The main problem with this is the notion of "Neutral Point of View", or, alternately, objectivity. This is at odds with the democratic or community standards of Wikipedia. Any attempts on wikipedia to establish what neutrality actually is eventually reduce to who is louder, more numerous, more energetic, more popular, and more in-line with the media, not whose ideas have the most merit. Most of the defenses I've seen of the process put forth are so ignorant of the very foundations of human reason that they border on the absurd; in fact, much of the system seems to be BASED on the ad hominem argument.
It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. - Stalin
The feds regulate the peak volume of broadcasts. They do not regulate the average volume. Range compression and amplification effectively makes every sound on the record within a few dB of the peak maximum, rather than orders of magnitude smaller, which is what natural sounds are like.
But why would you want all the sounds to be at the same level?
Because, as a record company executive, you want your songs to sell. Louder songs stand out more at clubs and on the radio. However, you must abide by government regulations as to how loud a song is, and radio stations play every song at the same volume on their end. However, the difference lies in the fact that humans perceive sounds as loud or soft based on their average loudness, not their peak loudness, and you can make sounds louder on average very easily using CDs. The loudness of the final product is an afterthought.
Yeah, I tried to correct myself on that, but I was heading out the door.
And you're right, there is no physical reason why they cannot make vinyl records very loud. In fact, I think they did just that with singles and jukebox records, so they would stand out in public spaces. However, I understand that this was not done extensively to full albums because it makes the grooves wider. Since the vibrations of the needle accord to the sound wave itself, you gotta get that needle moving if you want it to be loud, which means a deep, fat groove.
As I understand it, your dynamic range on a CD is proportionate to the depth (and thus width) of the groove. The wider the groove, the less audio you can fit on one disk.
Hmm. I think the real question is this: If I put Richard Dawkins and Ann Coulter in a room together, will they annihilate each other? Even if I can't harvest the result as energy, man, sounds like a win/win situation to me!
What middle ground? Neither thoughtful nor believer?
This is a false dilemma. Sciences (excepting social sciences) attempt to describe the world and its interactions. The questions it answers are undoubtedly important and useful. However, questions such as "How should I live my life?" are the domain of philosophy, culture, belief and religion. Sure, social sciences can help you in some very specific and useful ways, but at the end of the day human lives are too complex to establish experimental controls over in every respect. Wisdom is recognizing where to apply which methodology.
Your other supposition that all beliefs are inherently and intractably dogmatic is so patently false that I do not care to refute it. Extremist fundamentalism does not stand for all belief.
I heartily agree. And furthermore, I haven't really enjoyed an id engine-based game since Quake II. All of the games that came after it just felt less attractive in terms of motion and firing. There's something too fluid about Quake 3 and everything that came after it.
Firstly, your argument that, "Your evidence supporting not x actually supports x!" (liberally paraphrased) is absurd. Secondly, arguing that PC games are not being sold [much] because they are not being sold [much] in retail stores is illogical. I observe that people who go to GameStop are mostly juveniles and that juveniles are more likely to be primarily console gamers, so GameStop is just catering to its core audience. Adults are more likely to have exclusive access to a fast PC and are more likely to make purchases online because they are often too busy to go to the mall with the same leisure as youngsters and because they have credit cards.
Anyway, I played a bunch of great titles this year: Bioshock, Half-Life 2.2 (and 2.1, that doesn't really count though!), Supreme Commander, Portals, and TF2. I am intrigued by Hellgate: London. Never really liked the Battlefield games. And up until recently, I played more Warcraft than I'm comfortable admitting. However, I would've liked more truly great games, but I cannot say based on my current knowledge that there were fewer great games or less games sold. So I'm just uninformed on that point.However, despite that, it is overly aggressive to say that because a market is shrinking that it will someday just disappear.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that PC gaming is, in fact, becoming less attractive, and that this is in part because of WoW's hegemony. This will eventually pass as people get tired of it. It is also because PCs themselves are less attractive. Vista failed to deliver on its security promises and PCs are more prone to malware infections than ever, and require huge security suites to compensate for this, which precludes gaming. At the same time, HDTV and consequently HD gaming is making consoles much more visually attractive: this was, historically, PC gaming's big edge aside from the mouse/keyboard interface.
