Mario kart provides no method of communication at all. Metroid Prime only allows you to talk with people you've met before, and only during the time for choosing game options.
Seriously, some of us actually prefer this. It's the really hardcore players that get into the whole "clan" thing - even instant messaging through a game console is pretty geeky. I mean you can talk about how many subscribers XBL has - you're still talking a couple million people out of a population of 300 million in this country, and it's been stuck at that same number for a long time now. (It's also counting people like me, who got a free subscription, never used it, and then let it lapse.) Online team play and online chat with random people are features for a) the very young, and/or b) the very hardcore.
I think one of the lessons you can take from the DS is that the mass market either doesn't mind, or actually prefers, to be without these features. One of the things that drove me away from XBL was just the sheer idiocy I was forced to endure, and I know I'm not the only one who feels that way. It got so I would actually disconnect my headset and try to play without it, but then I'd either get kicked out of games or not allowed in because you can tell who's not voice connected. So then I'd connect my headset but just leave it on the floor - worked a little better, but it's a stupid thing to have to do. The bottom line is while I want to be able to play against other people, I do not want to have to talk to or listen to them. I know I'm not alone in this - it may go against the hardcore gamer grain, but there is a lot of resistance among more casual players to being forced into this soup of mostly teenage male hormones.
I've always said that XBL is just a disaster waiting to happen. Someday, a teenage prostitution ring is going to be discovered operating through XBL and that'll pretty much be the end of that for MS. They'll be held liable, whatever their user agreement states. You can bet congress will take notice if the courts don't. Why would Nintendo want any part of that potential headache?
I think it's probably pretty smart to enable anyone to play online for free, but to sell some sort of microphone attacment to those who want it. So if you want to have your games with friends, or you want to use the service as a dating service or whatever, you can. But those of us who just want to play a quick game against a human without fuss and without having to deal with a bunch of morons can do so without being shunned because we've turned off a required piece of borg electronics.
Again, things have only risen in complexity since the days of the NES and prior (not a bad thing, of course). If anything has brought gaming to the masses, it's marketing - certainly not any change in ease of use.
You apparently have never played the Nintendo DS, nor heard anything about its current market dominance (whether or not you believe it competes directly with the Xbox 360, it is nevertheless outselling it worldwide by a factor of about 10 to 1).
You've also apparently never heard of the upcoming Wii, which will compete more directly with the 360.
Of course, I would argue that portable systems do compete directly with home systems, in pretty much the same way laptop computers compete with desktop computers. So regardless, Nintendo is changing the way games are played, and that's the real subtext behind this article. MS is a lot of talk about making games more accessible; their competition is actually doing something about it.
Ahmadinejad, like many people in the middle east, believes that the number of Jews killed by Germany during WWII is frequently greatly overstated. While, in the opinion of most (including myself), this is an unjustified viewpoint, it is certainly much more defensible than the "there is no holocaust" claim that a lot of people think he made.
Whether or not there was a holocaust is wholly dependent on the "number" of Jews killed. That's the whole point. If six Jews were killed instead of six million, that's not exactly a holocaust, is it? Playing this sort of numbers game is what the holocaust deniers do to try to get you to admit that there was no holocaust.
I just saw Mike Wallace's interview with this guy last night. While he didn't say the holocaust was a "myth" this time, he did say "if there was a holocaust, where did it take place?" as if he's just throwing the idea out there for the sake of argument. He also played the same numbers game that all of the holocaust deniers play. And there is no point in debating the translation - he has a personal translator with him at all times so that the translation cannot be argued.
as per the "wipe Israel off the map" comments, that's a much worse mistranslation. He never used any language even close to that. He talked about his hope that the "occupying regime" would fall, akin to how the Shah fell, Saddam fell, and the Soviet Union fell.
The guy is a master of double-speak. Mike Wallace directly challenged him on this "wipe Israel off the map" comment and he never once denied it. Wallace asked him what he meant by that and he refused to answer, repeatedly, basically saying it was a 3 page answer and Wallace wasn't giving him the time he needed. Eventually he did say that Israel should not be located where it is - that sounds a lot like "wipe Israel off the map" to me.
Whenever he was asked an uncomfortable question, this was basically how he responded - Wallace also asked him yes or no if he'd like to re-establish a relationship with the United States, and his initial stab at it was "well, let us ask first who broke off ties in the first place?" Wallace asked him again, regardless of who broke off ties, yes or no would he like to re-establish them? He then launched into another history lesson. Wallace interrupted - "yes or no, why won't you answer the question?" Then he got mad - "is this multiple choice? These are complicated questions!" This is basically the guy's MO - say all kinds of crazy things, then when he's pressed for clarification, launch into a life story that's got nothing to do with the issue at hand in an attempt to confuse.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a n00b among us. Be gentle.
John Dvorak is not "just" a columnist, he's probably at least among the original columnists of the computer world. He's been writing for PC Magazine for as long as I can remember, including during its heyday when it was basically the reference of the industry.
For a few years during that time (and maybe even still), he had a column where he did nothing but throw out one-sentence predictions. Back then, he would have written something like "by next year, Apple will have switched to Intel CPU's" and people would have gone nuts on him. He made a lot of really outlandish predictions, but for a while it seemed like almost all of them were coming true. So people started paying attention. If you wanted to know where the industry was headed, no matter how unlikely it seemed, you read Dvorak. He got a lot of props because he made those true predictions that nobody else would make. Everybody else in the PC industry - even in PC Magazine - was very conservative about where the industry was headed at that time. They thought the industry had matured and was basically immune to further major upheavals. Dvorak knew better.
Of course, nowadays, he's basically a troll. He still throws out the occasional insight and has the occasional correct prediction, but over time he's morphed into the guy who just says outlandish things to get web site hits. This probably happened because of all the hate mail he used to get about his off-the-wall predictions. Over time, he seemed to grow to like playing the maverick. It wasn't his intent to do so originally, but now he's basically just playing a role. He's intentionally trying to incite.
So, these days you read him and take what he says with a grain of salt. Or just don't read him at all. But there are good reasons why there are people that pay attention to what he says.
Actually, I've talked with various people who have worked with both Macs and PCs by other companies, and they've invariably said that the number of problems they've had with their Apple hardware is significantly lower than the number of hardware issues they've had with their PCs.
I'm not going to doubt your second-hand anecdotal experience, but I work in a company that runs on a mix of Apple and PC hardware and we have had just as many breakdowns with our Apple hardware as with our PC's, if not more. We have five editing suites in my office with, until recently, a G4 in each, and at one point every single one of them was down with dead hard drives simultaneously. Individually, they would go down at least once per week. We finally replaced them with G5's about 6 months ago and haven't had any further problems so far with those particular machines.
However, just a month or so ago I noticed another encoding machine we have (a dual G5) was ouputting stuttering video from Sorenson Squeeze. I ran a hard drive check and discovered that - surprise! - the hard drive was trashed.
So that's six Macs out of probably 20 at our company with dead hard drives. That is not a great ratio.
There is really no reason why Apple even *should* be more reliable than other PC companies, except for the fact that they claim to be. But their laptops are built by Asus, which is just a Taiwanese PC hardware maker. Their desktop hardware is the same stuff in every PC - Seagate hard drives, Intel CPU's, probably Samsung memory, etc.
