You really have to wonder how effective their recycling operations are. Japan is going to experience a massive increase in solid waste being disposed of - with a good portion of it requiring special processing to handle the toxic elements - if this law is actually enforced.
Then again, I think this law is just a ploy by Nintendo lobbyists to force Japanese consumers to purchase their continual stream of repackaged..er..."innovative" GameBoys and uses a Revolution to play all of the old games, instead of a 1,000 yen secondhand GC/64/etc.;)
One thing that has always amused me is when I receive text messages from people who own phones with full QWERTY keyboards or T9 capability, and I'm still forced to deal with "u wana go 2 da cocrt". You've been handed a solution to having to hammer each key 3 times to get the letter you wanted - use it! I tolerated AOL-speak from people in years past when it really was a pain to type full words, much less use capitalization and punctuation.
Using AOL-speak on a desktop or laptop computer is only acceptable if you have some disability that limits your mobility, and makes hitting each key a struggle.
The worst part of all this is that many, many people are fully aware of how stupid they come across when they lower their standards of communication. Willfully ignorant behavior is the worst kind. The trend towards anti-intellectualism in today's society is sickening.
"Tell us again, why exactly would hardware sales collapse?"
It's quite simple. The PC market is much more price conscious than the Mac side of things. No one is going to pay the "Apple Tax" for hardware when they can build a PC for a few hundred bucks, or pay a small premium for someone to do it for them. Apple would still gain sales from style-concious consumers, but the overwhelming number of OS X users would drop the Mac in a heartbeat and go with something cheaper.
We know this because it happened once before already. Read up on your Apple history with regard to the mid-90s. That little episode was enough to bring the company to its knees.
Apple can't sell their OS for generic x86 systems.
The shortfall from the inevitable collapse of their hardware sales would drive the company into bankruptcy. Suddenly, no more Macs, no more OS X, and no...it wouldn't be open sourced in that case, so forget about that dream.
Everybody loses.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question...
on
Space Race 2.0 has Begun
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Would it be possible to use suborbital craft such as this as a means to provide rapid transportation between distant terrestrial locations?
If I recall correctly, ICBMs take suborbital, not orbital trajectories, and they are quite time savers when you want to wipe out a city, so could the same approach be applied to less malevolent projects?
It's far too early to tell how this generation is going to pan out. That won't generate traffic to any gaming sites, so they have to go off into the realm of mindless conjecture.
So far, the PS3 has been nothing but a smoke and mirrors show. The reason being, Sony needed to do something to blunt the 360 announcement long before the PS3 hardware was ready, so they sent the FUD machine into overdrive and spat out the same drivel they did when trying to kill off the Dreamcast. Not surprisingly, people lapped it right up, despite the previews being little more than mockups and "real time demos" rendered at 1FPS prior to the show and sped up. I'm not saying the PS3 is going to be a disappointment, nor am I saying that it will be comparable to, or lightyears beyond the 360 or Revolution. We simply know far too little substantive information about its capabilities and exactly what its game library will look like.
The Revolution was being heralded as the only good console of this generation - even before there was a single feature announced. Other than the controller and the back-catalog being rereleased for it, we have seen nothing of what it can do or what it will bring to the table.
Let's have this conversation in a few months, after E3.
Alien 3 was further brutalized by the studio cut that utterly ripped the guts out of the film. If you haven't already, go and watch the Director's Cut on the Quadriology (you can often rent it by itself). The film is infinitely better, and actually works as a small, dark, claustrophobic piece. It's not what fans were promised, it's not what they were expecting, it's not what should have been filmed. But it works. That's tough to admit, but it's nice to find a silver lining to the nightmare that was the movie's production.
Which brings me to...Alien 5
Since in the minds of Alien fans, Alien Vs. Predator simply does not exist, Alien 5 was intended to be something along the lines of what Alien 3's teaser promised. Long story short: James Cameron and Ridley Scott went to the studio with the pitch, the studio told them they were going to do A vs P instead, Cameron told them if that movie was made, he would walk. You know the rest. The film is officially, 100% dead.
