Ahem... good luck for having a call every second minute, but sorry it is like that. I will give you an example, a certain app which I normally regard high, due to its production values at a certain configuration writes 4 times into the registry always at the same keys. What happens now is, that uac pops up 4 the app wants to write into the registry window dialogs within 3 seconds, you see the problem. And it is not the only problem in this area, basically every app trying to behave like an old windows app has to be either pushed into admin mode or you have to live with uac.
Dont get me wrong, I ran separate user accounts also back in the XP days, but, it was less annoying, once an app was dedicatedly pushed into the admin domain it was silent afterwards, because windows assumed you knew what you were doing when you installed as a root user.
UAC is really broken by design and could be fixed, the saner solution, pushing out jailroots for legacy apps which want admin access was not done by Microsoft, probably due to ignorance, also a sane solution of a uac level 1 pseudo root where apps can be registered and uac is only used for the install and then deactivated also was not done, the third sane solutin at least cache the results of submitting uac oks for some time also was not done, they chose the uac annoys the hell out of the user way!
There probably are two factors. Microsoft probably preloads a load of.net dlls (I am sure the minute disk thrashing after the entire ui is there is partially caused by some of those things) but also it really seems they did a serious caching to ease the pain of apps which have to rely on a load of dependencies.
There are several problems with UAC, the main problem is that the dialog pops up constantly with old software hence basically renders the entire access control pointless!
You cannot customize uac to the level that you basically say once uac has been granted to a certain app for a certain critical op, the dialog should not popup anymore, you cannot really trim it down in a significant way it is either uac full or no uac at all.
The main problem in the way Microsoft solved the entir thing is, that the dialog pops up constantly, and after a while you simply hit the ok button without even thinking about it and reading the text, hence rendering the entire uac totally pointless.
There would have been several ways to resolve this issue elegantly.
a) Simply sandbox legacy apps in their own rootspace (jailroot them) and have no uac at all for them
b) Make the UAC more intelligent in the way that it remembers the grants which have been given to an app during execution time instead of forgetting it
From all possible solutions to deal with the problem Microsoft has chosen the worst one!
Lets say it that way it is a step back from ubuntu and osx...
There are more things than aero which drain the ba
on
Vista Eating Battery Life
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There are more things than aero which drain the battery in vista: aero is one of the factors, but, there is a lot of additional startup disk processing even after the ui has been started the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles the desktop search adds an additional processing overhead etc... etc...
or ot sum it up added automated features simply need energy!
The battery drain is less annoying than another load of idiotic features, UAC for instance is what sudo and the osx do but solved in a totally idiotic fashion, the new explorer is a lousy clone of mac osxs pathfinder (basically a clone of the worst features of finder and pathfinder), the system cofiguration tool setup is outright confusing with display settings for instance being distributed into 5-6 various tools some dont even have the slightest to do with the display settings.
the new start bar is outright annoying to hell, the search is inelegantly solved and annot be put into the tray where it really belongs, no decent desktop switcher, startup times are longer than a fully configured linux. The Expose copy is outright useless, Vista home allows you to backup for a restore you have to upgrade to ultimate, the wireless configuration is lousy as hell. The half transparent border effect causes motion sicknes... etc...
The only positive thing I really noticed is once it is loaded programs startup in no time, netbeans takes about 4 seconds openoffice around 3 and that on a 5200rpm notebook drive. There seems to be some serious app caching going on which optimizes the load times, especially java programs benefit tremendously from it. Tomcat 0.8 seconds, netbeans 4 seconds awesome.
Problem is, that there are solutions which are more worthwile to push into existence than playing catchup with microsoft with a uncertain future, there are alternatives to silverlight, Microsoft is very late to the game, projects worthwile would be:
a) improve the svg situation now that Adobe has dropped the ball, on windows, after all silverlight is mainly a flash clone with.net added as backend tech
b) try to give a helping hand to one of the projects why try to implement a really opensource flash tech or build on top of flash decent open rich ui frameworks
Miguel again has chosen the hardest way, and helping microsoft to fortify their monopoly in areas which currently are very vivid in the long run just for the sake of trying to clone yet another Microsoft tech!
