I believe the way the transfer kit works is that you take the old hard drive and connect it to the dongle, plug the new hard drive into the console, then connect the usb cable coming from the dongle to the Xbox. There shouldn't be any concerns about this.
And the new Xbox will support external hard drives/usb drives exactly like the current one does. If you meant it won't support the old style xbox "external" hard drive, you're correct...but that's not an issue due to the transfer cable and/or external memory stick/hdd options.
I think it's supposed to be a play off of the word kinetic, which makes 100% sense. It connects you to the console through motion. I'm not saying it's a great name or anything, but at least it makes a lot of sense...
There is no 5 year rule. Seriously. A couple generations back we had that cycle because technology was advancing rapidly. Now game console technology is waiting for consumers to catch up and adopt HD. Believe it or not, there's still plenty of people who don't have HDTVs. Also, now that people are getting HDTVs they're more than happy with the graphics on their 360 and PS3. Sony said, out the gate, that they were aiming for a 10 year product cycle on the PS3. Personally, I'm glad that no one (except for Nintendo) is in a huge hurry to push anything new out. It's not time. I'd rather see a huge jump from current gen to next gen instead of putting out the same console, just with marginally better graphics.
Then we have the developer issues. These new consoles are complicated to program. Heck, many of the companies have just finally got their internal development tools tweaked out for this gen. They're finally getting to the point where they can start putting out games faster and put out interesting/experimental games without taking a huge risk. It's not like things used to be...games are a massive undertaking now due to the complexity of the games themselves and high definition art. Game developers need this time to actually start turning decent profit. It's been a rough few years...
Besides, are you really in a hurry to spend $500+ on a new console? Shorter console life cycles benefit no one at this point, especially consumers.
I agree to some extent. It's like going to Wal-Mart. It wouldn't be such a bad experience if it wasn't for the other shoppers there. And, while Wal-Mart has a number of problems, I think it's their customers that give themselves a bad name more than the store itself. Windows, when properly configured and used by someone who doesn't click all the wrong things, is perfectly stable. Most of the instability is due to crappy hardware and bad drivers. The users just make it a target for malware and there's so many people pecking away at windows that any vulnerability is easily found and targeted.
And, honestly, while I'm not a security expert (and there may be tons of security problems I don't know about)...Windows 7 really upped MSs game. It's a good, user friendly OS that just works. IMHO, MS is a different beast than it was 5 years ago. Windows 7 is great. Zune's were pretty good and Zune HD's are fantastic. Xbox 360 is great. It's funny what new leadership and 5 years can do for a lumbering giant.
Violent video games only affect the kind of people who kill small animals just to see what it feels like. It's a similar rush, just from different things. If you're predisposed to this kind of violence, watching Robocop probably has the same likely hood of pushing you over the edge as a videogame does. As much as people talk about how we're desensitized to violence from movies and videogames, the second a normal person sees someone shot or seriously injured in real life their stomach usually turns.
The internet has made it too hard to hide the crap that we don't want you to see. You see much less of what's going on at the local level these days because everyone's online reading all the whistleblowing in Washington, which is making Washington crooks reassess local extortion opposed to national extortion.
Right, but these laws aren't set up to prevent people from eventually getting a gun, they're set up to avoid people buying guns in the heat of passion and killing either themselves or others before having a chance to cool down. I couldn't tell you if it works or not, but logic would assume that it hasn't hurt and I doubt it's going to hurt anyone to wait a few days to pick up a new gun. I think the DRM bit is a little silly though. We're comparing something that needs to be handled with care and respect with something that you listen to.
Sony announces technology expo next week for new, even better than Blu-Ray format set for release in 5 years, throwing everyone in limbo wondering if they should stick with DVDs, buy into Blu-Ray and pray for backwards compatibility, or not buy a movie for 5 years. Monster cable to demo new cable technology, provides everyone with magnifying glasses so they can experience the difference.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
My big question is, if all of the small details that kept people guessing, theorizing, watching every week were unimportant to the actual plot of the show, why put them there? The writers have said time and time again that it's a character based show, but almost everyone actually watched it for the plot. It's almost as if they used the mystery as a way to sell the show that they actually wanted to make, a show about the characters.
