It goes beyond that. In Canada, the courts have ruled that making available is legal. The analogy used in the decision was library photocopiers. It was said that making available a song was akin to a library having a photocopier, where it is still illegal to photocopy books in the library. So, it isn't illegal to make available in Canada.
And because this means that you're also not liable when somebody downloads a song off you, much in the same way that a library isn't liable when somebody photocopies a book in the library. Of course, it's still illegal to download, much like it's illegal to photocopy.
The problem is that it's impossible to prove that somebody downloaded something. You can prove that somebody HAS a file, because it's in their shared folder, but you can't reasonably prove that they downloaded the file and didn't just make the copy themselves, or get it some other way. The only way to truly prove it with a Kazaa-like program would be for the RIAA to be the actual person that you download from. And that's entrapment, and can't be used as proof. And it's not very reliable, as you'd need a large number of RIAA peers to be able to catch people downloading many songs.
BitTorrent systems might be a different story. Due to the way it works, it's far easier to prove this without entrapment. BitTorrent clients actually tell other peers that they're downloading the file. And they actively seek out other computers in the swarm to connect to, and tell them as well. The information is often also available directly from the tracker, since the client informs that as well. Your client is practically shouting out loud to anybody that will listen, hardly entrapment.
The ruling actually came from the CRIA (the RIAA's Canadian branch)'s attempts to force ISPs to give them the names of people who used certain IPs. The courts refused, saying that the proof (that the people had "made available" the recordings) was deemed insufficient, as it wasn't illegal to do so. BitTorrent will be another story.
It should be noted that one ISP, Videotron, gave up their client info anyhow. But they're owned by a company that sells music.
Consider the cost of bandwidth. Let's say you get a 100mbit Cogent line, for comparison. Cogent is a decent choice for a network like Steam that needs lots of cheap bandwidth. I'll use the 100mbit line just for price comparison's sake.
The line costs $3000 (Valve is a service provider) per month. It can handle in one month (if saturated), 32101GB. For a ~5GB game like BioShock, that's 6420 copies per month, at a cost of about 47 cents per copy.
Now, given, this is a simplification. People may (and do) download Steam games multiple times after purchase. And there's updates and free content to consider. But also consider that much of Valve's bandwidth for Steam is donated, and that Cogent's costs tend to drop significantly to a fraction of the advertised price when you're buying in bulk. And, as you mentioned, there are various P2P technologies that could significantly reduce the load.
Fact is, when you're selling things, bandwidth is cheap.
Owners of certain wireless network cards have been complaining since Vista's release that transferring data over the network causes the audio to stutter. I myself have this problem, and there is no movement toward new drivers for a fix.
It looks like notebook manufacturers released one set of drivers after Vista's release, and don't intend to provide any updates.
There are numerous issues with the game's demo that are probably present in the launch copy. For one thing, the game crashes for most people (all people?) with nVidia cards unless the newly released BioShock-specific driver is installed (or high quality shaders are disabled). That alone will probably cause a ton of confusion among less technically savvy users.
For another thing, the widescreen modes don't change the FoV, so going widescreen means the top/bottom of the screen are chopped off instead of the image being extended on either side. There's a lengthy thread on the official forums demanding a fix for this. It affects the 360 version as well.
Many stores released the game at midnight tonight, having held midnight launch sales (or being 24/7 stores). But for some reason, the game requires "activation" online (even for retail boxed copies), and the servers aren't up yet, so there's a ton of people complaining that they can't play the game that they bought legitimately on launch day.
The game is awesome, but this is definitely a rocky release. A patch for the game is already desperately needed. At the very minimum, if the game detects you're not running the newly released drivers (only released tonight at 7PM), it should disable high quality shaders entirely and inform you that you can't enable them until you upgrade your drivers. And, obviously, they need to fix the FoV issues.
It's not really the fault of the smaller DSL ISPs that you're too far from the CO. What you need is to convince Bell to install a stinger (remote DSLAM) closer to you to reduce your loop distance.
