#1 - You want it to look professional. This is where YOUR choice of name (making a Firstname.Lastname address or something similar, Firstletter+Lastname, Firstname+Lastletter, etc) comes into play.
#2 - You want it to be easily reached. If you have your own (neutral-sounding) domain, perhaps use that. If you have one at a free provider, that works. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are generally considered to be neutral, safe places to keep an email account. We have people in this thread taking potshots at them, but for the most part, you can be reassured that the Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail address on the resume in front of you will still be valid 6 months from now.
#3 - You may not want to use your employer's email, depending on circumstances. Especially if you are sending out resumes because you are looking to leave your employer in short order. Imagine your employer either (a) goes out of business, (b) goes through a round of layoffs, or (c) just plain fires your ass. Now, not only are you out on the curb, the email address on your resume to is sending new job offers or first-round interview offers straight into the bit bucket.
Hotmail and Yahoo convey that the address will be there for a while. So they're valid choices.
I see applications from people all the time that send in resumes with stupid email addresses. Right or wrong, we judge on this.
Commonsense (and most recruiters or professional resume polishers) will tell you: Get a nice, professional-looking email address. Your.Name@SomeBusiness.com can work (though be careful of that, since if you leave your job it may go away). Your.Name at somewhere neutral (yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc) works well. "Spicysluttybarbie@cheapdate.com" isn't going to look professional and unless you're applying for work as a stripper, isn't going to help you.
An AOL email address, today, has you attached to a sinking ship. Right or wrong, people are going to judge by that. And right or wrong, having an AOL address will indicate to people that you aren't very good with technology, which does make it harder for you to convince them you can match the job's skills requirement later.
My advice? Set your AOL address to a redirect, create a nice new, neutral/professional address, and go from there.
That is true if things get too far out of place (which the car, properly designed, could sense for).
However, you would be able to temporarily "recalibrate" a drive-by-wire joystick so that if let go and returning to zero point, the car drives straight rather than pulling to one side or the other. You can't do that with physical steering wheel designs.
You can use a joystick or a wheel/yoke to control an airplane. Older planes tend to have wheel/yoke, modern planes and especially fighter planes tend to use a joystick.
Likewise for boats. Smaller boats tend to use a simple rod attached to the rudder or outboard prop. Bigger boats tend to have a wheel for show. Boats are going through the same revolution now, however, with joystick control setups in production. Given a couple more generations, the wheel in the boats will probably go away entirely.
Are they? There's a movement (combined with the drive-by-wire electronic setups of coming automobile generations) to switch automobile control to joysticks.
Bonuses: - Allows putting the turn signals and other functions on joystick buttons, controllable with the same hand doing the steering - Allows for easy "zeroing out" (recalibration) of the steering; no more need to go spend $$$ at the shop to have your alignment adjusted, go into recalibration mode and set the new zero point, or even let the car sense the changes as they occur. Added bonus: the car's warning system can tell you when the physical alignment has gone too far off and needs servicing.
- Removes the biggest danger (crushing the driver against a steering column) of a head-on collision. - Removes the fire dangers of the steering column (which is a major heat-tube from most engines as well as producing a ton of wear-and-tear on wiring; you'd be surprised how many recalls there have been due to this recurring problem)
The modern steering wheel evolved out of a time when everything was gears and levers. It was literally connected (via chain, rod, or pulley) to devices like a ship's rudder or to cart wheels. Remove the requirement of a direct physical connection (I know, I know: "but what if your power goes dead or the connection shorts out!") and any equally sensitive analog device, or even a sensitive enough digital device with fine enough granularity, will work. Given that in a car you only need about 45 degrees, tops, of directional turning adjustment in either direction, a joystick is more than sufficient.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
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Framerates Matter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not quite.
The eye blur happens for two reasons. The first is the fact that the human eye is "assembling" an analog reading of the light taken over a specific time, very similar to how a camera exposure works. We aren't "digital" beings, in the sense that there is allowance forward and back in our visual processing, but we DO assemble "frames" for the rest of our brain to analyze.
The second is focusing. A fast-moving object moves into, and out of, the focused field quite quickly. Either we keep tracking it (in which case the unfocused foreground and background areas alter) or we don't, and it goes out of focus. We mentally render this as blurring. Directors in 2D movies use depth-of-field to do a quick transition between two speaking characters and ensure the right one has prominence, by keeping the speaker in focus and then quickly shifting focus in/out to bring the other to prominence when the dialogue turns.
The real sin, and unalterable problem currently, for 3D technology is that everything renders in-focus. Motion blurs work to some degree, but a large-scale image with "background" objects sharply in focus gives us headaches. We follow the other visual cues, try to "focus" to distance, try to "refocus" for the fuzziness it causes, and then wobble back and forth till we have sore, tired eye muscles.
The 3D Brendan Frasier Journey to the Center of the Earth was the closest done so far, because they did introduce some background blur, but it still had problems should the viewer decide to focus on something other than what the director wanted them to focus on, visually. Avatar commits the same sin as well, and doesn't even try to do it properly. It's like watching some big pixely, perfect-focus-for-miles video game.
As for the other items they mention - "The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic." Not true. Indeed, only true if you've got shoddy programmers (the fix for one of the most notorious examples, the jumping-height differences of various iterations of the Quake engine, was to simply lock the calculations to assume a static framerate; the id software programmers, who chose to instead discard "erroneous" round-up errors, wound up widely criticized for STILL making the jumps somewhat randomly framerate-dependent. The truth is that the visual rendering framerate of a game simply does not have to be the same as the internal calculation "frame" rate.
As for input lag... the difference in "lag" between a 30-fps framerate and a 60-fps framerate is 16 ms. Even if you get to 120-fps and have a monitor capable of doing so at your chosen resolution, your difference is 25 ms. Human reaction to visual stimuli is generally in the neighborhood of 150-300 ms.
Even playing on a LAN in the same building, you're looking at random lag times longer than the difference between 120fps and 30fps.
With EA holding the exclusive license for both NFL and FIFA, that means we just get one shitty "official roster" game per year rather than seven.
Imagine a world in which those shitty games then didn't make money. Why, maybe all the ridiculous amounts of money spent on giving Madden 11 more shoelace detail and graphical advertising textures on the knocked-out teeth could go instead into making some interesting and fun games.
You want to play football? Go outside. Grab a ball. Find some friends. They're probably just as out of shape as you are, couch potato, so it'll be an even match.