And I would have been fine if it truly was a character based show as it was stated. The problem with that was that most of the characters were fairly uninteresting on their own. In most cases the sub-par acting didn't help much either. They all had backstory, but it was presented in a way where you thought "this is going to be important later, let me soak this in." I'm sure, down the road, we'll see books hit the shelves about the making of Lost, what went behind the decisions, the staffs real opinions and reactions. I'll be very interested in seeing if this was another case of "This is what we went out to make, but the network forced us to do this."
In the end, Lost was two very different shows fighting each other for air time, a mystery and a drama. Sometimes they intertwined, but not nearly enough...and it showed in the episodes. You would love or hate each depending on if you were in it for the sci-fi for the drama. It was a smart at the time...ANYONE could watch the show. The fatal flaw was not giving both themes a proper ending.
As far as Star Wars not explaining the force, Star Wars never set you up for an explanation. Half of lost was nothing but new puzzle/old puzzle solved. That's not a fair comparison.
1) First and foremost, the quality of most streaming video is crap. Even the "HD" stuff, when viewed on an HDTV, looks like junk even on a 10mbps connection. Then you have buffering issues during peak hours. Google could do better.
2) There's a chance you could subscribe to HBO, Showtime, etc. without cable service. Major plus for some people.
3) There's also still novelty to being able to turn on the tv and just watch what's playing. When I used to have cable, I could turn on the tv to any of those channels I listed and watch indefinitely, more or less regardless of content. That has a real worth to me. First run tv is a nice novelty as well.
4) Google is an advertisement firm. They're smart, too. I'm sure they could sell networks on an advertisment structure for on-demand content that would be much more smooth and less invasive than what everyone is currently using.
5) I'm not a fan of loading time. Current online tv has loading time. The advertisement even has loading time. Google could make this instant.
I don't mind paying for a quality product. Current online tv is not a quality product. Not to mention most, if not all, streaming options are clunky.
To each their own. Like most gadgets we talk about around here, this is a luxury product. The service I want is a luxury service. I can understand if others wouldn't want it, but people have been begging for ala carte tv for years and I'm one of them.
And the first of these is by getting in bed with the major cable networks and offering an ala carte subscription service. I can get the big 4 over the air. If I can stream Comedy Central, Sci Fi, Cartoon Network, and Discovery I'd gladly pay them a little of the money that I was paying for hundreds of channels I didn't care about with cable. What do you say, Google? You're the only one who has the backbone to even attempt this. I'll even buy a stupidly overpriced box to buy into it. My only concern is that they'll pack so much content into this that I'll never want to turn off my Plasma...and that would get kinda pricey.
This is more akin to suing the phone company if someone calls in a bomb threat on a pay phone. It's public use. It's not the phone company's fault that someone abused a privilege.
but back to the door locked analogy, until there's a law stating I must lock my door (in this case, secure my wifi) I'm going to leave it open. I don't mind people tapping in to check their e-mail. I mainly leave it open because I've got at least 6-7 devices that run off of wifi around my house and, no matter what router I buy or security settings I set, at least one of them hiccups unless it's an open connection...but I don't mind people tapping in every now and then, on accident or on purpose. Not to mention I don't feel like having guests/friends/family add new connection settings when they're over just to check their e-mail/web browse on their cell phone/laptop.
If someone's going to do something illegal, if my wifi is secured they're just going to go to one of the hundred other houses/restaurants/cafes/etc in the immediate area with open wifi and do it there.
WebOS doesn't run the best on the Palm Pixi. Dropping down to an older gen CPU with a slower clockspeed would probably be nearly unusable, especially with the low RAM of those older devices. Even if this did happen, the performance would be poor and they'd have to disable things that really MAKE the OS, such as multitasking....