Sorry to say that, but enough is enough! It is not like sticking the head in the sand, Microsoft can push such things, but you do not have to help them all the way long until they have enough marketshare so they can easily kill you off...
Well flash video streaming is limited to currently two codecs
which can be done with jmf, yes jmf is not highly regarded, there are various reasons,
a) It was overly complicated in its first release
b) There was no huge need for other releases, since java found its corners elsewhere
But I do not see a lot of reasons why videostreaming could not be done, the main problem is more along the lines, flash has the advantage of having already a runtime on every Windows PC, which recent java vms especially the 6.x have become excellent in itselfs even the good old applets again shine but they have to be loaded and installed separately!
I really love the 6.x jdk as desptop platform, but there alyways is th e distribution problem, even nowadays forcing the users to download a 13MB jre can be troublesome!
Id rather see something truly open being supported instead of yet cloning another windows forever mac for a limited time technology into Linux until Microsoft starts suing it into oblivion once they have enough marketshare!
Miguel, read up the court documents regarding java and Microsofts failed attempt to take over the language which was so cross platform and which made several people very up being scared that Windows becomes obsolete.
Lets face it how long do you thing you can clone this stuff into Linux until Microsoft comes down on it full force via the patent laws and copyright laws?
Seriously I will give you the estimate, as soon as java and probably 1-2 other technologies are not a serious thread anymore. Dont expect Microsoft to allow anything to exist in the wild in a cross platform manner, it is not their intention, their intention is and has been once they started to take over the browser market to lock the whole thing down on windows.
Hence the IE development was stalled in a beta stage with IE6 for several years, hence only a half assed fixup of the worst CSS bugs in IE7, CSS and HTML is cross platform and not wanted by Microsoft period!
Due do you think this is a good idea in a situation where
we already are often on the edge of power outtakes.
I do not think so, the only way I see is to prevent this is to only
allow special connectors and special voltage degrees to get the average people
away from the power grid, those connectors can be plugged into solar panels or alternative "fuel" stations.
In the end I do not think hypbrids have any viable long term future.
There is another reason, total incompetence, it always amazes me how much of that especially in the Microsoft centric world can be found.
Lots of developers in that area I know simply do not know better and use everything Microsoft feeds to them.
Just recently a friend of mine asked me after being burned several times already with VSS, if VSS is garbage. The reason he still after 10 years have thought Microsoft finally has fixed this thing which inherently is broken by design. Needless to say I pointed him towards subversion, which he should have used in the first place.
So now back to Diebolt, they probably needed an embedded DB, so they just used jet, after all it is from Microsoft right. Since Diebold even uses Windows on their Cash mashines (which is another huge issue, but they are not the only ones) I cannot really say they have the most competent people.
Probably the guys doing this did not even know that dbs and embedded engines outside of the Microsoft world exist. They probably do not even know that there is something else besides Microsoft and even think Microsof thas invented relational DBs.
We are talking about the music labels here, those are the same guys who think they can make a business model out of suing six year old kids...
Is this enough explanation.
Canon never has sold refills, but their ink admittedly is affordable, they are the only ones not ripping off the customers (although they have added dongle chips to their latest models as well but they at least do not block out the print process they just warn you)
And their single ink carts in combination with affordable prices is a good way to go.
Well in Linux you have to check the hardware anyway. My recommendation is the canon ip4000 (the undongled one) the printer is a dream come true featurewise, while still being undongled and gobbling up cheap ink without too much hazzle (once the asia gulp clogs the nozzles drop in original canon carts and give the printer a rest, after a few days the nozzles are clean again)
Also the linux support nowadays is very good for this model, gutenprint almost supports all of the features it has. (Turbonprint however still gives better printout results)
Easy, because I am one of the lucky ones who still has an undongled ip4000, that is a dream come true. The printer while looking flakey on the outside is solid as hell, it was cheap (150 dollars) it is the last model which has undongled ink carts, and while being fed with almost 15.000 pages most of them printed with cheap refill ink it still works. Once the printhead is clogged by cheap ink, put in the orginal canon leave it there for a while and it is again unclogged. And besides that, it has cd label printing, colors, duplex (which I do not want to live without), two paper trays etc.. etc.. and you get color for a price you cannot match with a laser, if you use refills.
