Microsoft has been attached to the navy's destroyer program.
However, I distinctly remember that the navy used to be proud of their lack of automation. This allowed warships to survive severe amounts of damage without perishing. If a radio operator is severely wounded, you can replace them. If your transmitter board is damaged, you can throw in a new one. If a jolt takes out the hard drive on your software radio, you're screwed. Perhaps the US hasn't been in a real war for so long they forgot how to design for damage?
I'm not saying I want a war, or that I dislike the idea of warship automation, but the original stated intention of the Navy seemed somehow admirable in a way that installing 802.11b wireless helm control just doesn't. Increased automation does tend to increase the fragility of a device, and the amount of problems that might occurr. What happens when the captain walks out of range of a transmitter? What happens if the laptop is stolen, or comandeered? What is stopping someone from dropping little 802.11b jamlets onboard?
And what OS, praytell, will this system support? Will the Navy solicit imput from BMW?
-c
Re:A little more information
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 3, Interesting
KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work. Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours, and many KDE developers do so several times a week. Profiling and debugging tools for optimizing code are very processor and memory intensive. Hardware often is a bottleneck to KDE developers' productivity.
Thinking back to the useless hours being wasted trying to crack the X-Box encryption, how much of this compiling could be distributed? Obviously it wouldn't accelerate live debugging or optimizing tools, but what if there were networks of computers who people volunteered to standby and remotely download, build, and upload code, and a linker on the initiating machine to reassemble globals, etc?
I know nothing about distributed compiling, which probably means that either A: I should go back to college (very likely) or B: compiling doesn't break down nicely into chunks.
If it is possible, a network of volunteer Open Source compilers would probably build in a significantly faster time than many of the aformentioned older systems can, assuming no major bandwidth bottlenecks, and would probably find a rather large home of OSS and Free Software supporters who don't have the time to code as much as they would like to. Such a structure would probably support the compiling of any large linux project, such as X, or Gnome, or... err... Well, Kde, X or Gnome. Any of these projects would be worthwile.
Someone with more experience, please stand up! If it were possible, many people would become that much more involved, and the community would prosper. Could you imagine teams of people competing to help out the KDE developers as much as they do the seti@home project?
From the copyright office site. This rulemaking addresses only the prohibition on the conduct of circumventing measures that control "access" to copyrighted works, e.g., decryption or hacking of access controls such as passwords or serial numbers. The structure of section 1201 is such that there exists no comparable prohibition on the conduct of circumventing technological measures that protect the "rights of the copyright owner,"
This is a very important legal distinction, and one that congress didn't address enough of when creating the law. In theory, copyright holders do not have the legal right to prevent you from bringing their content across country lines for personal use (assuming the other country has similar laws). The obvious intent of the DMCA was to support the legal rights already given by the existing copyright laws, not to create an entirely new class of de-facto (and actionable) rights defined by those who currently have the right to mass-reproduce the material. EULA not withstanding (and, let's be honest, they don't), there is no legal framework for region control of copyrighted material. If such a thing is allowed to stand, the next logistical step is to segment the captive market by state and / or metropolis. This would reduce competitive pressures from surrounding communities, and reduce online sales to a few, more highly profitable mammoth corporate entities. I'm not being paranoid here: regional access was implemented in order to increase the sale price of overseas copyrights by segmenting the market and asuaging fears of competing with offshore copyright holders. This has been a part of the video game industry since Nintendo offered the US rights of the NES to Atari. Thankfully, without a DMCA provision, importation of videogames was available to the sub-market of any hobbyist who really wanted access to the material, a market not so large that it would reduce the attractiveness of a copyright that is likely to be purchased, but large enough that a truly significant game would not be completely missed by those who might consider gaming an emerging artform (Seiken Densetsu 3? Radiant Silvergun?).
This is just one point of the new generation of copyrights being taken by those who hold the traditional copyright. For example, they are taking the sole right to control access to the fast-forward button... preventing the user both physically and legally from advancing through anything they might have a financial stake in you watching. They have taken playback medium rights, ensuring that their content can only be seen in a particular set of circumstances, like on a Windows(tm) computer, or a Sony (tm) DVD player. Translations of media for personal use are gone, as are backups... an often abused right that is necessary for anyone who A: has lived through a fire or B: has no idea where they put that CD that they love so much.
Some of these new rights are being taken (backups) in an understandable attempt to enforce the rights they already have. But many (regions, commercials, resale rights) are simply a way to use the legal framework to squeese out more dollars from end consumers, and should be fought against.
Nowhere in the DMCA does it state that it is an intended framework for the non-congressional creation of new rights for copyright holders. Chapter 12 is titled "Copyright Protection and Management Systems," and the first and second sub-clause 1201 and 1202 (referred to in the above article), are entitled "Circumvention of copy protection systems" and "Integrity of copy management systems," respectively. Thus, when they referred to the circumvention of
''(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS.--(1) No person shall manufacture,
import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any
technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof,
that--
''(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose
of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure
that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under
this title in a work or a portion thereof;
Hence, as restricting region traversal is not a defined right of a copyright owner (holder), multi-region DVD players, and in fact the sale of region-free (but not copy-free) DVD players should be completely within the confines of the law. While it does, in certain points, refer to devices that circumvent access controls, it should be recognized that these two terms are being used interchangably by our elected officials, but that the overriding intent is the protection of existing rights, not creating a new class of rights. Intent is not the sole criteria of the courts, but many rulings have fallen upon the side of intent when explicit statements have failed. No court would believe that Congress intended to define the fast-forwarding of commercials as "theft."
I'm sorry, this was going to be a quick little ramble. It sort of grew a life of its own.
Now, if you can find a service that no one else can/does provide, then maybe you've found a tax loophole that can be exploited... (but probably not, because IANATA
Lol! I hope you can't provide a necessary service that nobody else provides... In a capitalist society that means you charge millions of dollars for it, and I'd hate to see that kind of tax bill showing up on my door if all I had handy were Norton notes
Did I just read that IBM put a dedicated chip in thinkpads that handles encryption / decryption? Yeah, yeah, protecting private keys is neat, and random number generation is certainly a worthy pursuit, but an encryption / decryption accelerator would be wonderful. Perhaps e-mail client programs will start incorporating hooks for invisible background encryption... or the files on your hard drive will all be encrypted by default, all of the time (don't fry your processor). Sure, that sort of thing could facilitate a protection layer fostered against us by the boys in blue, but only on Windows.
Ok, this is wild speculation, as the current TCPA only calls for encryption / decryption of the public key. Still, though, a dedicated chip that accepts a key and a stream of data, and spits out a stream of data, could be very useful for working seamlessly with encrypted files without overloading the processor (or having a higher level garble your data in the attempt).
In other news, we're *still* waiting for invisible encryption in e-mail messages. This is a good first step to protecting your most valuable data, but I would hardly call it an entirely safe platform.
Fairplay is right, in a sense. A sliding scale should be applied to album music, as well as all entertainment media, and I think we are seeing that emerge. Many bands are selling CDs for 5 dollars and raking in the sales. Some sell for 10, a reasonable amount for a heartfelt indy with a rich sound. And some reach for the gold with 20, and wonder why they can't make sales. And so we have a tier system, with labels selling for 20, indys selling for 10, and garages selling for 5. This is a system I can be comfortable with, though I think all CD's should be sold at 4-7 dollars.
Japan has a form of pricefixing, which ensures that album prices are kept high enough to warrant low-volume production runs. This makes a lot of sense as profit = sales * price - costs, and a niche market can be served so long as it desires one CD higher than another assuming fixed price. The problems associated with this is that it has a polarizing effect on the market: CDs and music in Japan are image tools, and at image tool prices the great bulk are sold to the young with flushable income (income that is given due to guilt about feelings of neglect from overworked salrymen). On a lower number, such a scheme might work here in America... however this has shown not to be true. We had a defacto pricefixing scheme and very little diversity. While it did support a surprisingly large number of "unprofitable" bands, that seems to be due to a process of everyone getting their fingers in the pie before the pie is weighed. Remember Forrest Gump being declared unprofitable?
While I know there is a difference between fixed costs and production costs, you would be amazed how many people work on any videogame released today. A band can write, practice, and record an album comfortably in 3 months. A game requires at minimum staffing a producer, an art director, several artists, several designers, several programmers, several testers, and a sound guy to be working full time for 6 months to 2 years. There are also motion-capture engineers, motion talent, voice actors, musicians, audio producers, writers, cutscene artists (usually handled out of house), network guys, fact checkers, lawyers... Basically, if you add up the amount you pay the staff, which is your single greatest cost in development, the amount made by the average game doesn't look too outrageous. Especially considering the average developer takes home a similar pay as a California garbageman... producers don't make 50k for a months work, they just make 50k.