Except, in this case, Nintendo DOESNT have the developers. They made this system that everyone in the world bought do to it being new, simple, and marketed brilliantly. Yet, Nintendo is still the only developer that's really putting out quality software for the console. The part where Nintendo failed was providing leadership and a braintrust to developers to help them figure out good ways to implement the technology and how to get around all the limitations of the system. I have my Wii and don't regret the purchase because Nintendo is one of my favorite game developers. I bought my 360 and PS3 for third party games (although I certainly do enjoy some of Sony's first party offerings). Nintendo's past three consoles (N64, GameCube, Wii) would have all been massive failures without Nintendo's first party games. One might argue that there never would have been a 360 without Halo, but the situation is much different with Sony and MS.
Oh, I'd take an iPad over a netbook anyday. That's not a hard task as I have want for a netbook. I also have zero want for an iPad, not because it's a bad product but because I have zero want to play in Steve Jobs playground with quarter slots on all the preapproved swings and slides. I really hope someone can manage to make a slider tablet where the keyboard slides out and configures the tablet into netbook factor, for when that 3rd mocha breve inspires you to pound out Shakespeare. Preferably in WebOS or Android flavors. They might not be as sweet, but they won't give you diabetes.
Basing pirating on jailbroken iPhones is ridiculous. About half the people I know who have iPhones have jailbroken their iPhones, but they did this so they could get functionality that SHOULD be built into the stupid thing to begin with. Basically, they use it as a way around Job's bureaucracy, not as a way to pirate games.
The thing is, HP isn't building this OS. Palm is still alive as a branch of HP. They're still writing WebOS. Palm has quite the history of writing Mobile OSs. I think they're pretty great at it, myself. Web OS is a fantastic product.
Tablets with WebOS WOULD be slick as hell. My only concern is form factor. If they leave palm in control of form factors, etc. then I have no worries. But when is the last time that you saw an HP laptop with good stylings or, at very least, a form factor that makes sense? I don't trust HP with intelligently designed products. I think this is part of the reason why everyone really hoped that HTC would snag up Palm. HTC actually learns from their mistakes.
The best thing that can come out of this deal for Palm is access to all of HPs fabrication plants. This might open a ton of doors for what Palm can do and will help them turn profit. It's hard being the small guy and making profit. When you have Daddy Warbucks with his hand on your shoulder, things change a bit...
You know the only reason the Japanese named it Ikaros instead of Icarus is so they could finally laugh at us mispronouncing something for once. Wow, the Abbot and Costello routine around this one almost writes itself....
While that guys usage is absurd, my Firefox memory usage is never under 200. It's the main reason I use Chrome now. I can kill off any processes that are slowing my system/browser down without killing everything. Sometimes my usage gets into the high 300s on my home computers, but I'm doing a lot more (browsing wise) at home than I am at work.
Apple is like Sony, they're willing to do anything to maintain the mystique of being "high end" even if they're pumping out products with problems. The main difference is that Apple isn't as massive in scale and size as Sony, so they haven't totally lost touch of the consumer base.
Either way, I think Apple is confusing the word "cheapness" with "affordability." If someone is selling an Apple product on a website and I can use a coupon code or something, that makes the product more affordable. Also, if I can choose which merchant I do business with, this doesn't cheapen anything, it gives me "freedom of choice," even if the retailer has signed a contract with Apple that bans them from selling the product less than MSRP. If anything, doing this makes Apple look greedy and doesn't reflect on whether I find their products cheap or not. "Apple, we keep our prices high because we want our products to maintain a luxurious mystique, not because we're greedy."
By this definition of parody, " a parody comments on the work itself," how many of "Weird" Al's songs would you actually consider a parody. I don't see many of them commenting directly on the song. In fact, they seem a lot more like the definition of satire (according to this article), "a satire uses the work to comment on something else." He used MacArthur Park to comment on Jurassic Park, I Was In Jeopardy to comment on Jeopardy, etc. In other words, by this definition I can use a Lady Gaga song to make a point that Lady Gaga is stupid; however, I could not use a Lady Gaga song to comment on "Bad Romances" in general.
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I believe the way the transfer kit works is that you take the old hard drive and connect it to the dongle, plug the new hard drive into the console, then connect the usb cable coming from the dongle to the Xbox. There shouldn't be any concerns about this.