My company pushes our Macs pretty hard, but then Apple markets these machines as being for creative professionals. The problem is they don't actually use any special hardware that's designed for durability, even though such hardware does exist. They use the same cheap ATA hard drives as everybody else, for example, even though Seagate and others have plenty of other options designed for enterprise-level use (some of which aren't very expensive). They don't even give you an option to upgrade for reliability; the only options are size options.
Anyway, so you said in your post that "invariably" you've only heard from people in mixed environs that their Macs are more reliable than their PC's, and now you can't say that anymore. I'm telling you that my company's Macs have been a nightmare to maintain and have eventually just needed to be replaced, and even the newer G5's are wearing out much faster than they should be.
You mean the Mac Pro being priced $1000 less than a comparably configured Dell?
You've apparently swallowed the Apple Kool-Aid on that one.
I saw Apple's slide of that part of their presentation. On the face, they looked like comparably equipped systems... until you spent the time to look a little closer. Among other differences, the Dell had a Quadro graphics card vs. the Apple's GeForce, and the Dell had a warranty 3 times as long as Apple's.
In other words, Apple basically configured a Dell system with the same hard drive, memory and CPU, then loaded up the Dell with a bunch of high-priced add-ons that the Mac Pro didn't have and called them "comparably configured" to make their price look better.
When MS uses these kinds of marketing tactics, they get slammed to the wall here. When Apple does it, people quote their marketing as if it's gospel without even checking whether or not it's true.
Let's review what we know: Terrorists are 1) usually middle eastern 2) always Muslim
You mean except when they're named Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols?
Or how about Thomas G. Doty, who bombed a Continental Airlines 707 in 1962, killing all on board?
Or, internationally, what about Kim Hyun Hee, who bombed a Korean Airlines 707 as an agent for North Korea in 1987? (No, I'm not talking about flight 007, which was shot down by the USSR.)
Or what about Inderjit Singh Reyat, who constructed the bomb that brought down Air India flight 182 in 1985? Oh, but he's of Indian descent, and I guess to you "they all look the same" over there. (Even though he was Canadian...)
Or how about John Graham, who bombed United Airlines flight 629 in 1955?
That's just scratching the surface; I haven't included bombings where non-muslim extremists from Latin America, the Balkans, or Asia are suspected but not named.
Still going to cling to your theory that terrorists are "always Muslim" or even "usually middle-eastern"? The vast majority of airliner bombings have been perpetrated by non-muslim, non-middle easterners. They're not always political (at least two of the above were life insurance scams), but that hardly matters to the passengers, who are just as dead.
While I can agree for the most part with your other points, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever check my laptop, ipod or cellphone like the UK is now requiring for flights to the US.
The other problem is that the equipment that we're buying (like Stealth Bombers) is too expensive, complicated, and fragile. True, it's very difficult to shoot a stealth bomber down, but more damage can be inflicted by a flight of 30 B-52s flying at 50,000 feet, even if we do lose one or two.
The question is, more damage inflicted on what?
It doesn't help much of anything if you're carpet-bombing a bunch of empty desert. And that's what B-52's are good at, at least when used in the way you're talking about. We did this in the first Iraq war; it made for good TV but we didn't kill many Iraqis or take out many targets doing it. You have to know what you're aiming at and be able to hit it.
B-52's can also carry cruise missiles, which have been used effectively in precision attacks in the past several wars. It can't carry very many of them, though - it's a lot more effective if you can fire these from ships. What B-52's cannot do, though, is execute first-line attacks through thick air defenses in the initial phases of an operation and hit with pinpoint precision. That's why we have B-2's.
The B-1B is actually the most versatile bomber we have, and these have seen the most action in recent conflicts. The USAF calls the B-1B the "backbone" of the long range bomber force. But the B-2 serves a different purpose; it's not meant as a B-1 replacement.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because one plane has a bigger payload than another that it can do more damage. B-52's are good at instilling fear but they are not our best option for actually taking out a target. Heck, most targets don't even call for a long-range bomber at all - a single F-16 or A-10 can take out more targets without re-arming than an entire squadron of WWII B-25's, despite the smaller payload. Payload is only a part of the equation.
In the past, our bombers used to deliver a bunch of dumb bombs over a wide area indiscriminantly. Whole cities ended up destroyed but the targets we were aiming at often survived. The idea these days is to at least try to do the opposite. It's a shock now when a civilian building gets hit; it makes the news and people get angry. That used to just be considered inevitable in war. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
FSF has a thing against DRM. This article tries to explain why RMS isn't a DRM (Note that NewsForge is also owned by OSTG)
We'd better get the CIA and FBI involved, along with the RIAA, NTSB, MPAA, ABC, CBS, CNN, AOL, MSN, and NBC. Oh, and be sure to alert the EFF and NRA while you're at it. Note that I am not affiliated with the RNC or DNC, although I am a FOB.
It wouldn't have been, if it had shipped with WinFS and a bunch of the other stuff they had touted. As it is, and I say this as someone who's running the beta at home, it is basically a gussied-up Windows XP with a new skin and a couple of new features that don't work very well. These features are why Paul previously said Vista was not ready, but the core functionality of the OS looks and feels pretty much just like Windows XP. (They've also made the now-standard arbitrary changes to things that worked perfectly fine previously, but this is par for the course in every Microsoft release.)
Underneath, the code may be a lot different. But that doesn't matter one whit to users. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
So Paul's point stands either way; comparing Vista to Leopard is pretty much the same as comparing Tiger to XP. Most of the things Apple is supposedly stealing from Vista are either also standard in XP (system restore, email stationery, etc.) or are available as free add-ons ("spaces"/virtual desktops).
If Nokia, who last I checked happens to sell a lot of phones, puts their music store/player software on a phone, and takes advantage of EDGE/UTMS networks to let people download music on the fly... hell, that's a lot more compelling than running home, buying something from the PC, syncing it over to the ipod, and then running off.
Yeah, you're about a year too late, because Verizon Wireless already offers this. And has for a while. And yet, somehow, that pesky iTunes just keeps right on going, doesn't it?
It's not that people (yourself notwithstanding) don't know about this, either - I can't watch 5 minutes worth of TV without seeing an ad for V-Cast. The big thing going right now is the "part mp3-player, part phone" Chocolate ads.
The problem is that this doesn't work. You might find the idea of downloading music through the air on the fly compelling until you actually try it. What if you already own a CD and decide one day you want to listen to a particular song from it? Well, too bad, because your phone doesn't have enough memory to store it along with the 150 other songs you wanted to hear that day. So now you have to navigate through a horrible WAP interface to find it, then spend $2 to download it, then wait 2 minutes while it does. Then you've got a song on your phone in a proprietary format that you can't play in any other player. And you've gotta erase it off the phone if you want to hear something else.
The alternative is you use an iTunes-like PC application that does basically the same thing but doesn't work as well. But then you're right back where you started, and you're still using an inferior, underpowered music player on the hardware end.
The reason why iTunes/iPod works is that it's once and you're done. Your entire music collection with you all the time. How is the method I just described above an improvement on that? So you've gotta be at home to buy a new album - first of all, so what? Have you actually been in situations where you just HAD to have a new album THAT MINUTE, no matter what you're doing outside? (Not that it ever would actually work that way anywway.) And second of all, that's not what most iTunes users do - they rip CD's. (I can't remember where I saw the statistics on this, but some unbelievably high percentage of iTunes users have never bought a song off the iTunes music store. They acquire their music elsewhere. I'm one of those people.)