I'm not trying to argue that with lower prices enough additional games would sell to increase margins (they probably would). I'm trying to distinguish between the record companies, which are suffocating under their own bloat, and videogame companies, which are trying to strike a delicate balance.
I hope laptop guy, and anyone else who has gotten jipped reads this. Small claims court filings (here in Massachusetts) cost 15 dollars, don't require a lawyer, and require about as much knowledge of the law as going to your parents and saying "johnny took my lunch." The court is chosen based upon your location, and if they don't show up a summary judgement will be had.
Don't let them get away with selling bad equipment. Go to your courthouse today.
Sega jumped out the gate with the Saturn, which confused most people and stole any sort of buildup they might have had. (5/5/95, was it?). Later on, they cut ahead of the competition with the Dreamcast, with the best technology and great games. That also failed.
The first out the door does not necessarily get a bit of a bonus, and Nintendo hasn't been first to market since the original Game Boy. They held off on the SNES and N64 to enjoy their profits, and wisely waited on the SNES CD in order to see how the Sega CD did. They launched the Cube long after the PS2 launched.
Sega, on the other hand, never liked to be shown up, and always went to market first. They are now out of the console business.
The first-to-market is an overhyped myth. I wouldn't want to make up a year's difference, but it isn't insurrmountable... What is more important than that is to know when the market is ripe for another transition. If you reach for it too early, when people are finally ready to upgrade your option will be too slow and have too few games to compete. By then you will have lost the newness edge, but will not yet have established your value.
I'm sure everyone is hard at work at new systems. I would be very surprised if half of the systems designed at major game companies make it out the door.
Don't throw away those Cubes yet, kiddies. Nintendo, Sony, et al are notorious for spreading rumors of new consoles "just around the corner," then releasing them years later when the market is finally ready. Remember how many extra years we had to wait for "project reality?" or the Playstation? If you go by the original announcements, the PS3 and XBox2 should already be out by now.
No, what is more likely is that Nintendo is countering Sony's mindshare ploy with a mindshare ploy of their own. This is the first real year for the Game Cube, and by my calculations that means that unless they fail miserably in the market, Nintendo won't release a new system until 2008. Nintendo knows this business, and they know that to be successful you have to make the majority of people wait just a little bit for a new system. The launch of a new system is a huge financial burden... why would they go running in to do that when they are so profitable at number 2?
Ah, but you can do all of that on a PC from 8 years ago.
Heh, only if you are programming with vi. If you want to get something done anytime soon, you're gonna want something a bit faster. I have no patience for slow machines.
You can do a lot with fast software. Right now I'm writing this in the freeware Easy Office because it launches to a pretty fully-fledged text editor in two seconds on my P3 800. There is also the excellent freeware office suite602 PC Suite, but it takes about 4 seconds. Either of these would be good alternatives to MS Office on a slower machine. There are great e-mail programs, browsers, etc, all readily available. I went to a friends house today who has a K2, running Windows 95, with lots of speed and response. He records television programs onto it. Don't underestimate the power of old hardware in the right hands.
I also know several network admins, so a console (and vi) is their work environment.
Not that I'd turn down a P4 3Ghz per say...
As for the rest of your comment, I apologize for jumping on you as if you were a drone: though you do have obvious, unwarranted biases, I see now that you were just being vocal about your preference, and holding your preferences up as a model hardcore gamer. I don't agree that the consoles will or will not unseat the PC as the hardcore gamer's platform of choice, as I do not agree that there is currently a seat or that the PC is in it. Personally, I use obscure consoles as one litmus test of a person's hardcoreness: if someone has a Neo Geo, they're hardcore. If they have a Neo Geo and a Supergraphix, they're very hardcore. I define hardcore gamer as one who is obviously and successfully obsessed with any portion of gamedom: Frag Parties, Cos Play, abnormally active emulation development, soundtrack obsession, anything involving a training regimen that lasts for more than 3 months (and preferably more than a year), and the collection of video-game themed breakfast cereals all qualify, in my opinion, for the hardcore gamer. Being hardcore is, by and large, platform agnostic.
One more thing. Despite your assertion, the PC does not offer "the freedom to create whatever [the developer] wants." Besides technical concerns, the developer is always limited by financial constraints. Many developers find it easier to achieve their budget-limited vision with a target, non-squirrely platform. The PC offers the developer a Hard Disk, a network connection, an interface device with 104 buttons, and freedom from a quality assurance department. These benefits are not true freedom, but an extension of the limitations already imposed upon software development, many of which have appeared on consoles. What hasn't appeared on consoles is the battle of OpenGL vs Direct X, the great vertex shader debate, switching target cards mid development between Nvida and ATI, XP SP1 compatibility patches, etc, etc, etc. Carmak will always be a computer game developer, but it isn't because the PC gives him the "freedom to create whatever he wants." That assertion is just bias.
And yes, to this day, the PC response time is less than that of the major consoles. It is only by several hundredths of a second, but many hardcore gamers notice, and can feel the difference. In many fighting games, that kind of lag can harm a finely honed play style. It's difficult to notice on most PC games because, as I mentioned, they develop PC games to PC's strengths and weaknesses. There is a bit of darwinian evolution to this too.
I too grew up with console games. I also grew up with Shareware and retail PC games. The console will never crash. It will never decide it doesn't like my graphics card. I will never have to check for compatibility. The OS will never steal focus. I will never have to even think about framerate. It will never be incompatible with my copy of Norton utilities. I will never have to download the latest Direct X. I will never have to revert to a previous version of Direct X. It will never freeze inexplicably for 5 seconds, then move on as if nothing had happened. I will never have to wait for it to boot or shut down. My console will never reject my registration code. In short, my console is a well behaved gaming environment where I can forget the technical background and focus on the enjoyment of the experience. I also love my computer, and am very protective of it. If a playmate gets loaded to the hard disk, and the playmate crashes my baby, that playmate is getting tossed out until it learns to behave. Pointing out crashing is not a pot-shot. Go play Black or White. It's an absolutely fun little playmate, that seems to punch you in the face every two hours.
Maybe I'm just very demanding, but if a game can't stay stable I'm getting my money back, period. We wouldn't put up with this at the movies, and being a young medium doesn't excuse it now.
BTW, I'm not arguing that your choice doesn't have merit. I'm arguing that the extrusion of your personal choice to proport to reflect all of gamedom is fundamentally flawed.
I'll have to get a Gravis Xterminator. Thanks for pointing it out. The last pad I bought was the original Eliminator, which stayed on my desk for about 2 hours until I realized that the reason characters would always go diagonally down when pressing left or right was because the D-pad had a gross design defect that had somehow made it through testing, if there was any testing.
We are focused on creating the best gaming experience for the consumer and most robust and high performance delivery system for game developers and publishers.
We do not plan on becoming a development company but will partner and support current developers and publishers with their current and upcoming titles.
We are actively partnering with Game Developer's and Publishers and look forward to the opportunity of partnering with and distributing their current and future titles on the Phantom Network.
I, for one, am pleased and glad with this visionary and entrepreneur's vision and forsight into the direction and tribulations of the console and software delivery mechanisms of the current and upcoming future. This shareware and freeware delivery and sales mechanism from Telco and DRM professionals will provide a valuable service and fill a need for the millions of broadband users without ISPs. I can see how such a modern and robust system would easily surmount the copyright hurdles of renting access to the 32 thousand games they couldn't possibly have acquired the rights to yet, as their company was founded in October. Being based on something as simple as Windows, I can easily see how their winning business plan and extensive industry experience would convince Microsoft to allow them to sell a competing platform based around Windows without paying a full OEM licence of $75 per copy. What are the chances of that happening when you have capabilities that are not available in today's marketplace, thereby appealing to the hard-core gamer and the high end consumer electronic purchaser while still being simple and safe enough for a mother and father to rest comfortably while their child enjoys the revolutionary entertainment experience?
I can do damn near anything with my computer that I want to. It can do thousands of things that the consoles can't even dream of. I even do real work on it.
Ah, but you can do all of that on a PC from 8 years ago. I have an old Mac Laptop here that chuggs away just fine at photoshop 7, thank you very much, and has just been converted to a dedicated piece of stereo equipment.
Let's not delude ourselves, you can get a computer to do all of the work that you need to (unless you are a game developer) for the cost of the video card that you have to throw away every two years.
But, even if we're just considering games, the PC still wins. Much better selection of controllers (including keyboard/mouse), giving you just the right type of control for any given game.
The keyboard / mouse controller combination is interesting, but by no means optimal for everything. And, unfortunately, that seems to be where the PC controller hegemony ends. You can't get a good-feeling gamepad for a PC no matter how hard you try. Even the nicer controllers that would have a chance of being good pads are opting for andlog D-pads, which ruins the precision of the interface.
