Up until very recently, the 360 outsold the PS3. Not only with hardware but with software units pushed. While the Wii outsold everyone hardware wise, they undersold everyone software-wise, it it depends on which rubric you're using for success here. At this point Microsoft and Sony have basically both tied each other in the race. Sure, outside of North America and parts of Europe Microsoft did poorly, but that just goes to show how important the North American market is to the videogame industry. If you don't sell a single console outside of North America, but you dominate in North America, you're still doing pretty fantastic.
Yup. And, seriously, I can't be the only one pissed off that they're getting 2gbps for the same price as most of us are paying for 10mbps. That's absurd. And I get nastygrams from the cable company when I watch too much Netflix (sorry, can't justify paying an extra $70 for a bunch of channels I don't want and a cable box).
I agree, this is nothing but a news site trying to make news. If you want the real story, do an article about how people no longer use computers at home because their cell phone does everything they really need. Unless you're a student or a creative type, you're probably only turning on your computer a couple times a month to write an e-mail, print coupons, or edit a photo. And, for the typical uses, an old computer works just fine.
People don't upgrade their computers for a new OS, they upgrade their computer because it's broken, painfully slow, or there's something it can't do. There hasn't been any real NEW functionality added to computers in AGES. People would rather take that money and buy gadgets (aka, tablets and cell phones) rather than upgrade a computer they barely use. While gaming rigs are on the rise (because the PC gaming market is improving quite a bit) and Mac sales are on the rise (it doesn't take much to improve sales of niche products), the home PC market is receding because people just don't need them. Heck, desktops are fairly close to becoming extinct.
Sound is more than numbers. You realize that just as much of the sound of a record comes from the cartridge than comes from the record itself, just like a cd will sound different dependant on the DAC it's run through. Also, if you're getting surface noise on your LPs, you're doing it wrong.
I'm not one of those people who think that vinyl is better than cd, it's just different. To be honest, the main reason I'm into vinyl is because there's so much pre-90s music that just sounds crap on cd because of trends in mixing and mastering. As someone with a high end rig, there's advantages and disadvantages to each format.
The biggest issue for AMD is that consumers don't understand the market, and there's little AMD can do to change the opinion at this point. Are Intel processors, as a whole, faster than AMD? You bet. They're also pretty efficient as well. People know this, they're not dumb. But what they don't understand is that when they're buying that low end $400-500 laptop, it's not all about processor power. AMD's line of APUs are a phenominal value to the consumer. It gives the low end buyer all the CPU they need and great baked in graphics to boot. In the long run, the extra boost in graphics over the Intel HD3000/4000 line makes a pretty significant difference.
Lets face it, unless you're doing extreme gaming or doing a lot of audio/video work, you just don't need an i7. Or even i5. An i3 or AMD chip is going to be good enough. If people knew they could save money, go AMD, and actually have a reasonable chance of being able to play modern games, I think the choice would be obvious. Unfortunately, those Intel vs AMD benchmarks are all most consumers know to look at.
I feel the same way. I can pay them $8 a month for the privilege of streaming free Hulu content over my Xbox/Blu-Ray player, yet when I actually GIVE them money for this privilege, they take away access to half the crap I wanted to watch. Really?
Fortunately, Hulu realizes this is a problem (bad forsight on negotiating contracts on their part) and they're working to make all content available on all platforms. It still kinda irritates me that the $8 will still only be a courtesy fee for using their content on certain devices and slightly outrages me that I still have commercials. For the time being, I'll just hook my laptop up to the tv.
Ehh, Matt Smith is more like Tennant's quirky, ugly brother. They're not too far apart in acting styles, although Smith does get a little more introspective than Tennant did. The only way Smith is more like the old Doctors is the fact that he dresses more like an old Doctor.
We're talking about Gimp and OpenOffice not cutting it. Gimp is an exercize in frustration due to it's absurd GUI. OpenOffice is a fantastic product, but if you're dealing with heavy formatting with multiple authors, it doesn't always work out so well...