The bottom line is you need an actual *library* to store your music. That's iTunes' primary function, and it's the reason why the phone companies completely miss the point. iTunes is an enabler for the iPod, and the iPod either a full or partial mirror of your iTunes library; that's it.
There may come a day when your library *is* your iPod, but today's phones aren't even close to having the power to be able to do that and they likely never will. You're talking about having a phone that's able to rip digitally from CD, that's able to store thousands or even tens of thousands of songs, that has a simple music-playing interface and that offers all the features we've come to expect from a phone as well, including battery life of more than a week on standby or 6-7 hours of talk. It's just never going to happen. (You can argue that instead, the phone could store all your music on the network and stream it, but there are major problems with that strategy too that nobody even seems willing to tackle, much less able to.)
Even I get tricked by those sometimes, because they come from random names that occasionally match the names of people I know
Er, this doesn't sound right - what I mean is I get tricked into *reading* them, I don't get tricked into actually clicking on the link because I think one of my friends sent it to me. Most spam I can immediately ID and delete before I even read it, but these can sometimes trick me into clicking through at least to the email itself.
Here are actual samples of emails that Gmail and Yahoo have let through to my inbox over the past couple days. First, Gmail:
Wells, who has had a rather similar historyand who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. In some ways his outlook is verysimilar to Dickenss. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees thelandscape. To Chesterton the poor means small shopkeepers andservants. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees thelandscape. It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this inreal life. And given the FACT ofservitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Theother point is that Dickenss early experiences have given him a horrorof proletarian roughness. They, and the men, always spoke of me as the younggentleman. It is one of the stockjokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Buthe is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations asindividuals. So were all the characteristic English novelists of thenineteenth century. The last thing anyone ever remembers about the books is theircentral story. Nevertheless hislist of most hated types is like enough to Wellss for the similarity tobe striking. A change of heart is in fact THE alibi of peoplewho do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. It is noticeable thatDickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. Therewere no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth. In Dickenss novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. And, on the whole, his attacks on good society are ratherperfunctory. But byorigins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to theclass he is satirizing. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical learning. In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical. It is usual to claim him as a popularwriter, a champion of the oppressed masses. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit inORLEY FARM, for instance. I do consider the young ooman, sir, said Sam. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollopeis startling. It is true that not all his novelsare alike in this. He getshimself arrested in order to follow Mr. Progressis not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariablydisappointing. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms aresoft, out he goes. It is perhaps more significant that he shows noprejudice against Jews. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrueand it needs some qualification. A modern manservant would neverthink of doing either. There arepractically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. If one wants a modern equivalent,the nearest would be H.
Attached to the above was an image file that contained an obvious ad. So to Gmail, this apparently looks like a regular text email that happens to have an attached image.
(You can argue about how effective this is, since Gmail thumbnails all images, meaning you'd need to click a separate link to open it and read it.)
Now Yahoo, where I get approximately 1,000 messages to my bulk folder per day - this is the only one that's gotten through to my inbox in the last day:
FROM THE DESK OF Mrs Queen Adams BANK OF AFRICA [BOA] OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO.
DEAR FRIEND,
I AM HOPEFUL THAT THIS MAIL WILL REACH YOU IN GOOD CONDITION OF HEALTH.I AM MRS QUEEN ADAMS A STAFF OF BANK OF AFRICA AND A BURKINABE RESIDENT IN BURKINA FASO ALSO.IN THE BANK WHERE I WORK AS AN AUDITOR,I DISCOVERED AN ABANDONED SUM OF MONEY AMOUNTING TO 15.2MILLION DOLLARS BELONGING TO DR GEORGE BRUMLEY WHO UNFORTUNATELY DIED IN THE PLANE CRASH OF UNION TRANSPORT AFRICAN FLIGHT BOEING 727 IN KENYA, EAST AFRICA ON SUNDAY
I've seen this said on a few other blogs as well, but I don't see it. It sounds like a form letter to me, probably sent to everybody that sends a similar inquiry regardless of company size. I don't see anything that implies that smaller vendors are "no longer welcome". All that it says is that it's a smaller event. Yes, that implies that smaller vendors will probably have a tougher time attracting the media, simply because there won't be a centralized place to find all these smaller vendors (most of the media covered Kentia Hall on the last day, all at once). But I don't see any suggestion here that these vendors cannot attend.
I think some people are surprised to see that the ESA refers to the "old" E3 as "cancelled". But once you get that fact through your heads, you'll stop reading things into letters like this that aren't there. E3 is cancelled for everybody, not just the smaller vendors. It hasn't been downsized. It's been cancelled, and a new event put in its place. The format of that new event will be totally different than the one its replacing, but it sounds to me as if everybody, vendor-wise, is just as equally welcome to attend it. How the media ends up covering it is a question for them, though, not the ESA.
The day that Sony Games rebels against the draconian wishes of the Sony Media division is the day the PSP will see success.
Well, this is the whole problem right here. If Sony hadn't tried to position this thing as a "multimedia" device in the first place, they wouldn't be in this mess at all. And they wouldn't be trying to fight on three different fronts - against both MS and Apple, as well as Nintendo - rather than one. They've set themselves up for failure.
Nintendo is beating them because the DS does one thing and one thing well. You've seen lately with titles like Brain Age and their translation titles how they're extending the idea of "game playing" into what used to be called "edutainment", and they've done it successfully because it's just organically grown out of the core function of the device. But they haven't even tried to tackle this idea of "convergence" or trying to create an "all-in-one" device - they understand that that's a losing proposition for precisely the reasons Sony is finding out now.
We'll see if Sony learns their lessons. So far, it doesn't sound like they have. But they've painted themselves into a corner; all the people who have bought the PSP expect it to play movies and music and do both of those things well (plus, of course, playing video games). They've got no choice now but to try to make those functions work and compete in multiple product categories. They'll never succeed being a jack-of-all-trades, though; not when their competition bests them with devices that perform each core function better.
So maybe this is a stretch, but, who is to say a game like Rallisport Challenge 2 isn't highbrow??
Why would a game designed to intentionally represent a real sport as accurately as possible be considered more "highbrow" than the sport it's intended to represent? At best, the highest form of culture it could aspire to would be the same as the sport itself.
I do think there are plenty of "higbrow" games out there, whatever that means, and it is one of those terms (like the term "insane") that is only used by people on the outside of both the industry in question and legitimate criticism of it. But I do get the gist of the intended meaning. Thing is, Merchant and Ivory (the example he cites from the film world) aren't really held in any higher regard in their industry than people like Martin Scorcese or Zhang Yimou, both of whom have made some extremely violent films. So I think looking for these sweeping, romantic, non-violent epics is kind of missing the point - that's a genre, not a measure of artistic value.
I could prattle off a list of 100 games I'd consider "highbrow" right now - in that they contain artistic elements that only those educated in critical thinking would catch (this is pretty much the definition of the term) - but I think it'd be kind of pointless, because that's not really what this guy's looking for. What he's looking for is the genre of romance games, which I'm honestly pretty thankful don't really exist.
The ESRP exists to give an opinion of what the game should be rated. This rating carries with it the force of law.
Ummm.
First, it's the ESRB. I could excuse this as a simple typo but for the second sentence above, where you clearly demonstrate that you do not even know what the ESRB is.
