and perhaps you will get a better perspective on this.
Microsoft cannot require a "license" for third party Messenger software anymore than it can require one for Open Office or Sun Office to interopt with Office files.
OK, they break the protocol for Messenger, look at the success AOL had keeping out the great unwashed from its IM service. Give it about two weeks to a month and everything will be back to normal.
You can't throw money at poverty and expect the problem to go away. The urban renewal projects in the inner cities of America proved that. The underlying reasons for poverty must be addressed.
Yes, a moon mission won't do a damn thing for poverty directly but it will move a nation forward technologically so that people that were once making carpets or driving taxis can now make rockets and drive spaceships. A poor nation technologically will result in a poor populace. Call centres and computer software engineering have pushed India incrementally ahead already, to deny those moves forward to "solve" the poverty issue is to simply perpetuate their impoverishment.
With the moves forward in technology and the education that surrounds such improvements you have a population that will not accept low paying jobs when they have skills far beyond them. In a few decades you have economic growth that will eventually push low paying jobs to other areas of the world; eventually and hopefully you end up with a world where Nike or Rebook can't make their shit anywhere for less than a reasonable wage.
Sorry, I was in rant mode. Yes, I meant less than half.
My KWh rate in Vancouver was around 4.5 cents/KWh when I left BC and my total electricity costs for a single bedroom apartment were around $23 a month. When I got here, the market rate was anywhere between 8-12 cents/KWh, depending on the season. I think the current rate is 14 cents/KWh, but I haven't checked my bill, I am afraid of sticker shock. Regardless of the KWh rate, we still pay the additional charges of tranmission cost, storage fees, consent fees, etc. that are not charged in regulated markets. There is no practical way to compare one companies electrical rates to another with the arbitrary nature of these additional charges. That is my main point, deregulation has brought more confusion than before.
In my opinion, it should be illegal to charge these additional fees; companies should be required to bill per unit or by monthly rate without the addition of a multitude of indeterminate charges. I really don't give a shit how much the "transmission fee" is, or the "storage rider" or whatever the fuck it's called this month. Charge me a market rate that reflects the cost of doing business and a measure of profit.
While I am at it, let's talk about NAFTA. If (or when) BC Hydro is privatized it is a one way street. Under NAFTA, a deregulated market must remain deregulated, there is no going back. If the electricty was required for the needs of Alberta or BC, tough luck, it still must be sold on the open market for anyone to buy.
I really pity those areas of the country that are considering deregulation. It simply amounts to more money out of your pocket and less respect and gratitude for the companies that provide my electricity.
I moved to Alberta from BC, to the left of Alberta on a map for those that don't know Canada, where the power is generally supplied by two companies, BC Hydro or West Koutenay Hydro (recently changed their name to something I can't remember). BC has abundant supplies of energy in the form of hydro electric power and depending on where you live you are supplied by one of these two companies.
My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh. On top of the KWh rate, I pay a consent fee and a storage rider and a whole host of bullshit fees that I did not see in BC because of REGULATION. I paid usage in KWh and that was it. I could even look on the meter and calculate my KWh usage and get a rough idea of what my bill was going to be (if you remember this from High School). You sure as hell can't do that here, who knows what the "storage rider" will be this month.
I have never understood the deregulation mentality; electricity is a necessity and business, especially high technology sectors, require and are attracted to cheap, reliable power. Deregulation has done none of that here in Alberta, costs are up and generation is down to maximize profit. I know several companies that locate themselves in BC due to the high demand they place on electricity, power that cannot be supplied by other provinces at such an attractive rate.
Now they are talking about partial deregulation of the BC market. Once again businesses small and large will get the shaft and the electrical producing companies will reap the rewards. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I don't know who is more at fault - the software developers for over-hyping their own product, the writer or editor for tying to write something sensational to overcome a jaded readership, or the reader for reading too much into what is essentially fluff. Maybe all the above? How often has a developer said, "Well, we hope to have advanced new AI in our upcoming release that will adjust itself to your skill level", that gets edited to, "Advanced new AI that adjusts to your skill level!"
It also depends on which gaming magazine or web site you regularly read. Some are truly dreck and some are fairly well written.