But, let's be real. If Open Office doesn't cut it for you, you're going to want MS Office. If Gimp isn't cutting it, you're going to want Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. I recognize that there are commercial software packages for Linux, some of them very good, but few of them for mainstream users.
And, of course, you can dual boot or even use Wine to run some Windows programs on Linux, but this isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about Linux for the mainstream. And, to my original point, most of these free ware Linux packages are open source and are available on Windows. I know because I use a lot of them on Windows on a daily basis.
Actually, I wish more project managers understood this. GUI tasking usually goes to graphic designers, who are the worst possible people for the task. They're most concerned about aesthetic than functionality. If the project is small enough where you can't hire a dedicated UI person (someone with a background in UI and/or psychology), then give the task to a tech writer. The tech writer is usually the one person on a project who sees the whole picture because they have to document the entire thing and share in the end users frustration.
To be fair, most of those 50 or so software packages you speak of are also available on the Windows platform for free. The difference is that if you decide you need a more robust solution, you can buy a more robust solution. On Linux, you're basically stuck with that free software package.
1) Mobile devices sell games to a different audience, people who want distractions on their mobile devices. Consoles sell games to people who want an immersive experience. 2) Of course mobile devices sell more games than consoles. Everyone has a cell phone these days and games range from free to $10. In other words, you're bored on your couch or the doctors office, you impulse buy cheap distractions. Console games cost much more, but also offer much more. While a mobile user might buy 3 games every month or so, a console owner might only buy a new game every few months. With games that take upwards of 40 hours to beat, they last a while. Not to mention the most popular console games now are online games with huge replay value. 3) There is plenty of room on the market for portable consoles. The iPhone isn't going to kill them. Gamers want games with depth, your average mobile user wants a distraction. Completely different audience.
I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the fact that mobile users and gamers are two different audiences. Remember, core distinction: distraction vs. game with depth.
Right. And Google really doesn't care if any of these ideas actually work and get implemented, as long as they patent all the work and eventually troll patent cash down the line for unfinished research. If you think that Google's in 95% of these projects for anything other than the patents they'll churn out as the result, you're sorely mistaken.
I think this is everyone's biggest issue with Open Source. It also seems to be the "least wanted" by programmers working on the projects.
As a professional tech writer, I've offered my services to a few open source projects that I'm a fan of but feel have a major lack of documentation. In each case I've been rejected. I've basically been told, "Our programmers write all of our documentation." The existing documentation in each case might as well say "just figure it out." I've offered GUI design in the past as well. Lets just say this didn't go over well at all.
It seems that Open Source is a programmers club more than anything. It's a real shame. There's so much talented work going into the development of the software that it would be nice if the rest of the work (documentation, gui design, graphic design, etc) was doled out to the experts. There's nothing wrong with admitting that you're not super talented at everything.
Please reread that last sentence and decide to delete it. It's racist and it's debatably slander towards Microsoft implying that they a) assume that all MLK Blvds are dangerous or in bad areas of town and b) their patent actually goes so far as to always exclude MLK Blvds from walking paths. You're not defending your point by linking to that St. Petersburg Times article, either.
I agree, the only time a "saturated market" exists is when you're talking about items that aren't often replaced or when people aren't buying those items. If the market was saturated, we'd see GOOD new cell phones showing up at discount outlets being sold for a loss. WebOS products weren't didn't fail because the market was saturated, they failed because of poor marketing and not listening to what consumers wanted hardware wise. While I liked the pebble design, the market wants 4"+ screens or Apple products. Had the hardware been more appealing to the masses, the OS would have caught up. I sold a number of people on WebOS products, despite their dislike of the hardware, after demoing the software. IMO, WebOS and WP7 are the only two mobile OSes that make sense from a usability perspective.
The issue isn't fast food, it's regular restaurants. At restaurants where you order an entre instead of ala cart items, the entre is usually way too big.