I agree, so it basically comes down to how much form factor counts. As computers begin to be seen as a necessary part of the home, and not newcomer utilities that you stick in an office somewhere out of the way, it will only become more important that they be attractive and not furious black balls of black cords and black plastic. They are becoming regular elements of interior design, and while my decorating instinct stops after I get the bed, the desk, the TV and the couch down, some people like to make a home look nice.
And I know it's a tired example, but a lot of the iPod's success comes strictly from the fact that it looks cool, and all the other offerings look like they were designed by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
Again, I basically agree with your point, I just don't think you can write off form factor that easily.
The problem is that they're been able to reach monopoly status during a period of regulation which limited their ability to abuse this status. Competition is supposed to be the force which ensures people will not be taken advantage of, and that they will see the fruits of productivity gains. However, removing the restraints on their powers does not instantly create competition, and the fact that the companies still have de facto monopoly status, tons of resources and no regulation virtually ensures that the customer's going to get fucked.
I have heard this argument before... When what that....
I have heard your counter-argument before. It's the one frequently used by global warming deniers and people who think we're never going to run out of oil.
But, of course, my response is just as fallacious as yours. So, what you've proven is that if bandwidth increases faster than demand, then we'll be fine. Okay. But I don't think that we can really treat that as a given.
In general, it is unwise to make business ventures based on pure speculation. Example: buying a rocky outcropping near a city in the 1940's and figuring you can someday build a fast-food joint up there because everyone will have flying cars and jetpacks by the 70's.
Furthermore, you seem to be leaving infrastructure out of the equation. Did you ever notice your cable going offline while your cable company replaced the wire going to your house? No, because it's probably the same wire that's been there since the late 1960's. Every speed improvement that you've gotten since 2001 has been due to an improvement at their offices and in their internet connection, and at some point, they're going to have to start running fiber to your house to get you going any faster, and it won't be cheap. Sure, your connection will probably keep getting faster, but what we've really been doing in the past 10 years or so is picking low-hanging fruit.
Will people even want online versions of these programs? I don't have a crystal ball anymore than the jerk who made the announcement, but the web is currently very much able to deliver a word processor or a spreadsheet. Despite their feasibility, I resent the very idea of an online office suite. Even if I knew there would be no browser issues and that my connection wouldn't go down at an unexpected moment I still wouldn't because it'd just feel wrong. Judging by the number of friends and colleagues who've come running to me saying they'll never use Office again because of Google Docs (0), or even the number who've had any inclination to try it (also 0), I don't think it's going to get picked up in the near future.
Really, I think this is just 1) Some technically illiterate manager's dream about no longer having to worry about piracy, and 2) vaporware for business development purposes. Some investor out there who got the trophy wife's smart genes instead of the business mogul's genes has started a conversation about whether adobe has a "web strategy", and pie-in-the-sky project was cooked up so that they could say they do.
Well then, why not sell Windows 7: Crufty Old Apps Business Edition and Windows 7: No Bullshit Legacy Crap Home Edition? They're so into selling different versions of their OS, they might as well have something to differentiate them besides windowdressing. I don't see a rational case for the needs of people who still use Cardfile imposing unwanted, non-optional, security-compromising, bloat-inducing features on little ol' me.
You ever been to a really nice restaurant? Say, a French place with a 50-100 dollar per plate menu. All the ones I've been to have one thing in common: fairly small portions. I'm not talking about those luxury joints that models go to to get a slice of carrot and a wheat cracker, of course, just places with actual great food. The idea is that if you get an appetizer, wine, and share a dessert, you will be pleasantly full by the end of the meal, as opposed to sick or in need of a takeout box. A lot of people get a culture shock when they are served a non-huge amount of food, but I challenge you to tell a guest at Chez Panisse they're not getting their money's worth.