I've never understood how the Supreme Court derived the "community standard" from the Constitution.
Imagine if your other rights varied based on community standards- you may or may not have the right to remain silent, privacy, right to vote, etc. It seems utterly illogical and nothing less than a cop out. What if the community found Democratic election signs obscene, but not Republican? It may sound ridiculous, but most obscenity provisions are so vague that it may be entirely possible.
I find a lot of the crime comics downright evil, but when confronted by images and themes that offend me I am forced to think and that is something I value far more than whatever temporary revulsion I might have. My opinion of what they are or aren't should not affect the right of someone else to buy and enjoy them.
For individual price fixing to work, it has to appeal to the consumer on a number of possible levels:
- Product appeal
- Convenience
- Value (or apparent value). Why do you think all those do-dads on TV include "free" items? To build value into otherwise worthless junk.
- Impulse purchase
- Level of trust
- Time limited offers
Any experienced on-line purchaser or consumer usually has a rough idea how much certain items are worth, i.e. CDs, movies, etc. This is why I don't think price discrimination will feature large differences is price. It's easy enough just to call down to my favorite music store and ask how much a particular movie or CD is before I purchase on-line, or check other web sites. The point is, comparison shop. If you shop around, the most a price discriminator could get away with is a few dollars, not the amounts that some people have indicated here, but YOU HAVE TO SHOP AROUND. Whenever I am considering a large on-line purchase, I compare the price to what is offered at a local store.
The problem, of course, with shopping around is it entails effort and many want the web to be effortless, so they impulse buy or worse yet trust the deal that's offered to them without shopping. It's the same in the real world, you have to comparison shop.
What I think you will find instead of huge price fluctuations is package deals and specials tailored to the individual consumer. I see nothing wrong with that, actually it quite appeals to me. I regularly receive specials from an on-line electronics dealer that I frequent and have taken advantage of quite a few of these specials, after comparing prices first.
I too was looking for a TV and I did not care about PIP. I was at the point of purchasing a certain model when I decided I was going to look around some more. Lo and behold I found the same TV but a model down and no PIP. Was it worth the effort? Well, I did save $100. It did take me an extra week of looking, but I did save some money. For a lot of people that extra week of effort is not worth $100 and for my company pestering a computer manufacturer for a refund on an unused copy of Windows entails a similar effort.
Companies use this psychology against us, ubsurd or not.
This is a perfect case where the public will not pursue a refund out of inconvenience, even if they wipe the hard drive and install BSD, or Linux or whatever (admittedly a rare occurence). Such as my company, we have a handful of Windows machines- everything else is wiped clean and Linux is installed.
In the end, convenience wins out over principle. Most people would say their time is worth more than the $199 recovered here, but really what they are saying is the saved effort involved is worth more to them than the principle of recouping $199 for something they will never use.
We need principled (or persistent) people in a capitalist economy for it to function effectively. It's difficult to be a consumer these days and comparison shopping is almost impossible with coupons and rebates and prices that are but really aren't; most people just give up and take what's given to them.
I concur completely (no Star Trek joke intended). I have a Gamecube and Rogue Squadron and while the graphics are phenomenal the gameplay is pretty iffy, it's just too hard and bears little relation to the gameplay in Xwing or Tie Fighter, both superb games.
As for adventure games, Indiana Jones and Atlantis was another adventure game I devoured besides the Star Trek series; excellent music, characters and story. Dune II was also an fantastic game that was really the predecesor to Warcraft and Command and Conquer, I don't know if it was licensed, but it seemed to follow the theme of the book thoroughly.
The latest game that stands out for me is Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, for the same reasons as every other licensed game- immersion. You really feel like Indiana Jones, or Luke Skywalker or whomever -- these are the licensed games that deliver gameplay that allows for complete immersion. After all, that's what the player wants, to be the character they see in movies, books, or TV.
"Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers."
and further down the article:
"Okamoto said the method also appears to hold the most promise for dramatically boosting the performance of the next PlayStation. Game developers have said they would like the next console to have a thousand times the processing power of the PlayStation 2. There's no way to do that with hardware advances alone, he said.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data."
and from theinquirer.net: (not that you could trust a name like that)
"SOURCES SAID that the architecture of the Sony Playstation3 is patently clear when you've found the US patent that it filed September 26th last year. A reliable source close to Sony's plans explained the way the Playstation3 works to the INQUIRER.