You also may want to try ADSL2+ service, if it's supported in your area. After about 5000m loop distance, speeds (and reach) is higher than traditional ADSL. And if you can get an ADSL2+ ISP that supports Annex L (ReADSL, I have no idea if Bell does), that'll extend the reach even further, providing higher speeds than ADSL2+ after about 3500m.
Of course, these aren't great speeds we're talking about here, but I'd rather have a 1mbit connection that was stable than a 5mbit connection that sucked.
Maybe there are other ADSL2+ providers than Bell in your area. I know that Colba.net services downtown Montreal and one CO in Toronto, for example. They have their own equipment colocated in Bell's COs.
Additionally, static IPs are overrated. You should try a dynamic DNS service such as dyndns.org. What does it matter if you have a dynamic IP if foo.ath.cx (or whatever) always points to the right IP address?
On the contrary, IDE ports are very important, as they can serve as a flash memory port. Your two choices are either a nice DOM (Disk On Module), which is essentially a flash card that plugs directly into an IDE port, or a CompactFlash adapter.
Even if there was a SATA option available, due to the nature of a SATA plug, it would probably have to be attached by a cable and not physically mounted on the motherboard by pins like a DOM or flash adapter would be.
I'd agree with you on PS/2, though. It's a dead format, and if you REALLY need to plug a PS/2 keyboard/mouse into a computer that lacks PS/2 ports, you can buy PS/2 to USB adapters for about $10 CAD that work exceptionally well (even with KVMs).
You also include WiFi in your list. That's quite illogical, as a WiFi radio would take up a significant amount of space (especially with the required shielding), produce extra heat, draw extra power, and probably wouldn't be useful to enough people. If you want to go down that route, you're better off just putting a MiniPCI or MiniPCIe port on the board so that a wireless radio (or other device) could be added with minimal fuss.
And, why two SODIMM slots? Not only would that consume a ton of extra space, it doesn't seem to be very useful. A single SODIMM slot should give you up to 2GB of memory capacity. Do you really need more than 2GB of RAM with such a slow processor? If you do, you're talking an edge case that is probably less common than people who use the ports you think should be removed.
Actually, they were all identically easy to flash up until they switched them to vxworks to save money with the v5 hardware. And even then, there was the WRT54GL v1.0 and v1.1 that were just as easy to flash as before.
So, no, they didn't get "progressively worse to flash". When they forked the models, one fork was just as easy to flash as before, and one was harder. Then again, this would only matter to somebody who continuously bought new models without paying attention to if they were buying the Linux models orn ot.
Voyager was my favourite of all the myriad series, so obviously not everybody shares your opinions.
On the other hand, it really was tending to get repetitive, and I do eagerly await this new movie. I expect it to be fresh.
It's a bit unfortunate they decided to get rid of EVERYBODY involved with the previous franchise, though. Michael Westmore did a great job on makeup...
You don't need to be a large site to spread yourself out. Even if you're just big enough to be able to afford $100-200 USD per month in hosting costs, you can do at least reasonably effective redundancy...
Roundrobin between the two servers means that in the event of an outage, only 50% of requests are denied, and you can change the DNS records (with a low TTL, I'd hope) and be switched over entirely to the surviving server within minutes. And that's just with two cheap budget dedicated servers in commodity datacenters...
I mean, throw one box up at ThePlanet in Dallas, another one up at iWeb in Montreal (Hah! Multi-country redundancy) and you've got yourself a pretty darned good chance of surviving ANY disaster. I mean, Quebec (Montreal) and Texas (Dallas) both have their own interconnects too, so one of those giant power outages that took out the eastern US/Canada a few years back (Except Quebec) wouldn't even affect both locations.
But I know very little about this sort of thing. So maybe my idea of zero-budget failover with DNS is stupid, somebody fill me in.