The ESRB is a voluntary ratings and regulatory organization set up by the games industry itself. It carries no force of law, nor is it beholden to any governmental agency. Therefore, requiring the board to play through all the games it rates to completion would likely do one thing: force it out of business. This is not an agency you can dictate to regarding their operations. It is a private organization.
Yes, they should have to play through the entire fucking thing. I fail to see how this is anything but immediately obvious.
GTA Vice City, to pick but one example, was more than 100 hours long if you played the "entire" thing through (including side missions). Multiply that by the number of games that come out every week and you tell me how many people would need to be on the ESRB payroll.
You're basically talking about creating a new and massive government bureacracy for one thing - to rate video games. This is how you want your tax dollars spent? Because the ESRB is not going to spend this money, nor do they have to.
For that reason, there are "forensic cameras" available that have a digital signature algorithm built in that sign the images. Any tampering results in an invalid signature. Perhaps news photographers are going to have to go that route next?
Well this brings up the point that all photographs are manipulated. The only question is degree. And the secondary question in the case of news is "what degree of manipulation is acceptable?"
People need to get it through their heads that just as a news report can never be truly unbiased, a photograph can never be a true representation of reality. In the old days, different film stocks rendered colors differently, and today different sensors do the same. Contrast, brightness, tonal range are never captured precisely or processed perfectly in the camera (or in photo processing software). The data needs to be manipulated to create a decent approximation, but it can only ever be that. Images obviously need to be resized to print on the web, and detail is lost. They need to be cropped to focus the eye on the important part of the image. Is this not acceptable? Presumably much of the rest of Beirut was *not* on fire when the photo in question here was taken - what if the photographer had simply cropped all of that out of the photo? Is that "over-dramatizing" the story or is that simply illustrating what the story is? After all, the story is that part of Beirut was bombed, not that most of it wasn't. (But the reality, of course, is the opposite.)
If you're talking about a digital "signature" that makes any change to an image impossible, then a) you are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose and capabilities of photography in general, and b) you are disallowing benign and even beneficial "manipulations" like resizing and cropping.
I think the bottom line is a human being needs to sit there and look at these photos and judge each one individually. It's not a question of whether the image is an exact representation of reality (which is impossible) or whether it's the exact image out of the camera (which, for both web and print publishing, is impractical). It's a question of when manipulation crosses an editorial line and starts having a point of view of its own. And that's what editors are supposed to be there to judge; that's why they call them "editors".
This photo was so blatantly over-manipulated that I have a hard time believing an editor ever saw it before it was published.
And my grandma still insists on using her phone book, her home phone, radio for weather and the newspaper for the news.
I use the internet, the internet, the internet and the internet.
And she can do a lot of things you can't. Namely, look up a phone number in a power failure. USE her phone in a power failure. Read the news while sitting on the crapper or in the subway.
More importantly, she knows to diversify her information sources. You rely on one data path. That data path goes down, for any reason, and you're officially screwed.
Those of us who have been around long enough - even those of us who are just young enough to not really remember the days before the internet - all know the benefits of this data diversification. We also know the benefits of tangible goods vs. virtual goods, because we've all experienced the headaches that come from "losing" your virtual goods - even though we may still have the media that may contain them.
You're underestimating the number of people who would just never buy a console that didn't support physical media. I wouldn't, the guy you're replying to wouldn't and the guy he's replying to wouldn't. There are a lot of us out there. Add in the fact that there will probably always be at least one competitor willing to shuck the current convention and provide what the other systems lack, and I doubt any console will ever succeed without physical media support. I'm serious. Even if we're talking DS-size (or smaller) memory chips... there has to be something you can hold in your hand that contains the game on it, separate from the game console. Something you can buy in a store, trade with friends, borrow, collect, re-sell, back up or whatever. That's just for starters. I'm sure there are people who, like you, are perfectly willing to trust the internet and their connected consoles for all their gaming needs, but the fact that even a number of people here on tech-centric/. are not should tell you something. As far as I'm concerned, doing away with physical goods goes against human nature itself. It will not be a successful strategy, any more than e-books so far have been a successful strategy (or ever will be).
(It can be *part* of a larger successful strategy, but it is not a strategy unto itself. Games have to be available on physical media, end of story.)
If Apple ever produced an iPhone it's pretty likely that they'd include a plane mode right from the start which disables the phone aspect.
Which wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. A phone's a phone in the eyes of the airlines; they're not going to start up different regulations for different makes and models. "Oh, if it's an Apple model, *and* you can verify that "plane mode" is switched on, then it's ok." No way that's gonna work.
An Apple phone will have the same problems as every other type of phone, including the inability to use it on a plane. For now, at least.
And it doesn't say what the format of those pre-ripped songs are, either, though it could very easily be assumed that they are DRM'd as well. If they are, it probably wouldn't be iPod compatible, either
Well, you say you read TFA, but I don't see much evidence of it:
"People familiar with the situation say Warner is close to a deal with Apple Computer Inc. that would make the digital tracks essentially identical to those the computer company sells through its iTunes Music Store service -- something that has proved elusive for others in the music industry, since Apple has been unwilling to license its proprietary copy-protection software to outsiders. People briefed on the talks said a likely solution would involve Apple creating the digital tracks and Warner putting them on DVDs."
he rags on the 360 because he's a bitter Sega fanboy.
I'm normally skeptical whenever someone accuses a writer in the mainstream gaming press of being a "fanboy", but then I read this:
If any one company has really reveled in contemporary console design, that would probably be Sega. The Master System, Genesis, and Dreamcast all glory in their forms, the former two being off-kilter, ornate, attention-grabbing, and plastered with huge logos. Likewise, with its brilliant white shell, orange decorations, four controller ports, and sleek-yet-bubbly facade, the Dreamcast both declares defiantly, in a no-nonsense voice, that it is a game console and that it is meant as a conscious reversal of Sega's fortunes - sort of a new start for the company. (White and orange are the opposite of black and blue.)
Jesus!
Okay, I like most of Sega's designs well enough, but there's nothing any more special about any of them than anybody else's. And the Dreamcast was probably about as innocuous and nondescript as it gets; it's a plain white box of a top-loading CD player. (Besides, if the design declared such a bold "new start" for the company, it obviously didn't do a very good job of it.)
I've been around video gaming since 1977 when Atari's VCS hit the market. (No, I can't claim to remember the days of the Fairchild Channel-F, unfortunately.) I've seen, and in fact own, pretty much every console that's come along since then. I don't see how today's systems are really any different than systems of the past; consoles have always tried to capture something about the essence of the era in which they're produced while at the same time seeking to stand out from the pack. They've also always been consciously designed such that they don't fit in with other electronics in a standard rack system; the idea is to make the system the center of attention, without making it so gaudy or unreasonable that customers resist it.
So he doesn't like the PS3 or Xbox 360 (I didn't even read what he said about the Wii). Fair enough. But throughout history, for every console design success, there has been a corresponding failure. Whereas the Coleco Vision was an all-American hot rod of a look, the Atari 5200 was just a big, bulky triangle of a machine. He seems to have liked the NES, but he's apparently never seen the original red and gold trimmed FamiCom, one of the ugliest systems ever produced, with curves and edges in all the wrong places.
And so it goes. I don't think any of this is specific to any era. There are only good designers and bad designers, and personal tastes to go along with them. You may or may not like today's consoles, but they're no better or worse - and certainly not fundamentally different in concept - than the designs of yesteryear's consoles.
duh? Isn't it common knowledge that machines with many choices that appeal to a broader audience will come out on top?