He said that the computers are made of cells, each one containing a CPU, which will probably be a PowerPC, and eight APUs (vectorial processors) each with 128K of memory.
It will run at 4GHz, producing a not inconsiderable 256Gflops, with the cells connected to the central 64MB memory through a switched 1024 bit bus.
It's still not clear how many of these "cells" will be used in the Playstation3, but Sony reckoned some time ago it could be as many as one teraflop, probably making it a four cell architecture.
Optical links - perhaps even FireWire optical links - could be used to share computing power."
I suspect that Sony is deliberately vague on what the cell technology will do, but it appears to be a multiprocessor system with the capability of networked systems to spread the processing demands around.
how many people, realistically, will have high speed access to flesh out this technology? What happens if hardly anyone connects their machine to the Internet? Will games not play or run poorly?
I don't see it, hardly anyone is on-line now. It won't be that much better in 2005, although Sony is pushing it with the latest version of the PS2 dropping Firewire and adding an integrated network adaptor.
In a related article it was stated that DTV pays royalties of 6.5% of revenue for their digital broadcasts. I inferred from the article that traditional radio stations pay much less percentage wise. Canadian radio stations pay 1.4% of total revenue, if I am not mistaken.
Now, if we assume that the minimum royalty rate for a small web broadcaster of $2000 represents 6.5% of revenue then the RIAA assumes that a small webcaster produces about $31,00 of revenue per year, or about $2600 a month. The question is, does that seem like a reasonable assumption? I don't think any small webcaster makes anything close to that, if anything at all after salaries, equipment costs, etc. This leaves established radio stations or corporations with money as the only players in the game, small webcasters are completely out of it financially. I wonder what percentage of revenue the RIAA thinks $2000 dollars represents for a small webcaster.
Government should bear the cost
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Laws are enacted for the benefit of the public. One of the bedrocks of jurisprudence is that the law must be publicly known for it to have any benefit at all, otherwise ignorance would be used as a defence. Righly so, to ask the public to remit a fee to obtain a copy of the laws that we are to keep completely undermines this principle.
Yes, there is a cost in establishing certain standards. If you wish these standards to become law, you either must be willing to bear the cost or work with the government to fund the cost.
It completely baffles me that anyone would submit an idea to government for inclusion as a law and expect to retain ownership of that idea. Ubsurd.
I just checked Eternal Darkness out on Gamespot, it gets a fantastic review and the game looks fantastic. Sadly, almost no one I have talked to has ever heard of this game. I am going to have a peek for it at EB.
In fairness to the Cube, we do see pretty much the same games as you get on the Xbox, with some exceptions. It just seems that the heavily promoted games are the "kiddy" flavor that atracts families but not gamers.
I was speaking to some friends about the disparity in on-line gaming that you see between computers and consoles. Obviously, the almost ubiquitous presence of DSL or cable connections for computer users (at least in Canada) and the depth of market penetration for computers feeds the desire for on-line gaming.
If console users could participate in the same on-line games that computer users do, I think we would see a huge increase in on-line play for console owners. Sadly, the only console I see that has the technical and logistical capability is the Xbox. It would be fantastic if I could play Warcraft or similar with a friend regardless of the hardware used for the game.
I've looked at the on-line offerings for the PS2, GC and Xbox and by far the Xbox strategy is the most attractive. I know that with my subscription to Xbox Live and an on-line enabled game I can play on-line. The problem is even with the ease of Xbox Live I still do not necessarily want to invest hours of my life playing with complete strangers. It's a nice diversion, but it isn't the end-all-be-all that some companies think it will be. I can see Nintendo's point, to a degree, do they really want to invest all the time and energy into something that few people can either afford or have an interest in? It's the chicken and egg scenario, which comes first, the desire for on-line gaming or on-line games?
When Nintendo does go on-line, it should be a consistent experience like Xbox live coupled with a must have game like the Sims, or whatever.