And to be honest, people who buy the PC version at retail are either stupid or ignorant (or on dialup).
They think that they're getting something concrete, that they're avoiding perceived problems with Steam. In fact, all they get is some DVDs with the Steam GCF cache files. In other words, they're still subject to the Steam system, and are in the exact same boat as somebody who bought it online. Considering buying the games on Steam is cheaper for the exact same thing (and really, the retail version isn't a usable game as shipped without Steam), the only possible reason anybody would have good reason to buy at retail is if they are stuck on dialup. And even then, they'd be better off saving themselves the retail premium, and buying the game on Steam and borrowing the GCF files from a friend to avoid the download off Steam.
Zero-configuration, works from within the OS unlike the DOS version, added support for TCP/IP, etc. The TCP/IP support meant that while PC users were limited to LANs, dialup, nullmodem cables, or KALI, Mac users could play over the net without any extra software. Although IRC was used to organize games.
If you're comparing to the DOS version, no worries about VESA drivers or whatever, or freeing up enough space in the first 640k of memory, no sound-card settings with IRQs and DMAs or anything, it really was zero-config.
That said, I'm a PC user now, and have been for at least a decade. But back in the day, the Mac port running on System 7 was a dream.
It should be noted that WarCraft 2 shipped as a dual-platform disc. That is, Mac and PC versions both on the same CD. Not for the entire lifetime of the product, but the discs started being dual-platform fairly early in the lifecycle, IIRC.
If this means that Blizzard did the port in-house (which makes sense, since I had a Mac, and having played both the PC and Mac ports from the same disc, the Mac port was quite a bit better, though we missed out on the classic "YOUH SOUND CAHD WUHKS PUHFECTLEE" audio test), then rather than starting to do their ports in-house, they would have been returning to doing it that way.
Diablo was also dual-platform, IIRC, but I'm not actually a hundred percent sure of that. I seem to recall using my disc both on my PC and at a friend's house on his Mac, but I'm not certain of it like I am with WC2. I'd have to check my Diablo disc.
Despite the wasted space from the per-ROM emulators, I haven't heard any widespread complaints about filling the Wii's 512MB of storage space. Granted, the SD card storage option is only good for backing up games, and playing a game stored on an SD card requires that you copy it back to the Wii, but still, people seem happy with the status quo on that account.
I'd wager there's a reason they chose the route they did. I can think of a few.
Perhaps it was easier for them to take one emulator and tweak it in source to work best for a specific game rather than trying to support profiles with enough flexibility to do what they wanted. Remember that those general purpose emulators you're talking about are the result of many years of hard work on the part of their authors, and they still don't get a hundred percent compatibility.
Perhaps they wanted the guarantee that tweaks made to the emulator to make one game work wouldn't break any other games. After all, once you purchase a VC game, it can't be allowed to stop working simply because Nintendo rolled out a new version of the emulator that fixes some other game. They likely need each game's emulator to be static for reliability reasons.
Perhaps they're pulling some crazy tricks on a per-game basis, and they don't want that code in the emulator being used by other games. At least some (or maybe all?) N64 games render at 640x480, four times the resolution of the N64 (which was 320x240). Some games have features added or removed. That might have been done through patching the ROM, or through the emulator. Different games interact with the hardware in different ways. Some mainstream emulators have enormous lists of per-game tweaks to get everything working, and often still have to resort to trickery to get games working "well enough". There's also the vast quantity of different hardware to support, all those umpteen accelerator chips that were put into various SNES carts, for example, or the different mechanisms that different games used for saves.
Regardless of the reason, I think the guarantee of a game that works now will always work to be a big benefit of having one emulator per ROM. If I buy a VC game today, I know it's always going to work. While PC-based emulators are great, they can't promise that a future patch won't break (or change the behaviour of) games.
Just keep checking Toys and Games - Special Deals and One-time Offers. It was online for at least 90 days.
costco.ca doesn't have that section. And on costco.com (which probably doesn't ship to Canada anyhow), it's actually "New Items & Limited Time Offers", not "Special Deals and One-time Offers".
