a capability I use for one I historically haven't (I used WFC to upload my GTA stats to unlock some missions today - that was the first I'd used WFC since FFIII was released, when I needed to use it to unlock something else) doesn't convince me to throw down the cash.
You're right that they don't come with boxes, but all WiiWare and Virtual Console games that I've tried have an instruction manual under the Home menu.
Can't read the Home menu in the bathroom. Or on the bus.
Ask a manager or employee of a gamestore what their markup is on new games - what they actually make as profit. If they're not complete assholes, they'll tell you - a games store makes only a couple of bucks off of the new stuff, if that - the publisher keeps the remainder. Pay 65$ for a new game, the publisher gets at least $60 of that.
Pay $20 for a used game, the games store gets around 15-19$ of that, depending on the condition of and demand for the game. The markup may seem a bit ridiculous, but independent games stores would be out of business if it wasn't for the used market - the margins on new games are so thin that they'd have to move an enormous volume of product to make up for the difference they see in returns on used games.
I'm all for the used market, even though I buy most of my games new - it keeps the stores in business, even with dozens (hundreds?) of copies of crap and not-as-popular-as-they-thought-they-would-be (Nintendogs, anyone?) games sitting on the shelves.
Maybe someone should tell you Valve fanboys a couple of things:
1. There's no Steam for the Nintendo DS. (as an example)
2. There's a booming used market for handheld and console games. I bought all of my Castlevania GBA games used, for example - along with New Super Mario Bros. and several other titles.
While Sony and Nintendo are slowly moving towards more and more DLC and downloaded games, they don't come with manuals or boxes and they're not portable in the sense that you can pull the cartridge (or optical media or whatever) out of your backpack and toss it to a friend to check out. The "downloadable" option isn't available for older machines - the heart of the used market, and where the "economically disadvantaged" buy their games.
Yeah, it's a DS Phat (as i've seen it spelled in some places). The Lite seems kinda dinky by comparison, honestly - though the screens are MUCH brighter and the battery life is apparently a lot longer.
My touch screen is starting to go a bit (the lower left quadrant can take multiple taps to register with a finger), and if you listen close you can hear the springs in the shoulder buttons - but otherwise, the thing functions fine. It just looks like it was dug out of a New Jersey ditch.
The price tag is bad enough - but until I can flip a PSP closed to protect the screen and controls the way anybody can with any of the three models of the Nintendo DS, there's just no way in hell I'm going to waste my money on one of these.
I carry my DS in the hip pocket of my cargo shorts - it gets banged up, sat on, smooshed against the hull of the bus. It's spanged off of desks and doors, barstools and bannisters. And while the case is scraped and scratched (and mildly pulverized in one corner thanks to a FLYING LEAP the thing took onto pavement), the screens are still in working order and the machine continues to give me games on the go without complaint.
Sure, I could buy a screen protector or whatever for the PSP like I have for my iPod - but the only thing I've ever had to buy for my DS is games, and I prefer to keep it that way. If I'm gaming outside and it's raining, I just stick the thing in a ziplock bag.
As I see it, I'd be paying a hundred bucks more for the "privilege" of the screen getting scratched all to hell the second I stick it in the pocket with my keys... and it doesn't play any of my games. And I have a lot of DS and GBA games.
Sony may have owned the 32-bit generation of consoles, but they have yet to come up with anything compelling in the portable (or online) arena. Heck, the one friend of mine with a PSP uses it to run a Skype client. What does that say about the platform?
On a related note - when the first GBAs hit the market, they could play GB games. That was dropped with the DS, which could play GBA games. Now, finally, with the DSi, Nintendo has dropped the GBA capability (along with battery life, which is why when my DS gives out I'll be buying a DS Lite - or even another DS if I can find a new one. The DSL is a smidge too small for my hands). Nintendo has gone through several generations of handhelds and has maintained backwards compatibility with at least the first generation of each. Sony's on their second PSP and they've already dropped UMD - which screws over anyone who's paid good money for games that come on UMD media.