Whatever does happen with the next console, actually right now, Nintendo needs to get their head out of the asses about adult games. Adults want adult driven games. No, I don't necesarily want to disembowel someone in a game, but give me something more than Pikmin, a little edge, give us the selection and a free hand to third party developers.
I love my Cube and I want to see it given a little more credence that it currently has.
Have you played this game? I got it on my GC demo disc and was mightily impressed. Soul Calibre II looks really good, but it lost its lustre after about half an hour for me. Anyone else I have shown the demo to has been impressed; one friend was so impressed with Viewtiful Joe he bought a GC that day (Zelda and Metroid Prime had a bit to do with it as well).
I am definitely going to buy it and I think it will do well. It fills a need that many games lack, namely playability. I find many 3D games feature amazing eye candy but poor playability, this games achieves both. It will be a winner.
Do you think sites like Google or Alta Vista likewise break the law? (such as their image search)
If so why, if not why?
Will you submit an article to that end?
It seems that whenever I pick up a newspaper and read an article on technology I invariably throw the article down in frustration. I realize that most reporters work very hard to write a readable, balanced story, but the difficulty I find with most mainstream media is the lack of the in-depth coverage. The more newspapers or TV news I watch the more I believe the media is attempting to foster emotion more than thought.
As a self described geek I find I have no real voice in the media so I turn to the Internet for the meat and potatoes of what I want and need for news, comment and information.
There are, obviously, newspapers and journalists that try and do get it right, but it seem the incessant pressure to sell something is working to make this obsolete. I am afraid that all we will be left with is tabloids and CNN.
Slashdot Mirror
and perhaps you will get a better perspective on this.
Microsoft cannot require a "license" for third party Messenger software anymore than it can require one for Open Office or Sun Office to interopt with Office files.
OK, they break the protocol for Messenger, look at the success AOL had keeping out the great unwashed from its IM service. Give it about two weeks to a month and everything will be back to normal.
and whether this a good thing or not.
You can't throw money at poverty and expect the problem to go away. The urban renewal projects in the inner cities of America proved that. The underlying reasons for poverty must be addressed.
Yes, a moon mission won't do a damn thing for poverty directly but it will move a nation forward technologically so that people that were once making carpets or driving taxis can now make rockets and drive spaceships. A poor nation technologically will result in a poor populace. Call centres and computer software engineering have pushed India incrementally ahead already, to deny those moves forward to "solve" the poverty issue is to simply perpetuate their impoverishment.
With the moves forward in technology and the education that surrounds such improvements you have a population that will not accept low paying jobs when they have skills far beyond them. In a few decades you have economic growth that will eventually push low paying jobs to other areas of the world; eventually and hopefully you end up with a world where Nike or Rebook can't make their shit anywhere for less than a reasonable wage.
That's my theory, but the hell do I know.
Went to check for updates today, just for the hell of it and the speed was a huge improvement over the old URL.
Sorry, I was in rant mode. Yes, I meant less than half.
My KWh rate in Vancouver was around 4.5 cents/KWh when I left BC and my total electricity costs for a single bedroom apartment were around $23 a month. When I got here, the market rate was anywhere between 8-12 cents/KWh, depending on the season. I think the current rate is 14 cents/KWh, but I haven't checked my bill, I am afraid of sticker shock. Regardless of the KWh rate, we still pay the additional charges of tranmission cost, storage fees, consent fees, etc. that are not charged in regulated markets. There is no practical way to compare one companies electrical rates to another with the arbitrary nature of these additional charges. That is my main point, deregulation has brought more confusion than before.
In my opinion, it should be illegal to charge these additional fees; companies should be required to bill per unit or by monthly rate without the addition of a multitude of indeterminate charges. I really don't give a shit how much the "transmission fee" is, or the "storage rider" or whatever the fuck it's called this month. Charge me a market rate that reflects the cost of doing business and a measure of profit.
While I am at it, let's talk about NAFTA. If (or when) BC Hydro is privatized it is a one way street. Under NAFTA, a deregulated market must remain deregulated, there is no going back. If the electricty was required for the needs of Alberta or BC, tough luck, it still must be sold on the open market for anyone to buy.