But maybe you're not as much of a food snob as me. Fair enough. If I recall correctly, Halo: Combat Evolved is so goddamn repetitive because it was originally a short game until word came down from MS that it had to be twice as long. I can't imagine that it would've been a worse game if they'd stuck to the original length. In fact, for the latter 75% of the game, I was gnashing my teeth and thinking, "When is this thing going to end?"
So, I think it's fair to say that quantity of content does not translate into quality of experience. In fact, I think that if Portal had been longer, it would have been a less enjoyable experience. In order to make it longer and more interesting, you would've had to add some other elements - another story arc, another bad guy, more enemies (and how many ways are there to deal with armed opponents when all you have is a freakin' portal gun?). And even then, it would've been less charming. One, the hollowness and oppressively static atmosphere of the game would've been gone. Two, it would've gotten boring and frustrating, because there's only so much you can do with Newtonian physics and jump puzzles require an annoying amount of precision. Really, all I want is to get Chell out of the rabbit hole and kill the evil AI. If it'd taken longer to get to the evil AI, I would've felt teased. If there had been some other bad guy to topple, I would've asked, "Why? I'm just some orphan in a rat maze who wants to get out. Why do I have to go after Dr. Nefario?"
But hey, if you like boring 40-hour games with identical, uninteresting levels and the same 5 entities repeated ad infinitum, or one and a half-pound hamburgers with tasteless meat, white bread, iceberg lettuce, mild onion and mealy tomatoes, don't let me impinge upon you "enjoyment".
Ironically, bright people are probably more likely to have this issue. They have tons of pride in their intellect and accomplishments, and they see their lack of mathematical performance as an embarrassing deformity, like a club foot.
Anyone with this problem, just remember: you're not alone. There's nothing wrong with not doing math very well. It doesn't mean you're stupid, it probably just means you didn't get some key concept when you were 12 and that sabotaged your mathematical education for years to come. Just take it slow, and keep in mind that math is a kind of game. It's a series of abstractions - that is, useful but nonetheless imaginary and artificial concepts, right down to numbers. So don't take it so seriously!
They probably implemented the policy to stop people from running blatant smear campaigns via AdWords. This problem is perhaps more threatening via AdWords simply because it is automated and potentially anonymous. If it got out of hand, it could lose Google a lot of money as well as the interest of advertisers. Remember, ads were the big pot o' gold that dried up completely during the burst, and now that you can make money in internet advertising again, they are probably looking at every way that could self-destruct.
It'd probably be just like will-call "e-tickets". They put down your name with a certain number of tickets associated with it, and you pick up those tickets at the window. Presumably, there's some kind of arbitrary limit. I'm not sure, I usually go with 2-4 people to shows.
The situation you describe has happened to some of my friends with the will-call system, and the staff at the venues I frequent have been understanding. However, as scale increases, so does bureaucratic inflexibility, so I do not know if it would hold for larger shows.
People are talking about auctions, lottery, and the credit card link system. It seems to me that the first two can still be gamed pretty easily. For lottery, you just add tons of fake names to the pool and you can tilt the lottery in your favor. For the auction, well, if you don't think an auction can be gamed, I got two words for you: eee-bay. The CC/ID link system is pretty hard to game, and would require widespread, systematic forgery, which IIRC is a felon. And the only people you screw over are unreliable, good-for-nothing flakes, perhaps my biggest pet peeve next to people putting their luggage on chairs. I realize a lot of people are kind of lax about appointments, and dates, but hey, you'd be doing your part to increase the punctuality of society at large!
That is very true - Halo was used to drive Xbox sales. It's the whole "killer app" phenomenon. The point that needs to be emphasized, though, is not that consumers were losing out, but that Bungie was losing out. They were losing money they would have made if they were not forced to make Halo an almost-exclusive title, and I betcha they lost even more money on that whole "Direct X 10 Only Because We Need to Sell Vista" debacle.