Clearly, they don't understand why Nintendo continues to dominate the market - only that they do. Kinda like Microsoft and Google - Sony, like Microsoft, seems to keep trying to take the lead, and every attempt is further and further proof that they just don't get it.
is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?/. has been trumpeting The Year Of Linux On The Desktop for as long as I've been a user - before, no doubt.
You want it to happen? Like, actually happen? Do that.
Consolidate, standardize, document. Choice is a fantastic thing to have and will always be there for those who need it - but it confuses the hell out of most grandmothers. Linux might be paradise for server-side and web developers (I heart my debian box) but it's a mess on the desktop. It's come a long way from the early days of Red Hat, to be sure - but Desktop Linux still suffers from Tinkering Required for some applications, and massive, massive bloat. X-windows toolkits, for example - Windows and the Mac have one UI toolkit. Linux (rather, X-Windows) has as many as it has IRC clients, and while GTK has gained a lot of marketshare, it's not A Standard in the sense that, say.... Cocoa is. Cocoa's just there OS X. Compare to GTK - your distro might have it, it might not... and if it does, what version? If it doesn't, how easy is it to get? Do you have to compile?
My grandmother doesn't know how to compile. She shouldn't have to.
I know, I know... making Linux truly Grandmother Friendly goes completely against the natural instincts of the developer community. That doesn't mean we can't have GrandmotherOS with a linux kernel and a set of rock-solid featureful APIs that make ISVs drool.... and then backport it to the distros we use on our LCIIIs, toasters, SGIs, sparcs, Apollos and DECs.
Where I grew up, there were four gaming mags readily available - Nintendo Power, Game Players, GamePro, and EGM.
At the time, Nintendo Power was low on ads and high on lengthy strategy articles and reviews (which were really just long form ads, but hey). GamePro seemed to be targeted at eight year olds, with more of an emphasis on the comic avatars of the editors than actual games, and they had a hefty dose of ads. GamePlayers had a pretty solid balance of gaming coverage and advertisements, and EGM...
What I remember of EGM is that it was thicker than the other mags, more than half advertisements (making Wired look like Readers Digest for ad density), and what content there was seemed to be made up almost entirely of screenshots. Oh, and a ridiculous over-emphasis on fighting and action games.
In the mid 90s, if you wanted the most bang for your buck, Nintendo Power was it. If you owned a non-Nintendo system, then Game Players was where it was at. The remaining contenders offered more ads and empty space than actual content, and were priced inversely - EGM had the highest price tag and boasted the thickest page count... but when you cut out all of the ads, all of the fluff, and boiled it down to actual gaming coverage, you came up several pages short of the content of Game Players or NP, and your wallet the lighter for it.
I don't miss EGM for the same reason I don't read Wired - the internet - even without adblock! - gives me a much more favorable Ads-to-Content ratio, with the added bonus of not paying five bucks for a two paragraph review and two pages of screenshots of the latest Final Fantasy that comes with twenty pages of Madden 09 strategy.
My point, building on your observation - if you only have the ONE raw feed... how do you know everything's there? How do you know the editors or producers at the feed source decided some bit was "objectionable" and thus held it back from distribution?
The more cameras and news sources on site, the more likely one of them will retain that little bit everyone else either missed or left out.
Ever see the footage from those ten cameras after ten different network editors have had a go at it?
One source, one series of questions... you'd think it would be one story, right? Wrong. Each network will edit the footage to say what they'd prefer it to say.
Anyone with an S-Band satellite dish who's spent time watching "wild feeds" - network uplinks of raw footage - who's then watched the finished product rolled out on the news a few hours later can confirm this. It's one of the reasons Bob Dole got trashed in the '96 election - media coverage just flat-out favored Clinton.
Drop the number of reporters and cameras down to one and you still have the one source, the one series of questions... but instead of being told the story ten different ways, you're now being fed one single pre-approved opinion.
Consoles are closed systems that you can't upgrade.
Your assumption is that this is a Bad Thing.