How is that like the american phones. When the vibrate goes off people go and pick up the phone and start talking loudly to it. Many times it is far more interupting then the phone itself.
A lot of people put their phones on vibrate when they go into the movies.
Only to sit there and have a conversation the moment it rings.
Needless to say, movie theaters need to have flamthrowers available to the audience.
Former smokers are the most militant non-smokers on the planet. Just take a 15 minute coffee break outside on the offce steps.
I'm sure a lot of people would..if they could hope to do so and keep their jobs.
Smokers get extra break privileges in many, many work environments all across the nation. Non-smokers are simply not allowed to take the same amount of time off from their work as their nicotine-favoring coworkers can. When you deny non-smokers the chance to take the same amount of time out of their workday for breaks, it leads to unnecessary resentment, and an upset workforce is not a productive workforce.
I simply reject the notion that 15 minute breaks will bring more harm than good to a company's bottom line. As studies have repeatedly shown, the longer you work after a certain point, the less "real" work you do. Mistakes begin to crop up, stress begins to mount, and you end up spending a much larger percentage of this time going back and correcting your errors, than actually producing anything. The impact of this stress on interpersonal relations in the work environment cannot easily be quantified, but I dare say it is significant.
Somehow I doubt the managers who love to fire people for "time-theft" of this nature are busy 100% of the time they are at work, and aren't the kind who take 2 hour lunches and skip out early on Fridays when they please. The more management creates and enforces rules against the most minute off-task behavior, the more their flagrant flaunting of such rules negatively impacts morale.
The human mind is not designed to stay on one task for hour after hour without a few minutes of mental downtime, and failing to recognize this and not to simply expect productivity, but blind mechanical function in a sentient being is not only wrong but fails to deliver the intended results.
It's a sad state of affairs when you realize that many people in their position tend to have a more anthropomorphic view of their pets than their employees.
First and foremost I am a huge Apple fan but there is a trend starting to develop that is one of the reasons the stock is dropping like a rock. They are bringing out item after item and quickly replacing it with something better.
Which is a hell of a lot better than their technological stagnation after the post-iMac introduction euphoria wore off.
Years of marginal updates to flagship products. How long did it take Apple to give people an option to have something bigger than a 15" CRT (a little more than 13" viewable) on a setup costing less than $1800? How many years did they offer you a choice between the Rage 128...the Rage 128 and uh...the Rage 128 as your video card? How long did it take them to replace the puck mouse..then the "Pro" mouse, before finally offering something that their new adopters from the 'nix world demanded? How long did the well-known and rather embarrassing bottlenecks remain in the motherboards (Hint: there is a reason 3D-heavy games on the PPC machines have never taken off)
So yeah..call me bitter, but the iPod refreshes and the new attitude with regard to the specs on the Mactels (so far) is a welcome change and I applaud Apple for it.
Now, if they could only get the replacement for my DOA iMac Core Duo to me before March.:(
I'm sure you'll be able to find it integrated into a cell phone and on the racks of Akihabra in about 6 months, where it will then be end-of-lifed in about a week, and replaced with a better model.
You open your laptop, attempt to sign onto the wireless network, and a man in a black turtleneck walks up to you, swipes your credit card and hands you a glass of Kool-Aid.
It takes 30 minutes for the first ping...but after that you can connect to anyone in the world for the next 12 hours. In fact, the connection is so good, you can leave your laptop and just move your life-spirit to the actual server you are connecting to, and savor the magnetic aura of the hard drives, whilst having full access to your iTunes library...even the songs that won't be written for another 20 years.
I'm probably one of the few who have been pleased by the lack of Japanese developer support for the original Xbox.
This has absolutely nothing to do with prejudices but rather trends in game development that are simply a turn-off for me.
The PS2 is notorious for games with cutscene overload. In-game cinematics are adored by many developers in Japan (who tend to develop for the PS2 more than any other platform), to the point where many were miffed at the lack of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD on the Xbox 360 simply because they were pressed for space to squeeze in more pre-rendered cutscenes. With this trend, actual gameplay itself has seemingly become secondary to having the player sit there and admire their non-interactive (and usually non-skippable) indulgences.