Just lazy, eh? Showing up to multiple stores once or twice a week to buy the thing is hardly lazy. The problem is that any store that gets them sells out within minutes.
Walmart might be a good bet, except they almost certainly don't get their shipments at the same time as they do in the US. I've heard rumors they get them Tuesday mornings... while I'm at work.
We don't have GameStop in Montreal. Or in Canada, I'd imagine. And my local EB Games Boutique has had a sign up in the window for the past five months that says, roughly translated from French, "Wii out of stock indefinitely."
I've been poking around other stores too, no luck. It isn't so easy when none of the stores actually know when shipments are going to arrive. They arrive randomly, in very small quantities.
Right. You obviously never bothered to check if any of those stores even SELL the Wii online.
Costco (US): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself Costco (Canada): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself Walmart (US): Only has the $600 bundle. Sold out. Walmart (Canada): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself. Target (US): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself. Target (Canada): There is no Target in Canada.
What was that about problem solved? You'll see the same situation at pretty much any online store. If they carry it, they're out of stock.
The free-until-June deal originally seemed awesome. Until I realized that every store around here still sells out the Wii instantly the moment they have any in stock.
There's a good chance that by the time the deal expires in June, it will still be almost impossible to find a Wii, and those of us that have been TRYING to buy one since launch day will have been screwed by Opera for not adjusting their deal to account for this problem.
Many products used in homebrew on the DS are manufactured in China, even when designed by western teams. I wonder, does Nintendo consider such flash carts and loaders to be "counterfeit" products?
Even worse, most DVD rips were ~700MB, and perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of people.
With improvements in compression (h.264) over what we were dealing with last time (better MPEG-4 implementations like xvid by the end), one can expect reasonable quality on a 720p rip at about double the size. You've got a 2.66x increase in resolution from DVD up to 720p HD, and with the improvement in compression quality (and the fact that artifacts get less noticeable the smaller they are), I think doubling the bitrate is sufficient.
You then get two-CD encodes that most people (read: the average computer user) thinks is OK. h.264 has in-loop deblocking too, which goes a long way to appeasing the average person.
Still, DVD+/-R is the new popular format. Bandwidth has increased. As HDDVD/Bluray rips become more commonplace, I expect 1080p rips will most likely be released to fit onto a single-layer DVD, or about 4.4GB. Ignoring any consideration of quality, people like the convenience of a movie fitting perfectly onto their preferred optical format.
So, yeah, you're correct, the "it's too large" argument doesn't hold any water today. You can already download 20GB copies of HDDVDs off the net, and many people do. Downloading something one quarter that size isn't a problem.
From what I understand, most large ISPs don't actually pay for (most of?) their connections. They arrange peering agreements with other large ISPs that are mutually beneficial to both parties.
I'd imagine that most of the cost is the infrastructure costs to maintain the backbone (which they would own), not paying per connection per month.
They also used compression not unlike the concepts behind animated GIF for the FMVs. You could probably fit the entire game on a single CD if ever FF7PC were opensourced and could be adapted to use more processor intensive (and more recent) compression. That's not the point, though, the point is you can just shove the discs onto a stick and go at it.
You can even fit all the FFVII discs on a 4GB stick.
Still, let's not undersell the DS as far as emulation goes. Anything of the SNES generation or older is fair game there, although I doubt there'd be any cost savings due to the cost of a homebrew cart like the MML combined with the cost of flash. Still, the Lite is more portable, and if I just really want to pay, say, Rock & Roll Racing on the go, then the DS is a bit more practical to shove in a pocket (and it's easier to get homebrew on it than the PSP). It's just the cost...
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It goes beyond that. In Canada, the courts have ruled that making available is legal. The analogy used in the decision was library photocopiers. It was said that making available a song was akin to a library having a photocopier, where it is still illegal to photocopy books in the library. So, it isn't illegal to make available in Canada.