I have stood by watching subordinates get treated this way, by those who didn't realize I was nearby. I have seen overly entitled-feeling "users" go so far as to insist that (for example) the tech go to THEIR house, and work on THEIR personal computer and THEIR personal network, on the tech's personal time, to try to resolve an issue with telecommuting that was clearly the result of their own bloody incompetence (and possibly also that of the install tech or "good friend" they had set up their home network).
Let's be clear here: I am speaking of a large number of users who, by the time someone walks in their door, are already being abusive. They are this way because upper/middle management feels somehow that treating IT personnel as if they were the aforementioned "corporate slave" or "house n****r" is an appropriate way to behave. And this comes from situations that are sometimes business-serious (in which case we will do everything in our power to get a resolution as expeditiously and correctly, concepts that are regrettably sometimes somewhat mutually exclusive, as possible) and are sometimes "you've got to be shitting me, grow the fuck up" situations.
I have seen emails in which an entire department of personnel was accused of "never having anything work" and "never doing their jobs" because someone didn't have a body in the door within 5 minutes of a direct email (which violated proper contact policy anyways) about their fucking game not working during their lunch break, during a time when there was a major cleanup in process due to a boob one floor down not following proper safety practices and letting a worm loose. That's the kind of shit I am speaking of.
Are IT personnel supposed to behave in a professional manner? Hell yes. Does that mean that treating them with disrespect is ok? Hell no.
Oh wait. I recognize that name. You're the guy who rants his head off about the utilities people use to replace their icons with something more entertaining.
I use disc backups to keep my system working correctly. Yeah, my experience is anecdotal, but when you see a 60-year-old with a pristine Wii that plays nothing but Wii Play have the drive fail at 1 year, 2 weeks old, you get suspicious of the drive's quality. Am I sure there are people who use them to steal games? Yeah. Am I sure they're jerks? Yeah. Does that mean I want to ban hammers because some assholes will use them to break car windows and steal car stereos rather than just drive nails into wood? No.
>90% of people using homebrew hacks to bypass console copy protection are in it for the warez games
Oh really? I'd love to see some backup for that claim. The Wii's shitty, underengineered DVD-rom drive has a pretty high failure rate (seen 4 of 10 blow out so far, counting friends/family who purchased the thing). Nintendo will charge you ~$100 (after shipping) to get it repaired, or you can go buy a new one (and then go through the hassle of trying to transfer your account and downloads).
Alternatively, a USB hard drive (as low as $25 depending on size) and simple tools can let you rip your discs to a hard drive, preventatively. This then gives you the awesome benefits of: #1 - reducing wear and tear on your DVD drive. #2 - reducing wear and tear on the discs themselves (especially nasty with the grabby slot-loader mechanism). #3 - reducing load times on the games. #4 - Being able to switch games without having to either (a) go to the locked cabinet to get the next one and put this one back or (b) figure out where your toddler hid the disc you want.
I for one can't see a downside to setting this up. $25 of preventative maintenance/upgrading is SO worth it.
Now, companies buy website templates for sixty bucks non-exclusive (three grand exclusive) and they're sitting in a server room at a place called Dreamhost or Hostgator.
Getting hacked regularly by some turd who wants to take over the server to make into a warez repository, spam relay, look around for credit card records, or replace all the images with "I kno u dont want 2 see thiz but herez tha ded iraqi babies tha ebil US killz."
The content is maintained via a CMS run by the Marketing secretary.
Who barely knows how to spell, let alone write, and thus the site looks incredibly unprofessional. But hey, you get what you pay for. And the exec who set it up this way got a blowjob from the Marketing Boobs...er Secretary.
Employers and employees are using Gmail and other cloud-based e-mail systems because the lines between personal and work IT space have become so blurred.
Which works great right until either their net connection goes down, or Gmail has an outage, or AT&T's crappy network is shitting again, and they're bugging the IT guy to "FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE."
Nobody needs help printing anymore, because an entire generation has been raised on the Internet and personal computer systems
Right up until they jam the printer, or come up with a document with nonstandard margins, or do 1001 other things that the lusers always do.
The level of competence in the average office is still right about zero. The difference today is that rather than having respect for the skills of those who can actually handle technology, the lusers have been told they have the right to treat IT staff as somewhere between the House N****r and Corporate Slave. Think about it. Would you stand over the guy fixing your car yelling "FIX IT FASTER I WANT IT NOW FIX IT FIX IT"? No? IT staff get that crap all day long. They are stuck in the no-win scenario wherein if required preventative maintenance means taking something offline for a couple hours, they are yelled at, but if they don't do the preventative maintenance, they get yelled at for not doing it when the system REALLY goes tits-up. They get nickeled and dimed for wanting to implement real security precautions such as proper firewalling and password security, but then blamed for "not doing enough" when Ditzy McSluttyboobs the secretary goes download-happy and unleashes half a dozen worms inside the corporate network.
And increasingly, they're supposed to be "supporting" systems spread over so many locations and they're only given proper admin control over their own locality, meaning that they get yelled at for telling someone that the problem is at Site #3, and yes, it's being worked on, and no, they don't have the access to fix it directly here at Site #2, and then Dipshit McBrainlesssuit sends an email to his bosses about how things are "always down" and "these guys aren't doing their jobs" in order to try to "force" the poor IT guy to "work faster" on something that isn't even under his control.
The amount of software I have a "cracked" version of running on my PC coincides in a scary manner (>85%) with the amount of software I have discs for sitting on my shelf.
The remainder I have either (a) lost the disc for or (b) had the floppy go bad.
Why so many of them cracked? In the case of games, so I don't have to get out the disc and use the DVD drive as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle just to play all the content that's been loaded to my hard drive anyways. In the case of the software, so I can disable the neverending stream of "UPDATE ME UPDATE ME UPDATE ME" crap and just use the software for what I need it for.
And don't tell me it really constantly needs to check for updates. It's phoning home just to fucking phone home.
They turn around and do this with "digital media" files, I don't bother with them any more. "Rights locker" my ass.
That doesn't help with snow-related icing, because snow doesn't "fall" like rain (more surface area, less density and so it's much more susceptible to slight wind gusts in any direction). Generally, it doesn't even "stick" in place unless you have either a barely-frozen "wet" snow in just-barely-freezing temps, or a surface with "just enough" heat to get the initial under-ice layer going.
There's plenty enough ambient blowing during a good snowstorm, and these LED's are putting out "just enough" heat that the first few snowflakes go through a slight partial melt and stick themselves on good and tight. Chicago Tribune has a great photo showing you what happened to the "blinders with no bottom" approach. Even if you squared off the hoods, you'd still have this issue.