I'm not sure when it became common knowledge that the PS2 won the last-gen battle because it offered karaoke.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that's still not common knowledge. Or really any other kind of knowledge, except in this article.
Generally speaking, products that usually win in any industry are products that do one thing and one thing well. That's as true of games as anything else. The PS2 won because it had the most games and the best ratio of price to game quantity and quality. It did not win because of any of this other crap this article talks about.
And this isn't "The Top 100 Games of the 21st Century" it's "The 100 top-selling console games of the last 5 years".
And?
You people are saying this as if a) you're giving the rest of us some great revelation that we couldn't otherwise figure out ourselves, and b) it matters.
So let me get this straight - you clicked the link actually expecting to find the definitive list - no further argument or debate necessary - of the top 100 games of the 21st century? I'm guessing that based on your literal interpretation of the wording, you also thought the list projected 94 years into the future? Wow, you must have been disappointed.
Here's a hint: some things are just meant to be fun to read.
Slashdot Mirror
Mario kart provides no method of communication at all. Metroid Prime only allows you to talk with people you've met before, and only during the time for choosing game options.
Seriously, some of us actually prefer this. It's the really hardcore players that get into the whole "clan" thing - even instant messaging through a game console is pretty geeky. I mean you can talk about how many subscribers XBL has - you're still talking a couple million people out of a population of 300 million in this country, and it's been stuck at that same number for a long time now. (It's also counting people like me, who got a free subscription, never used it, and then let it lapse.) Online team play and online chat with random people are features for a) the very young, and/or b) the very hardcore.
I think one of the lessons you can take from the DS is that the mass market either doesn't mind, or actually prefers, to be without these features. One of the things that drove me away from XBL was just the sheer idiocy I was forced to endure, and I know I'm not the only one who feels that way. It got so I would actually disconnect my headset and try to play without it, but then I'd either get kicked out of games or not allowed in because you can tell who's not voice connected. So then I'd connect my headset but just leave it on the floor - worked a little better, but it's a stupid thing to have to do. The bottom line is while I want to be able to play against other people, I do not want to have to talk to or listen to them. I know I'm not alone in this - it may go against the hardcore gamer grain, but there is a lot of resistance among more casual players to being forced into this soup of mostly teenage male hormones.
I've always said that XBL is just a disaster waiting to happen. Someday, a teenage prostitution ring is going to be discovered operating through XBL and that'll pretty much be the end of that for MS. They'll be held liable, whatever their user agreement states. You can bet congress will take notice if the courts don't. Why would Nintendo want any part of that potential headache?
I think it's probably pretty smart to enable anyone to play online for free, but to sell some sort of microphone attacment to those who want it. So if you want to have your games with friends, or you want to use the service as a dating service or whatever, you can. But those of us who just want to play a quick game against a human without fuss and without having to deal with a bunch of morons can do so without being shunned because we've turned off a required piece of borg electronics.
Again, things have only risen in complexity since the days of the NES and prior (not a bad thing, of course). If anything has brought gaming to the masses, it's marketing - certainly not any change in ease of use.
You apparently have never played the Nintendo DS, nor heard anything about its current market dominance (whether or not you believe it competes directly with the Xbox 360, it is nevertheless outselling it worldwide by a factor of about 10 to 1).
You've also apparently never heard of the upcoming Wii, which will compete more directly with the 360.
Of course, I would argue that portable systems do compete directly with home systems, in pretty much the same way laptop computers compete with desktop computers. So regardless, Nintendo is changing the way games are played, and that's the real subtext behind this article. MS is a lot of talk about making games more accessible; their competition is actually doing something about it.
Ahmadinejad, like many people in the middle east, believes that the number of Jews killed by Germany during WWII is frequently greatly overstated. While, in the opinion of most (including myself), this is an unjustified viewpoint, it is certainly much more defensible than the "there is no holocaust" claim that a lot of people think he made.
Whether or not there was a holocaust is wholly dependent on the "number" of Jews killed. That's the whole point. If six Jews were killed instead of six million, that's not exactly a holocaust, is it? Playing this sort of numbers game is what the holocaust deniers do to try to get you to admit that there was no holocaust.
I just saw Mike Wallace's interview with this guy last night. While he didn't say the holocaust was a "myth" this time, he did say "if there was a holocaust, where did it take place?" as if he's just throwing the idea out there for the sake of argument. He also played the same numbers game that all of the holocaust deniers play. And there is no point in debating the translation - he has a personal translator with him at all times so that the translation cannot be argued.
as per the "wipe Israel off the map" comments, that's a much worse mistranslation. He never used any language even close to that. He talked about his hope that the "occupying regime" would fall, akin to how the Shah fell, Saddam fell, and the Soviet Union fell.
The guy is a master of double-speak. Mike Wallace directly challenged him on this "wipe Israel off the map" comment and he never once denied it. Wallace asked him what he meant by that and he refused to answer, repeatedly, basically saying it was a 3 page answer and Wallace wasn't giving him the time he needed. Eventually he did say that Israel should not be located where it is - that sounds a lot like "wipe Israel off the map" to me.
Whenever he was asked an uncomfortable question, this was basically how he responded - Wallace also asked him yes or no if he'd like to re-establish a relationship with the United States, and his initial stab at it was "well, let us ask first who broke off ties in the first place?" Wallace asked him again, regardless of who broke off ties, yes or no would he like to re-establish them? He then launched into another history lesson. Wallace interrupted - "yes or no, why won't you answer the question?" Then he got mad - "is this multiple choice? These are complicated questions!" This is basically the guy's MO - say all kinds of crazy things, then when he's pressed for clarification, launch into a life story that's got nothing to do with the issue at hand in an attempt to confuse.
Who is Dvorak?
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a n00b among us. Be gentle.
John Dvorak is not "just" a columnist, he's probably at least among the original columnists of the computer world. He's been writing for PC Magazine for as long as I can remember, including during its heyday when it was basically the reference of the industry.
For a few years during that time (and maybe even still), he had a column where he did nothing but throw out one-sentence predictions. Back then, he would have written something like "by next year, Apple will have switched to Intel CPU's" and people would have gone nuts on him. He made a lot of really outlandish predictions, but for a while it seemed like almost all of them were coming true. So people started paying attention. If you wanted to know where the industry was headed, no matter how unlikely it seemed, you read Dvorak. He got a lot of props because he made those true predictions that nobody else would make. Everybody else in the PC industry - even in PC Magazine - was very conservative about where the industry was headed at that time. They thought the industry had matured and was basically immune to further major upheavals. Dvorak knew better.
Of course, nowadays, he's basically a troll. He still throws out the occasional insight and has the occasional correct prediction, but over time he's morphed into the guy who just says outlandish things to get web site hits. This probably happened because of all the hate mail he used to get about his off-the-wall predictions. Over time, he seemed to grow to like playing the maverick. It wasn't his intent to do so originally, but now he's basically just playing a role. He's intentionally trying to incite.
So, these days you read him and take what he says with a grain of salt. Or just don't read him at all. But there are good reasons why there are people that pay attention to what he says.
Actually, I've talked with various people who have worked with both Macs and PCs by other companies, and they've invariably said that the number of problems they've had with their Apple hardware is significantly lower than the number of hardware issues they've had with their PCs.