I also swore by myself never to buy an inkjet again and then canon released the ip4000. At the current market I do not see any printer model worthwile buying, all dongled, to keep printing costs up, but the ip4000 was one of those awesome machines which got almost everything right, until management saw that they had too much success, and ruined everything. Canon nowadays is not worth buying anymore compared to brother!
Or in other words, they have to tear this printer out of my cold hands...
the wrong word for it, family corruption probably would be the better word. The head of this whole thing is Janelly Fortou, which coincidentally is the wife of the Vivendi CEO.
Or in other words, this is a lex vivendi! It still has been pushed somewhat into saner waters, the original proposal would have been desastrous, even patent infringements would have been included (just to satisfy some pharma companies), even pro patent lobbyists like Microsoft (which do a lot of lobbying over here for pro software patents, so go figure how long they will be calm and not suing everyone left and right), tried to get rid of those clauses in the proposal.
Actually you have never seen a european used games store. Sure EBGames/Gamestop does not cover them but there are lots of shops which do. But in the end it is not really worthwile.
The average PC game hits the below 30 euros mark after 3-4 months (with around 50 for the new one) and hits the below 10 euros garbage bin mark after 8-10 months. So if you do a lot of gaming, PC games definitely are the way cheaper option than console. Especially if you go for the 4 months old and older mark.
I recently bought a wii, and after buying a few games, I started the calculation of what I had to invest into PC gaming in the past and how the console will fare, I ended up with the PC even with upgrades every two years being a lot cheaper, while the entry mark for the console was lower (which is nowadays not the case anymore in case of the PS3)
With Wii games ranging averagely on the 50-60 euros mark, and PS3 even worse in the 70 euros mark and neither system having any significant pricecuts the first year on games, and even used games being expensive (average Cube game here is 30 euros), this is a very expensive hobby, and if people would really look into options of not buying entire new pcs because the old one has become too slow but only would replace the needed replacement parts, things would look way cheaper on the PC side.
Heck we in Europe probably can be glad to get super paper mario 2007... there is not even a release date announced.
I saw the reasoning of nintendo for the delays, they said they have to translate and that means QAing the entire thing then getting the ratings.
Ok, I work in the software business, translations usually are done by adding resource bundles with the correct translation, then everything is QAed at once, with translators doing the work for every language which has to be covered parallely, this is obviously not the way Nintendo seems to do it, given their release delays (we finally got Excite Truck) they seem to have one universal uber translator doing every language sequentially and then going through QA for every language sequentially, sheesh...
I would love to play the games english only, but there are the region codes....
And the UK gets those things as late as the rest (this is the point where Nintendo finally manages to get into parallel mode)
Main problem over here in Europe (except the UK where really is a drought of Wii) is less that you cannot get a Wii, in almost every shop I walk they have 1-2 Wiis on the shelves ready to pick up. What Nintendo screwed up over here majorly, is the games releases, we run into a major release drought currently without any really interesting title being released until autumn. There is the lackluster mario strikers which is semi interesting, and no really interesting title in sight, we currently just get the last bunch of launch titles from the US (with Pangea Golf and Trauma Center being released in Summer)
It is not like Nintendo does not have interesting titles, the Paper mario game for instance, they just again screwed up the european releas by pushing it into oblivion. Now they even threaten to sue the mod chip makers and vendors, while modchipping your Wii currently is the only way to get paper mario up and running at all over here.
Ah yes, after two years of delay we finally got Metroid Prime pinpall over here!!
Currently the third party publishers are the only ones which keep the system semi afloat interesting wise, SSX having been release almost six months late, then the excellent rival swords, currently being the only highlights.
As much as I loved the Wii in the beginning, the usual nintendo tactic of releasing the games in Europe six months than a year later really sucks, and probably the Wii will be the last Nintendo system I will own unless they finally drop the region codes (which is less likely than hell freezing over, Nintendo are almost the same control freaks as Sony)
This only works as long as there is money, the way the us is headed means that it wont work in the long run anymore. The US tries to fix this by pushing a broken patent system on the rest of the world, that does not work either, the patent system will backfire once most of the innovation is done outside of the US, which means very soon. Workers only have incentive to go into the US as long as they earn more. Or to sum it up, rising salaries in asia, and a strong euro compared to the dollar will cut the US out of the brain drain loop in the long run.