The problems surrounding all three games are a point to make, however.
#1 - The "closest point", the 2001/2002 period (following the E3 2001 trailer) was a great time to "feature-lock" the game and get into "finish run" mode. Unfortunately, as I pointed out before, the failure of Daikatana was still fresh in gamer memory. That is why I point out Daikatana. When Prey finally released, DNF was probably too far gone; I surmise that the "best shot" for DNF to finish, following the E3 video, probably was harmed most by Broussard's memory of the Daikatana skewering. Remember, shortly after the 2001 E3 video, there were release shots/trailers for Unreal Tournament 2003, which was actually released October 2002... and at that time DNF were still trying to use a much older version of the Unreal engine. You can get the idea where Broussard would be worrying about releasing DNF in, say, March 2003 and getting the same "oh that is so old and dated" reaction because the UT2003 engine blew his game out of the water visually.
#2 - Like Daikatana, Duke Nukem had an amazing amount of hype to live up to. The original game had pretty big britches, even though its enemies were 2d sprites rather than 3d polygons. Broussard's crowings about what he wanted DNF to be didn't help. Had Eidos not launched the ridiculous "John Romero will make you his bitch" ad campaign, Daikatana's reviews might have been more in-line with what it was (a halfway-decent game with some interesting weapons, some good and some bad level design, plot/dialogue no worse than most FPS titles, and the misfortune to release on the very end of the lifecycle for its chosen graphics engine). Instead, it got hammered because it set the bar so high for itself. Likewise, releasing a mediocre Duke title could easily have elicited the same "we waited through 5+ years of bragging for THIS mediocre piece of shit???" reviews that dominated the listings of the Daikatana reviews.
In the end, Daikatana's reviews were bad because it became popular to diss Daikatana, regardless of the game's actual merits. One careless misstep in the DNF release could easily have brought on a similar event.
#3 - Oddly enough, the real problem for Ion Storm was that their "back burner" titles (Anachronox, Deus Ex) were so much better than their "frontline" titles (the oddly named Dominion:Storm Over Gift 3, Daikatana). Someone should have noticed this and refocused accordingly, but by the time that happened, it was too late and bad decisions hurt other followups (Anachronox never got the promised "other half of the story" sequel, and the Deus Ex sequel was hamstrung by Warren Spector's crosseyed vision of the crappy PS2 port's altered interface and his desire to oversimplify things way too fucking far).
Re:Both game developers and artists need money
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The Nuking of Duke Nukem
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oddly enough, there were two "OMG this is taking forever" titles.
The other one was Daikatana. The much-maligned Daikatana actually was released. It went through one engine switch, similar to DNF (Quake to Quake II) because the Quake II engine offered it more to work with. It was "Feature-locked" in mid-1999, as the Wired article suggests that DNF should have been several times, and then worked on to finish and release.
Unfortunately, it was beat to the market by Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 (November and December 1999, respectively) and so the graphics for it seemed "antiquated" when it was released in May 2000. It also put its worst graphical foot first (the first level, also used for the demo, is legitimately trash that does NOTHING to show off some pretty nice design and atmosphere available in later levels, especially the Greek levels).
Arguably, this is the counterargument to the Wired article. DNF could have been locked down and "worked to completion." Yes, it could have been finished at several points. They probably should have. At the same time, one of the best times for this to happen (the early 2000's) would have had George Broussard point right to the release of Daikatana and the fact that Daikatana's lockdown had let it get one-upped out of the gate.
Let's be clear about this: had Daikatana been released in, say, October 1999, reviews would probably have been a lot better. Graphically, it got universally spiked based on the fact that the "new standard" was now the UT or Q3 engines, despite the fact that games licensing engines always have a delay. Storyline/gameplay-wise, it got spiked for hubris, the same sort of hubris that George Broussard and the DNF team had committed over and over again. They couldn't risk getting spiked the same way. Or rather, they could, but fear of doing so is what eventually doomed the game entirely.
What's really sad is the fact that they had actually, finally, feature-locked the game and were in the final-release run. The shutdown came in a "black flagged on the last lap" situation.
Al Gore Senior was one of the MafiAA's pet stooges who wrote/pushed the 1987 predecessor to the DMCA that tried to criminalize DAT tape unless it had a "copy protection flag" built in.
Actually, bars and clubs (you know, places that serve alcohol till the wee hours of the morning) have been successfully sued for allowing drunk patrons to get into their cars and drive, when the patrons then got into wrecks and killed people. In at least a few states, the management is legally obliged to hold you and either call the cops (to pick you up) or a cab (to drive you home) if you insist on trying to drive when you are clearly intoxicated.
So yes, we have legal precedent. If you give the keys to the company van to your boss, knowing (and validated by other witnesses) that he is way too drunk to be driving, and he then goes out and kills someone, you are indeed guilty under legal term vicarious liability. This is sometimes called a "dram shop law." In many jurisdictions it extends to "letting your buddy drive drunk" as well.
Similarly, we have an odd case here:
#1 - He catches someone he believes to have been fired, snooping around and messing with City equipment after-hours. #2 - His boss then demands the passwords - on an open speakerphone call into which anyone could be listening, and with the aforementioned snoop (whose clearances are not nearly certain) in on the call. Said boss has been responsible for previous security incidences and is NOT on the approved list to have the aforementioned passwords. #3 - The City has a definite policy against revealing security information in insecure manner, and so he responds as he is supposed to within policy that he will give the passwords to the people on the list authorized to have them, when one of them comes to see him in person for the transfer (rather than on an unsecure speakerphone call into which anyone could be listening). #4 - 8 days later, the mayor pays him a visit, at which point he cheerily gives over the passwords, as he had promised to do and within the security policy of the City.
Why is he in jail at this point? Hell, why was he in jail in the first place? Because some trumped-up technophobe at the DA is too close to the pointy-haired boss. No other reason. He did his job within policy, he gave the passwords to someone actually authorized to have them in a secure manner in keeping with policy. Everything else from that point on has been pure vindictive spite.
The water treatment plants were amongst the infrastructures that he disabled.
Uhm, come again?
Nothing was "disabled." Nothing was turned off. The situation was quite simply that the routers were secured down to the point where, without having admin credentials, someone could not CHANGE them. This is not "negligent", this is smart design.
Then we get to the exorbitant bail amount, the fact that he's being held in lockup without a bail reduction even though better than 3/4 of the case has been dropped due to lack of evidence, and the fact that he in fact gave the passwords up to a competent authority (the SF Mayor, aka his boss's boss's boss), and it looks like a kangaroo court in process. The DA's office doesn't have much, if anything, of a case but they're desperate to justify what they have done so far so they just keep pushing along.