U.S. developers did the same thing a little over a decade ago, and gamers everywhere still roll their eyes over the mention of "FMV" which was an equally-detrimental addition to games that was wisely abandoned by most developers.
All of this is simply my opinion, and little more. That being said, cutscenes are merely an example of being led down the path that the developers choose to have you follow. They add a rigid structure to a game, and when they are over-used, it seems as if you are just going through the motions and not really playing, as you are firmly attached to the rails provided for you to follow.
Cinematics also act as padding. Hiring a bunch of artists to create a cutscnes is easier and much faster than finding a good group of level designers to put together well-balanced, quality interactive levels.
When the iTunes store first opened, a lot of people at/. bitched and moaned about how terrible it was that you were forced to buy individual songs or albums. Who would want to do that when you can pay a monthly fee and listen to everything in the catalog with a subscription service?
As it turns out, a lot of people actually.
The "all you can eat" method sounds great in theory, but the tracks from the major subscription services are often saddled with layers of rules and restrictions well beyond those you find with iTunes. Extra fees for moving them to portable music devices, extra fees for burning them to CDs and oh yeah...when you stop paying your monthly fee, everything goes away. Hundreds of dollars over years gone with one missed payment. All that money and you own absolutely *nothing*.
iTunes is not perfect, iTunes has problems. The artists do get far, far less than they should, but that is due to the way the contracts are written between the labels and the artists. Yes, you are restricted to playing (but not storing) the songs to any 5 computers at once (which you can change as often as you like). No, Steve Jobs can't lower the prices to 10 cents a track like you so often hear the uninformed claim. Yes, you can put the songs on as many iPods as you want without restriction. No, you can't get higher-bitrate tracks even though that should be an option. Etc.
At the end of the day, however...you can buy one song for 99 cents and that song will be there for you to play today, tomorrow and next year, the year after, etc. Wherever you want, whenever you want. You can buy that one song, buy 1,000 songs it doesn't matter. You only pay when you want to pay, and you don't feel compelled to justify what you spend each month, because unlike Napster and the Yahoo! Music Store, you only get what you pay for, and you only pay for what you get.
The dominance of the iPod, and its incompatibility with the other services is only part of the reason iTunes' competition is withering on the vine. People want to feel like they are left with something at the end of the day, and iTunes delivers that better than anyone else.
"But at the same time, every Xbox sold helps to create a self-fulfilling prophecy with regards to pitching the console to developers. If you can point at your market and say that there are n million consoles in deployment, even if 1 million of them aren't intended for game purchases, that still makes the market look that much bigger"
Developers also look at the attach rate for a console. They are very interested in the number of 3rd party titles that the average gamer has. If that number drops too low, you end up with a Gamecube situation where projects are canceled left and right while shelf space dries up because the projections indicate sales won't be worth the money and effort.
"... the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple..."
Hardly.
Former Apple CEO Gil Amelio wrote a book chronicling his experiences in the Bad Old Days of Apple. One important part that stuck with me is when he asked the editor of a major national newspaper (I believe it was the NYT) why they always ran stories about Apple as major, headline news.
His answer? He had conclusive data that every time an Apple headline ran, sales for that issue spiked by 5%.
I'll ignore the dupe aspect of this story to state that IE for the Mac has not received a significant update since the year 2000. Everything between then and the termination of development in 2003, was simply basic maintenance updates that kept it running on each version of OS X and squashed a few security bugs here and there.
IE for the Mac has been very dead for a very long time.
With every not-so-great (in my opinion, anyway) gadget, there is always that sliver lining. That one thing that makes you go "At least they tried...it's not so bad, really".
I never had that moment with the N-Gage. Every single aspect of its design seemed to be engineered to piss off the end user and make them throw it across the room in an unspeakable rage.
The screen's aspect ratio was 180 degrees off, the device had to be disassembled to change games, it tried to be the Swiss Army Knife of phones and failed miserably at it...the brutally awful sidetalking "feature" along with the painfully awkward keypad made it something that not even the overpowering hype could render a somewhat decent product in the minds of potential customers.