I just get the Southwestern chicken salad if I have to go to McDonalds. It's actually pretty good. They recently stopped putting transfats in their crispy chicken as well, so sometimes I'll even treat myself to that! People should stop slamming McDonalds so much. They actually do have a handful of fairly healthy menu alternatives. I'd actually RATHER eat their salad than their burgers, it just tastes better.
No it doesn't, it upscales your games from 720p or less to 1080p. The only games that are true 1080p are some live arcade games. If you're lucky, the title screen/menu screen in your games will be true 1080p. All the 1080p blurb on the back of the box means is that the xbox will upscale the game. Same goes with the PS3, there are a small handful of titles that will run native in 1080p (I want to say 3). 1080p will be a huge deal next generation, especially for those with large 1080p tvs or people who play at a desk attached to a monitor. You'll definitely be able to see the difference.
Why does everyone bill this the 720? This thing should be called the Xbox 1080. Everyone's billing their next gen systems as being 3x as powerful (360x3, do the math). Also, the next gen systems will all do 1080p. Despite marketing, there are only a small handful of current gen console games that run at 1080p. Even if the game states 1080p on the box, it's generally just stating that it will upscale the game to 1080p. The only real 1080p you're getting are menus and title screens.
Windows 9 is going to be everything and nothing at once. They're stripping the kernel to its core and use it as the basis for all their products. Desktop OS, mobile OS, Xbox, set top boxes, etc. It's going to be a great thing for MS because they'll be able to focus on improving a unified core. Basically, they're trying to do with Windows what everyone has been doing with Linux for years, make it something that's easily scalable and customizable across a family of products.
It's going to save MS a ton of money and allow them to focus on keeping their products secure and fast instead of constantly having to patch crappy modules of code that have been carried over for a decade. Microsoft is a lot smarter than people give them credit for, they're just such a huge entity that it takes a while for their plans to build inertia.
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Up until very recently, the 360 outsold the PS3. Not only with hardware but with software units pushed. While the Wii outsold everyone hardware wise, they undersold everyone software-wise, it it depends on which rubric you're using for success here. At this point Microsoft and Sony have basically both tied each other in the race. Sure, outside of North America and parts of Europe Microsoft did poorly, but that just goes to show how important the North American market is to the videogame industry. If you don't sell a single console outside of North America, but you dominate in North America, you're still doing pretty fantastic.
Yup. And, seriously, I can't be the only one pissed off that they're getting 2gbps for the same price as most of us are paying for 10mbps. That's absurd. And I get nastygrams from the cable company when I watch too much Netflix (sorry, can't justify paying an extra $70 for a bunch of channels I don't want and a cable box).
I agree, this is nothing but a news site trying to make news. If you want the real story, do an article about how people no longer use computers at home because their cell phone does everything they really need. Unless you're a student or a creative type, you're probably only turning on your computer a couple times a month to write an e-mail, print coupons, or edit a photo. And, for the typical uses, an old computer works just fine.
People don't upgrade their computers for a new OS, they upgrade their computer because it's broken, painfully slow, or there's something it can't do. There hasn't been any real NEW functionality added to computers in AGES. People would rather take that money and buy gadgets (aka, tablets and cell phones) rather than upgrade a computer they barely use. While gaming rigs are on the rise (because the PC gaming market is improving quite a bit) and Mac sales are on the rise (it doesn't take much to improve sales of niche products), the home PC market is receding because people just don't need them. Heck, desktops are fairly close to becoming extinct.
They're not talking about the triggers, they're talking about the 4 face buttons...
Sound is more than numbers. You realize that just as much of the sound of a record comes from the cartridge than comes from the record itself, just like a cd will sound different dependant on the DAC it's run through. Also, if you're getting surface noise on your LPs, you're doing it wrong.
I'm not one of those people who think that vinyl is better than cd, it's just different. To be honest, the main reason I'm into vinyl is because there's so much pre-90s music that just sounds crap on cd because of trends in mixing and mastering. As someone with a high end rig, there's advantages and disadvantages to each format.