And the new Xbox will support external hard drives/usb drives exactly like the current one does. If you meant it won't support the old style xbox "external" hard drive, you're correct...but that's not an issue due to the transfer cable and/or external memory stick/hdd options.
I think it's supposed to be a play off of the word kinetic, which makes 100% sense. It connects you to the console through motion. I'm not saying it's a great name or anything, but at least it makes a lot of sense...
There is no 5 year rule. Seriously. A couple generations back we had that cycle because technology was advancing rapidly. Now game console technology is waiting for consumers to catch up and adopt HD. Believe it or not, there's still plenty of people who don't have HDTVs. Also, now that people are getting HDTVs they're more than happy with the graphics on their 360 and PS3. Sony said, out the gate, that they were aiming for a 10 year product cycle on the PS3. Personally, I'm glad that no one (except for Nintendo) is in a huge hurry to push anything new out. It's not time. I'd rather see a huge jump from current gen to next gen instead of putting out the same console, just with marginally better graphics.
Then we have the developer issues. These new consoles are complicated to program. Heck, many of the companies have just finally got their internal development tools tweaked out for this gen. They're finally getting to the point where they can start putting out games faster and put out interesting/experimental games without taking a huge risk. It's not like things used to be...games are a massive undertaking now due to the complexity of the games themselves and high definition art. Game developers need this time to actually start turning decent profit. It's been a rough few years...
Besides, are you really in a hurry to spend $500+ on a new console? Shorter console life cycles benefit no one at this point, especially consumers.
I agree to some extent. It's like going to Wal-Mart. It wouldn't be such a bad experience if it wasn't for the other shoppers there. And, while Wal-Mart has a number of problems, I think it's their customers that give themselves a bad name more than the store itself. Windows, when properly configured and used by someone who doesn't click all the wrong things, is perfectly stable. Most of the instability is due to crappy hardware and bad drivers. The users just make it a target for malware and there's so many people pecking away at windows that any vulnerability is easily found and targeted.
And, honestly, while I'm not a security expert (and there may be tons of security problems I don't know about)...Windows 7 really upped MSs game. It's a good, user friendly OS that just works. IMHO, MS is a different beast than it was 5 years ago. Windows 7 is great. Zune's were pretty good and Zune HD's are fantastic. Xbox 360 is great. It's funny what new leadership and 5 years can do for a lumbering giant.
Violent video games only affect the kind of people who kill small animals just to see what it feels like. It's a similar rush, just from different things. If you're predisposed to this kind of violence, watching Robocop probably has the same likely hood of pushing you over the edge as a videogame does. As much as people talk about how we're desensitized to violence from movies and videogames, the second a normal person sees someone shot or seriously injured in real life their stomach usually turns.
The internet has made it too hard to hide the crap that we don't want you to see. You see much less of what's going on at the local level these days because everyone's online reading all the whistleblowing in Washington, which is making Washington crooks reassess local extortion opposed to national extortion.
Right, but these laws aren't set up to prevent people from eventually getting a gun, they're set up to avoid people buying guns in the heat of passion and killing either themselves or others before having a chance to cool down. I couldn't tell you if it works or not, but logic would assume that it hasn't hurt and I doubt it's going to hurt anyone to wait a few days to pick up a new gun. I think the DRM bit is a little silly though. We're comparing something that needs to be handled with care and respect with something that you listen to.
Sony announces technology expo next week for new, even better than Blu-Ray format set for release in 5 years, throwing everyone in limbo wondering if they should stick with DVDs, buy into Blu-Ray and pray for backwards compatibility, or not buy a movie for 5 years. Monster cable to demo new cable technology, provides everyone with magnifying glasses so they can experience the difference.
My big question is, if all of the small details that kept people guessing, theorizing, watching every week were unimportant to the actual plot of the show, why put them there? The writers have said time and time again that it's a character based show, but almost everyone actually watched it for the plot. It's almost as if they used the mystery as a way to sell the show that they actually wanted to make, a show about the characters.