And because this means that you're also not liable when somebody downloads a song off you, much in the same way that a library isn't liable when somebody photocopies a book in the library. Of course, it's still illegal to download, much like it's illegal to photocopy.
The problem is that it's impossible to prove that somebody downloaded something. You can prove that somebody HAS a file, because it's in their shared folder, but you can't reasonably prove that they downloaded the file and didn't just make the copy themselves, or get it some other way. The only way to truly prove it with a Kazaa-like program would be for the RIAA to be the actual person that you download from. And that's entrapment, and can't be used as proof. And it's not very reliable, as you'd need a large number of RIAA peers to be able to catch people downloading many songs.
BitTorrent systems might be a different story. Due to the way it works, it's far easier to prove this without entrapment. BitTorrent clients actually tell other peers that they're downloading the file. And they actively seek out other computers in the swarm to connect to, and tell them as well. The information is often also available directly from the tracker, since the client informs that as well. Your client is practically shouting out loud to anybody that will listen, hardly entrapment.
The ruling actually came from the CRIA (the RIAA's Canadian branch)'s attempts to force ISPs to give them the names of people who used certain IPs. The courts refused, saying that the proof (that the people had "made available" the recordings) was deemed insufficient, as it wasn't illegal to do so. BitTorrent will be another story.
It should be noted that one ISP, Videotron, gave up their client info anyhow. But they're owned by a company that sells music.
Consider the cost of bandwidth. Let's say you get a 100mbit Cogent line, for comparison. Cogent is a decent choice for a network like Steam that needs lots of cheap bandwidth. I'll use the 100mbit line just for price comparison's sake.
The line costs $3000 (Valve is a service provider) per month. It can handle in one month (if saturated), 32101GB. For a ~5GB game like BioShock, that's 6420 copies per month, at a cost of about 47 cents per copy.
Now, given, this is a simplification. People may (and do) download Steam games multiple times after purchase. And there's updates and free content to consider. But also consider that much of Valve's bandwidth for Steam is donated, and that Cogent's costs tend to drop significantly to a fraction of the advertised price when you're buying in bulk. And, as you mentioned, there are various P2P technologies that could significantly reduce the load.
Fact is, when you're selling things, bandwidth is cheap.
Owners of certain wireless network cards have been complaining since Vista's release that transferring data over the network causes the audio to stutter. I myself have this problem, and there is no movement toward new drivers for a fix.
It looks like notebook manufacturers released one set of drivers after Vista's release, and don't intend to provide any updates.
BioShock is a single-player game, though. There's no question of certain players having unfair advantages.
There are numerous issues with the game's demo that are probably present in the launch copy. For one thing, the game crashes for most people (all people?) with nVidia cards unless the newly released BioShock-specific driver is installed (or high quality shaders are disabled). That alone will probably cause a ton of confusion among less technically savvy users.
For another thing, the widescreen modes don't change the FoV, so going widescreen means the top/bottom of the screen are chopped off instead of the image being extended on either side. There's a lengthy thread on the official forums demanding a fix for this. It affects the 360 version as well.
Many stores released the game at midnight tonight, having held midnight launch sales (or being 24/7 stores). But for some reason, the game requires "activation" online (even for retail boxed copies), and the servers aren't up yet, so there's a ton of people complaining that they can't play the game that they bought legitimately on launch day.
The game is awesome, but this is definitely a rocky release. A patch for the game is already desperately needed. At the very minimum, if the game detects you're not running the newly released drivers (only released tonight at 7PM), it should disable high quality shaders entirely and inform you that you can't enable them until you upgrade your drivers. And, obviously, they need to fix the FoV issues.
It's not really the fault of the smaller DSL ISPs that you're too far from the CO. What you need is to convince Bell to install a stinger (remote DSLAM) closer to you to reduce your loop distance.
