This is my beef with Vista. It is late and when it ships, I expect it to be buggy with many follow-on Service Packs. The reason it is late and buggy is the absurd devotion to backwards compatability. I don't understand it. I could accept software compatability, but the hardware aspect is mystifying. Microsoft could spend five more years trying to get Vista to be all things to all people, but its stupid. OS X ships every 18-24 months. Granted this is not a full up new OS, but these releases are much more significant than service packs. I am of the mind that this is possible because they make the hard decisions about what hardware and legacy support should be cut.
I'm waiting for the little light bulb to go off in your mind that explains to you the reason why Macs have a 4% worldwide market share.
Businesses cannot afford to be dealing with full hardware and software upgrades all the time, and waiting for other vendors to update their own software to work on new operating systems. My company does have a few Macs for specific tasks, and we couldn't even upgrade to OSX at all until a few months ago - let alone any "latest version" - because one of the apps we use, Media 100i, wouldn't work properly on OSX (I never tried it in compatibility mode, but was told not to). When we bought new hardware, we had to actually downgrade the OS. A lot of time and effort had to go into keeping those machines stuck in 1999, all because Apple does not believe in backward compatibility.
If you have to upgrade your hardware and apps at the same time as you upgrade your OS, that is both a huge expense and a huge disruption to any company.
You can argue that it makes for a cleaner, more modern system if you don't worry about backward compatibility, but the logistical and business arguments in favor of it should be obvious. MS and Intel (and even AMD) wouldn't be where they are today without it.
Isn't month-by-month analysis self-defeating? I mean really, some months there just aren't many new games worth buying. I'd be very surprised if there WEREN'T monthly fluctuations.
Like the stock market, there will be fluctuations, but there should be an upward trend. If there isn't, you start to look at the reasons why. But even within each fluctuation, there are reasons for everything - the only question is whether or not they matter in the long-term. Usually, they don't - unless they keep coming up again and again and turn into a trend. But it is worthwhile to find out what those reasons are so you can identify trends earlier.
I do think that, when you look at the Xbox 360, which supposedly had so much pent-up demand due to shortages, and then it only sold 290-some thousand units in April when the shortage was alleviated, and then actually dropped in May, you can start to look at things and say "hmmm, that's odd." Is that a trend? Maybe, maybe not, but if it's not a trend downward, then it's not a trend upward either. Either way I think you can start to worry if you're MS.
In about a year.. when DS Lite and Wii have had a chance to penetrate the market Nintendo may buy Apple... at least CNET will tell us so.
That would honestly make more sense. Have we all (or at least C-Net) forgotten this?
Nintendo is for all intents and purposes a privately owned company. If Yamauchi says they're not for sale, they're not for sale. (Yamauchi stepped down only as CEO - he is still majority shareholder.) And we all know him - he's not about to sell out the company for a merger that doesn't help Nintendo in the least.
A hostile takeover of Apple by Nintendo, though, is unlikely but theoretically possible.
Games get cancelled all the time for lots of reasons. But if this actually was a Rockstar game, instead of a game from another studio also owned by Rockstar's parent company, I can't imagine that controversy would have anything to do with it's cancellation.
Indeed, the headline here is completely inaccurate. This game had nothing to do with Rockstar.
I used to work for Rockstar (though I quit several years ago now). Honestly, even calling 2K Games and Rockstar the same company to a Rockstar employee would probably just earn you a punch in the face. The fact is they are owned by the same parent company, but they do completely different things and have completely different employees (yes, the paychecks do say "Rockstar Games Inc." if that's who you work for). Rockstar has a very particular vibe that they go for, and they are run by different people than those running the 2K label. You may as well call NBA 2K6 a "Rockstar" game - it just isn't.
So the implication that this was cancelled because of "controversy" is probably just as inaccurate. I had never even heard of the game before today, and I still follow the industry on a daily basis. Bully? Check. Table Tennis? Odd as it is, check. I still know what's going on at Rockstar. But Snow? WTF is that?
I think 2K would have probably paid good money for the amount of controversy even a b-list Rockstar title like Table Tennis generates. (Though that game was controversial for a different reason.) The simple truth is games get cancelled all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with the heat they attract. This was probably just a crap game and somebody at the company finally realized it.
On price alone, I think Nintendo's going to do well.
If console wars were won and lost on price alone, Nintendo would have been #1 with the GameCube. The fact of the matter is that's not all it takes. In fact, it's rare for the cheapest system to win in any given generation - generally, the cheapest system is cheap for a reason. If Nintendo were operating from a position of strength, they might be able to charge $600 like Sony apparently thinks they can. Trying to compete on price is a sign that you are trying to win back lost market share. It is not confidence-inspiring.
The war will be won or lost on the games available. That's the way it always is; no different now.
From an article I read on the effect of telecommuting, employees are *more* effective, or accomplish more, in less amount of time, when working from home, as it allows for a more relaxed atmosphere, among other benefits.