I'm not going to doubt your second-hand anecdotal experience, but I work in a company that runs on a mix of Apple and PC hardware and we have had just as many breakdowns with our Apple hardware as with our PC's, if not more. We have five editing suites in my office with, until recently, a G4 in each, and at one point every single one of them was down with dead hard drives simultaneously. Individually, they would go down at least once per week. We finally replaced them with G5's about 6 months ago and haven't had any further problems so far with those particular machines.
However, just a month or so ago I noticed another encoding machine we have (a dual G5) was ouputting stuttering video from Sorenson Squeeze. I ran a hard drive check and discovered that - surprise! - the hard drive was trashed.
So that's six Macs out of probably 20 at our company with dead hard drives. That is not a great ratio.
There is really no reason why Apple even *should* be more reliable than other PC companies, except for the fact that they claim to be. But their laptops are built by Asus, which is just a Taiwanese PC hardware maker. Their desktop hardware is the same stuff in every PC - Seagate hard drives, Intel CPU's, probably Samsung memory, etc.
My company pushes our Macs pretty hard, but then Apple markets these machines as being for creative professionals. The problem is they don't actually use any special hardware that's designed for durability, even though such hardware does exist. They use the same cheap ATA hard drives as everybody else, for example, even though Seagate and others have plenty of other options designed for enterprise-level use (some of which aren't very expensive). They don't even give you an option to upgrade for reliability; the only options are size options.
Anyway, so you said in your post that "invariably" you've only heard from people in mixed environs that their Macs are more reliable than their PC's, and now you can't say that anymore. I'm telling you that my company's Macs have been a nightmare to maintain and have eventually just needed to be replaced, and even the newer G5's are wearing out much faster than they should be.
You mean the Mac Pro being priced $1000 less than a comparably configured Dell?
You've apparently swallowed the Apple Kool-Aid on that one.
I saw Apple's slide of that part of their presentation. On the face, they looked like comparably equipped systems... until you spent the time to look a little closer. Among other differences, the Dell had a Quadro graphics card vs. the Apple's GeForce, and the Dell had a warranty 3 times as long as Apple's.
In other words, Apple basically configured a Dell system with the same hard drive, memory and CPU, then loaded up the Dell with a bunch of high-priced add-ons that the Mac Pro didn't have and called them "comparably configured" to make their price look better.
When MS uses these kinds of marketing tactics, they get slammed to the wall here. When Apple does it, people quote their marketing as if it's gospel without even checking whether or not it's true.
Let's review what we know: Terrorists are 1) usually middle eastern 2) always Muslim
You mean except when they're named Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols?
Or how about Thomas G. Doty, who bombed a Continental Airlines 707 in 1962, killing all on board?
Or, internationally, what about Kim Hyun Hee, who bombed a Korean Airlines 707 as an agent for North Korea in 1987? (No, I'm not talking about flight 007, which was shot down by the USSR.)
Or what about Inderjit Singh Reyat, who constructed the bomb that brought down Air India flight 182 in 1985? Oh, but he's of Indian descent, and I guess to you "they all look the same" over there. (Even though he was Canadian...)
Or how about John Graham, who bombed United Airlines flight 629 in 1955?
That's just scratching the surface; I haven't included bombings where non-muslim extremists from Latin America, the Balkans, or Asia are suspected but not named.
Still going to cling to your theory that terrorists are "always Muslim" or even "usually middle-eastern"? The vast majority of airliner bombings have been perpetrated by non-muslim, non-middle easterners. They're not always political (at least two of the above were life insurance scams), but that hardly matters to the passengers, who are just as dead.
While I can agree for the most part with your other points, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever check my laptop, ipod or cellphone like the UK is now requiring for flights to the US.
Then all I can say is, watch out for icebergs!
The other problem is that the equipment that we're buying (like Stealth Bombers) is too expensive, complicated, and fragile. True, it's very difficult to shoot a stealth bomber down, but more damage can be inflicted by a flight of 30 B-52s flying at 50,000 feet, even if we do lose one or two.
The question is, more damage inflicted on what?
It doesn't help much of anything if you're carpet-bombing a bunch of empty desert. And that's what B-52's are good at, at least when used in the way you're talking about. We did this in the first Iraq war; it made for good TV but we didn't kill many Iraqis or take out many targets doing it. You have to know what you're aiming at and be able to hit it.
B-52's can also carry cruise missiles, which have been used effectively in precision attacks in the past several wars. It can't carry very many of them, though - it's a lot more effective if you can fire these from ships. What B-52's cannot do, though, is execute first-line attacks through thick air defenses in the initial phases of an operation and hit with pinpoint precision. That's why we have B-2's.
The B-1B is actually the most versatile bomber we have, and these have seen the most action in recent conflicts. The USAF calls the B-1B the "backbone" of the long range bomber force. But the B-2 serves a different purpose; it's not meant as a B-1 replacement.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because one plane has a bigger payload than another that it can do more damage. B-52's are good at instilling fear but they are not our best option for actually taking out a target. Heck, most targets don't even call for a long-range bomber at all - a single F-16 or A-10 can take out more targets without re-arming than an entire squadron of WWII B-25's, despite the smaller payload. Payload is only a part of the equation.
In the past, our bombers used to deliver a bunch of dumb bombs over a wide area indiscriminantly. Whole cities ended up destroyed but the targets we were aiming at often survived. The idea these days is to at least try to do the opposite. It's a shock now when a civilian building gets hit; it makes the news and people get angry. That used to just be considered inevitable in war. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
FSF has a thing against DRM. This article tries to explain why RMS isn't a DRM (Note that NewsForge is also owned by OSTG)
We'd better get the CIA and FBI involved, along with the RIAA, NTSB, MPAA, ABC, CBS, CNN, AOL, MSN, and NBC. Oh, and be sure to alert the EFF and NRA while you're at it. Note that I am not affiliated with the RNC or DNC, although I am a FOB.
OS X is out now. Leopard is a point release.
Vista, on the other hand...
Is also what amounts to a point release.
It wouldn't have been, if it had shipped with WinFS and a bunch of the other stuff they had touted. As it is, and I say this as someone who's running the beta at home, it is basically a gussied-up Windows XP with a new skin and a couple of new features that don't work very well. These features are why Paul previously said Vista was not ready, but the core functionality of the OS looks and feels pretty much just like Windows XP. (They've also made the now-standard arbitrary changes to things that worked perfectly fine previously, but this is par for the course in every Microsoft release.)
Underneath, the code may be a lot different. But that doesn't matter one whit to users. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
So Paul's point stands either way; comparing Vista to Leopard is pretty much the same as comparing Tiger to XP. Most of the things Apple is supposedly stealing from Vista are either also standard in XP (system restore, email stationery, etc.) or are available as free add-ons ("spaces"/virtual desktops).
If Nokia, who last I checked happens to sell a lot of phones, puts their music store/player software on a phone, and takes advantage of EDGE/UTMS networks to let people download music on the fly... hell, that's a lot more compelling than running home, buying something from the PC, syncing it over to the ipod, and then running off.
Yeah, you're about a year too late, because Verizon Wireless already offers this. And has for a while. And yet, somehow, that pesky iTunes just keeps right on going, doesn't it?
It's not that people (yourself notwithstanding) don't know about this, either - I can't watch 5 minutes worth of TV without seeing an ad for V-Cast. The big thing going right now is the "part mp3-player, part phone" Chocolate ads.