Compare playing a FPS game using keyboard/mouse to attempting to aim using those crappy thumb-nobs on most console controllers.
Very true. However, halo is a lot of fun, and is a console FPS. Quake, et al, were developed and optimized for a computer's strengths and weaknesses. It isn't surprising that they work best on a computer. On the other hand, have you tried playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 with a keyboard and mouse? Go on, download MAME and let me know what you think. It's horrible, isn't it? The keyboard / finger combination is very slow compared to the button / thumb. Besides that, the computer doesn't respond as quickly to imput.
Much more flexibility and immersiveness in games.
Flexibility, yes. Immersiveness? Another poster mentioned Vice City, but there is also Final Fantasy, Metroid Prime, Zelda, Robotech, Onimusha... How is it immersive again when I finally make it through the outer lines of the general's encampment and WW2 online crashes *again* because Cornered Rat hasn't finished patching it?
No console can match the PC for depth of gameplay, and especially not for customization.
Interesting this poster puts those two things together. Millions of options and sub-menus do not depth make. Diablo, for instance, had no artistic gameplay depth. Or Evercrack. They were both founded on the principle of exploiting the leveling treadmill, and they both did terifficly well in the marketplace. So yes, if you are going to just look at Warcraft 3, then we're going to look at Virtua Fighter. They both have a tremendous depth, but Virtua Fighter 3's depth is a subtlety in the interplay between attack priorities, ranges, speeds, and knowledge of your opponent. Warcraft 3's depth also relies upon all of those same things, but with a bit more explicitness. When you are talking best-of-breed, you have to forgive a few Daikatanas, Trailer Park Tycoons, and BMX XXXs'. Without comparing the bland middles to the bubbly top, PC's and Consoles both have a lot of depth.
Try creating a game like Neverwinter Nights for a console. Not gonna work.
Try creating a game like Xenosaga, Panzeer Dragoon, Devil May Cry, Guilty Gear XX, Tekken 4, or NFL 2K3 on a computer. Not gonna work. They were designed to take advantage of the strengths of the platforms they find themselves on. Apparently you have been with PC games for so long that the strengths of PC games, which they compete with eachother upon, have become your immediate criteria of judgement. It could be just as true to say that no system will ever come as close to the Virtua Boy at recreating fun 3D -tennis, so they are all inferior.
Consoles still have a looong way to go before they can compete with the PC.
Ah, and Saddam won the gulf war, didn't he? What was that magic number, 10 billion dollars this year?
They're fine if you're just a casual gamer and you don't have much use for a decent PC other than games, but if you're a more serious gamer, then there's nothing out there that can beat a good PC.
Unless you want a good Japanese RPG, then you need a console. And say what you will about FPS nuts, I've never seen one show up to a CosPlay convention. People whose hobby is making costumes from the characters in Dance Dance Revolution... are not casual gamers.
Sure, it's a lot of money, but you get a LOT more out of it than you get from a console.
Perhaps you do, but I know many people who both go to frag parties and who enjoy a game of Vice City or Twisted Metal Black. They're not that dissimilar. Do you get Metroid Prime out of computers? Do you get Starcraft out of consoles?
From a developers standpoint, consoles are wonderful. You can create an established toolset, you have only one piece of hardware to shoot for which doesn't change, and once you go gold your obligation to that game is over. You only have to re-learn every 5 years, and in the meantime you have the satisfying process of refining your tricks and knowledge. You're also much more difficult to pirate, which leads to significantly increased revenue.
There was a nice backlash a few years back to the "X-Box sucks!" "No, Game Cube Sucks!" discussions that were happening on the boards. Platform loyalty is every bit as trivial as console loyalty or soda-brand loyalty. There are nearly as many of *them* as there are of *you,* so if you honestly believe that there is no worthwile reason to play *their* platform, then you must be missing something.
I've interviewed at several MMPORPG places, and worked at a place releasing a X-Box live title, and the kind of infrastructure you would need to have thin clients in the living room just doesn't exist. I'm not trying to pull expert power here (I was just a tester), but most server-side online games are designed very specifically to avoid packet loss related deaths. For example, no MMPORPG features death pits, because the control over characters cannot be that fine with ASP. You have to figure a decent connection to the server is going to take 5ms to be parsed and pushed through a TCP/IP stack, and 30 ms to travel to the server. If the server updates the clients on the state of the game world every 60 ms, chances are it will be 30 ms before the server can get to the incoming message. The server then processes for 60ms, and sends out an update that takes 30 ms to reach your client. Your client, which has been "drifting" the state of the world, now knows what is going on, and changes itself and renders to the screen in 10 ms. Some of these numbers are guesses, but you see that in a good case (and this would be a good case). The controller response time is, therefore, about.17 seconds, and to mask this lag your character has to turn slowly. An acceptable responce time for a console is 1/16th of a second, or.06 seconds, and you really should be shooting for better, as many experienced players will notice.06. Everyone notices.1. This is one of the reasons why you click to attack, instead of pressing a button to swing your sword.
As for the system requirements, it is impossible to stream good 640 x 480 video over a broadband pipe. In an ideal situation you get a megabit per second, which comes out to.12 megabytes. Actual throughput is much, much lower, as communication protocols have to be established, and these things don't exist in a vaccuum: DSL is constantly stretched further from the switches than they should be, old cable equipment always degrades the line, someone always has Kazaa open... There are good DIVX movies floating around with 150 minutes of video encoded to 700 megabytes of space. That comes out to.19 MB per second, which is a good deal more than a real broadband line can handle. Plus, it would be incredibly bandwidth intensive for the server farm, which is a non-negligable cost spread over 1 million users. And you still have to have a graphics card per person churning out those vistas.
Which means, you need to do the graphics processing on the client, not the server. For the GPU to do its job, the CPU has to be strong enough to manipulate the game world in response to the update packets recieved from the server. You would also probably want to load all of the textures and structures to a permanent medium as filling the 128 MB of graphics card memory without significant wait periods is impracticle over a.12 MB line. Remember how slow single-speed CDRoms were? Those are.15 MB. Would you want to play Worlds of Warcraft on a single-speed CDROM without loading anything to a hard disk?
OK, so you need a great graphics card, a decent CPU, an EIDE interface and a hard disk, a sound card, and 2 USB controller ports. What you have, so far, is a cheap microtel PC with onboard audio and a blazing graphics card, but no CD or floppy, and lobotomized ports. And that's just to be a thin client. At that point, it is far more economical to download the game to the player and let them update the world state (as they can't run cheat programs on it). That takes a slightly better CPU, but not significantly.
Sadly, yes. Ironically, just before the release of Capcom vs. SNK, SNK filed for the Japanese equivalent of chapter 7.
A brief history of ugly consoles.
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Phantom Game Console
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't know. If you are talking success the 2600, NES, SNES, GameBoy, PS1, and PS2 are the most successful systems of all time, and most of them are really, really ugly. The 3DO, TG-16, and Sega CD (1st edition) were all very, very pretty, and failed miserably in the market. The PS2 looks like an average a VCR, the financially successful N64 looked like someone threw a cartridge into a blob of clay, and the GameBoy looked like a boring beige box with a green screen when it first came out, especially compared to the vastly cooler Turbo Express, Lynx, Game Gear, and eventually Nomad and Neo Geo Express.
The SNES? Lavender and Beige? I mean, Lavender and Beige? How did this get past test marketing?
For that matter, no system in history has looked as cool relitive to their companions as the Neo Geo did back in the 16 bit era. That company no longer exists, of course.
I'm starting to wonder if very, very ugly systems stick out in consumers minds, thereby increasing sales. It couldn't be just that the name eminates the coolness factor: who didn't laugh the first time they heard the word "Playstation," "Dreamcast," "Ultra 64," "SuperNES," etc.
Perhaps those industry critics are right when they say that people decide on games to buy, then get the console to support them, rather than buying cool consoles to facilitate gaming. In that situation, the "WOW" factor is firmly where it belongs: with the developers. In the mean time, big players will probably continue to hire design professionals who have never touched a console in their lives. Look at the Playstation. Look at the Vaio line of computers. Which looks very, very cool, and which pads Sony's bottom line to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year?
Current prototype appears to be a mouse
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Peephole Displays
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· Score: 1
if you look closely at the picture provided on the page, the current prototype is implemented with an optical mouse (on a visor). This limits the functionality of the tool to areas where enough space would be available for, say, a laptop if one were available. Something like this would need to be too sensitive (1 pixel or less resolution) for GPS, so in a practical implementation of a free-floating system one would need a relativistic system, which would require some sort of tagging for the user. Either way, it would be grossly impractical to use this sort of thing to write with (try writing on a piece of glass while moving it), limiting its utility to reading / playback. For those things, however, a built-in trackball would be as easy / simple to use, and wouldn't require a separate dongle or an extra hand.