I'll offer you a choice. You are being reassigned to a new area. Your "boss", the blithering idiot who still keeps his password in a sticky note on his monitor and who holds a bitchfest every time he's told he has to pick a password that actually conforms to complexity requirements rather than using "god", demands a ton of passwords with root-level access. You've seen numerous situations before where the "admin at the time" (e.g. you) has been turned into the fall guy for shit going wrong or security breaches, when it's obvious to anyone doing any research that the real problem is some moron boss with less brain cells than teeth, an MBA, and a napoleon complex.
A lot of the stuff they put out is partnerships and they participate in many of the industry standard committees.
Yes, so that they can get their patents included in the "standard." It's part of the ongoing barrier-to-entry collusion on the part of the "standards committees"; if you're part of the committee, you generally have some form of patent-access trade so that you can produce the "standard-based" equipment with no patent cost. If a new guy wants to come along and enter the market, the "standards committee" members (of which $ony is one) all agree to hike their access costs to an exorbitant amount to keep real competition out of the marketplace.
They've sectioned up the market quite nicely to themselves, really. Note how LG is given de facto control of the entry-level segment, as long as they agree to not compete higher up.
Beta, for instance, ran for nearly two decades. Not in the home VHS market (which was their original target) but in the home camera market (where the smaller size made for easier handheld video cameras) and the television broadcast market (where they don't care so much about having to switch tapes after a certain time limit, but DO care very much about getting higher, more reliable video quality). Those two sectors were still using Beta tapes for a very long time, in fact some more rural TV broadcasting stations were still using them right up until the limit of HDTV broadcast conversion.
DAT was exceedingly popular in Europe and Asia, just not in the US - and Sony took their money there quite happily. It took longer to get DAT into the US because the RIAA, and their pet senators like Al Gore Senior, pushed the predecessor to the DMCA, the Digital Audio Recorder Copycode Act of 1987, with the intent of making DAT carry a "copyright flag." Sound anywhere similar to MafiAA tactics today?
Memory Stick Duo hasn't gone away. It's not used on many non-Sony devices, but Sony sells enough cameras and PSPs that they can keep it on the shelves and make a fair bit of money back from third-party manufacturers like Sandisk who license it.
I could go on, but the point is, not all of their "failures" failed spectacularly, and they have had plenty enough successes to fund everything else they have wanted to do. Had they actually been smart and come up with a "flash once" Memory Stick Duo standard rather than trying to push UMD on the PSP for their games (or alternatively, had the PSP had RCA/Composite video and audio outputs in its original incarnation so that it could simply be plugged into a TV for playing those UMD movies), it's quite possible they could have had yet another proprietary standard that did "well enough."
Did you not note that I pointed out DVD was in the PS2 for the same reason?
Sony has a hand in the design of Blu-Ray. They, along with a set of other companies who also "contribute", gain a certain amount from the royalties on discs/players adhering to the blu-ray format, the same way they were connected to DVD.
Sony's setup has always been this way. They never implement an open, universal standard unless they absolutely, positively have to. Look at the amazing number of "standards" they've tried to develop themselves (Beta vs VHS, Compact Disc they had a hand in, DAT, Video8/Hi8, Minidisc vs Philips Digital Compact Cassette, Sony ATRAC vs MP3, Sony SACD vs DVD-Audio, MMCD vs SuperDensity till they gave in and "contributed" their patents to merge EFMPlus into the DVD standard with Toshiba, Memory Stick Duo vs SD, SDDS "Sony Digital Dynamic Sound" versus DTS and Dolby Digital, and of course the craptacular UMD format). Their goal is to make their proprietary "standard" the industry standard, and rake in the royalties, not unlike Microsoft's "embrace, extend, destroy" philosophy concerning open standards.
Too many consoles? Check. We have the Wii, Xbox360, PS2, and PS3 all jockeying. Back in 1984 it was Coleco, Vectrex, Atari and Mattel (plus a bunch of people making Atari/Mattel clones) battling it out.
Loss of control of licensing? Well, sort of. It's not that there are nonlicensed titles, but the licensing is so wide open that the shovelware problem is just as bad. There are maybe (if you're optimistic) 20 good titles for the Wii, out of a selection of well over 300. Similar ratios exist for the other consoles (hell, there are maybe 5 good games for the PS3 at best).
Overhyping and epidemic of crappy movie/TV license titles? Oh, you'd better fucking believe it. Activision are at the forefront of "crappy movie games", but there are plenty from other sources. Between those and overhyped "blockbuster" titles that can only get a high reviewer score if it's bought and paid for (one of the reasons Gamerankings now only aggregates from the few big Gamespot/IGN-level sites, rather than including honest sites that actually played the real game instead of partial publisher-provided demos with a promise of "everything you don't like will be fixed so review as if it was"), what do you expect?
We had a minicrash a while back when Sega almost folded and turned themselves into a "software developer"; it's quite ironic that they're now primarily publishing on their former biggest rival's (Nintendo) console. Then again, no Sega game has been worthwhile in years; they even managed to crap up a few good Nintendo franchises (see F-Zero GX, a pale imitation of its predecessor).
The only reason that yet another console manufacturer hasn't fallen out has been that they're all bankrolled. Nintendo is the "too big to fail" of Japan and are very canny about making sure none of their manufacturing is at a loss, even though their hardware is far inferior (gimmicky controller that rarely sees its features truly used notwithstanding) to the other two. Microsoft and Sony have deep, deep pockets. Sony isn't about to let the PS3 go when they're counting on it to push Blu-Ray (their proprietary format), just like they counted on the handheld camera market (Betacam) to push Beta and the PS2 to push DVD back when Sony was one of the 6 companies that held licensing interest in the DVD format.
Outside answer? Yeah, we're looking at a crash. It may not be as total as the 1983 crash, but the market can't exist at the level of shovelware being pushed. Something has to give, a number of developers need to die, and certain overly abused lines need to get radically scaled back (Activision's yearly Tony Hawk crappings, for instance: after seeing Tony Hawk: Ride we might as well rename the series Tony Hawk: Bird Poo and get it over with).
Slashdot Mirror
You want to convey three things.
#1 - You want it to look professional. This is where YOUR choice of name (making a Firstname.Lastname address or something similar, Firstletter+Lastname, Firstname+Lastletter, etc) comes into play.