You did read the part where they said it was a suicide mission, right?
The biggest issue for AMD is that consumers don't understand the market, and there's little AMD can do to change the opinion at this point. Are Intel processors, as a whole, faster than AMD? You bet. They're also pretty efficient as well. People know this, they're not dumb. But what they don't understand is that when they're buying that low end $400-500 laptop, it's not all about processor power. AMD's line of APUs are a phenominal value to the consumer. It gives the low end buyer all the CPU they need and great baked in graphics to boot. In the long run, the extra boost in graphics over the Intel HD3000/4000 line makes a pretty significant difference.
Lets face it, unless you're doing extreme gaming or doing a lot of audio/video work, you just don't need an i7. Or even i5. An i3 or AMD chip is going to be good enough. If people knew they could save money, go AMD, and actually have a reasonable chance of being able to play modern games, I think the choice would be obvious. Unfortunately, those Intel vs AMD benchmarks are all most consumers know to look at.
I feel the same way. I can pay them $8 a month for the privilege of streaming free Hulu content over my Xbox/Blu-Ray player, yet when I actually GIVE them money for this privilege, they take away access to half the crap I wanted to watch. Really?
Fortunately, Hulu realizes this is a problem (bad forsight on negotiating contracts on their part) and they're working to make all content available on all platforms. It still kinda irritates me that the $8 will still only be a courtesy fee for using their content on certain devices and slightly outrages me that I still have commercials. For the time being, I'll just hook my laptop up to the tv.
Don't look at yr junk unless you want the truth.
Ehh, Matt Smith is more like Tennant's quirky, ugly brother. They're not too far apart in acting styles, although Smith does get a little more introspective than Tennant did. The only way Smith is more like the old Doctors is the fact that he dresses more like an old Doctor.
We're talking about Gimp and OpenOffice not cutting it. Gimp is an exercize in frustration due to it's absurd GUI. OpenOffice is a fantastic product, but if you're dealing with heavy formatting with multiple authors, it doesn't always work out so well...
But, let's be real. If Open Office doesn't cut it for you, you're going to want MS Office. If Gimp isn't cutting it, you're going to want Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. I recognize that there are commercial software packages for Linux, some of them very good, but few of them for mainstream users.
And, of course, you can dual boot or even use Wine to run some Windows programs on Linux, but this isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about Linux for the mainstream. And, to my original point, most of these free ware Linux packages are open source and are available on Windows. I know because I use a lot of them on Windows on a daily basis.
Actually, I wish more project managers understood this. GUI tasking usually goes to graphic designers, who are the worst possible people for the task. They're most concerned about aesthetic than functionality. If the project is small enough where you can't hire a dedicated UI person (someone with a background in UI and/or psychology), then give the task to a tech writer. The tech writer is usually the one person on a project who sees the whole picture because they have to document the entire thing and share in the end users frustration.
To be fair, most of those 50 or so software packages you speak of are also available on the Windows platform for free. The difference is that if you decide you need a more robust solution, you can buy a more robust solution. On Linux, you're basically stuck with that free software package.
1) Mobile devices sell games to a different audience, people who want distractions on their mobile devices. Consoles sell games to people who want an immersive experience.
2) Of course mobile devices sell more games than consoles. Everyone has a cell phone these days and games range from free to $10. In other words, you're bored on your couch or the doctors office, you impulse buy cheap distractions. Console games cost much more, but also offer much more. While a mobile user might buy 3 games every month or so, a console owner might only buy a new game every few months. With games that take upwards of 40 hours to beat, they last a while. Not to mention the most popular console games now are online games with huge replay value.
3) There is plenty of room on the market for portable consoles. The iPhone isn't going to kill them. Gamers want games with depth, your average mobile user wants a distraction. Completely different audience.
I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the fact that mobile users and gamers are two different audiences. Remember, core distinction: distraction vs. game with depth.