And I would have been fine if it truly was a character based show as it was stated. The problem with that was that most of the characters were fairly uninteresting on their own. In most cases the sub-par acting didn't help much either. They all had backstory, but it was presented in a way where you thought "this is going to be important later, let me soak this in." I'm sure, down the road, we'll see books hit the shelves about the making of Lost, what went behind the decisions, the staffs real opinions and reactions. I'll be very interested in seeing if this was another case of "This is what we went out to make, but the network forced us to do this."
In the end, Lost was two very different shows fighting each other for air time, a mystery and a drama. Sometimes they intertwined, but not nearly enough...and it showed in the episodes. You would love or hate each depending on if you were in it for the sci-fi for the drama. It was a smart at the time...ANYONE could watch the show. The fatal flaw was not giving both themes a proper ending.
As far as Star Wars not explaining the force, Star Wars never set you up for an explanation. Half of lost was nothing but new puzzle/old puzzle solved. That's not a fair comparison.
1) First and foremost, the quality of most streaming video is crap. Even the "HD" stuff, when viewed on an HDTV, looks like junk even on a 10mbps connection. Then you have buffering issues during peak hours. Google could do better.
2) There's a chance you could subscribe to HBO, Showtime, etc. without cable service. Major plus for some people.
3) There's also still novelty to being able to turn on the tv and just watch what's playing. When I used to have cable, I could turn on the tv to any of those channels I listed and watch indefinitely, more or less regardless of content. That has a real worth to me. First run tv is a nice novelty as well.
4) Google is an advertisement firm. They're smart, too. I'm sure they could sell networks on an advertisment structure for on-demand content that would be much more smooth and less invasive than what everyone is currently using.
5) I'm not a fan of loading time. Current online tv has loading time. The advertisement even has loading time. Google could make this instant.
I don't mind paying for a quality product. Current online tv is not a quality product. Not to mention most, if not all, streaming options are clunky.
To each their own. Like most gadgets we talk about around here, this is a luxury product. The service I want is a luxury service. I can understand if others wouldn't want it, but people have been begging for ala carte tv for years and I'm one of them.
And the first of these is by getting in bed with the major cable networks and offering an ala carte subscription service. I can get the big 4 over the air. If I can stream Comedy Central, Sci Fi, Cartoon Network, and Discovery I'd gladly pay them a little of the money that I was paying for hundreds of channels I didn't care about with cable. What do you say, Google? You're the only one who has the backbone to even attempt this. I'll even buy a stupidly overpriced box to buy into it. My only concern is that they'll pack so much content into this that I'll never want to turn off my Plasma...and that would get kinda pricey.
This is more akin to suing the phone company if someone calls in a bomb threat on a pay phone. It's public use. It's not the phone company's fault that someone abused a privilege.
but back to the door locked analogy, until there's a law stating I must lock my door (in this case, secure my wifi) I'm going to leave it open. I don't mind people tapping in to check their e-mail. I mainly leave it open because I've got at least 6-7 devices that run off of wifi around my house and, no matter what router I buy or security settings I set, at least one of them hiccups unless it's an open connection...but I don't mind people tapping in every now and then, on accident or on purpose. Not to mention I don't feel like having guests/friends/family add new connection settings when they're over just to check their e-mail/web browse on their cell phone/laptop.
If someone's going to do something illegal, if my wifi is secured they're just going to go to one of the hundred other houses/restaurants/cafes/etc in the immediate area with open wifi and do it there.
WebOS doesn't run the best on the Palm Pixi. Dropping down to an older gen CPU with a slower clockspeed would probably be nearly unusable, especially with the low RAM of those older devices. Even if this did happen, the performance would be poor and they'd have to disable things that really MAKE the OS, such as multitasking....