I could see that being the case for 2-3 days out of the week, depending on what your job is. But really, if you're working in a team situation (as 99% of people are), there is really no way to effectively work from home 100% of the time. You need to be able to sit down with the rest of your team and brainstorm, or just keep each other updated on what's going on. IM and conference calls just aren't effective replacements for face-to-face meetings.
At most companies these days, meetings use up about 30-40% of the time. Some companies are pretty over the top in their meeting culture (at a certain point, it does just cut in to actual work time), but given the complexity of the work done at most companies and the need for all departments to coordinate effectively, there is some amount of necessary (and often impromptu) in-person conversation.
I work in production for my company's web site, and it drives me crazy how slow our network is at the office - if I'm doing nothing but entering content all day, I could work probably five times faster at home. But that's not all I'm doing - about half my time is spent meeting with various people to make sure we're all on the same page in what we're doing, to brainstorm new ideas, or to just put out fires. Ideally I'd love to work from home some of the time, but I just can't see how it'd ever work all of the time, and I'm sure my job is typical of most people working in technology.
If what you want is The Perfect Keyboard for Computer Geeks, then you'll want an Avant Stellar.
The keyswitches themselves seem lower quality than on IBM's old Model M's, though. But this may be a personal preference thing. Avant's keyboards have a lighter touch - some people may like that, but then some people actually prefer rubber domes. I still think if you're a real keyboard snob, you go for a Model M.
It's good to keep in mind, though, that "Model M", despite its name, is not one model of keyboard. It's basically what IBM called all of its standard 101 key keyboards for a while. IBM even made a Model M with rubber dome keys. You need to be a little bit careful in which Model M you get, though all you really need to do is just look at the pictures and read the description carefully. If it says "clicky" or "buckling spring" or "keyswitch", it's the good kind. Then it's mainly a question of cable type - PS/2, the old AT style, coiled, straight, detachable or not. Also, some Model M's had detachable key caps - so you could a) remap the keyboard to a Dvorak layout very easily, and b) clean the key caps a lot more easily than with most keyboards.
IBM did make a Model M in black as well. Check it out. They are harder to find than the standard ones, though, and definitely more expensive. Still a bargain when you consider how much you'll use it, though. But not so much when you consider that you pay basically about an 80% premium for the color.
Had both listened to the air control tower or the onboard warning systems everything would have worked.
And this new system will not solve that problem, because it would require all aircraft to be equipped with it to work, not just Airbus.
If the new system commands the airplane to dive, and the other pilot follows instructions from controllers on his manually-controlled plane to also dive, then you're still looking at an accident. This solves nothing, really.
Relying on ATC in this situation is, in any case, about the worst thing you can do - and it's the reason why standard procedure in the west is not to. Only the pilots of the airplanes, by virtue of their accident avoidance systems, have the situational awareness required to take appropriate action in time to avoid an accident. And these accident avoidance systems will never give conflicting instructions - if the system in one plane says to pull up, the system in the other will say dive.
Anyway, there are good reasons why airline pilots dislike having control taken away from them, especially in critical situations - because software in airliners, just like software in home computers, is prone to bugs. If you could see the software service advisories for the 747-400 flight management computer alone over the life of that airplane, you would probably never want to fly one again. Some of the lesser bugs have still never been patched; the manual simply contains workarounds for them. (These manuals are available to the public, despite the government's security concerns - you can buy one online, legally, if you'd like to see for yourself.) Obviously, anything safety-related would be patched as soon as it was found, but what if the first time a bug is discovered is after it causes an accident?
No thanks. Flight management systems have evolved to the point where I feel comfortable enough flying in airplanes that I know are on auto-pilot in nominal flying conditions (as most are from shortly after takeoff to shortly before landing, or even right through landing), but in critical situations, I want somebody with both learned skill and judgement flying that plane. The key word being "somebody".
Sorry, but you don't know what "proprietary" means. Proprietary means that the format is owned by someone, which it is. The fact that a bunch of big companies got together and formed an association doesn't change that fact.
proprietary adj.
1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend's house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.
It all depends on which definition you're using. You are assuming definition #3. But it seems clear from the context that the article itself (written by Joystiq?) is using definition #2.
The point is Blu-Ray is no more proprietary than HD-DVD or even regular DVD. The fact that Joystiq used the word at all is implying that Blu-Ray is somehow proprietary in a way that those other formats are not. Otherwise, there'd be no reason to describe it in that manner - I mean the Xbox 360 is using the "proprietary" DVD format and it only costs $300-$400. So this is not a differential between these two systems, and implying that it is is at best biased reporting and at worst just plain incorrect.
It is almost definitely true that the BD drive is one reason why the PS3 is so expensive, but that's just because it's new technology. It's got nothing to do with it being proprietary or not.
Different user base. Compuserv was far more targeted toward the geeks, and AOL was more newbie and family oriented. Prodigy and GEnie somewhere in the middle.