Right. And Google really doesn't care if any of these ideas actually work and get implemented, as long as they patent all the work and eventually troll patent cash down the line for unfinished research. If you think that Google's in 95% of these projects for anything other than the patents they'll churn out as the result, you're sorely mistaken.
I think this is everyone's biggest issue with Open Source. It also seems to be the "least wanted" by programmers working on the projects.
As a professional tech writer, I've offered my services to a few open source projects that I'm a fan of but feel have a major lack of documentation. In each case I've been rejected. I've basically been told, "Our programmers write all of our documentation." The existing documentation in each case might as well say "just figure it out." I've offered GUI design in the past as well. Lets just say this didn't go over well at all.
It seems that Open Source is a programmers club more than anything. It's a real shame. There's so much talented work going into the development of the software that it would be nice if the rest of the work (documentation, gui design, graphic design, etc) was doled out to the experts. There's nothing wrong with admitting that you're not super talented at everything.
Please reread that last sentence and decide to delete it. It's racist and it's debatably slander towards Microsoft implying that they a) assume that all MLK Blvds are dangerous or in bad areas of town and b) their patent actually goes so far as to always exclude MLK Blvds from walking paths. You're not defending your point by linking to that St. Petersburg Times article, either.
I agree, the only time a "saturated market" exists is when you're talking about items that aren't often replaced or when people aren't buying those items. If the market was saturated, we'd see GOOD new cell phones showing up at discount outlets being sold for a loss. WebOS products weren't didn't fail because the market was saturated, they failed because of poor marketing and not listening to what consumers wanted hardware wise. While I liked the pebble design, the market wants 4"+ screens or Apple products. Had the hardware been more appealing to the masses, the OS would have caught up. I sold a number of people on WebOS products, despite their dislike of the hardware, after demoing the software. IMO, WebOS and WP7 are the only two mobile OSes that make sense from a usability perspective.
The issue isn't fast food, it's regular restaurants. At restaurants where you order an entre instead of ala cart items, the entre is usually way too big.
I just get the Southwestern chicken salad if I have to go to McDonalds. It's actually pretty good. They recently stopped putting transfats in their crispy chicken as well, so sometimes I'll even treat myself to that! People should stop slamming McDonalds so much. They actually do have a handful of fairly healthy menu alternatives. I'd actually RATHER eat their salad than their burgers, it just tastes better.
Don't worry, that was an typo on the editor's part. I clearly remember Hugh Jackman describing it like getting a "Fiero without a paint job."
No it doesn't, it upscales your games from 720p or less to 1080p. The only games that are true 1080p are some live arcade games. If you're lucky, the title screen/menu screen in your games will be true 1080p. All the 1080p blurb on the back of the box means is that the xbox will upscale the game. Same goes with the PS3, there are a small handful of titles that will run native in 1080p (I want to say 3). 1080p will be a huge deal next generation, especially for those with large 1080p tvs or people who play at a desk attached to a monitor. You'll definitely be able to see the difference.
Why does everyone bill this the 720? This thing should be called the Xbox 1080. Everyone's billing their next gen systems as being 3x as powerful (360x3, do the math). Also, the next gen systems will all do 1080p. Despite marketing, there are only a small handful of current gen console games that run at 1080p. Even if the game states 1080p on the box, it's generally just stating that it will upscale the game to 1080p. The only real 1080p you're getting are menus and title screens.
Windows 9 is going to be everything and nothing at once. They're stripping the kernel to its core and use it as the basis for all their products. Desktop OS, mobile OS, Xbox, set top boxes, etc. It's going to be a great thing for MS because they'll be able to focus on improving a unified core. Basically, they're trying to do with Windows what everyone has been doing with Linux for years, make it something that's easily scalable and customizable across a family of products.
It's going to save MS a ton of money and allow them to focus on keeping their products secure and fast instead of constantly having to patch crappy modules of code that have been carried over for a decade. Microsoft is a lot smarter than people give them credit for, they're just such a huge entity that it takes a while for their plans to build inertia.