Besides, when was the last time you stood absolutely still while using your PDA?
I don't mean to rail on the guy for coming up with a creative and fun interface option. This is very, very cool. But it isn't very useful, and I would hate to see too much VC devoted to it instead of something that would reach production... like a 2d clone of the jogdial.
Agreed. A doll is a likeness of a human being for use in play. A doll is not a human being. The characters that the dolls are based on are not human beings. (Çeci n'est pas une pipe) All dolls are characters based on likenesses of things that are based on likenesses of human beings, be they Barbies, Kens, or Spawn. Otherwise one could easily argue that the Street Fighter dolls are based on video games, not people, the A-team is based on TV images, not people, Barbie is based on advertising stereotypes of the 50's, not people...
The X-men certainly are "likenesses" of human beings, in the same way that Superman, Ultraman, Spiderman, and Ryoko are all "likenesses" of human beings. This is ridiculous.
Real dolls are made in San Marcos, California, and are therefore not subject to tariff.
I'm sorry, but the current state of the art in available voice recognition (Dragon, of course) is pretty unreliable on its own. With several hours of training, it gets about one in twenty words wrong. It also doesn't understand new words and many proper names, like Kazakhstan, Khomami, Schwarzkopf, etc. As long as he only speaks to people named Greg and doesn't talk about the 60 Palestinian shops burned near Tulkarm, he should be OK. Otherwise, he will have to recognize that the imputing software made a mistake (which, as you said, is unlikely), highlight the text, and replace it manually with a keyboard. And without training, that accuracy drops precipitously.
Why do all of that? He's vision impaired, he should have a friend teach him to touch-type.
Browser / Program control is easy. Get a Mac. They have had built-in voice-based program control with speakable items for about ten years now, and there are products that extend the existing control base.
The google directory has links to a lot of speech recognition companies, but I still think your client would be most happy with OSX's recognition options. It doesn't have to be trained for a voice, though its full power does require some Apple Scripting. And there are many products that build on apple's relatively solid base, if you choose not to script "go back" to "apple-B" in the browser yourself. Having used it myself in the past I can confidently say it exists, and used to work at least most of the time.
That's more than can be said for most voice-recognition products. Bring him to an Apple store, and have him try it out. If you go to CompUSA or another superstore, bring your own apple guru to show you.
On the one hand, they appear to be charging for downloads of traditional PC games, so it appears that they have finally found another way to take commodity hardware and make money licensing game sales (the other, XBox).
Outperforming a generation of consoles that was released over two years ago isn't particularly difficult... The Dreamcast did it quite well, but failed miserably in the market. The key is not to be better than everyone else, (the PS2 is currently the slowest console available), but to be so much better that all of the developers flock to your system and produce must-have games. With a system of renting otherwise available PC games, I don't see how they will have any of the exclusives they need to thrive, unless they develop them themselves.
Limiting themselves to broadband-only customers and broadband-only distribution is an interesting choice. Traditionally, if you wanted to sell a console you had to convince hundreds of thousands of stores across the world to devote 5 - 20 feet of shelf space to your product... a difficult task to say the least. However, by going with broadband, they have cut out that huge fixed cost. If they didn't go overboard with their DRM and can find a somewhat linearly scaling manufacturing facility (difficult, I admit), they *could* survive on a very small installed userbase. They will have to work with the Nintendo model (all partners absorb fixed cost risks in exchange for a cut of razor blade sales), but I could really see them living comfortably on a base of 1 to 2 million people or less.
On the other hand, by going with broadband, they have limited themselves to selling a crippled, specialized PC to people who are guaranteed to already have a full-fledged PC. Microsoft tried it with the XBox, and while sales aren't horrible, they are still losing the race with a lunchbox. Infinium will have to develop / buy exclusives, and it doesn't seem like they have the funding to do that.
Furthermore, DRM and temporary rentals are *designed* to frustrate consumers, and the home entertainment device crowd is notoriously unforgiving when they feel they have been wronged. They will have to dance a fine line between demos / rentals / subscriptions / and sales. Just reading their mission statement makes me wonder if they will have anytime, night-and-weekend, and overtime minutes. Can I get extra minutes if I sign to a one-year contract? What do you mean I owe $170 dollars for going over? But it was Final Fantasy, what do you expect me to do?
I'd like to say I have high-hopes in this situation, but high hopes in this situation would be survival.
Could we at least describe them as "naturalized" humans? It feels wrong that Marvel the company is more human than the X-men.
The official definition of a member of a species is one who can successfully interbreed, hence huskies are of the same species as poodles, whereas cats cannot. Has Marvel addressed this key question?
I get asked a lot more often about Red Hat during interviews than Office.
Knowing dozens of office suites has been more valuable to me than knowing just Office. It enables easy switching to a company's custom developed software.
But with 90% of the world's computers running a MS operating system, it is obvious that the school isn't giving them Linux experience instead of windows but augmenting their windows life(tm) with something different. And adaptation to different computing environments is a very important skill, something which appears to be sorely underrepresented in today's education. Elementary school kids should be switched from Mac, Linux, Windows, BSD, SUN, and any other environment they can get their hands on, as the computer interface they will use in 15 years when they make it to the work force will represent windows as much as XP resembles dos. It does make them more capable of using different software packages, and it makes them more open to experimenting with them. As you said yourself, the students can learn to use MS Office, or they can learn to use Open Office and KWord and AbiWord. Hopefully the administration was forward-minded enough to configure these systems with multiple packages to solve each problem, but that wouldn't even be possible in a totally closed-source environment.
Everyone is better off if everyone uses Linux over Windows, but if a single school gives students experience with Linux and the rest Windows, it's doing a worse job of helping its students.
Using Word is like operating a television set: anyone can do it. Not everyone is familiar with UNIX based operating systems. That gives them an edge. If they don't know how to make a borderless text box in Word, they can pick it up in a day. Applications are honestly dirt easy if you have a broad enough experience base. It is virtually impossible to avoid MS Office these days, and enough to put down on a resume is trivial. Being able to add Linux on a resume at least is interesting and at most shows competence.
Quite honestly, Putting MS Office on your resume is like putting "Can use Pencil."
If you have a choice between hiring Jonny, who knows Word (which your company uses) and Jimmy, who knows KWord (which you've never heard of)...well, you're going to grab the one that's going to generate less support costs.
And if Jimmy comes to you and says that he can save your organization tens of thousands of dollars per year by switching you to an OS and an Office Suite you have never heard of, you are going to like that initiative. Even if you are hesitant and don't follow through with it, you will see Jimmy as a managerial material, rather than another office drone.
In twenty years, it's very unlikely if people will be using something much like the current iteration of MS Word *or* Open Office. But there is a not insignificant short-term benefit, and I don't think it's entirely fair to the students to deprive them of that edge.
Sorry, it's pretty insignificant, compared to being able to offer a programming elective. These kids are growing up in a world where the average 5 year old is more familiar with a computer than the average current office worker. They can undo in their sleep. What you hold prescious and dear just isn't that impressive. There may have been some debate originally about whether to use rotary or numeric phones in diagrams for children, but the distinction was, quite honestly, a trivial one. The ability to use MS Office and Open Office is trivial, but using MS Office is unavoidable while having used Open Office is at least a little special. Picking up a windowed interface is unavoidable, but picking up a powerful command line is actually useful (even in a business setting, typing ftp somehost@somewhere.com is much easier than opening Internet Explorer, going to a download site, getting administrator priveledges...).
You're probably trolling too (as judging from your previous comments you don't seem to be experienced), but this is exactly the sort of argument that you hear from many computer-illiterate managers who are struggling to learn the "industry standard" interface. To the next generation, Office is a 4-th grade computer literacy level. We can do better.
People seem to have the ethos in computing of buying the cheapest junk with the highest specs possible, not realizing that they just supported junk instead of quality. This is how quality is ratcheted lower, and it becomes difficult or impossible to find anything decent. $15 PSUs that weigh maybe.5 lbs are frighteningly common, as are CAT5 cables thinner than a drinking straw, motherboards with %20 defect rates, and on-board audio that just crackles instead of recording.
I don't agree that "if it ain't broke, don't fuck with it," as tweaking and playing are both very natural and very educational: but don't return it. You broke it: you fix it. If you can't fix it: you buy one that can do what you wanted it to do in the first place. But don't fall into the pit of buyers remorse by getting a wall-mart, emachines, or other low-quality computer to save a few dollars, then chop it up to try and compensate for not buying something that could satisfy you. Buy and support the things that you want. And always, always do your research. If you could spend 3 hours finding out what the best available PSU for your system is, you could save 6 hours later on trying to cut it open and cool it.