The problem is that this doesn't work. You might find the idea of downloading music through the air on the fly compelling until you actually try it. What if you already own a CD and decide one day you want to listen to a particular song from it? Well, too bad, because your phone doesn't have enough memory to store it along with the 150 other songs you wanted to hear that day. So now you have to navigate through a horrible WAP interface to find it, then spend $2 to download it, then wait 2 minutes while it does. Then you've got a song on your phone in a proprietary format that you can't play in any other player. And you've gotta erase it off the phone if you want to hear something else.
The alternative is you use an iTunes-like PC application that does basically the same thing but doesn't work as well. But then you're right back where you started, and you're still using an inferior, underpowered music player on the hardware end.
The reason why iTunes/iPod works is that it's once and you're done. Your entire music collection with you all the time. How is the method I just described above an improvement on that? So you've gotta be at home to buy a new album - first of all, so what? Have you actually been in situations where you just HAD to have a new album THAT MINUTE, no matter what you're doing outside? (Not that it ever would actually work that way anywway.) And second of all, that's not what most iTunes users do - they rip CD's. (I can't remember where I saw the statistics on this, but some unbelievably high percentage of iTunes users have never bought a song off the iTunes music store. They acquire their music elsewhere. I'm one of those people.)
The bottom line is you need an actual *library* to store your music. That's iTunes' primary function, and it's the reason why the phone companies completely miss the point. iTunes is an enabler for the iPod, and the iPod either a full or partial mirror of your iTunes library; that's it.
There may come a day when your library *is* your iPod, but today's phones aren't even close to having the power to be able to do that and they likely never will. You're talking about having a phone that's able to rip digitally from CD, that's able to store thousands or even tens of thousands of songs, that has a simple music-playing interface and that offers all the features we've come to expect from a phone as well, including battery life of more than a week on standby or 6-7 hours of talk. It's just never going to happen. (You can argue that instead, the phone could store all your music on the network and stream it, but there are major problems with that strategy too that nobody even seems willing to tackle, much less able to.)
Even I get tricked by those sometimes, because they come from random names that occasionally match the names of people I know
Er, this doesn't sound right - what I mean is I get tricked into *reading* them, I don't get tricked into actually clicking on the link because I think one of my friends sent it to me. Most spam I can immediately ID and delete before I even read it, but these can sometimes trick me into clicking through at least to the email itself.
Here are actual samples of emails that Gmail and Yahoo have let through to my inbox over the past couple days. First, Gmail:
Attached to the above was an image file that contained an obvious ad. So to Gmail, this apparently looks like a regular text email that happens to have an attached image.
(You can argue about how effective this is, since Gmail thumbnails all images, meaning you'd need to click a separate link to open it and read it.)
Now Yahoo, where I get approximately 1,000 messages to my bulk folder per day - this is the only one that's gotten through to my inbox in the last day:
I've seen this said on a few other blogs as well, but I don't see it. It sounds like a form letter to me, probably sent to everybody that sends a similar inquiry regardless of company size. I don't see anything that implies that smaller vendors are "no longer welcome". All that it says is that it's a smaller event. Yes, that implies that smaller vendors will probably have a tougher time attracting the media, simply because there won't be a centralized place to find all these smaller vendors (most of the media covered Kentia Hall on the last day, all at once). But I don't see any suggestion here that these vendors cannot attend.
I think some people are surprised to see that the ESA refers to the "old" E3 as "cancelled". But once you get that fact through your heads, you'll stop reading things into letters like this that aren't there. E3 is cancelled for everybody, not just the smaller vendors. It hasn't been downsized. It's been cancelled, and a new event put in its place. The format of that new event will be totally different than the one its replacing, but it sounds to me as if everybody, vendor-wise, is just as equally welcome to attend it. How the media ends up covering it is a question for them, though, not the ESA.
The day that Sony Games rebels against the draconian wishes of the Sony Media division is the day the PSP will see success.
Well, this is the whole problem right here. If Sony hadn't tried to position this thing as a "multimedia" device in the first place, they wouldn't be in this mess at all. And they wouldn't be trying to fight on three different fronts - against both MS and Apple, as well as Nintendo - rather than one. They've set themselves up for failure.
Nintendo is beating them because the DS does one thing and one thing well. You've seen lately with titles like Brain Age and their translation titles how they're extending the idea of "game playing" into what used to be called "edutainment", and they've done it successfully because it's just organically grown out of the core function of the device. But they haven't even tried to tackle this idea of "convergence" or trying to create an "all-in-one" device - they understand that that's a losing proposition for precisely the reasons Sony is finding out now.
We'll see if Sony learns their lessons. So far, it doesn't sound like they have. But they've painted themselves into a corner; all the people who have bought the PSP expect it to play movies and music and do both of those things well (plus, of course, playing video games). They've got no choice now but to try to make those functions work and compete in multiple product categories. They'll never succeed being a jack-of-all-trades, though; not when their competition bests them with devices that perform each core function better.
So maybe this is a stretch, but, who is to say a game like Rallisport Challenge 2 isn't highbrow??
Why would a game designed to intentionally represent a real sport as accurately as possible be considered more "highbrow" than the sport it's intended to represent? At best, the highest form of culture it could aspire to would be the same as the sport itself.
I do think there are plenty of "higbrow" games out there, whatever that means, and it is one of those terms (like the term "insane") that is only used by people on the outside of both the industry in question and legitimate criticism of it. But I do get the gist of the intended meaning. Thing is, Merchant and Ivory (the example he cites from the film world) aren't really held in any higher regard in their industry than people like Martin Scorcese or Zhang Yimou, both of whom have made some extremely violent films. So I think looking for these sweeping, romantic, non-violent epics is kind of missing the point - that's a genre, not a measure of artistic value.
I could prattle off a list of 100 games I'd consider "highbrow" right now - in that they contain artistic elements that only those educated in critical thinking would catch (this is pretty much the definition of the term) - but I think it'd be kind of pointless, because that's not really what this guy's looking for. What he's looking for is the genre of romance games, which I'm honestly pretty thankful don't really exist.
(Sex games are a different matter entirely.)
The ESRP exists to give an opinion of what the game should be rated. This rating carries with it the force of law.
Ummm.
First, it's the ESRB. I could excuse this as a simple typo but for the second sentence above, where you clearly demonstrate that you do not even know what the ESRB is.
The ESRB is a voluntary ratings and regulatory organization set up by the games industry itself. It carries no force of law, nor is it beholden to any governmental agency. Therefore, requiring the board to play through all the games it rates to completion would likely do one thing: force it out of business. This is not an agency you can dictate to regarding their operations. It is a private organization.
Yes, they should have to play through the entire fucking thing. I fail to see how this is anything but immediately obvious.
GTA Vice City, to pick but one example, was more than 100 hours long if you played the "entire" thing through (including side missions). Multiply that by the number of games that come out every week and you tell me how many people would need to be on the ESRB payroll.
You're basically talking about creating a new and massive government bureacracy for one thing - to rate video games. This is how you want your tax dollars spent? Because the ESRB is not going to spend this money, nor do they have to.
For that reason, there are "forensic cameras" available that have a digital signature algorithm built in that sign the images. Any tampering results in an invalid signature. Perhaps news photographers are going to have to go that route next?
Well this brings up the point that all photographs are manipulated. The only question is degree. And the secondary question in the case of news is "what degree of manipulation is acceptable?"