#2 - You want it to be easily reached. If you have your own (neutral-sounding) domain, perhaps use that. If you have one at a free provider, that works. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are generally considered to be neutral, safe places to keep an email account. We have people in this thread taking potshots at them, but for the most part, you can be reassured that the Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail address on the resume in front of you will still be valid 6 months from now.
#3 - You may not want to use your employer's email, depending on circumstances. Especially if you are sending out resumes because you are looking to leave your employer in short order. Imagine your employer either (a) goes out of business, (b) goes through a round of layoffs, or (c) just plain fires your ass. Now, not only are you out on the curb, the email address on your resume to is sending new job offers or first-round interview offers straight into the bit bucket.
Hotmail and Yahoo convey that the address will be there for a while. So they're valid choices.
I see applications from people all the time that send in resumes with stupid email addresses. Right or wrong, we judge on this.
Commonsense (and most recruiters or professional resume polishers) will tell you: Get a nice, professional-looking email address. Your.Name@SomeBusiness.com can work (though be careful of that, since if you leave your job it may go away). Your.Name at somewhere neutral (yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc) works well. "Spicysluttybarbie@cheapdate.com" isn't going to look professional and unless you're applying for work as a stripper, isn't going to help you.
An AOL email address, today, has you attached to a sinking ship. Right or wrong, people are going to judge by that. And right or wrong, having an AOL address will indicate to people that you aren't very good with technology, which does make it harder for you to convince them you can match the job's skills requirement later.
My advice? Set your AOL address to a redirect, create a nice new, neutral/professional address, and go from there.
That is true if things get too far out of place (which the car, properly designed, could sense for).
However, you would be able to temporarily "recalibrate" a drive-by-wire joystick so that if let go and returning to zero point, the car drives straight rather than pulling to one side or the other. You can't do that with physical steering wheel designs.
Obligatory: The truth about Twilight.
Meyer is a cheap hack at best. Meyerpires are... well... yeah.
You can use a joystick or a wheel/yoke to control an airplane. Older planes tend to have wheel/yoke, modern planes and especially fighter planes tend to use a joystick.
Likewise for boats. Smaller boats tend to use a simple rod attached to the rudder or outboard prop. Bigger boats tend to have a wheel for show. Boats are going through the same revolution now, however, with joystick control setups in production. Given a couple more generations, the wheel in the boats will probably go away entirely.
Are they? There's a movement (combined with the drive-by-wire electronic setups of coming automobile generations) to switch automobile control to joysticks.
Bonuses:
- Allows putting the turn signals and other functions on joystick buttons, controllable with the same hand doing the steering
- Allows for easy "zeroing out" (recalibration) of the steering; no more need to go spend $$$ at the shop to have your alignment adjusted, go into recalibration mode and set the new zero point, or even let the car sense the changes as they occur. Added bonus: the car's warning system can tell you when the physical alignment has gone too far off and needs servicing.
- Removes the biggest danger (crushing the driver against a steering column) of a head-on collision.
- Removes the fire dangers of the steering column (which is a major heat-tube from most engines as well as producing a ton of wear-and-tear on wiring; you'd be surprised how many recalls there have been due to this recurring problem)
The modern steering wheel evolved out of a time when everything was gears and levers. It was literally connected (via chain, rod, or pulley) to devices like a ship's rudder or to cart wheels. Remove the requirement of a direct physical connection (I know, I know: "but what if your power goes dead or the connection shorts out!") and any equally sensitive analog device, or even a sensitive enough digital device with fine enough granularity, will work. Given that in a car you only need about 45 degrees, tops, of directional turning adjustment in either direction, a joystick is more than sufficient.
Yeah. They used to wait over a year before you could even get the VHS... and we hated the hell out of that.
Artificial scarcity doesn't work. Period. If only they could learn this.
But dude... Joe Schlabotnik was AWESOME!!!!
Not quite.
The eye blur happens for two reasons. The first is the fact that the human eye is "assembling" an analog reading of the light taken over a specific time, very similar to how a camera exposure works. We aren't "digital" beings, in the sense that there is allowance forward and back in our visual processing, but we DO assemble "frames" for the rest of our brain to analyze.
The second is focusing. A fast-moving object moves into, and out of, the focused field quite quickly. Either we keep tracking it (in which case the unfocused foreground and background areas alter) or we don't, and it goes out of focus. We mentally render this as blurring. Directors in 2D movies use depth-of-field to do a quick transition between two speaking characters and ensure the right one has prominence, by keeping the speaker in focus and then quickly shifting focus in/out to bring the other to prominence when the dialogue turns.
The real sin, and unalterable problem currently, for 3D technology is that everything renders in-focus. Motion blurs work to some degree, but a large-scale image with "background" objects sharply in focus gives us headaches. We follow the other visual cues, try to "focus" to distance, try to "refocus" for the fuzziness it causes, and then wobble back and forth till we have sore, tired eye muscles.
The 3D Brendan Frasier Journey to the Center of the Earth was the closest done so far, because they did introduce some background blur, but it still had problems should the viewer decide to focus on something other than what the director wanted them to focus on, visually. Avatar commits the same sin as well, and doesn't even try to do it properly. It's like watching some big pixely, perfect-focus-for-miles video game.
As for the other items they mention - "The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic." Not true. Indeed, only true if you've got shoddy programmers (the fix for one of the most notorious examples, the jumping-height differences of various iterations of the Quake engine, was to simply lock the calculations to assume a static framerate; the id software programmers, who chose to instead discard "erroneous" round-up errors, wound up widely criticized for STILL making the jumps somewhat randomly framerate-dependent. The truth is that the visual rendering framerate of a game simply does not have to be the same as the internal calculation "frame" rate.
As for input lag... the difference in "lag" between a 30-fps framerate and a 60-fps framerate is 16 ms. Even if you get to 120-fps and have a monitor capable of doing so at your chosen resolution, your difference is 25 ms. Human reaction to visual stimuli is generally in the neighborhood of 150-300 ms.
Even playing on a LAN in the same building, you're looking at random lag times longer than the difference between 120fps and 30fps.
With EA holding the exclusive license for both NFL and FIFA, that means we just get one shitty "official roster" game per year rather than seven.
Imagine a world in which those shitty games then didn't make money. Why, maybe all the ridiculous amounts of money spent on giving Madden 11 more shoelace detail and graphical advertising textures on the knocked-out teeth could go instead into making some interesting and fun games.
You want to play football? Go outside. Grab a ball. Find some friends. They're probably just as out of shape as you are, couch potato, so it'll be an even match.