If I was an employee at Bungie, I'd be thinking something along the lines of, "Oh, so look what's happened: we've gone from one of the industry's most respected niche game developers to a subsidiary which exists first and foremost to make Microsoft's shitty products more appealing, not to make great games." Then, I'd be talking to my buddies about leaving en masse and founding a startup studio - and oh yeah, fat chance of releasing anything for the 360. So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the separation was made to meet the staff halfway and prevent a brain drain.
This may sound a bit passionate, but game developers tend to be just about the most passionate software developers on the planet - you have to be, to endure the rigors and frequent lack of reward. And given that level of passion, I wouldn't be surprised if some people were downright irate over being forced to sabotage something they put years of work into.
The study's findings are pretty believable whenever the choice is trivial and the chooser is not in a good place to make an informed decision. When the choice is important, the chooser better damn well get informed, and if the chooser is informed, they are in as good a position as anyone to decide what they want to eat or code.
And sure, it probably would be better for someone doing their first or second parallel project to only have a few options, most of which are considered very good. Maybe it'd even be better for more experienced people, because they'd have more colleagues in each set. But it's a pretty immature field compared to other areas, and that's why there are a bunch of options. Once some are shown to be conclusively better, the herd will thin out naturally.
For the most part the only time I hear complaints out of Windows gamers is the ones that don't have enough cash to buy their own gear and have to live off of mommy and daddy's hand me downs.
Bitch about the memory and pat yourself on the back all you want but when is the last time a gig of ram cost more then the latest PS3 title? In perspective the issue of buying an off-the-shelf PC to play games on and adding the ram yourself is normally going to cost you less then the sales tax on most new machines.
It sounds like you just took my statement, added some pepper, and threw it back at me like it was a counter-argument.
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The main problem with this is the notion of "Neutral Point of View", or, alternately, objectivity. This is at odds with the democratic or community standards of Wikipedia. Any attempts on wikipedia to establish what neutrality actually is eventually reduce to who is louder, more numerous, more energetic, more popular, and more in-line with the media, not whose ideas have the most merit. Most of the defenses I've seen of the process put forth are so ignorant of the very foundations of human reason that they border on the absurd; in fact, much of the system seems to be BASED on the ad hominem argument.
The feds regulate the peak volume of broadcasts. They do not regulate the average volume. Range compression and amplification effectively makes every sound on the record within a few dB of the peak maximum, rather than orders of magnitude smaller, which is what natural sounds are like.
Because, as a record company executive, you want your songs to sell. Louder songs stand out more at clubs and on the radio. However, you must abide by government regulations as to how loud a song is, and radio stations play every song at the same volume on their end. However, the difference lies in the fact that humans perceive sounds as loud or soft based on their average loudness, not their peak loudness, and you can make sounds louder on average very easily using CDs. The loudness of the final product is an afterthought.
Yeah, I tried to correct myself on that, but I was heading out the door.
And you're right, there is no physical reason why they cannot make vinyl records very loud. In fact, I think they did just that with singles and jukebox records, so they would stand out in public spaces. However, I understand that this was not done extensively to full albums because it makes the grooves wider. Since the vibrations of the needle accord to the sound wave itself, you gotta get that needle moving if you want it to be loud, which means a deep, fat groove.
As I understand it, your dynamic range on a CD is proportionate to the depth (and thus width) of the groove. The wider the groove, the less audio you can fit on one disk.
Hmm. I think the real question is this: If I put Richard Dawkins and Ann Coulter in a room together, will they annihilate each other? Even if I can't harvest the result as energy, man, sounds like a win/win situation to me!