People need to get it through their heads that just as a news report can never be truly unbiased, a photograph can never be a true representation of reality. In the old days, different film stocks rendered colors differently, and today different sensors do the same. Contrast, brightness, tonal range are never captured precisely or processed perfectly in the camera (or in photo processing software). The data needs to be manipulated to create a decent approximation, but it can only ever be that. Images obviously need to be resized to print on the web, and detail is lost. They need to be cropped to focus the eye on the important part of the image. Is this not acceptable? Presumably much of the rest of Beirut was *not* on fire when the photo in question here was taken - what if the photographer had simply cropped all of that out of the photo? Is that "over-dramatizing" the story or is that simply illustrating what the story is? After all, the story is that part of Beirut was bombed, not that most of it wasn't. (But the reality, of course, is the opposite.)
If you're talking about a digital "signature" that makes any change to an image impossible, then a) you are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose and capabilities of photography in general, and b) you are disallowing benign and even beneficial "manipulations" like resizing and cropping.
I think the bottom line is a human being needs to sit there and look at these photos and judge each one individually. It's not a question of whether the image is an exact representation of reality (which is impossible) or whether it's the exact image out of the camera (which, for both web and print publishing, is impractical). It's a question of when manipulation crosses an editorial line and starts having a point of view of its own. And that's what editors are supposed to be there to judge; that's why they call them "editors".
This photo was so blatantly over-manipulated that I have a hard time believing an editor ever saw it before it was published.
And my grandma still insists on using her phone book, her home phone, radio for weather and the newspaper for the news.
/. are not should tell you something. As far as I'm concerned, doing away with physical goods goes against human nature itself. It will not be a successful strategy, any more than e-books so far have been a successful strategy (or ever will be).
I use the internet, the internet, the internet and the internet.
And she can do a lot of things you can't. Namely, look up a phone number in a power failure. USE her phone in a power failure. Read the news while sitting on the crapper or in the subway.
More importantly, she knows to diversify her information sources. You rely on one data path. That data path goes down, for any reason, and you're officially screwed.
Those of us who have been around long enough - even those of us who are just young enough to not really remember the days before the internet - all know the benefits of this data diversification. We also know the benefits of tangible goods vs. virtual goods, because we've all experienced the headaches that come from "losing" your virtual goods - even though we may still have the media that may contain them.
You're underestimating the number of people who would just never buy a console that didn't support physical media. I wouldn't, the guy you're replying to wouldn't and the guy he's replying to wouldn't. There are a lot of us out there. Add in the fact that there will probably always be at least one competitor willing to shuck the current convention and provide what the other systems lack, and I doubt any console will ever succeed without physical media support. I'm serious. Even if we're talking DS-size (or smaller) memory chips... there has to be something you can hold in your hand that contains the game on it, separate from the game console. Something you can buy in a store, trade with friends, borrow, collect, re-sell, back up or whatever. That's just for starters. I'm sure there are people who, like you, are perfectly willing to trust the internet and their connected consoles for all their gaming needs, but the fact that even a number of people here on tech-centric
(It can be *part* of a larger successful strategy, but it is not a strategy unto itself. Games have to be available on physical media, end of story.)
If Apple ever produced an iPhone it's pretty likely that they'd include a plane mode right from the start which disables the phone aspect.
Which wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. A phone's a phone in the eyes of the airlines; they're not going to start up different regulations for different makes and models. "Oh, if it's an Apple model, *and* you can verify that "plane mode" is switched on, then it's ok." No way that's gonna work.
An Apple phone will have the same problems as every other type of phone, including the inability to use it on a plane. For now, at least.
And it doesn't say what the format of those pre-ripped songs are, either, though it could very easily be assumed that they are DRM'd as well. If they are, it probably wouldn't be iPod compatible, either
Well, you say you read TFA, but I don't see much evidence of it:
"People familiar with the situation say Warner is close to a deal with Apple Computer Inc. that would make the digital tracks essentially identical to those the computer company sells through its iTunes Music Store service -- something that has proved elusive for others in the music industry, since Apple has been unwilling to license its proprietary copy-protection software to outsiders. People briefed on the talks said a likely solution would involve Apple creating the digital tracks and Warner putting them on DVDs."
Makes sense to me.
he rags on the 360 because he's a bitter Sega fanboy.
I'm normally skeptical whenever someone accuses a writer in the mainstream gaming press of being a "fanboy", but then I read this:
If any one company has really reveled in contemporary console design, that would probably be Sega. The Master System, Genesis, and Dreamcast all glory in their forms, the former two being off-kilter, ornate, attention-grabbing, and plastered with huge logos. Likewise, with its brilliant white shell, orange decorations, four controller ports, and sleek-yet-bubbly facade, the Dreamcast both declares defiantly, in a no-nonsense voice, that it is a game console and that it is meant as a conscious reversal of Sega's fortunes - sort of a new start for the company. (White and orange are the opposite of black and blue.)
Jesus!
Okay, I like most of Sega's designs well enough, but there's nothing any more special about any of them than anybody else's. And the Dreamcast was probably about as innocuous and nondescript as it gets; it's a plain white box of a top-loading CD player. (Besides, if the design declared such a bold "new start" for the company, it obviously didn't do a very good job of it.)
I've been around video gaming since 1977 when Atari's VCS hit the market. (No, I can't claim to remember the days of the Fairchild Channel-F, unfortunately.) I've seen, and in fact own, pretty much every console that's come along since then. I don't see how today's systems are really any different than systems of the past; consoles have always tried to capture something about the essence of the era in which they're produced while at the same time seeking to stand out from the pack. They've also always been consciously designed such that they don't fit in with other electronics in a standard rack system; the idea is to make the system the center of attention, without making it so gaudy or unreasonable that customers resist it.
So he doesn't like the PS3 or Xbox 360 (I didn't even read what he said about the Wii). Fair enough. But throughout history, for every console design success, there has been a corresponding failure. Whereas the Coleco Vision was an all-American hot rod of a look, the Atari 5200 was just a big, bulky triangle of a machine. He seems to have liked the NES, but he's apparently never seen the original red and gold trimmed FamiCom, one of the ugliest systems ever produced, with curves and edges in all the wrong places.
And so it goes. I don't think any of this is specific to any era. There are only good designers and bad designers, and personal tastes to go along with them. You may or may not like today's consoles, but they're no better or worse - and certainly not fundamentally different in concept - than the designs of yesteryear's consoles.
duh? Isn't it common knowledge that machines with many choices that appeal to a broader audience will come out on top?
I'm not sure when it became common knowledge that the PS2 won the last-gen battle because it offered karaoke.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that's still not common knowledge. Or really any other kind of knowledge, except in this article.
Generally speaking, products that usually win in any industry are products that do one thing and one thing well. That's as true of games as anything else. The PS2 won because it had the most games and the best ratio of price to game quantity and quality. It did not win because of any of this other crap this article talks about.
And this isn't "The Top 100 Games of the 21st Century" it's "The 100 top-selling console games of the last 5 years".
And?
You people are saying this as if a) you're giving the rest of us some great revelation that we couldn't otherwise figure out ourselves, and b) it matters.
So let me get this straight - you clicked the link actually expecting to find the definitive list - no further argument or debate necessary - of the top 100 games of the 21st century? I'm guessing that based on your literal interpretation of the wording, you also thought the list projected 94 years into the future? Wow, you must have been disappointed.
Here's a hint: some things are just meant to be fun to read.