I have stood by watching subordinates get treated this way, by those who didn't realize I was nearby. I have seen overly entitled-feeling "users" go so far as to insist that (for example) the tech go to THEIR house, and work on THEIR personal computer and THEIR personal network, on the tech's personal time, to try to resolve an issue with telecommuting that was clearly the result of their own bloody incompetence (and possibly also that of the install tech or "good friend" they had set up their home network).
Let's be clear here: I am speaking of a large number of users who, by the time someone walks in their door, are already being abusive. They are this way because upper/middle management feels somehow that treating IT personnel as if they were the aforementioned "corporate slave" or "house n****r" is an appropriate way to behave. And this comes from situations that are sometimes business-serious (in which case we will do everything in our power to get a resolution as expeditiously and correctly, concepts that are regrettably sometimes somewhat mutually exclusive, as possible) and are sometimes "you've got to be shitting me, grow the fuck up" situations.
I have seen emails in which an entire department of personnel was accused of "never having anything work" and "never doing their jobs" because someone didn't have a body in the door within 5 minutes of a direct email (which violated proper contact policy anyways) about their fucking game not working during their lunch break, during a time when there was a major cleanup in process due to a boob one floor down not following proper safety practices and letting a worm loose. That's the kind of shit I am speaking of.
Are IT personnel supposed to behave in a professional manner? Hell yes. Does that mean that treating them with disrespect is ok? Hell no.
Obviously you haven't yet heard about the ridiculously shitty 4.2 system updater nintendo pushed that tends to brick even PRISTINE consoles...
Oh wait. I recognize that name. You're the guy who rants his head off about the utilities people use to replace their icons with something more entertaining.
I use disc backups to keep my system working correctly. Yeah, my experience is anecdotal, but when you see a 60-year-old with a pristine Wii that plays nothing but Wii Play have the drive fail at 1 year, 2 weeks old, you get suspicious of the drive's quality. Am I sure there are people who use them to steal games? Yeah. Am I sure they're jerks? Yeah. Does that mean I want to ban hammers because some assholes will use them to break car windows and steal car stereos rather than just drive nails into wood? No.
>90% of people using homebrew hacks to bypass console copy protection are in it for the warez games
Oh really? I'd love to see some backup for that claim. The Wii's shitty, underengineered DVD-rom drive has a pretty high failure rate (seen 4 of 10 blow out so far, counting friends/family who purchased the thing). Nintendo will charge you ~$100 (after shipping) to get it repaired, or you can go buy a new one (and then go through the hassle of trying to transfer your account and downloads).
Alternatively, a USB hard drive (as low as $25 depending on size) and simple tools can let you rip your discs to a hard drive, preventatively. This then gives you the awesome benefits of:
#1 - reducing wear and tear on your DVD drive.
#2 - reducing wear and tear on the discs themselves (especially nasty with the grabby slot-loader mechanism).
#3 - reducing load times on the games.
#4 - Being able to switch games without having to either (a) go to the locked cabinet to get the next one and put this one back or (b) figure out where your toddler hid the disc you want.
I for one can't see a downside to setting this up. $25 of preventative maintenance/upgrading is SO worth it.
Now, companies buy website templates for sixty bucks non-exclusive (three grand exclusive) and they're sitting in a server room at a place called Dreamhost or Hostgator.
Getting hacked regularly by some turd who wants to take over the server to make into a warez repository, spam relay, look around for credit card records, or replace all the images with "I kno u dont want 2 see thiz but herez tha ded iraqi babies tha ebil US killz."
The content is maintained via a CMS run by the Marketing secretary.
Who barely knows how to spell, let alone write, and thus the site looks incredibly unprofessional. But hey, you get what you pay for. And the exec who set it up this way got a blowjob from the Marketing Boobs...er Secretary.
Employers and employees are using Gmail and other cloud-based e-mail systems because the lines between personal and work IT space have become so blurred.
Which works great right until either their net connection goes down, or Gmail has an outage, or AT&T's crappy network is shitting again, and they're bugging the IT guy to "FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE."
Nobody needs help printing anymore, because an entire generation has been raised on the Internet and personal computer systems
Right up until they jam the printer, or come up with a document with nonstandard margins, or do 1001 other things that the lusers always do.
The level of competence in the average office is still right about zero. The difference today is that rather than having respect for the skills of those who can actually handle technology, the lusers have been told they have the right to treat IT staff as somewhere between the House N****r and Corporate Slave. Think about it. Would you stand over the guy fixing your car yelling "FIX IT FASTER I WANT IT NOW FIX IT FIX IT"? No? IT staff get that crap all day long. They are stuck in the no-win scenario wherein if required preventative maintenance means taking something offline for a couple hours, they are yelled at, but if they don't do the preventative maintenance, they get yelled at for not doing it when the system REALLY goes tits-up. They get nickeled and dimed for wanting to implement real security precautions such as proper firewalling and password security, but then blamed for "not doing enough" when Ditzy McSluttyboobs the secretary goes download-happy and unleashes half a dozen worms inside the corporate network.
And increasingly, they're supposed to be "supporting" systems spread over so many locations and they're only given proper admin control over their own locality, meaning that they get yelled at for telling someone that the problem is at Site #3, and yes, it's being worked on, and no, they don't have the access to fix it directly here at Site #2, and then Dipshit McBrainlesssuit sends an email to his bosses about how things are "always down" and "these guys aren't doing their jobs" in order to try to "force" the poor IT guy to "work faster" on something that isn't even under his control.
The amount of software I have a "cracked" version of running on my PC coincides in a scary manner (>85%) with the amount of software I have discs for sitting on my shelf.
The remainder I have either (a) lost the disc for or (b) had the floppy go bad.
Why so many of them cracked? In the case of games, so I don't have to get out the disc and use the DVD drive as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle just to play all the content that's been loaded to my hard drive anyways. In the case of the software, so I can disable the neverending stream of "UPDATE ME UPDATE ME UPDATE ME" crap and just use the software for what I need it for.
And don't tell me it really constantly needs to check for updates. It's phoning home just to fucking phone home.
They turn around and do this with "digital media" files, I don't bother with them any more. "Rights locker" my ass.
That doesn't help with snow-related icing, because snow doesn't "fall" like rain (more surface area, less density and so it's much more susceptible to slight wind gusts in any direction). Generally, it doesn't even "stick" in place unless you have either a barely-frozen "wet" snow in just-barely-freezing temps, or a surface with "just enough" heat to get the initial under-ice layer going.