I really pity those areas of the country that are considering deregulation. It simply amounts to more money out of your pocket and less respect and gratitude for the companies that provide my electricity.
I moved to Alberta from BC, to the left of Alberta on a map for those that don't know Canada, where the power is generally supplied by two companies, BC Hydro or West Koutenay Hydro (recently changed their name to something I can't remember). BC has abundant supplies of energy in the form of hydro electric power and depending on where you live you are supplied by one of these two companies.
My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh. On top of the KWh rate, I pay a consent fee and a storage rider and a whole host of bullshit fees that I did not see in BC because of REGULATION. I paid usage in KWh and that was it. I could even look on the meter and calculate my KWh usage and get a rough idea of what my bill was going to be (if you remember this from High School). You sure as hell can't do that here, who knows what the "storage rider" will be this month.
I have never understood the deregulation mentality; electricity is a necessity and business, especially high technology sectors, require and are attracted to cheap, reliable power. Deregulation has done none of that here in Alberta, costs are up and generation is down to maximize profit. I know several companies that locate themselves in BC due to the high demand they place on electricity, power that cannot be supplied by other provinces at such an attractive rate.
Now they are talking about partial deregulation of the BC market. Once again businesses small and large will get the shaft and the electrical producing companies will reap the rewards. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Like ATI supports Linux anyway, although I hear the latest slate of drivers actually work.
Makes me happy that I chose Nvidia.
I don't know who is more at fault - the software developers for over-hyping their own product, the writer or editor for tying to write something sensational to overcome a jaded readership, or the reader for reading too much into what is essentially fluff. Maybe all the above? How often has a developer said, "Well, we hope to have advanced new AI in our upcoming release that will adjust itself to your skill level", that gets edited to, "Advanced new AI that adjusts to your skill level!"
It also depends on which gaming magazine or web site you regularly read. Some are truly dreck and some are fairly well written.
I've never understood how the Supreme Court derived the "community standard" from the Constitution.
Imagine if your other rights varied based on community standards- you may or may not have the right to remain silent, privacy, right to vote, etc. It seems utterly illogical and nothing less than a cop out. What if the community found Democratic election signs obscene, but not Republican? It may sound ridiculous, but most obscenity provisions are so vague that it may be entirely possible.
I find a lot of the crime comics downright evil, but when confronted by images and themes that offend me I am forced to think and that is something I value far more than whatever temporary revulsion I might have. My opinion of what they are or aren't should not affect the right of someone else to buy and enjoy them.
"A senior official overseeing the project acknowledged it could be intrusive and pledged to use it with restraint"
Perhaps this will be the great defense to the subjugation of our liberties: "But we used restraint!"
I feel better already, after all they're going to use restraint.
For individual price fixing to work, it has to appeal to the consumer on a number of possible levels:
- Product appeal
- Convenience
- Value (or apparent value). Why do you think all those do-dads on TV include "free" items? To build value into otherwise worthless junk.
- Impulse purchase
- Level of trust
- Time limited offers
Any experienced on-line purchaser or consumer usually has a rough idea how much certain items are worth, i.e. CDs, movies, etc. This is why I don't think price discrimination will feature large differences is price. It's easy enough just to call down to my favorite music store and ask how much a particular movie or CD is before I purchase on-line, or check other web sites. The point is, comparison shop. If you shop around, the most a price discriminator could get away with is a few dollars, not the amounts that some people have indicated here, but YOU HAVE TO SHOP AROUND. Whenever I am considering a large on-line purchase, I compare the price to what is offered at a local store.
The problem, of course, with shopping around is it entails effort and many want the web to be effortless, so they impulse buy or worse yet trust the deal that's offered to them without shopping. It's the same in the real world, you have to comparison shop.
What I think you will find instead of huge price fluctuations is package deals and specials tailored to the individual consumer. I see nothing wrong with that, actually it quite appeals to me. I regularly receive specials from an on-line electronics dealer that I frequent and have taken advantage of quite a few of these specials, after comparing prices first.
My 2 cents.
Thank you for making my point.