(Which reminds me, my PSU is too loud. Where did my Dremel go?)
The problem with people coding tools for themselves is that they know too well how the code works - they are at the defining end of the learning curve. I remember being a tester on a project, and rattling off the name of a sub-sub-sub-sub menu to a producer along with a procedure that any of the other testers would have understood. His blank stare made me wonder if I was so experienced with the product that I had lost any idea of how people actually used it.
I ran testing for a long time with much success as a standard desktop, and know several business who rely upon stable for their desktops. Together, Debian would benifit from Mandrake's install tools, and Mandrake would benifit greatly from apt-get. X would have to be stripped for server installs, but X doesn't start automatically now anyway.
The problem, though, is trying to avoid growing into an XP: the server/Desktop OS that is a marriage of convienience rather than love. Debian is great because the developers are hardcore netjunkies serving the interests of admins everywhere. Mandrake is great because of a devotion to producing the easiest, simplest, purest linux desktop experience. If you marry those two, you get something that isn't particularly focused on either important target, though you risk destroying two of the best distros available. Better to have frequent interludes of cross pollination than a full code-synch.
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However, I distinctly remember that the navy used to be proud of their lack of automation. This allowed warships to survive severe amounts of damage without perishing. If a radio operator is severely wounded, you can replace them. If your transmitter board is damaged, you can throw in a new one. If a jolt takes out the hard drive on your software radio, you're screwed. Perhaps the US hasn't been in a real war for so long they forgot how to design for damage?
I'm not saying I want a war, or that I dislike the idea of warship automation, but the original stated intention of the Navy seemed somehow admirable in a way that installing 802.11b wireless helm control just doesn't. Increased automation does tend to increase the fragility of a device, and the amount of problems that might occurr. What happens when the captain walks out of range of a transmitter? What happens if the laptop is stolen, or comandeered? What is stopping someone from dropping little 802.11b jamlets onboard?
And what OS, praytell, will this system support? Will the Navy solicit imput from BMW?
-c
Thinking back to the useless hours being wasted trying to crack the X-Box encryption, how much of this compiling could be distributed? Obviously it wouldn't accelerate live debugging or optimizing tools, but what if there were networks of computers who people volunteered to standby and remotely download, build, and upload code, and a linker on the initiating machine to reassemble globals, etc?
I know nothing about distributed compiling, which probably means that either A: I should go back to college (very likely) or B: compiling doesn't break down nicely into chunks.
If it is possible, a network of volunteer Open Source compilers would probably build in a significantly faster time than many of the aformentioned older systems can, assuming no major bandwidth bottlenecks, and would probably find a rather large home of OSS and Free Software supporters who don't have the time to code as much as they would like to. Such a structure would probably support the compiling of any large linux project, such as X, or Gnome, or... err... Well, Kde, X or Gnome. Any of these projects would be worthwile.
Someone with more experience, please stand up! If it were possible, many people would become that much more involved, and the community would prosper. Could you imagine teams of people competing to help out the KDE developers as much as they do the seti@home project?
This is a very important legal distinction, and one that congress didn't address enough of when creating the law. In theory, copyright holders do not have the legal right to prevent you from bringing their content across country lines for personal use (assuming the other country has similar laws). The obvious intent of the DMCA was to support the legal rights already given by the existing copyright laws, not to create an entirely new class of de-facto (and actionable) rights defined by those who currently have the right to mass-reproduce the material. EULA not withstanding (and, let's be honest, they don't), there is no legal framework for region control of copyrighted material. If such a thing is allowed to stand, the next logistical step is to segment the captive market by state and / or metropolis. This would reduce competitive pressures from surrounding communities, and reduce online sales to a few, more highly profitable mammoth corporate entities. I'm not being paranoid here: regional access was implemented in order to increase the sale price of overseas copyrights by segmenting the market and asuaging fears of competing with offshore copyright holders. This has been a part of the video game industry since Nintendo offered the US rights of the NES to Atari. Thankfully, without a DMCA provision, importation of videogames was available to the sub-market of any hobbyist who really wanted access to the material, a market not so large that it would reduce the attractiveness of a copyright that is likely to be purchased, but large enough that a truly significant game would not be completely missed by those who might consider gaming an emerging artform (Seiken Densetsu 3? Radiant Silvergun?).
This is just one point of the new generation of copyrights being taken by those who hold the traditional copyright. For example, they are taking the sole right to control access to the fast-forward button... preventing the user both physically and legally from advancing through anything they might have a financial stake in you watching. They have taken playback medium rights, ensuring that their content can only be seen in a particular set of circumstances, like on a Windows(tm) computer, or a Sony (tm) DVD player. Translations of media for personal use are gone, as are backups... an often abused right that is necessary for anyone who A: has lived through a fire or B: has no idea where they put that CD that they love so much.
Some of these new rights are being taken (backups) in an understandable attempt to enforce the rights they already have. But many (regions, commercials, resale rights) are simply a way to use the legal framework to squeese out more dollars from end consumers, and should be fought against.
Nowhere in the DMCA does it state that it is an intended framework for the non-congressional creation of new rights for copyright holders. Chapter 12 is titled "Copyright Protection and Management Systems," and the first and second sub-clause 1201 and 1202 (referred to in the above article), are entitled "Circumvention of copy protection systems" and "Integrity of copy management systems," respectively. Thus, when they referred to the circumvention of ''(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS.--(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that-- ''(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
Hence, as restricting region traversal is not a defined right of a copyright owner (holder), multi-region DVD players, and in fact the sale of region-free (but not copy-free) DVD players should be completely within the confines of the law. While it does, in certain points, refer to devices that circumvent access controls, it should be recognized that these two terms are being used interchangably by our elected officials, but that the overriding intent is the protection of existing rights, not creating a new class of rights. Intent is not the sole criteria of the courts, but many rulings have fallen upon the side of intent when explicit statements have failed. No court would believe that Congress intended to define the fast-forwarding of commercials as "theft."
I'm sorry, this was going to be a quick little ramble. It sort of grew a life of its own.
-C
Lol! I hope you can't provide a necessary service that nobody else provides... In a capitalist society that means you charge millions of dollars for it, and I'd hate to see that kind of tax bill showing up on my door if all I had handy were Norton notes
-C
Did I just read that IBM put a dedicated chip in thinkpads that handles encryption / decryption? Yeah, yeah, protecting private keys is neat, and random number generation is certainly a worthy pursuit, but an encryption / decryption accelerator would be wonderful. Perhaps e-mail client programs will start incorporating hooks for invisible background encryption... or the files on your hard drive will all be encrypted by default, all of the time (don't fry your processor). Sure, that sort of thing could facilitate a protection layer fostered against us by the boys in blue, but only on Windows.
Ok, this is wild speculation, as the current TCPA only calls for encryption / decryption of the public key. Still, though, a dedicated chip that accepts a key and a stream of data, and spits out a stream of data, could be very useful for working seamlessly with encrypted files without overloading the processor (or having a higher level garble your data in the attempt).
In other news, we're *still* waiting for invisible encryption in e-mail messages. This is a good first step to protecting your most valuable data, but I would hardly call it an entirely safe platform.
-C
Fairplay is right, in a sense. A sliding scale should be applied to album music, as well as all entertainment media, and I think we are seeing that emerge. Many bands are selling CDs for 5 dollars and raking in the sales. Some sell for 10, a reasonable amount for a heartfelt indy with a rich sound. And some reach for the gold with 20, and wonder why they can't make sales. And so we have a tier system, with labels selling for 20, indys selling for 10, and garages selling for 5. This is a system I can be comfortable with, though I think all CD's should be sold at 4-7 dollars.
Japan has a form of pricefixing, which ensures that album prices are kept high enough to warrant low-volume production runs. This makes a lot of sense as profit = sales * price - costs, and a niche market can be served so long as it desires one CD higher than another assuming fixed price. The problems associated with this is that it has a polarizing effect on the market: CDs and music in Japan are image tools, and at image tool prices the great bulk are sold to the young with flushable income (income that is given due to guilt about feelings of neglect from overworked salrymen). On a lower number, such a scheme might work here in America... however this has shown not to be true. We had a defacto pricefixing scheme and very little diversity. While it did support a surprisingly large number of "unprofitable" bands, that seems to be due to a process of everyone getting their fingers in the pie before the pie is weighed. Remember Forrest Gump being declared unprofitable?