This is a false dilemma. Sciences (excepting social sciences) attempt to describe the world and its interactions. The questions it answers are undoubtedly important and useful. However, questions such as "How should I live my life?" are the domain of philosophy, culture, belief and religion. Sure, social sciences can help you in some very specific and useful ways, but at the end of the day human lives are too complex to establish experimental controls over in every respect. Wisdom is recognizing where to apply which methodology.
Your other supposition that all beliefs are inherently and intractably dogmatic is so patently false that I do not care to refute it. Extremist fundamentalism does not stand for all belief.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
I heartily agree. And furthermore, I haven't really enjoyed an id engine-based game since Quake II. All of the games that came after it just felt less attractive in terms of motion and firing. There's something too fluid about Quake 3 and everything that came after it.
Oh, and one more thing: I absolutely hate titles that compromise their PC interface for the sake of consoles.
Firstly, your argument that, "Your evidence supporting not x actually supports x!" (liberally paraphrased) is absurd. Secondly, arguing that PC games are not being sold [much] because they are not being sold [much] in retail stores is illogical. I observe that people who go to GameStop are mostly juveniles and that juveniles are more likely to be primarily console gamers, so GameStop is just catering to its core audience. Adults are more likely to have exclusive access to a fast PC and are more likely to make purchases online because they are often too busy to go to the mall with the same leisure as youngsters and because they have credit cards.
Anyway, I played a bunch of great titles this year: Bioshock, Half-Life 2.2 (and 2.1, that doesn't really count though!), Supreme Commander, Portals, and TF2. I am intrigued by Hellgate: London. Never really liked the Battlefield games. And up until recently, I played more Warcraft than I'm comfortable admitting. However, I would've liked more truly great games, but I cannot say based on my current knowledge that there were fewer great games or less games sold. So I'm just uninformed on that point.However, despite that, it is overly aggressive to say that because a market is shrinking that it will someday just disappear.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that PC gaming is, in fact, becoming less attractive, and that this is in part because of WoW's hegemony. This will eventually pass as people get tired of it. It is also because PCs themselves are less attractive. Vista failed to deliver on its security promises and PCs are more prone to malware infections than ever, and require huge security suites to compensate for this, which precludes gaming. At the same time, HDTV and consequently HD gaming is making consoles much more visually attractive: this was, historically, PC gaming's big edge aside from the mouse/keyboard interface.
I agree, so it basically comes down to how much form factor counts. As computers begin to be seen as a necessary part of the home, and not newcomer utilities that you stick in an office somewhere out of the way, it will only become more important that they be attractive and not furious black balls of black cords and black plastic. They are becoming regular elements of interior design, and while my decorating instinct stops after I get the bed, the desk, the TV and the couch down, some people like to make a home look nice.
And I know it's a tired example, but a lot of the iPod's success comes strictly from the fact that it looks cool, and all the other offerings look like they were designed by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
Again, I basically agree with your point, I just don't think you can write off form factor that easily.
The problem is that they're been able to reach monopoly status during a period of regulation which limited their ability to abuse this status. Competition is supposed to be the force which ensures people will not be taken advantage of, and that they will see the fruits of productivity gains. However, removing the restraints on their powers does not instantly create competition, and the fact that the companies still have de facto monopoly status, tons of resources and no regulation virtually ensures that the customer's going to get fucked.
I have heard your counter-argument before. It's the one frequently used by global warming deniers and people who think we're never going to run out of oil.
But, of course, my response is just as fallacious as yours. So, what you've proven is that if bandwidth increases faster than demand, then we'll be fine. Okay. But I don't think that we can really treat that as a given.
In general, it is unwise to make business ventures based on pure speculation. Example: buying a rocky outcropping near a city in the 1940's and figuring you can someday build a fast-food joint up there because everyone will have flying cars and jetpacks by the 70's.
Furthermore, you seem to be leaving infrastructure out of the equation. Did you ever notice your cable going offline while your cable company replaced the wire going to your house? No, because it's probably the same wire that's been there since the late 1960's. Every speed improvement that you've gotten since 2001 has been due to an improvement at their offices and in their internet connection, and at some point, they're going to have to start running fiber to your house to get you going any faster, and it won't be cheap. Sure, your connection will probably keep getting faster, but what we've really been doing in the past 10 years or so is picking low-hanging fruit.