There's plenty enough ambient blowing during a good snowstorm, and these LED's are putting out "just enough" heat that the first few snowflakes go through a slight partial melt and stick themselves on good and tight. Chicago Tribune has a great photo showing you what happened to the "blinders with no bottom" approach. Even if you squared off the hoods, you'd still have this issue.
The problems surrounding all three games are a point to make, however.
#1 - The "closest point", the 2001/2002 period (following the E3 2001 trailer) was a great time to "feature-lock" the game and get into "finish run" mode. Unfortunately, as I pointed out before, the failure of Daikatana was still fresh in gamer memory. That is why I point out Daikatana. When Prey finally released, DNF was probably too far gone; I surmise that the "best shot" for DNF to finish, following the E3 video, probably was harmed most by Broussard's memory of the Daikatana skewering. Remember, shortly after the 2001 E3 video, there were release shots/trailers for Unreal Tournament 2003, which was actually released October 2002... and at that time DNF were still trying to use a much older version of the Unreal engine. You can get the idea where Broussard would be worrying about releasing DNF in, say, March 2003 and getting the same "oh that is so old and dated" reaction because the UT2003 engine blew his game out of the water visually.
#2 - Like Daikatana, Duke Nukem had an amazing amount of hype to live up to. The original game had pretty big britches, even though its enemies were 2d sprites rather than 3d polygons. Broussard's crowings about what he wanted DNF to be didn't help. Had Eidos not launched the ridiculous "John Romero will make you his bitch" ad campaign, Daikatana's reviews might have been more in-line with what it was (a halfway-decent game with some interesting weapons, some good and some bad level design, plot/dialogue no worse than most FPS titles, and the misfortune to release on the very end of the lifecycle for its chosen graphics engine). Instead, it got hammered because it set the bar so high for itself. Likewise, releasing a mediocre Duke title could easily have elicited the same "we waited through 5+ years of bragging for THIS mediocre piece of shit???" reviews that dominated the listings of the Daikatana reviews.
In the end, Daikatana's reviews were bad because it became popular to diss Daikatana, regardless of the game's actual merits. One careless misstep in the DNF release could easily have brought on a similar event.
#3 - Oddly enough, the real problem for Ion Storm was that their "back burner" titles (Anachronox, Deus Ex) were so much better than their "frontline" titles (the oddly named Dominion:Storm Over Gift 3, Daikatana). Someone should have noticed this and refocused accordingly, but by the time that happened, it was too late and bad decisions hurt other followups (Anachronox never got the promised "other half of the story" sequel, and the Deus Ex sequel was hamstrung by Warren Spector's crosseyed vision of the crappy PS2 port's altered interface and his desire to oversimplify things way too fucking far).
Oddly enough, there were two "OMG this is taking forever" titles.
The other one was Daikatana. The much-maligned Daikatana actually was released. It went through one engine switch, similar to DNF (Quake to Quake II) because the Quake II engine offered it more to work with. It was "Feature-locked" in mid-1999, as the Wired article suggests that DNF should have been several times, and then worked on to finish and release.
Unfortunately, it was beat to the market by Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 (November and December 1999, respectively) and so the graphics for it seemed "antiquated" when it was released in May 2000. It also put its worst graphical foot first (the first level, also used for the demo, is legitimately trash that does NOTHING to show off some pretty nice design and atmosphere available in later levels, especially the Greek levels).
Arguably, this is the counterargument to the Wired article. DNF could have been locked down and "worked to completion." Yes, it could have been finished at several points. They probably should have. At the same time, one of the best times for this to happen (the early 2000's) would have had George Broussard point right to the release of Daikatana and the fact that Daikatana's lockdown had let it get one-upped out of the gate.
Let's be clear about this: had Daikatana been released in, say, October 1999, reviews would probably have been a lot better. Graphically, it got universally spiked based on the fact that the "new standard" was now the UT or Q3 engines, despite the fact that games licensing engines always have a delay. Storyline/gameplay-wise, it got spiked for hubris, the same sort of hubris that George Broussard and the DNF team had committed over and over again. They couldn't risk getting spiked the same way. Or rather, they could, but fear of doing so is what eventually doomed the game entirely.
What's really sad is the fact that they had actually, finally, feature-locked the game and were in the final-release run. The shutdown came in a "black flagged on the last lap" situation.
Al Gore Senior was one of the MafiAA's pet stooges who wrote/pushed the 1987 predecessor to the DMCA that tried to criminalize DAT tape unless it had a "copy protection flag" built in.
Amazing how some things never change, indeed!
Actually, bars and clubs (you know, places that serve alcohol till the wee hours of the morning) have been successfully sued for allowing drunk patrons to get into their cars and drive, when the patrons then got into wrecks and killed people. In at least a few states, the management is legally obliged to hold you and either call the cops (to pick you up) or a cab (to drive you home) if you insist on trying to drive when you are clearly intoxicated.
So yes, we have legal precedent. If you give the keys to the company van to your boss, knowing (and validated by other witnesses) that he is way too drunk to be driving, and he then goes out and kills someone, you are indeed guilty under legal term vicarious liability. This is sometimes called a "dram shop law." In many jurisdictions it extends to "letting your buddy drive drunk" as well.
Similarly, we have an odd case here:
#1 - He catches someone he believes to have been fired, snooping around and messing with City equipment after-hours.
#2 - His boss then demands the passwords - on an open speakerphone call into which anyone could be listening, and with the aforementioned snoop (whose clearances are not nearly certain) in on the call. Said boss has been responsible for previous security incidences and is NOT on the approved list to have the aforementioned passwords.
#3 - The City has a definite policy against revealing security information in insecure manner, and so he responds as he is supposed to within policy that he will give the passwords to the people on the list authorized to have them, when one of them comes to see him in person for the transfer (rather than on an unsecure speakerphone call into which anyone could be listening).
#4 - 8 days later, the mayor pays him a visit, at which point he cheerily gives over the passwords, as he had promised to do and within the security policy of the City.
Why is he in jail at this point? Hell, why was he in jail in the first place? Because some trumped-up technophobe at the DA is too close to the pointy-haired boss. No other reason. He did his job within policy, he gave the passwords to someone actually authorized to have them in a secure manner in keeping with policy. Everything else from that point on has been pure vindictive spite.
The water treatment plants were amongst the infrastructures that he disabled.
Uhm, come again?
Nothing was "disabled." Nothing was turned off. The situation was quite simply that the routers were secured down to the point where, without having admin credentials, someone could not CHANGE them. This is not "negligent", this is smart design.