While I know there is a difference between fixed costs and production costs, you would be amazed how many people work on any videogame released today. A band can write, practice, and record an album comfortably in 3 months. A game requires at minimum staffing a producer, an art director, several artists, several designers, several programmers, several testers, and a sound guy to be working full time for 6 months to 2 years. There are also motion-capture engineers, motion talent, voice actors, musicians, audio producers, writers, cutscene artists (usually handled out of house), network guys, fact checkers, lawyers... Basically, if you add up the amount you pay the staff, which is your single greatest cost in development, the amount made by the average game doesn't look too outrageous. Especially considering the average developer takes home a similar pay as a California garbageman... producers don't make 50k for a months work, they just make 50k.
I'm not trying to argue that with lower prices enough additional games would sell to increase margins (they probably would). I'm trying to distinguish between the record companies, which are suffocating under their own bloat, and videogame companies, which are trying to strike a delicate balance.
I hope laptop guy, and anyone else who has gotten jipped reads this. Small claims court filings (here in Massachusetts) cost 15 dollars, don't require a lawyer, and require about as much knowledge of the law as going to your parents and saying "johnny took my lunch." The court is chosen based upon your location, and if they don't show up a summary judgement will be had.
Don't let them get away with selling bad equipment. Go to your courthouse today.
Sega jumped out the gate with the Saturn, which confused most people and stole any sort of buildup they might have had. (5/5/95, was it?). Later on, they cut ahead of the competition with the Dreamcast, with the best technology and great games. That also failed.
The first out the door does not necessarily get a bit of a bonus, and Nintendo hasn't been first to market since the original Game Boy. They held off on the SNES and N64 to enjoy their profits, and wisely waited on the SNES CD in order to see how the Sega CD did. They launched the Cube long after the PS2 launched.
Sega, on the other hand, never liked to be shown up, and always went to market first. They are now out of the console business.
The first-to-market is an overhyped myth. I wouldn't want to make up a year's difference, but it isn't insurrmountable... What is more important than that is to know when the market is ripe for another transition. If you reach for it too early, when people are finally ready to upgrade your option will be too slow and have too few games to compete. By then you will have lost the newness edge, but will not yet have established your value.
I'm sure everyone is hard at work at new systems. I would be very surprised if half of the systems designed at major game companies make it out the door.
Don't throw away those Cubes yet, kiddies. Nintendo, Sony, et al are notorious for spreading rumors of new consoles "just around the corner," then releasing them years later when the market is finally ready. Remember how many extra years we had to wait for "project reality?" or the Playstation? If you go by the original announcements, the PS3 and XBox2 should already be out by now.
No, what is more likely is that Nintendo is countering Sony's mindshare ploy with a mindshare ploy of their own. This is the first real year for the Game Cube, and by my calculations that means that unless they fail miserably in the market, Nintendo won't release a new system until 2008. Nintendo knows this business, and they know that to be successful you have to make the majority of people wait just a little bit for a new system. The launch of a new system is a huge financial burden... why would they go running in to do that when they are so profitable at number 2?
Heh, only if you are programming with vi. If you want to get something done anytime soon, you're gonna want something a bit faster. I have no patience for slow machines.
You can do a lot with fast software. Right now I'm writing this in the freeware Easy Office because it launches to a pretty fully-fledged text editor in two seconds on my P3 800. There is also the excellent freeware office suite602 PC Suite, but it takes about 4 seconds. Either of these would be good alternatives to MS Office on a slower machine. There are great e-mail programs, browsers, etc, all readily available. I went to a friends house today who has a K2, running Windows 95, with lots of speed and response. He records television programs onto it. Don't underestimate the power of old hardware in the right hands.
I also know several network admins, so a console (and vi) is their work environment.
Not that I'd turn down a P4 3Ghz per say...
As for the rest of your comment, I apologize for jumping on you as if you were a drone: though you do have obvious, unwarranted biases, I see now that you were just being vocal about your preference, and holding your preferences up as a model hardcore gamer. I don't agree that the consoles will or will not unseat the PC as the hardcore gamer's platform of choice, as I do not agree that there is currently a seat or that the PC is in it. Personally, I use obscure consoles as one litmus test of a person's hardcoreness: if someone has a Neo Geo, they're hardcore. If they have a Neo Geo and a Supergraphix, they're very hardcore. I define hardcore gamer as one who is obviously and successfully obsessed with any portion of gamedom: Frag Parties, Cos Play, abnormally active emulation development, soundtrack obsession, anything involving a training regimen that lasts for more than 3 months (and preferably more than a year), and the collection of video-game themed breakfast cereals all qualify, in my opinion, for the hardcore gamer. Being hardcore is, by and large, platform agnostic.
One more thing. Despite your assertion, the PC does not offer "the freedom to create whatever [the developer] wants." Besides technical concerns, the developer is always limited by financial constraints. Many developers find it easier to achieve their budget-limited vision with a target, non-squirrely platform. The PC offers the developer a Hard Disk, a network connection, an interface device with 104 buttons, and freedom from a quality assurance department. These benefits are not true freedom, but an extension of the limitations already imposed upon software development, many of which have appeared on consoles. What hasn't appeared on consoles is the battle of OpenGL vs Direct X, the great vertex shader debate, switching target cards mid development between Nvida and ATI, XP SP1 compatibility patches, etc, etc, etc. Carmak will always be a computer game developer, but it isn't because the PC gives him the "freedom to create whatever he wants." That assertion is just bias.
And yes, to this day, the PC response time is less than that of the major consoles. It is only by several hundredths of a second, but many hardcore gamers notice, and can feel the difference. In many fighting games, that kind of lag can harm a finely honed play style. It's difficult to notice on most PC games because, as I mentioned, they develop PC games to PC's strengths and weaknesses. There is a bit of darwinian evolution to this too.
I too grew up with console games. I also grew up with Shareware and retail PC games. The console will never crash. It will never decide it doesn't like my graphics card. I will never have to check for compatibility. The OS will never steal focus. I will never have to even think about framerate. It will never be incompatible with my copy of Norton utilities. I will never have to download the latest Direct X. I will never have to revert to a previous version of Direct X. It will never freeze inexplicably for 5 seconds, then move on as if nothing had happened. I will never have to wait for it to boot or shut down. My console will never reject my registration code. In short, my console is a well behaved gaming environment where I can forget the technical background and focus on the enjoyment of the experience. I also love my computer, and am very protective of it. If a playmate gets loaded to the hard disk, and the playmate crashes my baby, that playmate is getting tossed out until it learns to behave. Pointing out crashing is not a pot-shot. Go play Black or White. It's an absolutely fun little playmate, that seems to punch you in the face every two hours.
Maybe I'm just very demanding, but if a game can't stay stable I'm getting my money back, period. We wouldn't put up with this at the movies, and being a young medium doesn't excuse it now.
BTW, I'm not arguing that your choice doesn't have merit. I'm arguing that the extrusion of your personal choice to proport to reflect all of gamedom is fundamentally flawed.
I'll have to get a Gravis Xterminator. Thanks for pointing it out. The last pad I bought was the original Eliminator, which stayed on my desk for about 2 hours until I realized that the reason characters would always go diagonally down when pressing left or right was because the D-pad had a gross design defect that had somehow made it through testing, if there was any testing.
- C
We are focused on creating the best gaming experience for the consumer and most robust and high performance delivery system for game developers and publishers.
We do not plan on becoming a development company but will partner and support current developers and publishers with their current and upcoming titles.
We are actively partnering with Game Developer's and Publishers and look forward to the opportunity of partnering with and distributing their current and future titles on the Phantom Network.
I, for one, am pleased and glad with this visionary and entrepreneur's vision and forsight into the direction and tribulations of the console and software delivery mechanisms of the current and upcoming future. This shareware and freeware delivery and sales mechanism from Telco and DRM professionals will provide a valuable service and fill a need for the millions of broadband users without ISPs. I can see how such a modern and robust system would easily surmount the copyright hurdles of renting access to the 32 thousand games they couldn't possibly have acquired the rights to yet, as their company was founded in October. Being based on something as simple as Windows, I can easily see how their winning business plan and extensive industry experience would convince Microsoft to allow them to sell a competing platform based around Windows without paying a full OEM licence of $75 per copy. What are the chances of that happening when you have capabilities that are not available in today's marketplace, thereby appealing to the hard-core gamer and the high end consumer electronic purchaser while still being simple and safe enough for a mother and father to rest comfortably while their child enjoys the revolutionary entertainment experience?
Ah, but you can do all of that on a PC from 8 years ago. I have an old Mac Laptop here that chuggs away just fine at photoshop 7, thank you very much, and has just been converted to a dedicated piece of stereo equipment.
Let's not delude ourselves, you can get a computer to do all of the work that you need to (unless you are a game developer) for the cost of the video card that you have to throw away every two years.
But, even if we're just considering games, the PC still wins. Much better selection of controllers (including keyboard/mouse), giving you just the right type of control for any given game.