Will people even want online versions of these programs? I don't have a crystal ball anymore than the jerk who made the announcement, but the web is currently very much able to deliver a word processor or a spreadsheet. Despite their feasibility, I resent the very idea of an online office suite. Even if I knew there would be no browser issues and that my connection wouldn't go down at an unexpected moment I still wouldn't because it'd just feel wrong. Judging by the number of friends and colleagues who've come running to me saying they'll never use Office again because of Google Docs (0), or even the number who've had any inclination to try it (also 0), I don't think it's going to get picked up in the near future.
Really, I think this is just 1) Some technically illiterate manager's dream about no longer having to worry about piracy, and 2) vaporware for business development purposes. Some investor out there who got the trophy wife's smart genes instead of the business mogul's genes has started a conversation about whether adobe has a "web strategy", and pie-in-the-sky project was cooked up so that they could say they do.
I liked this one: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html. The Windows 7 hype, however, probably has as much to do with the way people are fleeing from Vista like it's Mt. Vesuvius.
It's not the same market nowadays, though, and I think people will be generally less inclined to fall prey to this kind of thing.
Well then, why not sell Windows 7: Crufty Old Apps Business Edition and Windows 7: No Bullshit Legacy Crap Home Edition? They're so into selling different versions of their OS, they might as well have something to differentiate them besides windowdressing. I don't see a rational case for the needs of people who still use Cardfile imposing unwanted, non-optional, security-compromising, bloat-inducing features on little ol' me.
You ever been to a really nice restaurant? Say, a French place with a 50-100 dollar per plate menu. All the ones I've been to have one thing in common: fairly small portions. I'm not talking about those luxury joints that models go to to get a slice of carrot and a wheat cracker, of course, just places with actual great food. The idea is that if you get an appetizer, wine, and share a dessert, you will be pleasantly full by the end of the meal, as opposed to sick or in need of a takeout box. A lot of people get a culture shock when they are served a non-huge amount of food, but I challenge you to tell a guest at Chez Panisse they're not getting their money's worth.
But maybe you're not as much of a food snob as me. Fair enough. If I recall correctly, Halo: Combat Evolved is so goddamn repetitive because it was originally a short game until word came down from MS that it had to be twice as long. I can't imagine that it would've been a worse game if they'd stuck to the original length. In fact, for the latter 75% of the game, I was gnashing my teeth and thinking, "When is this thing going to end?"
So, I think it's fair to say that quantity of content does not translate into quality of experience. In fact, I think that if Portal had been longer, it would have been a less enjoyable experience. In order to make it longer and more interesting, you would've had to add some other elements - another story arc, another bad guy, more enemies (and how many ways are there to deal with armed opponents when all you have is a freakin' portal gun?). And even then, it would've been less charming. One, the hollowness and oppressively static atmosphere of the game would've been gone. Two, it would've gotten boring and frustrating, because there's only so much you can do with Newtonian physics and jump puzzles require an annoying amount of precision. Really, all I want is to get Chell out of the rabbit hole and kill the evil AI. If it'd taken longer to get to the evil AI, I would've felt teased. If there had been some other bad guy to topple, I would've asked, "Why? I'm just some orphan in a rat maze who wants to get out. Why do I have to go after Dr. Nefario?"
But hey, if you like boring 40-hour games with identical, uninteresting levels and the same 5 entities repeated ad infinitum, or one and a half-pound hamburgers with tasteless meat, white bread, iceberg lettuce, mild onion and mealy tomatoes, don't let me impinge upon you "enjoyment".
Ironically, bright people are probably more likely to have this issue. They have tons of pride in their intellect and accomplishments, and they see their lack of mathematical performance as an embarrassing deformity, like a club foot.