For a lot of people, myself included, it's a Good Thing. A very good thing. I buy the console hardware, and every game for that console works with it.* I don't have to upgrade the console every few months in order to get optimal performance for a new game. I don't have to spend triple the price of the machine over the life of the machine just to play the games it's designed to play. I can, instead, spend the money on games. My Nintendo DS cost me about $150. Total. Just the once. And didn't have to upgrade it to play GTA : Chinatown Wars, or other new games.
Of course, in Wintendo world, the parts are cheap. You can get a new video card for the price of a box of cereal. As a mac user, with a couple of aging G4s under my desk, my experience with upgradeable gaming hardware is different and altogether more expensive. The video card - the only thing you really can upgrade on Power Macs (ram doesn't count, you can upgrade that on every shipping mac) - typically costs anywhere from 5-150x the PC equivalent. Radeon 9600s (the last card I bought) were 150$ for the Mac versions when the PC versions were down to $30 or $40 and already obsolete.
Think about that. 150$ for an already obsolete video card (or 500$+ for a reasonably current one that'll cost windows users 80$) that'll let me play Civ4 at minimum settings, or the same cash for a console or handheld I'll never have to upgrade ?
Not much to think about!
* Notable exceptions being some N64 games that required the ram expansion module to enable full functionality.
(the only other one I've met is a former colleague who got me into the series)
While wikipedia seems to generally disagree with Nathan's statement, I happen to agree with it - an ordered society (with laws and taxes and social services and whatnot) with no single "head" of state is theoretically possible. Unfortunately I can't think of any real-world examples.:-|
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using a G4 dual 450 for SD playback for the past several years... now I'm gonna have to upgrade! :-|
... it's easier to find a new DM than a new boss. Though unlike a boss, the Tinpot Dictator model of DM - the kind who doesn't listen to the players, who's "my way or the highway" with the rules, who tells you can always find another game if you don't like how he does things - is more likely to eventually change his tune if his players are unhappy.
(everyone who Knows Better will know I'm talking about most users, IT shops, etc - not the technical "merits")
Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.
Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.
XP is the new BSD. It'll be "dying" for the next five to ten years. It's going to take a massive paradigm shift* in computing to get rid of it.
* I don't mean quad cores or eight-way cores or 64 gigs of ram for a nickel. I mean something equivalent to a massive rendering farm running an OS with a pile of APIs that'll securely handle every windows (and mac, while we're fantasizing) application ever written, with a battery life measured in decades. Said hardware would be the size of an iPhone, even easier to use, and you'd be able to buy them in vending machines at bus stations for $1.25. I mean that kind of paradigm shift.
Politically unattractive is the idea of depending on the Soyuz to get to the ISS while we continue to develop a new launch vehicle that by any reasonable metric should be done by now.
I'm a huge fan of the Russian space program, but I also feel that it's a matter of national pride to have our own crew launch vehicle(s). If NASA is incapable and commercial interests can step up, then let's go with commercial interests - bidding out to American companies means it's still an American project; an American "win."
What's more attractive - sending US Astronauts into space on a SpaceX or Scaled Composites launch vehicle, or bidding for space on a Soyuz launch (at over $40 million a seat) while bureaucrats continue to insist Ares/Orion will work?
I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.
Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.
It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.
Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)
Two points:
1. Every mini before the current revision has a single DVI port. The new machines can do dual displays - I'm thankful for that, even if it comes at a price. (wonky adapters)
2. If you're trying to use a dual-link display with the mini, you're obviously not the target market. Apple's gotta justify the price of the Power Mac somehow...
Apple is no stranger to the adapter boondoggle - DB-25, Applevision, the proprietary Apple Cinema Display connector, non-standardized "mini" monitor outputs across the iMac and laptop lines...
The Mini is there for people who need a desktop but lack the disposable income to buy the Power Mac. Pity the entire iMac (and laptop) lines sit between the two for price points.
Yeah, even with motion control, it'll be hard to beat The Nintendo Experience. Kinda like the Zune and the iPod. :-)
Honestly, the Wii doesn't have anything that really interests me beyond the Virtual Console. The kind of gameplay I like caused me to move from the SNES to the Playstation (for FF7) and then back to Nintendo for the GBA and DS (for more Square remakes and ports). In the portable space it's hard to justify a PSP when the DS already has everything I like.... and in the console space, it's hard to justify a Wii when the DS already has everything I like...