The keyboard / mouse controller combination is interesting, but by no means optimal for everything. And, unfortunately, that seems to be where the PC controller hegemony ends. You can't get a good-feeling gamepad for a PC no matter how hard you try. Even the nicer controllers that would have a chance of being good pads are opting for andlog D-pads, which ruins the precision of the interface.
Compare playing a FPS game using keyboard/mouse to attempting to aim using those crappy thumb-nobs on most console controllers.
Very true. However, halo is a lot of fun, and is a console FPS. Quake, et al, were developed and optimized for a computer's strengths and weaknesses. It isn't surprising that they work best on a computer. On the other hand, have you tried playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 with a keyboard and mouse? Go on, download MAME and let me know what you think. It's horrible, isn't it? The keyboard / finger combination is very slow compared to the button / thumb. Besides that, the computer doesn't respond as quickly to imput.
Much more flexibility and immersiveness in games.
Flexibility, yes. Immersiveness? Another poster mentioned Vice City, but there is also Final Fantasy, Metroid Prime, Zelda, Robotech, Onimusha... How is it immersive again when I finally make it through the outer lines of the general's encampment and WW2 online crashes *again* because Cornered Rat hasn't finished patching it?
No console can match the PC for depth of gameplay, and especially not for customization.
Interesting this poster puts those two things together. Millions of options and sub-menus do not depth make. Diablo, for instance, had no artistic gameplay depth. Or Evercrack. They were both founded on the principle of exploiting the leveling treadmill, and they both did terifficly well in the marketplace. So yes, if you are going to just look at Warcraft 3, then we're going to look at Virtua Fighter. They both have a tremendous depth, but Virtua Fighter 3's depth is a subtlety in the interplay between attack priorities, ranges, speeds, and knowledge of your opponent. Warcraft 3's depth also relies upon all of those same things, but with a bit more explicitness. When you are talking best-of-breed, you have to forgive a few Daikatanas, Trailer Park Tycoons, and BMX XXXs'. Without comparing the bland middles to the bubbly top, PC's and Consoles both have a lot of depth.
Try creating a game like Neverwinter Nights for a console. Not gonna work.
Try creating a game like Xenosaga, Panzeer Dragoon, Devil May Cry, Guilty Gear XX, Tekken 4, or NFL 2K3 on a computer. Not gonna work. They were designed to take advantage of the strengths of the platforms they find themselves on. Apparently you have been with PC games for so long that the strengths of PC games, which they compete with eachother upon, have become your immediate criteria of judgement. It could be just as true to say that no system will ever come as close to the Virtua Boy at recreating fun 3D -tennis, so they are all inferior.
Consoles still have a looong way to go before they can compete with the PC.
Ah, and Saddam won the gulf war, didn't he? What was that magic number, 10 billion dollars this year?
They're fine if you're just a casual gamer and you don't have much use for a decent PC other than games, but if you're a more serious gamer, then there's nothing out there that can beat a good PC.
Unless you want a good Japanese RPG, then you need a console. And say what you will about FPS nuts, I've never seen one show up to a CosPlay convention. People whose hobby is making costumes from the characters in Dance Dance Revolution... are not casual gamers.
Sure, it's a lot of money, but you get a LOT more out of it than you get from a console.
Perhaps you do, but I know many people who both go to frag parties and who enjoy a game of Vice City or Twisted Metal Black. They're not that dissimilar. Do you get Metroid Prime out of computers? Do you get Starcraft out of consoles?
From a developers standpoint, consoles are wonderful. You can create an established toolset, you have only one piece of hardware to shoot for which doesn't change, and once you go gold your obligation to that game is over. You only have to re-learn every 5 years, and in the meantime you have the satisfying process of refining your tricks and knowledge. You're also much more difficult to pirate, which leads to significantly increased revenue.
There was a nice backlash a few years back to the "X-Box sucks!" "No, Game Cube Sucks!" discussions that were happening on the boards. Platform loyalty is every bit as trivial as console loyalty or soda-brand loyalty. There are nearly as many of *them* as there are of *you,* so if you honestly believe that there is no worthwile reason to play *their* platform, then you must be missing something.
You're on for that Guinness. I'm in Boston, BTW.
.17 seconds, and to mask this lag your character has to turn slowly. An acceptable responce time for a console is 1/16th of a second, or .06 seconds, and you really should be shooting for better, as many experienced players will notice .06. Everyone notices .1. This is one of the reasons why you click to attack, instead of pressing a button to swing your sword.
.12 megabytes. Actual throughput is much, much lower, as communication protocols have to be established, and these things don't exist in a vaccuum: DSL is constantly stretched further from the switches than they should be, old cable equipment always degrades the line, someone always has Kazaa open... There are good DIVX movies floating around with 150 minutes of video encoded to 700 megabytes of space. That comes out to .19 MB per second, which is a good deal more than a real broadband line can handle. Plus, it would be incredibly bandwidth intensive for the server farm, which is a non-negligable cost spread over 1 million users. And you still have to have a graphics card per person churning out those vistas.
.12 MB line. Remember how slow single-speed CDRoms were? Those are .15 MB. Would you want to play Worlds of Warcraft on a single-speed CDROM without loading anything to a hard disk?
I've interviewed at several MMPORPG places, and worked at a place releasing a X-Box live title, and the kind of infrastructure you would need to have thin clients in the living room just doesn't exist. I'm not trying to pull expert power here (I was just a tester), but most server-side online games are designed very specifically to avoid packet loss related deaths. For example, no MMPORPG features death pits, because the control over characters cannot be that fine with ASP. You have to figure a decent connection to the server is going to take 5ms to be parsed and pushed through a TCP/IP stack, and 30 ms to travel to the server. If the server updates the clients on the state of the game world every 60 ms, chances are it will be 30 ms before the server can get to the incoming message. The server then processes for 60ms, and sends out an update that takes 30 ms to reach your client. Your client, which has been "drifting" the state of the world, now knows what is going on, and changes itself and renders to the screen in 10 ms. Some of these numbers are guesses, but you see that in a good case (and this would be a good case). The controller response time is, therefore, about
As for the system requirements, it is impossible to stream good 640 x 480 video over a broadband pipe. In an ideal situation you get a megabit per second, which comes out to
Which means, you need to do the graphics processing on the client, not the server. For the GPU to do its job, the CPU has to be strong enough to manipulate the game world in response to the update packets recieved from the server. You would also probably want to load all of the textures and structures to a permanent medium as filling the 128 MB of graphics card memory without significant wait periods is impracticle over a
OK, so you need a great graphics card, a decent CPU, an EIDE interface and a hard disk, a sound card, and 2 USB controller ports. What you have, so far, is a cheap microtel PC with onboard audio and a blazing graphics card, but no CD or floppy, and lobotomized ports. And that's just to be a thin client. At that point, it is far more economical to download the game to the player and let them update the world state (as they can't run cheat programs on it). That takes a slightly better CPU, but not significantly.
What you have sold them, then, is an X-Box.
Where is that Guinness?
Sadly, yes. Ironically, just before the release of Capcom vs. SNK, SNK filed for the Japanese equivalent of chapter 7.
I don't know. If you are talking success the 2600, NES, SNES, GameBoy, PS1, and PS2 are the most successful systems of all time, and most of them are really, really ugly. The 3DO, TG-16, and Sega CD (1st edition) were all very, very pretty, and failed miserably in the market. The PS2 looks like an average a VCR, the financially successful N64 looked like someone threw a cartridge into a blob of clay, and the GameBoy looked like a boring beige box with a green screen when it first came out, especially compared to the vastly cooler Turbo Express, Lynx, Game Gear, and eventually Nomad and Neo Geo Express.
The SNES? Lavender and Beige? I mean, Lavender and Beige? How did this get past test marketing?
For that matter, no system in history has looked as cool relitive to their companions as the Neo Geo did back in the 16 bit era. That company no longer exists, of course.
I'm starting to wonder if very, very ugly systems stick out in consumers minds, thereby increasing sales. It couldn't be just that the name eminates the coolness factor: who didn't laugh the first time they heard the word "Playstation," "Dreamcast," "Ultra 64," "SuperNES," etc.
Perhaps those industry critics are right when they say that people decide on games to buy, then get the console to support them, rather than buying cool consoles to facilitate gaming. In that situation, the "WOW" factor is firmly where it belongs: with the developers. In the mean time, big players will probably continue to hire design professionals who have never touched a console in their lives. Look at the Playstation. Look at the Vaio line of computers. Which looks very, very cool, and which pads Sony's bottom line to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year?
if you look closely at the picture provided on the page, the current prototype is implemented with an optical mouse (on a visor). This limits the functionality of the tool to areas where enough space would be available for, say, a laptop if one were available. Something like this would need to be too sensitive (1 pixel or less resolution) for GPS, so in a practical implementation of a free-floating system one would need a relativistic system, which would require some sort of tagging for the user. Either way, it would be grossly impractical to use this sort of thing to write with (try writing on a piece of glass while moving it), limiting its utility to reading / playback. For those things, however, a built-in trackball would be as easy / simple to use, and wouldn't require a separate dongle or an extra hand.