I too was looking for a TV and I did not care about PIP. I was at the point of purchasing a certain model when I decided I was going to look around some more. Lo and behold I found the same TV but a model down and no PIP. Was it worth the effort? Well, I did save $100. It did take me an extra week of looking, but I did save some money. For a lot of people that extra week of effort is not worth $100 and for my company pestering a computer manufacturer for a refund on an unused copy of Windows entails a similar effort.
Companies use this psychology against us, ubsurd or not.
This is a perfect case where the public will not pursue a refund out of inconvenience, even if they wipe the hard drive and install BSD, or Linux or whatever (admittedly a rare occurence). Such as my company, we have a handful of Windows machines- everything else is wiped clean and Linux is installed.
In the end, convenience wins out over principle. Most people would say their time is worth more than the $199 recovered here, but really what they are saying is the saved effort involved is worth more to them than the principle of recouping $199 for something they will never use.
We need principled (or persistent) people in a capitalist economy for it to function effectively. It's difficult to be a consumer these days and comparison shopping is almost impossible with coupons and rebates and prices that are but really aren't; most people just give up and take what's given to them.
I concur completely (no Star Trek joke intended). I have a Gamecube and Rogue Squadron and while the graphics are phenomenal the gameplay is pretty iffy, it's just too hard and bears little relation to the gameplay in Xwing or Tie Fighter, both superb games.
As for adventure games, Indiana Jones and Atlantis was another adventure game I devoured besides the Star Trek series; excellent music, characters and story. Dune II was also an fantastic game that was really the predecesor to Warcraft and Command and Conquer, I don't know if it was licensed, but it seemed to follow the theme of the book thoroughly.
The latest game that stands out for me is Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, for the same reasons as every other licensed game- immersion. You really feel like Indiana Jones, or Luke Skywalker or whomever -- these are the licensed games that deliver gameplay that allows for complete immersion. After all, that's what the player wants, to be the character they see in movies, books, or TV.
I know that with 17,000 PS2s I would not have to worry about replacing the DVD drive for about two years.
I would get a little nervous when I hit machine 16,999 around the end of year two.
Could you be a genius if you heard the following:
"Albert, get this chalk board out of the living room, NOW!"
"Johan Sebastian Bach stop that infernal racket this instant!"
"Rene! Cartesian my ass, help me with the laundry!"
I mean genius has it's limits.
From news.com:
"Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers."
and further down the article:
"Okamoto said the method also appears to hold the most promise for dramatically boosting the performance of the next PlayStation. Game developers have said they would like the next console to have a thousand times the processing power of the PlayStation 2. There's no way to do that with hardware advances alone, he said.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data."
and from theinquirer.net: (not that you could trust a name like that)
"SOURCES SAID that the architecture of the Sony Playstation3 is patently clear when you've found the US patent that it filed September 26th last year.
A reliable source close to Sony's plans explained the way the Playstation3 works to the INQUIRER.
He said that the computers are made of cells, each one containing a CPU, which will probably be a PowerPC, and eight APUs (vectorial processors) each with 128K of memory.
It will run at 4GHz, producing a not inconsiderable 256Gflops, with the cells connected to the central 64MB memory through a switched 1024 bit bus.
It's still not clear how many of these "cells" will be used in the Playstation3, but Sony reckoned some time ago it could be as many as one teraflop, probably making it a four cell architecture.
Optical links - perhaps even FireWire optical links - could be used to share computing power."
I suspect that Sony is deliberately vague on what the cell technology will do, but it appears to be a multiprocessor system with the capability of networked systems to spread the processing demands around.
Who knows what the end result will be, though.
how many people, realistically, will have high speed access to flesh out this technology? What happens if hardly anyone connects their machine to the Internet? Will games not play or run poorly?
I don't see it, hardly anyone is on-line now. It won't be that much better in 2005, although Sony is pushing it with the latest version of the PS2 dropping Firewire and adding an integrated network adaptor.
In a related article it was stated that DTV pays royalties of 6.5% of revenue for their digital broadcasts. I inferred from the article that traditional radio stations pay much less percentage wise. Canadian radio stations pay 1.4% of total revenue, if I am not mistaken.