Either way, nintendo got my money and a whiny developer whose game I wouldn't buy anyway gets to whine. :-)
Agreed. It's hard to beat the Nethack load time.
I still play Quake 3 every so often - it's simple by today's standards but it also loads almost instantly. None of this Waiting Around that plagues more modern FPSsen.
We all know a game doesn't have to have OMG GRAPHIX!!!!!!! to be great. This developer didn't get the memo and instead chooses to piss and moan about draw distance.
And Rockstar, rather than piss and moan about DS capabilities, jammed Liberty City into a Nintendo DS cart. Mad points for them. Points off to the developer in the parent post for whining.
The Wii isn't designed for these kinds of games.
That's what the X-Box 360, PS3, and PC are for. The Wii is for people who want to play games they can quickly pick up and put down.
D13 H4rD G4M3RZ are NOT the target audience.
(Score -1: Obvious)
We did the Apollo thing not really to do it, but to rub the Soviet's nose in it. The the NASA manned program feels like it's been coasting on "hey, wasn't that AWESOME?!" for the last thirty years.
Don't get me wrong - I love the space program and think it's money well spent (overall - Ares/Orion is debatable, but look at the science we've gotten from Hubble and compare the cost of the maintenance flights against, say... the F-22 Raptor program). However, there's no competition in the manned arena and there hasn't been since the days of the Saturn V and the N-1 (or space stations, if you want to go there - We've fielded one and a fraction. The russians have done much, much more in that area).
And there won't be competition until China - who's been excluded from the ISS program - starts making some serious strides towards putting a man on the moon. Or mars. Or an asteroid or a comet or whatever.
So despite the setbacks they've faced, I'm all for the Chinese space program - eventually they'll catch up to NASA/Roscosmos and we won't have a choice - we'll have to get off our asses and start giving a shit about the manned program again, or lose the prestige forever.
NASA costs pennies compared to the black hole of the bailouts and massive defense boondoggles such as the recent USAF tanker fiasco or the Army's Future Combat Systems. Pennies - fractions of pennies - on the dollar, with REAL results.
It'll be the one thing we have in common, no matter what. However they conceptualize it, unless our first contact is some kind of space manatee that communicates in radio waves, whatever we make contact with will have to have developed transmission/reception capability. Language would be a big puzzle to crack, and probably a really frustrating one... but 2+2=4 everywhere you go.
That's great. I have a Nintendo DS and a bunch of GBA games. The DSi has no GBA capability. Sure you can probably add it through a homebrew emulator, but that does nothing for my save files. Swapping a capability I use for one I historically haven't (I used WFC to upload my GTA stats to unlock some missions today - that was the first I'd used WFC since FFIII was released, when I needed to use it to unlock something else) doesn't convince me to throw down the cash.
Can't read the Home menu in the bathroom. Or on the bus.
Ask a manager or employee of a gamestore what their markup is on new games - what they actually make as profit. If they're not complete assholes, they'll tell you - a games store makes only a couple of bucks off of the new stuff, if that - the publisher keeps the remainder. Pay 65$ for a new game, the publisher gets at least $60 of that.
Pay $20 for a used game, the games store gets around 15-19$ of that, depending on the condition of and demand for the game. The markup may seem a bit ridiculous, but independent games stores would be out of business if it wasn't for the used market - the margins on new games are so thin that they'd have to move an enormous volume of product to make up for the difference they see in returns on used games.
I'm all for the used market, even though I buy most of my games new - it keeps the stores in business, even with dozens (hundreds?) of copies of crap and not-as-popular-as-they-thought-they-would-be (Nintendogs, anyone?) games sitting on the shelves.
Maybe someone should tell you Valve fanboys a couple of things:
1. There's no Steam for the Nintendo DS. (as an example)
2. There's a booming used market for handheld and console games. I bought all of my Castlevania GBA games used, for example - along with New Super Mario Bros. and several other titles.