The entire course of the US trying to base a business model on cloud and air (IP) via laws is desastrous. Especially given the social situation that real innovation is not rewarded but punished by socially being uncool, workwise being outsource, and legally by being dragged into homlessness by an army of laywers trying to sue the last cent out of you via the broken patent law which should fix things.
The king solomon solution in that case would be to cut the child...
seriously, a total overhaul of the patent system is really needed not the reinforcement of the current one.
There are various solutions to the problem, some have to deal with gradual patent times, getting rid of patents in areas which grew without them, and also try to cut down massively on things which patent trolls live on etc...
the solutions would be clear without sacrificing the patent law in areas which grew with it (pharma industries) but the main problem is nobody has the balls to touch it.
Main problem is not the oil, you will get heart problems from ghee and other stuff as well, the main problem is the lack of excersize and simply too much food.
There is one reason, you can charge more for the average console game reused than you can for the average use pc game. Used pc games can bo obtained for 2-3 dollars and new ones often for 30 dollars, while new console games range from 50-70 dollars and used ones can be obtained for 30 dollars. Now those shops make their bucks via used game sells, so which platforms do they want to target most...
Yes, indeed, PCs are the entry portal to the console business for game makers...
but there is more to it, consoles have drawn the last 10 years from the pc hardware, once
the pc hardware especially the 3d chipset market stagnates, the so called next gen consoles
will not get the desired advances.
The main problem I see now, is now that AMD has sucked up ATI that this even could happen
without any influence of the gamers not buying the latest hardware pushing games.
Depending on AMDs strategy, if they drop out of the 3d race then NVidia has no huge incentive to push 3d further, and dont count on intel, while having the biggest market share, their 3d chipsets still suck compared to nividia and ATI performancewise, and they are neglegted by most game makers!
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem... good luck for having a call every second minute, but sorry it is like that.
I will give you an example, a certain app which I normally regard high, due to its production values at a certain configuration writes 4 times into the registry always at the same keys. What happens now is, that uac pops up 4 the app wants to write into the registry window dialogs within 3 seconds, you see the problem.
And it is not the only problem in this area, basically every app trying to behave like an old windows app has to be either pushed into admin mode or you have to live with uac.
Dont get me wrong, I ran separate user accounts also back in the XP days, but, it was less annoying, once an app was dedicatedly pushed into the admin domain it was silent afterwards, because windows assumed you knew what you were doing when you installed as a root user.
UAC is really broken by design and could be fixed, the saner solution, pushing out jailroots for legacy apps which want admin access was not done by Microsoft, probably due to ignorance, also a sane solution of a uac level 1 pseudo root where apps can be registered and uac is only used for the install and then deactivated also was not done, the third sane solutin at least cache the results of submitting uac oks for some time also was not done, they chose the uac annoys the hell out of the user way!
There probably are two factors. Microsoft probably preloads a load of .net dlls (I am sure the minute disk thrashing after the entire ui is there is partially caused by some of those things) but also it really seems they did a serious caching to ease the pain of apps which have to rely on a load of dependencies.
There are several problems with UAC, the main problem is that the dialog pops up constantly with old software hence basically renders the entire access control pointless! You cannot customize uac to the level that you basically say once uac has been granted to a certain app for a certain critical op, the dialog should not popup anymore, you cannot really trim it down in a significant way it is either uac full or no uac at all. The main problem in the way Microsoft solved the entir thing is, that the dialog pops up constantly, and after a while you simply hit the ok button without even thinking about it and reading the text, hence rendering the entire uac totally pointless. There would have been several ways to resolve this issue elegantly. a) Simply sandbox legacy apps in their own rootspace (jailroot them) and have no uac at all for them b) Make the UAC more intelligent in the way that it remembers the grants which have been given to an app during execution time instead of forgetting it From all possible solutions to deal with the problem Microsoft has chosen the worst one!
Lets say it that way it is a step back from ubuntu and osx...