You also may want to try ADSL2+ service, if it's supported in your area. After about 5000m loop distance, speeds (and reach) is higher than traditional ADSL. And if you can get an ADSL2+ ISP that supports Annex L (ReADSL, I have no idea if Bell does), that'll extend the reach even further, providing higher speeds than ADSL2+ after about 3500m.
Of course, these aren't great speeds we're talking about here, but I'd rather have a 1mbit connection that was stable than a 5mbit connection that sucked.
Maybe there are other ADSL2+ providers than Bell in your area. I know that Colba.net services downtown Montreal and one CO in Toronto, for example. They have their own equipment colocated in Bell's COs.
Additionally, static IPs are overrated. You should try a dynamic DNS service such as dyndns.org. What does it matter if you have a dynamic IP if foo.ath.cx (or whatever) always points to the right IP address?
On the contrary, IDE ports are very important, as they can serve as a flash memory port. Your two choices are either a nice DOM (Disk On Module), which is essentially a flash card that plugs directly into an IDE port, or a CompactFlash adapter.
Even if there was a SATA option available, due to the nature of a SATA plug, it would probably have to be attached by a cable and not physically mounted on the motherboard by pins like a DOM or flash adapter would be.
I'd agree with you on PS/2, though. It's a dead format, and if you REALLY need to plug a PS/2 keyboard/mouse into a computer that lacks PS/2 ports, you can buy PS/2 to USB adapters for about $10 CAD that work exceptionally well (even with KVMs).
You also include WiFi in your list. That's quite illogical, as a WiFi radio would take up a significant amount of space (especially with the required shielding), produce extra heat, draw extra power, and probably wouldn't be useful to enough people. If you want to go down that route, you're better off just putting a MiniPCI or MiniPCIe port on the board so that a wireless radio (or other device) could be added with minimal fuss.
And, why two SODIMM slots? Not only would that consume a ton of extra space, it doesn't seem to be very useful. A single SODIMM slot should give you up to 2GB of memory capacity. Do you really need more than 2GB of RAM with such a slow processor? If you do, you're talking an edge case that is probably less common than people who use the ports you think should be removed.
Actually, they were all identically easy to flash up until they switched them to vxworks to save money with the v5 hardware. And even then, there was the WRT54GL v1.0 and v1.1 that were just as easy to flash as before.
So, no, they didn't get "progressively worse to flash". When they forked the models, one fork was just as easy to flash as before, and one was harder. Then again, this would only matter to somebody who continuously bought new models without paying attention to if they were buying the Linux models orn ot.
Voyager was my favourite of all the myriad series, so obviously not everybody shares your opinions.
On the other hand, it really was tending to get repetitive, and I do eagerly await this new movie. I expect it to be fresh.
It's a bit unfortunate they decided to get rid of EVERYBODY involved with the previous franchise, though. Michael Westmore did a great job on makeup...
You don't need to be a large site to spread yourself out. Even if you're just big enough to be able to afford $100-200 USD per month in hosting costs, you can do at least reasonably effective redundancy...
Roundrobin between the two servers means that in the event of an outage, only 50% of requests are denied, and you can change the DNS records (with a low TTL, I'd hope) and be switched over entirely to the surviving server within minutes. And that's just with two cheap budget dedicated servers in commodity datacenters...
I mean, throw one box up at ThePlanet in Dallas, another one up at iWeb in Montreal (Hah! Multi-country redundancy) and you've got yourself a pretty darned good chance of surviving ANY disaster. I mean, Quebec (Montreal) and Texas (Dallas) both have their own interconnects too, so one of those giant power outages that took out the eastern US/Canada a few years back (Except Quebec) wouldn't even affect both locations.
But I know very little about this sort of thing. So maybe my idea of zero-budget failover with DNS is stupid, somebody fill me in.
And to be honest, people who buy the PC version at retail are either stupid or ignorant (or on dialup).