Then we get to the exorbitant bail amount, the fact that he's being held in lockup without a bail reduction even though better than 3/4 of the case has been dropped due to lack of evidence, and the fact that he in fact gave the passwords up to a competent authority (the SF Mayor, aka his boss's boss's boss), and it looks like a kangaroo court in process. The DA's office doesn't have much, if anything, of a case but they're desperate to justify what they have done so far so they just keep pushing along.
I'll offer you a choice. You are being reassigned to a new area. Your "boss", the blithering idiot who still keeps his password in a sticky note on his monitor and who holds a bitchfest every time he's told he has to pick a password that actually conforms to complexity requirements rather than using "god", demands a ton of passwords with root-level access. You've seen numerous situations before where the "admin at the time" (e.g. you) has been turned into the fall guy for shit going wrong or security breaches, when it's obvious to anyone doing any research that the real problem is some moron boss with less brain cells than teeth, an MBA, and a napoleon complex.
What. Do. You. Do?
A lot of the stuff they put out is partnerships and they participate in many of the industry standard committees.
Yes, so that they can get their patents included in the "standard." It's part of the ongoing barrier-to-entry collusion on the part of the "standards committees"; if you're part of the committee, you generally have some form of patent-access trade so that you can produce the "standard-based" equipment with no patent cost. If a new guy wants to come along and enter the market, the "standards committee" members (of which $ony is one) all agree to hike their access costs to an exorbitant amount to keep real competition out of the marketplace.
They've sectioned up the market quite nicely to themselves, really. Note how LG is given de facto control of the entry-level segment, as long as they agree to not compete higher up.
You'd be surprised.
Beta, for instance, ran for nearly two decades. Not in the home VHS market (which was their original target) but in the home camera market (where the smaller size made for easier handheld video cameras) and the television broadcast market (where they don't care so much about having to switch tapes after a certain time limit, but DO care very much about getting higher, more reliable video quality). Those two sectors were still using Beta tapes for a very long time, in fact some more rural TV broadcasting stations were still using them right up until the limit of HDTV broadcast conversion.
DAT was exceedingly popular in Europe and Asia, just not in the US - and Sony took their money there quite happily. It took longer to get DAT into the US because the RIAA, and their pet senators like Al Gore Senior, pushed the predecessor to the DMCA, the Digital Audio Recorder Copycode Act of 1987, with the intent of making DAT carry a "copyright flag." Sound anywhere similar to MafiAA tactics today?
Memory Stick Duo hasn't gone away. It's not used on many non-Sony devices, but Sony sells enough cameras and PSPs that they can keep it on the shelves and make a fair bit of money back from third-party manufacturers like Sandisk who license it.
I could go on, but the point is, not all of their "failures" failed spectacularly, and they have had plenty enough successes to fund everything else they have wanted to do. Had they actually been smart and come up with a "flash once" Memory Stick Duo standard rather than trying to push UMD on the PSP for their games (or alternatively, had the PSP had RCA/Composite video and audio outputs in its original incarnation so that it could simply be plugged into a TV for playing those UMD movies), it's quite possible they could have had yet another proprietary standard that did "well enough."
Did you not note that I pointed out DVD was in the PS2 for the same reason?
Sony has a hand in the design of Blu-Ray. They, along with a set of other companies who also "contribute", gain a certain amount from the royalties on discs/players adhering to the blu-ray format, the same way they were connected to DVD.
Sony's setup has always been this way. They never implement an open, universal standard unless they absolutely, positively have to. Look at the amazing number of "standards" they've tried to develop themselves (Beta vs VHS, Compact Disc they had a hand in, DAT, Video8/Hi8, Minidisc vs Philips Digital Compact Cassette, Sony ATRAC vs MP3, Sony SACD vs DVD-Audio, MMCD vs SuperDensity till they gave in and "contributed" their patents to merge EFMPlus into the DVD standard with Toshiba, Memory Stick Duo vs SD, SDDS "Sony Digital Dynamic Sound" versus DTS and Dolby Digital, and of course the craptacular UMD format). Their goal is to make their proprietary "standard" the industry standard, and rake in the royalties, not unlike Microsoft's "embrace, extend, destroy" philosophy concerning open standards.
Look at the parallels to 1983.
Too many consoles? Check. We have the Wii, Xbox360, PS2, and PS3 all jockeying. Back in 1984 it was Coleco, Vectrex, Atari and Mattel (plus a bunch of people making Atari/Mattel clones) battling it out.
Loss of control of licensing? Well, sort of. It's not that there are nonlicensed titles, but the licensing is so wide open that the shovelware problem is just as bad. There are maybe (if you're optimistic) 20 good titles for the Wii, out of a selection of well over 300. Similar ratios exist for the other consoles (hell, there are maybe 5 good games for the PS3 at best).
Overhyping and epidemic of crappy movie/TV license titles? Oh, you'd better fucking believe it. Activision are at the forefront of "crappy movie games", but there are plenty from other sources. Between those and overhyped "blockbuster" titles that can only get a high reviewer score if it's bought and paid for (one of the reasons Gamerankings now only aggregates from the few big Gamespot/IGN-level sites, rather than including honest sites that actually played the real game instead of partial publisher-provided demos with a promise of "everything you don't like will be fixed so review as if it was"), what do you expect?
We had a minicrash a while back when Sega almost folded and turned themselves into a "software developer"; it's quite ironic that they're now primarily publishing on their former biggest rival's (Nintendo) console. Then again, no Sega game has been worthwhile in years; they even managed to crap up a few good Nintendo franchises (see F-Zero GX, a pale imitation of its predecessor).
The only reason that yet another console manufacturer hasn't fallen out has been that they're all bankrolled. Nintendo is the "too big to fail" of Japan and are very canny about making sure none of their manufacturing is at a loss, even though their hardware is far inferior (gimmicky controller that rarely sees its features truly used notwithstanding) to the other two. Microsoft and Sony have deep, deep pockets. Sony isn't about to let the PS3 go when they're counting on it to push Blu-Ray (their proprietary format), just like they counted on the handheld camera market (Betacam) to push Beta and the PS2 to push DVD back when Sony was one of the 6 companies that held licensing interest in the DVD format.
Outside answer? Yeah, we're looking at a crash. It may not be as total as the 1983 crash, but the market can't exist at the level of shovelware being pushed. Something has to give, a number of developers need to die, and certain overly abused lines need to get radically scaled back (Activision's yearly Tony Hawk crappings, for instance: after seeing Tony Hawk: Ride we might as well rename the series Tony Hawk: Bird Poo and get it over with).