There are more things than aero which drain the battery in vista:
aero is one of the factors, but, there is a lot of additional startup disk processing even after the ui has been started
the drm which is in there left and right adds additional processor cycles
the desktop search adds an additional processing overhead etc... etc...
or ot sum it up added automated features simply need energy!
The battery drain is less annoying than another load of idiotic features, UAC for instance is what sudo and the osx do but solved in a totally idiotic fashion, the new explorer is a lousy clone of mac osxs pathfinder (basically a clone of the worst features of finder and pathfinder), the system cofiguration tool setup is outright confusing with display settings for instance being distributed into 5-6 various tools some dont even have the slightest to do with the display settings.
the new start bar is outright annoying to hell, the search is inelegantly solved and annot be put into the tray where it really belongs, no decent desktop switcher, startup times are longer than a fully configured linux.
The Expose copy is outright useless, Vista home allows you to backup for a restore you have to upgrade to ultimate, the wireless configuration is lousy as hell. The half transparent border effect causes motion sicknes... etc...
The only positive thing I really noticed is once it is loaded programs startup in no time, netbeans takes about 4 seconds openoffice around 3 and that on a 5200rpm notebook drive. There seems to be some serious app caching going on which optimizes the load times, especially java programs benefit tremendously from it. Tomcat 0.8 seconds, netbeans 4 seconds awesome.
Problem is, that there are solutions which are more worthwile to push into existence than playing catchup with microsoft with a uncertain future, there are alternatives to silverlight, Microsoft is very late to the game, projects worthwile would be:
.net added as backend tech
a) improve the svg situation now that Adobe has dropped the ball, on windows, after all silverlight is mainly a flash clone with
b) try to give a helping hand to one of the projects why try to implement a really opensource flash tech or build on top of flash decent open rich ui frameworks
Miguel again has chosen the hardest way, and helping microsoft to fortify their monopoly in areas which currently are very vivid in the long run just for the sake of trying to clone yet another Microsoft tech!
Sorry to say that, but enough is enough!
It is not like sticking the head in the sand, Microsoft can push such things, but you do not have to help them all the way long until they have enough marketshare so they can easily kill you off...
Well flash video streaming is limited to currently two codecs which can be done with jmf, yes jmf is not highly regarded, there are various reasons, a) It was overly complicated in its first release b) There was no huge need for other releases, since java found its corners elsewhere But I do not see a lot of reasons why videostreaming could not be done, the main problem is more along the lines, flash has the advantage of having already a runtime on every Windows PC, which recent java vms especially the 6.x have become excellent in itselfs even the good old applets again shine but they have to be loaded and installed separately! I really love the 6.x jdk as desptop platform, but there alyways is th e distribution problem, even nowadays forcing the users to download a 13MB jre can be troublesome!
Add to that openlazlo a bunch of other webframeworks which are moving into the cross platform domain, add to that echo2, and http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/category/F3 ...
Id rather see something truly open being supported instead of yet cloning another windows forever mac for a limited time technology into Linux until Microsoft starts suing it into oblivion once they have enough marketshare!
Miguel, read up the court documents regarding java and Microsofts failed attempt to take over the language which was so cross platform and which made several people very up being scared that Windows becomes obsolete. Lets face it how long do you thing you can clone this stuff into Linux until Microsoft comes down on it full force via the patent laws and copyright laws? Seriously I will give you the estimate, as soon as java and probably 1-2 other technologies are not a serious thread anymore. Dont expect Microsoft to allow anything to exist in the wild in a cross platform manner, it is not their intention, their intention is and has been once they started to take over the browser market to lock the whole thing down on windows. Hence the IE development was stalled in a beta stage with IE6 for several years, hence only a half assed fixup of the worst CSS bugs in IE7, CSS and HTML is cross platform and not wanted by Microsoft period!
Due do you think this is a good idea in a situation where we already are often on the edge of power outtakes. I do not think so, the only way I see is to prevent this is to only allow special connectors and special voltage degrees to get the average people away from the power grid, those connectors can be plugged into solar panels or alternative "fuel" stations. In the end I do not think hypbrids have any viable long term future.
There is another reason, total incompetence, it always amazes me how much of that especially in the Microsoft centric world can be found.