While Sony and Nintendo are slowly moving towards more and more DLC and downloaded games, they don't come with manuals or boxes and they're not portable in the sense that you can pull the cartridge (or optical media or whatever) out of your backpack and toss it to a friend to check out. The "downloadable" option isn't available for older machines - the heart of the used market, and where the "economically disadvantaged" buy their games.
Yeah, it's a DS Phat (as i've seen it spelled in some places). The Lite seems kinda dinky by comparison, honestly - though the screens are MUCH brighter and the battery life is apparently a lot longer.
My touch screen is starting to go a bit (the lower left quadrant can take multiple taps to register with a finger), and if you listen close you can hear the springs in the shoulder buttons - but otherwise, the thing functions fine. It just looks like it was dug out of a New Jersey ditch.
The price tag is bad enough - but until I can flip a PSP closed to protect the screen and controls the way anybody can with any of the three models of the Nintendo DS, there's just no way in hell I'm going to waste my money on one of these.
I carry my DS in the hip pocket of my cargo shorts - it gets banged up, sat on, smooshed against the hull of the bus. It's spanged off of desks and doors, barstools and bannisters. And while the case is scraped and scratched (and mildly pulverized in one corner thanks to a FLYING LEAP the thing took onto pavement), the screens are still in working order and the machine continues to give me games on the go without complaint.
Sure, I could buy a screen protector or whatever for the PSP like I have for my iPod - but the only thing I've ever had to buy for my DS is games, and I prefer to keep it that way. If I'm gaming outside and it's raining, I just stick the thing in a ziplock bag.
As I see it, I'd be paying a hundred bucks more for the "privilege" of the screen getting scratched all to hell the second I stick it in the pocket with my keys... and it doesn't play any of my games. And I have a lot of DS and GBA games.
Sony may have owned the 32-bit generation of consoles, but they have yet to come up with anything compelling in the portable (or online) arena. Heck, the one friend of mine with a PSP uses it to run a Skype client. What does that say about the platform?
On a related note - when the first GBAs hit the market, they could play GB games. That was dropped with the DS, which could play GBA games. Now, finally, with the DSi, Nintendo has dropped the GBA capability (along with battery life, which is why when my DS gives out I'll be buying a DS Lite - or even another DS if I can find a new one. The DSL is a smidge too small for my hands). Nintendo has gone through several generations of handhelds and has maintained backwards compatibility with at least the first generation of each. Sony's on their second PSP and they've already dropped UMD - which screws over anyone who's paid good money for games that come on UMD media.
Clearly, they don't understand why Nintendo continues to dominate the market - only that they do. Kinda like Microsoft and Google - Sony, like Microsoft, seems to keep trying to take the lead, and every attempt is further and further proof that they just don't get it.
is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular? /. has been trumpeting The Year Of Linux On The Desktop for as long as I've been a user - before, no doubt.
You want it to happen? Like, actually happen? Do that.
Consolidate, standardize, document. Choice is a fantastic thing to have and will always be there for those who need it - but it confuses the hell out of most grandmothers. Linux might be paradise for server-side and web developers (I heart my debian box) but it's a mess on the desktop. It's come a long way from the early days of Red Hat, to be sure - but Desktop Linux still suffers from Tinkering Required for some applications, and massive, massive bloat. X-windows toolkits, for example - Windows and the Mac have one UI toolkit. Linux (rather, X-Windows) has as many as it has IRC clients, and while GTK has gained a lot of marketshare, it's not A Standard in the sense that, say.... Cocoa is. Cocoa's just there OS X. Compare to GTK - your distro might have it, it might not... and if it does, what version? If it doesn't, how easy is it to get? Do you have to compile?
My grandmother doesn't know how to compile. She shouldn't have to.
I know, I know... making Linux truly Grandmother Friendly goes completely against the natural instincts of the developer community. That doesn't mean we can't have GrandmotherOS with a linux kernel and a set of rock-solid featureful APIs that make ISVs drool.... and then backport it to the distros we use on our LCIIIs, toasters, SGIs, sparcs, Apollos and DECs.
Where I grew up, there were four gaming mags readily available - Nintendo Power, Game Players, GamePro, and EGM.