Most people I encountered wouldn't even use one if they got it for free. Until the PSP came out, there was nothing for gamers who found that the GBA/DS did not offer the kind of game library they were after. They blew a perfect chance, and no amount of hardware revising could correct the fatally undermined confidence that the public had in the entire platform.
What criteria determines if someone is "gifted"?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
I tested far, far above my peers in virtually every area when I was 8 years old. My intelligence was equivalent to someone in their 4th year of college.
That being said, there was one horrible catch.
I was, and always have been terrible in math. Absolutely awful. It just doesn't click in my brain.
As a result of this, I was denied access to more challenging work in school, and in fact, I was shunted to the lowest-rung classes while anyone demonstrating above-average aptitude in mathematics was shifted to the gifted program - despite any significant and obvious weaknesses in reading, writing, etc. Since then, I've recognized a widespread belief that anyone who is considered uncommonly intelligent is automatically a math genius and that if they do not possess extraordinary math skills, then they should not be seen as deserving of any extra positive attention in school regardless of their other strengths.
My impression is that Slashdot editors are pushing the Xbox 360 fever to incredible hights. Every time I visit Slashdot, there is a story on the 360.
I'm usually quick on the draw to nail the editors for stupid decisions, but their treatment of the 360 is absolutely fair.
There are a lot of articles about it because it is coming out in 2 days. Are there any consoles coming out this week, month, year? No? OK then!
Have we seen anything substantial from Sony or Nintendo that accurately depicts what we will be playing on their new hardware sometime next year? No? OK then!
Have we already had countless stories about the Cell, Revolution controller, etc despite a near total dearth of information since E3? Yes? OK then!
There are reasons why you are seeing so much about the 360, and you can count on Slashdot. going batshit next year when the Revolution and PS3 arrive. Hell, I've had people telling me left and right that the 360 and PS3 are completely boring and that the Revolution is 100x more interesting and cool since over a year before the Revolution was even unveiled. How is that for bias?
The extortion I face when it comes time to add any content to my phone is the primary reason I'm dumping T-Mobile in January.
My Sidekick 2 has been quite useful to me, but the damn thing is locked down hard and T-Mobile rarely even updates the content catalog, while not even offering the same broad selection that they provide to every other phone they sell. SK2 users don't get T-Zones. We get a literal handful of tracks/message alerts, 90% of which are ghetto. By "ghetto" I mean for example, the following is virtually all of the alerts they offer:
"Baby Girl You Got"
"Attention All Pimps"
"Baby Mother"
"Message Dog"
"Check Yo Messages Cuzz"
"Massage Message"
"Only Pimps Get 40 Or More Messages"
"Paging The Pimp On Premesis"
"Remind Ya Playa"
"What Time Is It Playa"
"You Supposed To?"
"Pimp To Da Strip"
While the music section is 90% rap/r&b.
When it comes to applications, you can count on 3 new apps/games every few months.
I find it pretty insulting and rather pointless. It wouldn't be too hard for them to offer more, and more varied offerings, but they have resisted the considerable pressure to do so. If you are going to lock it down, at least give me something worth buying.
The Sidekick 2 is horribly out of date anyway. It's been almost a year and a half since the hardware was refreshed, and nothing is on the horizon. I don't really want to spent $400 on a replacement, but I'm not going to sign up for another year of being spoon-fed content on an obsolete phone. I know companies will charge whatever the market will bear, but I think that there is a large section of the market outsde of the "Teenagers and college students living off of Mom and Dad's wallet" that feels a bit neglected.
Actually this is an area that I hope M$ does well, for the same reason that I dislike their behavior in the OS market. If the Xbox does well and puts some pressure on Sony then hopefully features will be improved and prices driven down for both competitors.
Exactly.
Microsoft has traction in the console market, but not absolute dominance. Sony and Nintendo were caught off-guard by their strong second place showing in the last generation and have been driven that much harder to make things better ever since.
Personally, I'd love it if Microsoft outsells Sony this time 'round (not happening), and Nintendo outsells them all the generation after that. I want them all to stay on their toes and avoid the complacency that was settling into the market at the dawn of the last generation before Microsoft was actually seen as a viable competitor.