Except, in this case, Nintendo DOESNT have the developers. They made this system that everyone in the world bought do to it being new, simple, and marketed brilliantly. Yet, Nintendo is still the only developer that's really putting out quality software for the console. The part where Nintendo failed was providing leadership and a braintrust to developers to help them figure out good ways to implement the technology and how to get around all the limitations of the system. I have my Wii and don't regret the purchase because Nintendo is one of my favorite game developers. I bought my 360 and PS3 for third party games (although I certainly do enjoy some of Sony's first party offerings). Nintendo's past three consoles (N64, GameCube, Wii) would have all been massive failures without Nintendo's first party games. One might argue that there never would have been a 360 without Halo, but the situation is much different with Sony and MS.
Oh, I'd take an iPad over a netbook anyday. That's not a hard task as I have want for a netbook. I also have zero want for an iPad, not because it's a bad product but because I have zero want to play in Steve Jobs playground with quarter slots on all the preapproved swings and slides. I really hope someone can manage to make a slider tablet where the keyboard slides out and configures the tablet into netbook factor, for when that 3rd mocha breve inspires you to pound out Shakespeare. Preferably in WebOS or Android flavors. They might not be as sweet, but they won't give you diabetes.
Basing pirating on jailbroken iPhones is ridiculous. About half the people I know who have iPhones have jailbroken their iPhones, but they did this so they could get functionality that SHOULD be built into the stupid thing to begin with. Basically, they use it as a way around Job's bureaucracy, not as a way to pirate games.
I put 5 hours into it, thought it was utter crap...from the battle system to the story...put it down, and never picked it back up.
The thing is, HP isn't building this OS. Palm is still alive as a branch of HP. They're still writing WebOS. Palm has quite the history of writing Mobile OSs. I think they're pretty great at it, myself. Web OS is a fantastic product.
In the new Pres, they've actually done away with the button. It's now, except for the volume controls and keyboard, a buttonless phone.
Tablets with WebOS WOULD be slick as hell. My only concern is form factor. If they leave palm in control of form factors, etc. then I have no worries. But when is the last time that you saw an HP laptop with good stylings or, at very least, a form factor that makes sense? I don't trust HP with intelligently designed products. I think this is part of the reason why everyone really hoped that HTC would snag up Palm. HTC actually learns from their mistakes.
The best thing that can come out of this deal for Palm is access to all of HPs fabrication plants. This might open a ton of doors for what Palm can do and will help them turn profit. It's hard being the small guy and making profit. When you have Daddy Warbucks with his hand on your shoulder, things change a bit...
You know the only reason the Japanese named it Ikaros instead of Icarus is so they could finally laugh at us mispronouncing something for once. Wow, the Abbot and Costello routine around this one almost writes itself....
While that guys usage is absurd, my Firefox memory usage is never under 200. It's the main reason I use Chrome now. I can kill off any processes that are slowing my system/browser down without killing everything. Sometimes my usage gets into the high 300s on my home computers, but I'm doing a lot more (browsing wise) at home than I am at work.
Apple is like Sony, they're willing to do anything to maintain the mystique of being "high end" even if they're pumping out products with problems. The main difference is that Apple isn't as massive in scale and size as Sony, so they haven't totally lost touch of the consumer base.
Either way, I think Apple is confusing the word "cheapness" with "affordability." If someone is selling an Apple product on a website and I can use a coupon code or something, that makes the product more affordable. Also, if I can choose which merchant I do business with, this doesn't cheapen anything, it gives me "freedom of choice," even if the retailer has signed a contract with Apple that bans them from selling the product less than MSRP. If anything, doing this makes Apple look greedy and doesn't reflect on whether I find their products cheap or not. "Apple, we keep our prices high because we want our products to maintain a luxurious mystique, not because we're greedy."
By this definition of parody, " a parody comments on the work itself," how many of "Weird" Al's songs would you actually consider a parody. I don't see many of them commenting directly on the song. In fact, they seem a lot more like the definition of satire (according to this article), "a satire uses the work to comment on something else." He used MacArthur Park to comment on Jurassic Park, I Was In Jeopardy to comment on Jeopardy, etc. In other words, by this definition I can use a Lady Gaga song to make a point that Lady Gaga is stupid; however, I could not use a Lady Gaga song to comment on "Bad Romances" in general.
I must have accidentally hit post anonymously. This wasn't meant to be an anonymous post.