Lots of developers in that area I know simply do not know better and use everything Microsoft feeds to them.
Just recently a friend of mine asked me after being burned several times already with VSS, if VSS is garbage. The reason he still after 10 years have thought Microsoft finally has fixed this thing which inherently is broken by design.
Needless to say I pointed him towards subversion, which he should have used in the first place.
So now back to Diebolt, they probably needed an embedded DB, so they just used jet, after all it is from Microsoft right. Since Diebold even uses Windows on their Cash mashines (which is another huge issue, but they are not the only ones) I cannot really say they have the most competent people.
Probably the guys doing this did not even know that dbs and embedded engines outside of the Microsoft world exist. They probably do not even know that there is something else besides Microsoft and even think Microsof thas invented relational DBs.
Diebolt used the worst DB Engine in existence, even MySQL probably would have been a better choice...
We are talking about the music labels here, those are the same guys who think they can make a business model out of suing six year old kids... Is this enough explanation.
Canon never has sold refills, but their ink admittedly is affordable, they are the only ones not ripping off the customers (although they have added dongle chips to their latest models as well but they at least do not block out the print process they just warn you) And their single ink carts in combination with affordable prices is a good way to go.
Well in Linux you have to check the hardware anyway. My recommendation is the canon ip4000 (the undongled one) the printer is a dream come true featurewise, while still being undongled and gobbling up cheap ink without too much hazzle (once the asia gulp clogs the nozzles drop in original canon carts and give the printer a rest, after a few days the nozzles are clean again) Also the linux support nowadays is very good for this model, gutenprint almost supports all of the features it has. (Turbonprint however still gives better printout results)
Easy, because I am one of the lucky ones who still has an undongled ip4000, that is a dream come true. The printer while looking flakey on the outside is solid as hell, it was cheap (150 dollars) it is the last model which has undongled ink carts, and while being fed with almost 15.000 pages most of them printed with cheap refill ink it still works.
Once the printhead is clogged by cheap ink, put in the orginal canon leave it there for a while and it is again unclogged.
And besides that, it has cd label printing, colors, duplex (which I do not want to live without), two paper trays etc.. etc.. and you get color for a price you cannot match with a laser, if you use refills.
I also swore by myself never to buy an inkjet again and then canon released the ip4000. At the current market I do not see any printer model worthwile buying, all dongled, to keep printing costs up, but the ip4000 was one of those awesome machines which got almost everything right, until management saw that they had too much success, and ruined everything.
Canon nowadays is not worth buying anymore compared to brother!
Or in other words, they have to tear this printer out of my cold hands...
the wrong word for it, family corruption probably would be the better word.
The head of this whole thing is Janelly Fortou, which coincidentally is the wife of the Vivendi CEO.
Or in other words, this is a lex vivendi!
It still has been pushed somewhat into saner waters, the original proposal would have been desastrous, even patent infringements would have been included (just to satisfy some pharma companies), even pro patent lobbyists like Microsoft (which do a lot of lobbying over here for pro software patents, so go figure how long they will be calm and not suing everyone left and right), tried to get rid of those clauses in the proposal.
Actually you have never seen a european used games store. Sure EBGames/Gamestop does not cover them but there are lots of shops which do.
But in the end it is not really worthwile.
The average PC game hits the below 30 euros mark after 3-4 months (with around 50 for the new one) and hits the below 10 euros garbage bin mark after 8-10 months.
So if you do a lot of gaming, PC games definitely are the way cheaper option than console.
Especially if you go for the 4 months old and older mark.
I recently bought a wii, and after buying a few games, I started the calculation of what I had to invest into PC gaming in the past and how the console will fare, I ended up with the PC even with upgrades every two years being a lot cheaper, while the entry mark for the console was lower (which is nowadays not the case anymore in case of the PS3)
With Wii games ranging averagely on the 50-60 euros mark, and PS3 even worse in the 70 euros mark and neither system having any significant pricecuts the first year on games, and even used games being expensive (average Cube game here is 30 euros), this is a very expensive hobby, and if people would really look into options of not buying entire new pcs because the old one has become too slow but only would replace the needed replacement parts, things would look way cheaper on the PC side.