Nintendo and Sony were really beginning to rest on their laurels and that has come to an end.
The 360 hardware aside, the PS2 and to a much lesser extent the Gamecube are beginning to show their age. The GC has been spared the ravages of time a bit because of Nintendo's disinterest in pushing the graphic envelope (they have their reasons, and I respect that. I'm not looking for a flamefest on that issue) but the PS2 has really been forced to hang on a bit too long.
Slashdot Mirror
You really have to wonder how effective their recycling operations are. Japan is going to experience a massive increase in solid waste being disposed of - with a good portion of it requiring special processing to handle the toxic elements - if this law is actually enforced.
;)
Then again, I think this law is just a ploy by Nintendo lobbyists to force Japanese consumers to purchase their continual stream of repackaged..er..."innovative" GameBoys and uses a Revolution to play all of the old games, instead of a 1,000 yen secondhand GC/64/etc.
One thing that has always amused me is when I receive text messages from people who own phones with full QWERTY keyboards or T9 capability, and I'm still forced to deal with "u wana go 2 da cocrt". You've been handed a solution to having to hammer each key 3 times to get the letter you wanted - use it! I tolerated AOL-speak from people in years past when it really was a pain to type full words, much less use capitalization and punctuation.
Using AOL-speak on a desktop or laptop computer is only acceptable if you have some disability that limits your mobility, and makes hitting each key a struggle.
The worst part of all this is that many, many people are fully aware of how stupid they come across when they lower their standards of communication. Willfully ignorant behavior is the worst kind. The trend towards anti-intellectualism in today's society is sickening.
It's quite simple. The PC market is much more price conscious than the Mac side of things. No one is going to pay the "Apple Tax" for hardware when they can build a PC for a few hundred bucks, or pay a small premium for someone to do it for them. Apple would still gain sales from style-concious consumers, but the overwhelming number of OS X users would drop the Mac in a heartbeat and go with something cheaper.
We know this because it happened once before already. Read up on your Apple history with regard to the mid-90s. That little episode was enough to bring the company to its knees.
We've been over this about 1,000 times already.
Apple can't sell their OS for generic x86 systems.
The shortfall from the inevitable collapse of their hardware sales would drive the company into bankruptcy. Suddenly, no more Macs, no more OS X, and no...it wouldn't be open sourced in that case, so forget about that dream.
Everybody loses.
Would it be possible to use suborbital craft such as this as a means to provide rapid transportation between distant terrestrial locations?
If I recall correctly, ICBMs take suborbital, not orbital trajectories, and they are quite time savers when you want to wipe out a city, so could the same approach be applied to less malevolent projects?
New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes, anyone?
It's far too early to tell how this generation is going to pan out. That won't generate traffic to any gaming sites, so they have to go off into the realm of mindless conjecture.
So far, the PS3 has been nothing but a smoke and mirrors show. The reason being, Sony needed to do something to blunt the 360 announcement long before the PS3 hardware was ready, so they sent the FUD machine into overdrive and spat out the same drivel they did when trying to kill off the Dreamcast. Not surprisingly, people lapped it right up, despite the previews being little more than mockups and "real time demos" rendered at 1FPS prior to the show and sped up. I'm not saying the PS3 is going to be a disappointment, nor am I saying that it will be comparable to, or lightyears beyond the 360 or Revolution. We simply know far too little substantive information about its capabilities and exactly what its game library will look like.
The Revolution was being heralded as the only good console of this generation - even before there was a single feature announced. Other than the controller and the back-catalog being rereleased for it, we have seen nothing of what it can do or what it will bring to the table.
Let's have this conversation in a few months, after E3.
Alien 3 was further brutalized by the studio cut that utterly ripped the guts out of the film. If you haven't already, go and watch the Director's Cut on the Quadriology (you can often rent it by itself). The film is infinitely better, and actually works as a small, dark, claustrophobic piece. It's not what fans were promised, it's not what they were expecting, it's not what should have been filmed. But it works. That's tough to admit, but it's nice to find a silver lining to the nightmare that was the movie's production.