They think that they're getting something concrete, that they're avoiding perceived problems with Steam. In fact, all they get is some DVDs with the Steam GCF cache files. In other words, they're still subject to the Steam system, and are in the exact same boat as somebody who bought it online. Considering buying the games on Steam is cheaper for the exact same thing (and really, the retail version isn't a usable game as shipped without Steam), the only possible reason anybody would have good reason to buy at retail is if they are stuck on dialup. And even then, they'd be better off saving themselves the retail premium, and buying the game on Steam and borrowing the GCF files from a friend to avoid the download off Steam.
Zero-configuration, works from within the OS unlike the DOS version, added support for TCP/IP, etc. The TCP/IP support meant that while PC users were limited to LANs, dialup, nullmodem cables, or KALI, Mac users could play over the net without any extra software. Although IRC was used to organize games.
If you're comparing to the DOS version, no worries about VESA drivers or whatever, or freeing up enough space in the first 640k of memory, no sound-card settings with IRQs and DMAs or anything, it really was zero-config.
That said, I'm a PC user now, and have been for at least a decade. But back in the day, the Mac port running on System 7 was a dream.
It should be noted that WarCraft 2 shipped as a dual-platform disc. That is, Mac and PC versions both on the same CD. Not for the entire lifetime of the product, but the discs started being dual-platform fairly early in the lifecycle, IIRC.
If this means that Blizzard did the port in-house (which makes sense, since I had a Mac, and having played both the PC and Mac ports from the same disc, the Mac port was quite a bit better, though we missed out on the classic "YOUH SOUND CAHD WUHKS PUHFECTLEE" audio test), then rather than starting to do their ports in-house, they would have been returning to doing it that way.
Diablo was also dual-platform, IIRC, but I'm not actually a hundred percent sure of that. I seem to recall using my disc both on my PC and at a friend's house on his Mac, but I'm not certain of it like I am with WC2. I'd have to check my Diablo disc.
Despite the wasted space from the per-ROM emulators, I haven't heard any widespread complaints about filling the Wii's 512MB of storage space. Granted, the SD card storage option is only good for backing up games, and playing a game stored on an SD card requires that you copy it back to the Wii, but still, people seem happy with the status quo on that account.
I'd wager there's a reason they chose the route they did. I can think of a few.
Perhaps it was easier for them to take one emulator and tweak it in source to work best for a specific game rather than trying to support profiles with enough flexibility to do what they wanted. Remember that those general purpose emulators you're talking about are the result of many years of hard work on the part of their authors, and they still don't get a hundred percent compatibility.
Perhaps they wanted the guarantee that tweaks made to the emulator to make one game work wouldn't break any other games. After all, once you purchase a VC game, it can't be allowed to stop working simply because Nintendo rolled out a new version of the emulator that fixes some other game. They likely need each game's emulator to be static for reliability reasons.
Perhaps they're pulling some crazy tricks on a per-game basis, and they don't want that code in the emulator being used by other games. At least some (or maybe all?) N64 games render at 640x480, four times the resolution of the N64 (which was 320x240). Some games have features added or removed. That might have been done through patching the ROM, or through the emulator. Different games interact with the hardware in different ways. Some mainstream emulators have enormous lists of per-game tweaks to get everything working, and often still have to resort to trickery to get games working "well enough". There's also the vast quantity of different hardware to support, all those umpteen accelerator chips that were put into various SNES carts, for example, or the different mechanisms that different games used for saves.
Regardless of the reason, I think the guarantee of a game that works now will always work to be a big benefit of having one emulator per ROM. If I buy a VC game today, I know it's always going to work. While PC-based emulators are great, they can't promise that a future patch won't break (or change the behaviour of) games.
You mean, Linux has documentation that isn't a man page or a '-h' switch?!
I tried to pre-order in October, but ever store had sold-out their pre-orders.
Found it at Costco
Is it This?
Hello Kitty® 128MB MP3 Player? No. That's not it.