Now, if we assume that the minimum royalty rate for a small web broadcaster of $2000 represents 6.5% of revenue then the RIAA assumes that a small webcaster produces about $31,00 of revenue per year, or about $2600 a month. The question is, does that seem like a reasonable assumption? I don't think any small webcaster makes anything close to that, if anything at all after salaries, equipment costs, etc. This leaves established radio stations or corporations with money as the only players in the game, small webcasters are completely out of it financially. I wonder what percentage of revenue the RIAA thinks $2000 dollars represents for a small webcaster.
Laws are enacted for the benefit of the public. One of the bedrocks of jurisprudence is that the law must be publicly known for it to have any benefit at all, otherwise ignorance would be used as a defence. Righly so, to ask the public to remit a fee to obtain a copy of the laws that we are to keep completely undermines this principle.
Yes, there is a cost in establishing certain standards. If you wish these standards to become law, you either must be willing to bear the cost or work with the government to fund the cost.
It completely baffles me that anyone would submit an idea to government for inclusion as a law and expect to retain ownership of that idea. Ubsurd.
I just checked Eternal Darkness out on Gamespot, it gets a fantastic review and the game looks fantastic. Sadly, almost no one I have talked to has ever heard of this game. I am going to have a peek for it at EB.
In fairness to the Cube, we do see pretty much the same games as you get on the Xbox, with some exceptions. It just seems that the heavily promoted games are the "kiddy" flavor that atracts families but not gamers.
Good point though.
I was speaking to some friends about the disparity in on-line gaming that you see between computers and consoles. Obviously, the almost ubiquitous presence of DSL or cable connections for computer users (at least in Canada) and the depth of market penetration for computers feeds the desire for on-line gaming.
If console users could participate in the same on-line games that computer users do, I think we would see a huge increase in on-line play for console owners. Sadly, the only console I see that has the technical and logistical capability is the Xbox. It would be fantastic if I could play Warcraft or similar with a friend regardless of the hardware used for the game.
Just an idea.
I've looked at the on-line offerings for the PS2, GC and Xbox and by far the Xbox strategy is the most attractive. I know that with my subscription to Xbox Live and an on-line enabled game I can play on-line. The problem is even with the ease of Xbox Live I still do not necessarily want to invest hours of my life playing with complete strangers. It's a nice diversion, but it isn't the end-all-be-all that some companies think it will be. I can see Nintendo's point, to a degree, do they really want to invest all the time and energy into something that few people can either afford or have an interest in? It's the chicken and egg scenario, which comes first, the desire for on-line gaming or on-line games?
When Nintendo does go on-line, it should be a consistent experience like Xbox live coupled with a must have game like the Sims, or whatever.
Whatever does happen with the next console, actually right now, Nintendo needs to get their head out of the asses about adult games. Adults want adult driven games. No, I don't necesarily want to disembowel someone in a game, but give me something more than Pikmin, a little edge, give us the selection and a free hand to third party developers.
I love my Cube and I want to see it given a little more credence that it currently has.
Have you played this game? I got it on my GC demo disc and was mightily impressed. Soul Calibre II looks really good, but it lost its lustre after about half an hour for me. Anyone else I have shown the demo to has been impressed; one friend was so impressed with Viewtiful Joe he bought a GC that day (Zelda and Metroid Prime had a bit to do with it as well).
I am definitely going to buy it and I think it will do well. It fills a need that many games lack, namely playability. I find many 3D games feature amazing eye candy but poor playability, this games achieves both. It will be a winner.
MORONIC with IRONIC.
Do you think he broke the law?
Do you think sites like Google or Alta Vista likewise break the law? (such as their image search)
If so why, if not why?
Will you submit an article to that end?
It seems that whenever I pick up a newspaper and read an article on technology I invariably throw the article down in frustration. I realize that most reporters work very hard to write a readable, balanced story, but the difficulty I find with most mainstream media is the lack of the in-depth coverage. The more newspapers or TV news I watch the more I believe the media is attempting to foster emotion more than thought.
As a self described geek I find I have no real voice in the media so I turn to the Internet for the meat and potatoes of what I want and need for news, comment and information.
There are, obviously, newspapers and journalists that try and do get it right, but it seem the incessant pressure to sell something is working to make this obsolete. I am afraid that all we will be left with is tabloids and CNN.