Which brings me to...Alien 5
Since in the minds of Alien fans, Alien Vs. Predator simply does not exist, Alien 5 was intended to be something along the lines of what Alien 3's teaser promised. Long story short: James Cameron and Ridley Scott went to the studio with the pitch, the studio told them they were going to do A vs P instead, Cameron told them if that movie was made, he would walk. You know the rest. The film is officially, 100% dead.
A lot of people put their phones on vibrate when they go into the movies.
Only to sit there and have a conversation the moment it rings.
Needless to say, movie theaters need to have flamthrowers available to the audience.
I'm sure a lot of people would..if they could hope to do so and keep their jobs.
Smokers get extra break privileges in many, many work environments all across the nation. Non-smokers are simply not allowed to take the same amount of time off from their work as their nicotine-favoring coworkers can. When you deny non-smokers the chance to take the same amount of time out of their workday for breaks, it leads to unnecessary resentment, and an upset workforce is not a productive workforce.
I simply reject the notion that 15 minute breaks will bring more harm than good to a company's bottom line. As studies have repeatedly shown, the longer you work after a certain point, the less "real" work you do. Mistakes begin to crop up, stress begins to mount, and you end up spending a much larger percentage of this time going back and correcting your errors, than actually producing anything. The impact of this stress on interpersonal relations in the work environment cannot easily be quantified, but I dare say it is significant.
Somehow I doubt the managers who love to fire people for "time-theft" of this nature are busy 100% of the time they are at work, and aren't the kind who take 2 hour lunches and skip out early on Fridays when they please. The more management creates and enforces rules against the most minute off-task behavior, the more their flagrant flaunting of such rules negatively impacts morale.
The human mind is not designed to stay on one task for hour after hour without a few minutes of mental downtime, and failing to recognize this and not to simply expect productivity, but blind mechanical function in a sentient being is not only wrong but fails to deliver the intended results.
It's a sad state of affairs when you realize that many people in their position tend to have a more anthropomorphic view of their pets than their employees.
Which is a hell of a lot better than their technological stagnation after the post-iMac introduction euphoria wore off.
Years of marginal updates to flagship products. How long did it take Apple to give people an option to have something bigger than a 15" CRT (a little more than 13" viewable) on a setup costing less than $1800? How many years did they offer you a choice between the Rage 128...the Rage 128 and uh...the Rage 128 as your video card? How long did it take them to replace the puck mouse..then the "Pro" mouse, before finally offering something that their new adopters from the 'nix world demanded? How long did the well-known and rather embarrassing bottlenecks remain in the motherboards (Hint: there is a reason 3D-heavy games on the PPC machines have never taken off)
So yeah..call me bitter, but the iPod refreshes and the new attitude with regard to the specs on the Mactels (so far) is a welcome change and I applaud Apple for it.
Now, if they could only get the replacement for my DOA iMac Core Duo to me before March.
I'm sure you'll be able to find it integrated into a cell phone and on the racks of Akihabra in about 6 months, where it will then be end-of-lifed in about a week, and replaced with a better model.
The "Jobs" class of connections.
You open your laptop, attempt to sign onto the wireless network, and a man in a black turtleneck walks up to you, swipes your credit card and hands you a glass of Kool-Aid.
It takes 30 minutes for the first ping...but after that you can connect to anyone in the world for the next 12 hours. In fact, the connection is so good, you can leave your laptop and just move your life-spirit to the actual server you are connecting to, and savor the magnetic aura of the hard drives, whilst having full access to your iTunes library...even the songs that won't be written for another 20 years.
Beat that shit.
I'm probably one of the few who have been pleased by the lack of Japanese developer support for the original Xbox.
This has absolutely nothing to do with prejudices but rather trends in game development that are simply a turn-off for me.
The PS2 is notorious for games with cutscene overload. In-game cinematics are adored by many developers in Japan (who tend to develop for the PS2 more than any other platform), to the point where many were miffed at the lack of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD on the Xbox 360 simply because they were pressed for space to squeeze in more pre-rendered cutscenes. With this trend, actual gameplay itself has seemingly become secondary to having the player sit there and admire their non-interactive (and usually non-skippable) indulgences.