Besides, when was the last time you stood absolutely still while using your PDA?
I don't mean to rail on the guy for coming up with a creative and fun interface option. This is very, very cool. But it isn't very useful, and I would hate to see too much VC devoted to it instead of something that would reach production... like a 2d clone of the jogdial.
Agreed. A doll is a likeness of a human being for use in play. A doll is not a human being. The characters that the dolls are based on are not human beings. (Çeci n'est pas une pipe) All dolls are characters based on likenesses of things that are based on likenesses of human beings, be they Barbies, Kens, or Spawn. Otherwise one could easily argue that the Street Fighter dolls are based on video games, not people, the A-team is based on TV images, not people, Barbie is based on advertising stereotypes of the 50's, not people...
The X-men certainly are "likenesses" of human beings, in the same way that Superman, Ultraman, Spiderman, and Ryoko are all "likenesses" of human beings. This is ridiculous.
Real dolls are made in San Marcos, California, and are therefore not subject to tariff.
Why do all of that? He's vision impaired, he should have a friend teach him to touch-type.
Browser / Program control is easy. Get a Mac. They have had built-in voice-based program control with speakable items for about ten years now, and there are products that extend the existing control base.
The google directory has links to a lot of speech recognition companies, but I still think your client would be most happy with OSX's recognition options. It doesn't have to be trained for a voice, though its full power does require some Apple Scripting. And there are many products that build on apple's relatively solid base, if you choose not to script "go back" to "apple-B" in the browser yourself. Having used it myself in the past I can confidently say it exists, and used to work at least most of the time.
That's more than can be said for most voice-recognition products. Bring him to an Apple store, and have him try it out. If you go to CompUSA or another superstore, bring your own apple guru to show you.
On the one hand, they appear to be charging for downloads of traditional PC games, so it appears that they have finally found another way to take commodity hardware and make money licensing game sales (the other, XBox).
Outperforming a generation of consoles that was released over two years ago isn't particularly difficult... The Dreamcast did it quite well, but failed miserably in the market. The key is not to be better than everyone else, (the PS2 is currently the slowest console available), but to be so much better that all of the developers flock to your system and produce must-have games. With a system of renting otherwise available PC games, I don't see how they will have any of the exclusives they need to thrive, unless they develop them themselves.
Limiting themselves to broadband-only customers and broadband-only distribution is an interesting choice. Traditionally, if you wanted to sell a console you had to convince hundreds of thousands of stores across the world to devote 5 - 20 feet of shelf space to your product... a difficult task to say the least. However, by going with broadband, they have cut out that huge fixed cost. If they didn't go overboard with their DRM and can find a somewhat linearly scaling manufacturing facility (difficult, I admit), they *could* survive on a very small installed userbase. They will have to work with the Nintendo model (all partners absorb fixed cost risks in exchange for a cut of razor blade sales), but I could really see them living comfortably on a base of 1 to 2 million people or less.
On the other hand, by going with broadband, they have limited themselves to selling a crippled, specialized PC to people who are guaranteed to already have a full-fledged PC. Microsoft tried it with the XBox, and while sales aren't horrible, they are still losing the race with a lunchbox. Infinium will have to develop / buy exclusives, and it doesn't seem like they have the funding to do that.
Furthermore, DRM and temporary rentals are *designed* to frustrate consumers, and the home entertainment device crowd is notoriously unforgiving when they feel they have been wronged. They will have to dance a fine line between demos / rentals / subscriptions / and sales. Just reading their mission statement makes me wonder if they will have anytime, night-and-weekend, and overtime minutes. Can I get extra minutes if I sign to a one-year contract? What do you mean I owe $170 dollars for going over? But it was Final Fantasy, what do you expect me to do?
I'd like to say I have high-hopes in this situation, but high hopes in this situation would be survival.
-c
Could we at least describe them as "naturalized" humans? It feels wrong that Marvel the company is more human than the X-men.
The official definition of a member of a species is one who can successfully interbreed, hence huskies are of the same species as poodles, whereas cats cannot. Has Marvel addressed this key question?
I get asked a lot more often about Red Hat during interviews than Office.
Knowing dozens of office suites has been more valuable to me than knowing just Office. It enables easy switching to a company's custom developed software.
Everyone is better off if everyone uses Linux over Windows, but if a single school gives students experience with Linux and the rest Windows, it's doing a worse job of helping its students.
Using Word is like operating a television set: anyone can do it. Not everyone is familiar with UNIX based operating systems. That gives them an edge. If they don't know how to make a borderless text box in Word, they can pick it up in a day. Applications are honestly dirt easy if you have a broad enough experience base. It is virtually impossible to avoid MS Office these days, and enough to put down on a resume is trivial. Being able to add Linux on a resume at least is interesting and at most shows competence.
Quite honestly, Putting MS Office on your resume is like putting "Can use Pencil."
If you have a choice between hiring Jonny, who knows Word (which your company uses) and Jimmy, who knows KWord (which you've never heard of)...well, you're going to grab the one that's going to generate less support costs.
And if Jimmy comes to you and says that he can save your organization tens of thousands of dollars per year by switching you to an OS and an Office Suite you have never heard of, you are going to like that initiative. Even if you are hesitant and don't follow through with it, you will see Jimmy as a managerial material, rather than another office drone.
In twenty years, it's very unlikely if people will be using something much like the current iteration of MS Word *or* Open Office. But there is a not insignificant short-term benefit, and I don't think it's entirely fair to the students to deprive them of that edge.
Sorry, it's pretty insignificant, compared to being able to offer a programming elective. These kids are growing up in a world where the average 5 year old is more familiar with a computer than the average current office worker. They can undo in their sleep. What you hold prescious and dear just isn't that impressive. There may have been some debate originally about whether to use rotary or numeric phones in diagrams for children, but the distinction was, quite honestly, a trivial one. The ability to use MS Office and Open Office is trivial, but using MS Office is unavoidable while having used Open Office is at least a little special. Picking up a windowed interface is unavoidable, but picking up a powerful command line is actually useful (even in a business setting, typing ftp somehost@somewhere.com is much easier than opening Internet Explorer, going to a download site, getting administrator priveledges...).
You're probably trolling too (as judging from your previous comments you don't seem to be experienced), but this is exactly the sort of argument that you hear from many computer-illiterate managers who are struggling to learn the "industry standard" interface. To the next generation, Office is a 4-th grade computer literacy level. We can do better.
People seem to have the ethos in computing of buying the cheapest junk with the highest specs possible, not realizing that they just supported junk instead of quality. This is how quality is ratcheted lower, and it becomes difficult or impossible to find anything decent. $15 PSUs that weigh maybe .5 lbs are frighteningly common, as are CAT5 cables thinner than a drinking straw, motherboards with %20 defect rates, and on-board audio that just crackles instead of recording.
I don't agree that "if it ain't broke, don't fuck with it," as tweaking and playing are both very natural and very educational: but don't return it. You broke it: you fix it. If you can't fix it: you buy one that can do what you wanted it to do in the first place. But don't fall into the pit of buyers remorse by getting a wall-mart, emachines, or other low-quality computer to save a few dollars, then chop it up to try and compensate for not buying something that could satisfy you. Buy and support the things that you want. And always, always do your research. If you could spend 3 hours finding out what the best available PSU for your system is, you could save 6 hours later on trying to cut it open and cool it.
(Which reminds me, my PSU is too loud. Where did my Dremel go?)
-C
The problem with people coding tools for themselves is that they know too well how the code works - they are at the defining end of the learning curve. I remember being a tester on a project, and rattling off the name of a sub-sub-sub-sub menu to a producer along with a procedure that any of the other testers would have understood. His blank stare made me wonder if I was so experienced with the product that I had lost any idea of how people actually used it.
-C
I ran testing for a long time with much success as a standard desktop, and know several business who rely upon stable for their desktops. Together, Debian would benifit from Mandrake's install tools, and Mandrake would benifit greatly from apt-get. X would have to be stripped for server installs, but X doesn't start automatically now anyway.
The problem, though, is trying to avoid growing into an XP: the server/Desktop OS that is a marriage of convienience rather than love. Debian is great because the developers are hardcore netjunkies serving the interests of admins everywhere. Mandrake is great because of a devotion to producing the easiest, simplest, purest linux desktop experience. If you marry those two, you get something that isn't particularly focused on either important target, though you risk destroying two of the best distros available. Better to have frequent interludes of cross pollination than a full code-synch.
-C