Just keep checking Toys and Games - Special Deals and One-time Offers. It was online for at least 90 days.
costco.ca doesn't have that section. And on costco.com (which probably doesn't ship to Canada anyhow), it's actually "New Items & Limited Time Offers", not "Special Deals and One-time Offers".
Just lazy, eh? Showing up to multiple stores once or twice a week to buy the thing is hardly lazy. The problem is that any store that gets them sells out within minutes.
Walmart might be a good bet, except they almost certainly don't get their shipments at the same time as they do in the US. I've heard rumors they get them Tuesday mornings... while I'm at work.
We don't have GameStop in Montreal. Or in Canada, I'd imagine. And my local EB Games Boutique has had a sign up in the window for the past five months that says, roughly translated from French, "Wii out of stock indefinitely."
I've been poking around other stores too, no luck. It isn't so easy when none of the stores actually know when shipments are going to arrive. They arrive randomly, in very small quantities.
Right. You obviously never bothered to check if any of those stores even SELL the Wii online.
Costco (US): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself
Costco (Canada): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself
Walmart (US): Only has the $600 bundle. Sold out.
Walmart (Canada): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself.
Target (US): Doesn't sell the Wii console itself.
Target (Canada): There is no Target in Canada.
What was that about problem solved? You'll see the same situation at pretty much any online store. If they carry it, they're out of stock.
The free-until-June deal originally seemed awesome. Until I realized that every store around here still sells out the Wii instantly the moment they have any in stock.
There's a good chance that by the time the deal expires in June, it will still be almost impossible to find a Wii, and those of us that have been TRYING to buy one since launch day will have been screwed by Opera for not adjusting their deal to account for this problem.
Many products used in homebrew on the DS are manufactured in China, even when designed by western teams. I wonder, does Nintendo consider such flash carts and loaders to be "counterfeit" products?
Even worse, most DVD rips were ~700MB, and perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of people.
With improvements in compression (h.264) over what we were dealing with last time (better MPEG-4 implementations like xvid by the end), one can expect reasonable quality on a 720p rip at about double the size. You've got a 2.66x increase in resolution from DVD up to 720p HD, and with the improvement in compression quality (and the fact that artifacts get less noticeable the smaller they are), I think doubling the bitrate is sufficient.
You then get two-CD encodes that most people (read: the average computer user) thinks is OK. h.264 has in-loop deblocking too, which goes a long way to appeasing the average person.
Still, DVD+/-R is the new popular format. Bandwidth has increased. As HDDVD/Bluray rips become more commonplace, I expect 1080p rips will most likely be released to fit onto a single-layer DVD, or about 4.4GB. Ignoring any consideration of quality, people like the convenience of a movie fitting perfectly onto their preferred optical format.
So, yeah, you're correct, the "it's too large" argument doesn't hold any water today. You can already download 20GB copies of HDDVDs off the net, and many people do. Downloading something one quarter that size isn't a problem.
From what I understand, most large ISPs don't actually pay for (most of?) their connections. They arrange peering agreements with other large ISPs that are mutually beneficial to both parties.
I'd imagine that most of the cost is the infrastructure costs to maintain the backbone (which they would own), not paying per connection per month.
They also used compression not unlike the concepts behind animated GIF for the FMVs. You could probably fit the entire game on a single CD if ever FF7PC were opensourced and could be adapted to use more processor intensive (and more recent) compression. That's not the point, though, the point is you can just shove the discs onto a stick and go at it.
You can even fit all the FFVII discs on a 4GB stick.
Still, let's not undersell the DS as far as emulation goes. Anything of the SNES generation or older is fair game there, although I doubt there'd be any cost savings due to the cost of a homebrew cart like the MML combined with the cost of flash. Still, the Lite is more portable, and if I just really want to pay, say, Rock & Roll Racing on the go, then the DS is a bit more practical to shove in a pocket (and it's easier to get homebrew on it than the PSP). It's just the cost...