U.S. developers did the same thing a little over a decade ago, and gamers everywhere still roll their eyes over the mention of "FMV" which was an equally-detrimental addition to games that was wisely abandoned by most developers.
All of this is simply my opinion, and little more. That being said, cutscenes are merely an example of being led down the path that the developers choose to have you follow. They add a rigid structure to a game, and when they are over-used, it seems as if you are just going through the motions and not really playing, as you are firmly attached to the rails provided for you to follow.
Cinematics also act as padding. Hiring a bunch of artists to create a cutscnes is easier and much faster than finding a good group of level designers to put together well-balanced, quality interactive levels.
When the iTunes store first opened, a lot of people at /. bitched and moaned about how terrible it was that you were forced to buy individual songs or albums. Who would want to do that when you can pay a monthly fee and listen to everything in the catalog with a subscription service?
As it turns out, a lot of people actually.
The "all you can eat" method sounds great in theory, but the tracks from the major subscription services are often saddled with layers of rules and restrictions well beyond those you find with iTunes. Extra fees for moving them to portable music devices, extra fees for burning them to CDs and oh yeah...when you stop paying your monthly fee, everything goes away. Hundreds of dollars over years gone with one missed payment. All that money and you own absolutely *nothing*.
iTunes is not perfect, iTunes has problems. The artists do get far, far less than they should, but that is due to the way the contracts are written between the labels and the artists. Yes, you are restricted to playing (but not storing) the songs to any 5 computers at once (which you can change as often as you like). No, Steve Jobs can't lower the prices to 10 cents a track like you so often hear the uninformed claim. Yes, you can put the songs on as many iPods as you want without restriction. No, you can't get higher-bitrate tracks even though that should be an option. Etc.
At the end of the day, however...you can buy one song for 99 cents and that song will be there for you to play today, tomorrow and next year, the year after, etc. Wherever you want, whenever you want. You can buy that one song, buy 1,000 songs it doesn't matter. You only pay when you want to pay, and you don't feel compelled to justify what you spend each month, because unlike Napster and the Yahoo! Music Store, you only get what you pay for, and you only pay for what you get.
The dominance of the iPod, and its incompatibility with the other services is only part of the reason iTunes' competition is withering on the vine. People want to feel like they are left with something at the end of the day, and iTunes delivers that better than anyone else.
Developers also look at the attach rate for a console. They are very interested in the number of 3rd party titles that the average gamer has. If that number drops too low, you end up with a Gamecube situation where projects are canceled left and right while shelf space dries up because the projections indicate sales won't be worth the money and effort.
"... the vast majority of the computer-using population doesn't care about Apple..."
Hardly. Former Apple CEO Gil Amelio wrote a book chronicling his experiences in the Bad Old Days of Apple. One important part that stuck with me is when he asked the editor of a major national newspaper (I believe it was the NYT) why they always ran stories about Apple as major, headline news.
His answer? He had conclusive data that every time an Apple headline ran, sales for that issue spiked by 5%.
I'll ignore the dupe aspect of this story to state that IE for the Mac has not received a significant update since the year 2000. Everything between then and the termination of development in 2003, was simply basic maintenance updates that kept it running on each version of OS X and squashed a few security bugs here and there.
IE for the Mac has been very dead for a very long time.
With every not-so-great (in my opinion, anyway) gadget, there is always that sliver lining. That one thing that makes you go "At least they tried...it's not so bad, really".
I never had that moment with the N-Gage. Every single aspect of its design seemed to be engineered to piss off the end user and make them throw it across the room in an unspeakable rage.
The screen's aspect ratio was 180 degrees off, the device had to be disassembled to change games, it tried to be the Swiss Army Knife of phones and failed miserably at it...the brutally awful sidetalking "feature" along with the painfully awkward keypad made it something that not even the overpowering hype could render a somewhat decent product in the minds of potential customers.
Most people I encountered wouldn't even use one if they got it for free. Until the PSP came out, there was nothing for gamers who found that the GBA/DS did not offer the kind of game library they were after. They blew a perfect chance, and no amount of hardware revising could correct the fatally undermined confidence that the public had in the entire platform.