Anyone with this problem, just remember: you're not alone. There's nothing wrong with not doing math very well. It doesn't mean you're stupid, it probably just means you didn't get some key concept when you were 12 and that sabotaged your mathematical education for years to come. Just take it slow, and keep in mind that math is a kind of game. It's a series of abstractions - that is, useful but nonetheless imaginary and artificial concepts, right down to numbers. So don't take it so seriously!
They probably implemented the policy to stop people from running blatant smear campaigns via AdWords. This problem is perhaps more threatening via AdWords simply because it is automated and potentially anonymous. If it got out of hand, it could lose Google a lot of money as well as the interest of advertisers. Remember, ads were the big pot o' gold that dried up completely during the burst, and now that you can make money in internet advertising again, they are probably looking at every way that could self-destruct.
I hear you can become a Wikipedian if your grandfather was a Wikipedian, or if you save the life of a Wikipedian.
It'd probably be just like will-call "e-tickets". They put down your name with a certain number of tickets associated with it, and you pick up those tickets at the window. Presumably, there's some kind of arbitrary limit. I'm not sure, I usually go with 2-4 people to shows.
The situation you describe has happened to some of my friends with the will-call system, and the staff at the venues I frequent have been understanding. However, as scale increases, so does bureaucratic inflexibility, so I do not know if it would hold for larger shows.
People are talking about auctions, lottery, and the credit card link system. It seems to me that the first two can still be gamed pretty easily. For lottery, you just add tons of fake names to the pool and you can tilt the lottery in your favor. For the auction, well, if you don't think an auction can be gamed, I got two words for you: eee-bay. The CC/ID link system is pretty hard to game, and would require widespread, systematic forgery, which IIRC is a felon. And the only people you screw over are unreliable, good-for-nothing flakes, perhaps my biggest pet peeve next to people putting their luggage on chairs. I realize a lot of people are kind of lax about appointments, and dates, but hey, you'd be doing your part to increase the punctuality of society at large!
That is very true - Halo was used to drive Xbox sales. It's the whole "killer app" phenomenon. The point that needs to be emphasized, though, is not that consumers were losing out, but that Bungie was losing out. They were losing money they would have made if they were not forced to make Halo an almost-exclusive title, and I betcha they lost even more money on that whole "Direct X 10 Only Because We Need to Sell Vista" debacle.
If I was an employee at Bungie, I'd be thinking something along the lines of, "Oh, so look what's happened: we've gone from one of the industry's most respected niche game developers to a subsidiary which exists first and foremost to make Microsoft's shitty products more appealing, not to make great games." Then, I'd be talking to my buddies about leaving en masse and founding a startup studio - and oh yeah, fat chance of releasing anything for the 360. So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the separation was made to meet the staff halfway and prevent a brain drain.
This may sound a bit passionate, but game developers tend to be just about the most passionate software developers on the planet - you have to be, to endure the rigors and frequent lack of reward. And given that level of passion, I wouldn't be surprised if some people were downright irate over being forced to sabotage something they put years of work into.
The study's findings are pretty believable whenever the choice is trivial and the chooser is not in a good place to make an informed decision. When the choice is important, the chooser better damn well get informed, and if the chooser is informed, they are in as good a position as anyone to decide what they want to eat or code.
And sure, it probably would be better for someone doing their first or second parallel project to only have a few options, most of which are considered very good. Maybe it'd even be better for more experienced people, because they'd have more colleagues in each set. But it's a pretty immature field compared to other areas, and that's why there are a bunch of options. Once some are shown to be conclusively better, the herd will thin out naturally.
Bitch about the memory and pat yourself on the back all you want but when is the last time a gig of ram cost more then the latest PS3 title? In perspective the issue of buying an off-the-shelf PC to play games on and adding the ram yourself is normally going to cost you less then the sales tax on most new machines.
It sounds like you just took my statement, added some pepper, and threw it back at me like it was a counter-argument.