Heck we in Europe probably can be glad to get super paper mario 2007... there is not even a release date announced. I saw the reasoning of nintendo for the delays, they said they have to translate and that means QAing the entire thing then getting the ratings. Ok, I work in the software business, translations usually are done by adding resource bundles with the correct translation, then everything is QAed at once, with translators doing the work for every language which has to be covered parallely, this is obviously not the way Nintendo seems to do it, given their release delays (we finally got Excite Truck) they seem to have one universal uber translator doing every language sequentially and then going through QA for every language sequentially, sheesh... I would love to play the games english only, but there are the region codes.... And the UK gets those things as late as the rest (this is the point where Nintendo finally manages to get into parallel mode)
Main problem over here in Europe (except the UK where really is a drought of Wii) is less that you cannot get a Wii, in almost every shop I walk they have 1-2 Wiis on the shelves ready to pick up. What Nintendo screwed up over here majorly, is the games releases, we run into a major release drought currently without any really interesting title being released until autumn. There is the lackluster mario strikers which is semi interesting, and no really interesting title in sight, we currently just get the last bunch of launch titles from the US (with Pangea Golf and Trauma Center being released in Summer)
It is not like Nintendo does not have interesting titles, the Paper mario game for instance, they just again screwed up the european releas by pushing it into oblivion. Now they even threaten to sue the mod chip makers and vendors, while modchipping your Wii currently is the only way to get paper mario up and running at all over here.
Ah yes, after two years of delay we finally got Metroid Prime pinpall over here!!
Currently the third party publishers are the only ones which keep the system semi afloat interesting wise, SSX having been release almost six months late, then the excellent rival swords, currently being the only highlights.
As much as I loved the Wii in the beginning, the usual nintendo tactic of releasing the games in Europe six months than a year later really sucks, and probably the Wii will be the last Nintendo system I will own unless they finally drop the region codes (which is less likely than hell freezing over, Nintendo are almost the same control freaks as Sony)
This only works as long as there is money, the way the us is headed means that it wont work in the long run anymore.
The US tries to fix this by pushing a broken patent system on the rest of the world, that does not work either, the patent system will backfire once most of the innovation is done outside of the US, which means very soon.
Workers only have incentive to go into the US as long as they earn more. Or to sum it up, rising salaries in asia, and a strong euro compared to the dollar will cut the US out of the brain drain loop in the long run.
The entire course of the US trying to base a business model on cloud and air (IP) via laws is desastrous. Especially given the social situation that real innovation is not rewarded but punished by socially being uncool, workwise being outsource, and legally by being dragged into homlessness by an army of laywers trying to sue the last cent out of you via the broken patent law which should fix things.
The king solomon solution in that case would be to cut the child... seriously, a total overhaul of the patent system is really needed not the reinforcement of the current one. There are various solutions to the problem, some have to deal with gradual patent times, getting rid of patents in areas which grew without them, and also try to cut down massively on things which patent trolls live on etc... the solutions would be clear without sacrificing the patent law in areas which grew with it (pharma industries) but the main problem is nobody has the balls to touch it.
Main problem is not the oil, you will get heart problems from ghee and other stuff as well, the main problem is the lack of excersize and simply too much food.
There is one reason, you can charge more for the average console game reused than you can for the average use pc game. Used pc games can bo obtained for 2-3 dollars and new ones often for 30 dollars, while new console games range from 50-70 dollars and used ones can be obtained for 30 dollars. Now those shops make their bucks via used game sells, so which platforms do they want to target most...
Yes, indeed, PCs are the entry portal to the console business for game makers... but there is more to it, consoles have drawn the last 10 years from the pc hardware, once the pc hardware especially the 3d chipset market stagnates, the so called next gen consoles will not get the desired advances. The main problem I see now, is now that AMD has sucked up ATI that this even could happen without any influence of the gamers not buying the latest hardware pushing games. Depending on AMDs strategy, if they drop out of the 3d race then NVidia has no huge incentive to push 3d further, and dont count on intel, while having the biggest market share, their 3d chipsets still suck compared to nividia and ATI performancewise, and they are neglegted by most game makers!