I tested far, far above my peers in virtually every area when I was 8 years old. My intelligence was equivalent to someone in their 4th year of college.
That being said, there was one horrible catch.
I was, and always have been terrible in math. Absolutely awful. It just doesn't click in my brain.
As a result of this, I was denied access to more challenging work in school, and in fact, I was shunted to the lowest-rung classes while anyone demonstrating above-average aptitude in mathematics was shifted to the gifted program - despite any significant and obvious weaknesses in reading, writing, etc. Since then, I've recognized a widespread belief that anyone who is considered uncommonly intelligent is automatically a math genius and that if they do not possess extraordinary math skills, then they should not be seen as deserving of any extra positive attention in school regardless of their other strengths.
There are a lot of articles about it because it is coming out in 2 days. Are there any consoles coming out this week, month, year? No? OK then!
Have we seen anything substantial from Sony or Nintendo that accurately depicts what we will be playing on their new hardware sometime next year? No? OK then!
Have we already had countless stories about the Cell, Revolution controller, etc despite a near total dearth of information since E3? Yes? OK then!
There are reasons why you are seeing so much about the 360, and you can count on Slashdot. going batshit next year when the Revolution and PS3 arrive. Hell, I've had people telling me left and right that the 360 and PS3 are completely boring and that the Revolution is 100x more interesting and cool since over a year before the Revolution was even unveiled. How is that for bias?
I wish I was making this up. I really do. :(
Their marketing campaigns are completely geared towards the urban market, but the phone appealed to me based on its long-outdated specs.
The extortion I face when it comes time to add any content to my phone is the primary reason I'm dumping T-Mobile in January.
My Sidekick 2 has been quite useful to me, but the damn thing is locked down hard and T-Mobile rarely even updates the content catalog, while not even offering the same broad selection that they provide to every other phone they sell. SK2 users don't get T-Zones. We get a literal handful of tracks/message alerts, 90% of which are ghetto. By "ghetto" I mean for example, the following is virtually all of the alerts they offer:
"Baby Girl You Got"
"Attention All Pimps"
"Baby Mother"
"Message Dog"
"Check Yo Messages Cuzz"
"Massage Message"
"Only Pimps Get 40 Or More Messages"
"Paging The Pimp On Premesis"
"Remind Ya Playa"
"What Time Is It Playa"
"You Supposed To?"
"Pimp To Da Strip"
While the music section is 90% rap/r&b.
When it comes to applications, you can count on 3 new apps/games every few months.
I find it pretty insulting and rather pointless. It wouldn't be too hard for them to offer more, and more varied offerings, but they have resisted the considerable pressure to do so. If you are going to lock it down, at least give me something worth buying.
The Sidekick 2 is horribly out of date anyway. It's been almost a year and a half since the hardware was refreshed, and nothing is on the horizon. I don't really want to spent $400 on a replacement, but I'm not going to sign up for another year of being spoon-fed content on an obsolete phone. I know companies will charge whatever the market will bear, but I think that there is a large section of the market outsde of the "Teenagers and college students living off of Mom and Dad's wallet" that feels a bit neglected.
Microsoft has traction in the console market, but not absolute dominance. Sony and Nintendo were caught off-guard by their strong second place showing in the last generation and have been driven that much harder to make things better ever since.
Personally, I'd love it if Microsoft outsells Sony this time 'round (not happening), and Nintendo outsells them all the generation after that. I want them all to stay on their toes and avoid the complacency that was settling into the market at the dawn of the last generation before Microsoft was actually seen as a viable competitor.
Nintendo and Sony were really beginning to rest on their laurels and that has come to an end.
The 360 hardware aside, the PS2 and to a much lesser extent the Gamecube are beginning to show their age. The GC has been spared the ravages of time a bit because of Nintendo's disinterest in pushing the graphic envelope (they have their reasons, and I respect that. I'm not looking for a flamefest on that issue) but the PS2 has really been forced to hang on a bit too long.
In a perfect world, she would have just yelled "Leggo, my Eggo!" and that would have been the end of it.