At the time, Nintendo Power was low on ads and high on lengthy strategy articles and reviews (which were really just long form ads, but hey). GamePro seemed to be targeted at eight year olds, with more of an emphasis on the comic avatars of the editors than actual games, and they had a hefty dose of ads. GamePlayers had a pretty solid balance of gaming coverage and advertisements, and EGM...
What I remember of EGM is that it was thicker than the other mags, more than half advertisements (making Wired look like Readers Digest for ad density), and what content there was seemed to be made up almost entirely of screenshots. Oh, and a ridiculous over-emphasis on fighting and action games.
In the mid 90s, if you wanted the most bang for your buck, Nintendo Power was it. If you owned a non-Nintendo system, then Game Players was where it was at. The remaining contenders offered more ads and empty space than actual content, and were priced inversely - EGM had the highest price tag and boasted the thickest page count... but when you cut out all of the ads, all of the fluff, and boiled it down to actual gaming coverage, you came up several pages short of the content of Game Players or NP, and your wallet the lighter for it.
I don't miss EGM for the same reason I don't read Wired - the internet - even without adblock! - gives me a much more favorable Ads-to-Content ratio, with the added bonus of not paying five bucks for a two paragraph review and two pages of screenshots of the latest Final Fantasy that comes with twenty pages of Madden 09 strategy.
If that were true then Fox News would have folded years ago...
My point, building on your observation - if you only have the ONE raw feed... how do you know everything's there? How do you know the editors or producers at the feed source decided some bit was "objectionable" and thus held it back from distribution?
The more cameras and news sources on site, the more likely one of them will retain that little bit everyone else either missed or left out.
Batshit? Are you sure it wasn't notability? :)
Ever see the footage from those ten cameras after ten different network editors have had a go at it?
One source, one series of questions... you'd think it would be one story, right? Wrong. Each network will edit the footage to say what they'd prefer it to say.
Anyone with an S-Band satellite dish who's spent time watching "wild feeds" - network uplinks of raw footage - who's then watched the finished product rolled out on the news a few hours later can confirm this. It's one of the reasons Bob Dole got trashed in the '96 election - media coverage just flat-out favored Clinton.
Drop the number of reporters and cameras down to one and you still have the one source, the one series of questions... but instead of being told the story ten different ways, you're now being fed one single pre-approved opinion.
There's no way that's a good thing.
Consoles are closed systems that you can't upgrade.
Your assumption is that this is a Bad Thing.
For a lot of people, myself included, it's a Good Thing. A very good thing. I buy the console hardware, and every game for that console works with it.* I don't have to upgrade the console every few months in order to get optimal performance for a new game. I don't have to spend triple the price of the machine over the life of the machine just to play the games it's designed to play. I can, instead, spend the money on games. My Nintendo DS cost me about $150. Total. Just the once. And didn't have to upgrade it to play GTA : Chinatown Wars, or other new games.
Of course, in Wintendo world, the parts are cheap. You can get a new video card for the price of a box of cereal. As a mac user, with a couple of aging G4s under my desk, my experience with upgradeable gaming hardware is different and altogether more expensive. The video card - the only thing you really can upgrade on Power Macs (ram doesn't count, you can upgrade that on every shipping mac) - typically costs anywhere from 5-150x the PC equivalent. Radeon 9600s (the last card I bought) were 150$ for the Mac versions when the PC versions were down to $30 or $40 and already obsolete.
Think about that. 150$ for an already obsolete video card (or 500$+ for a reasonably current one that'll cost windows users 80$) that'll let me play Civ4 at minimum settings, or the same cash for a console or handheld I'll never have to upgrade ?
Not much to think about!
* Notable exceptions being some N64 games that required the ram expansion module to enable full functionality.
Holy crap, another Star Cops fan!
(the only other one I've met is a former colleague who got me into the series)
While wikipedia seems to generally disagree with Nathan's statement, I happen to agree with it - an ordered society (with laws and taxes and social services and whatnot) with no single "head" of state is theoretically possible. Unfortunately I can't think of any real-world examples. :-|
Maybe Box knows...