Well, let's go back to the parent post, which said this:
But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs.
He wasn't talking about demographics, he categorically said there were no other comparable services. Which is not true.
CompuServe was probably the first of these - it's at least the first I remember, and it definitely predates AOL by at least several years. (Side note: it's kind of funny that people now commonly write "CompuServ", as if they automatically assume they need to get cutesy with the name.) Prodigy also came before AOL, and did pretty much the same things - in fact, more at first. Both Prodigy and CompuServe had "instant messaging" (though it was called something else) before AOL, for example. Prodigy was always positioned as an easier-to-use service than CompuServe, and it was as graphical as AOL ever was.
I don't really know how or why AOL suddenly ballooned into the behemoth that it became, but it was probably just the MySpace/Ebay effect - you reach a critical mass of any one group of people and everybody's then gotta be where they think the action is. I think it was the teenagers that drove the rush towards AOL, not the moms and pops. The kids demanded to be on AOL and they brought their parents with them.
Anyway, the point is AOL neither did anything first nor did they do much of anything better than anyone else. They may have hit upon just the right formula of features and marketing to attract just enough of one particular demographic to then push them past the tipping point, beyond which it didn't matter anymore how good they were in relation to any of the other services. And that's the point at which they turned crap.
Nurses are, however, almost the lifeblood of a facility as there are few things they can't & don't do, out of care for the patients as much as pure necessity. You don't see orderlies any more.
Sure you do - they're just called nurse's aides now. These are the people who do stuff like wipe the butts and change the sheets of patients who shit themselves in the middle of the night. (I'm serious.)
For every 2 or so nurses in most units, there is 1 nurse's aide. There have to be more nurses because they have more to do - and about half of a nurse's job is paperwork (who do you think does the charting?).
It is true, though, that nurses - especially in this country - have more medical training and fill more of a medical role than nurses in other countries.
It's not unusual for a minimum of the staff, working directly or indirectly for the hospital, to be more than 1/3 nurses.
I'm not sure what nurses work "indirectly" for a hospital - the number of freelance nurses out there could probably be counted on one hand. But 1/3 of the staff? Not even close. Most of a major hospital's staff is administrative.
Smaller hospitals with only 20 or 30 employees might have 5-10 nurses. But a hospital with 2,000 employees does not have 700 nurses. Maybe 100-150 at most. The larger a hospital gets, the more overhead and the more administration required, at all levels.
There's only one thing which nurses do not cope with very well: hospitals which offshore nurses; i.e., bring in 3rd-world nurses. There is almost nothing they won't do -- trumping the nurses we believe so strongly in. Fortunately, this is a rare, rare situation.
Uh... it kinda has to be, because you can't work as a nurse here without proper licensure. And that takes quite a long time to get, not to mention the proper immigration status.
I'm saying all this both first-hand and second-hand. My wife is a nurse at a major hospital in NYC, and she's from Japan (where she was also a nurse). I myself have been a recent and pretty frequent (unfortunately) patient at various hospitals as I've been dealing with a recurrent spontaneous pneumothorax condition and subsequent major surgery. So first I lived through my wife's experience trying to transfer her occupation to the United States, then lately I've been experiencing things through the other end of the looking glass.
Anyway, you can't just "offshore" a nurse. Nursing licenses do not transfer, not even from state to state within the US. This is why there is such a persistent nursing shortage in the US - if hospitals could just poach nurses from elsewhere, they would. It is not that easy. They can recruit from third-world countries, but they then have to pay for their education in the US, they have to help them with their immigration issues (and hope there are no snags), and hope that they eventually obtain their licenses here. Often that doesn't happen because of the language barrier - as hard as it is to learn English in the first place, just imagine how hard it is to learn English medical terminology. My wife, with ten years experience as a nurse in Japan, took four years to obtain her nursing license in the US. It doesn't have to take that long, but I'd imagine for some people it takes even longer. Japan is a pretty advanced country and she was pretty advanced in English when she got here - for a less accomplished English speaker from a less medically advanced country, it would be even harder.
In the meantime, they can work as a medical assistant or nurse's aide. (And yeah, as a nurse's aide you'd better be prepared to do anything.) That sort of experience usually doesn't do anything but make them anxious for the day when they can give up all that stuff and turn over the crap jobs to a new batch of nurse's aides, though. So I wouldn't say nurses that have immigrated from third-world countries do anything more than nurses born here.
I know Nintendo stays away from games like GTA:SA and they are one of the greatest game makers ever (Mario is still the king) but it's games like GTA:SA that sell like gasoline at a SUV convention.
Nintendo would give their left nut for a port of GTA:SA, and don't let anyone tell you different.
Nintendo themselves have no interest in making games like that, but nobody should ever suggest that they would turn down the opportunity to have a game that sold 10 million copies on their system.
Nintendo's problem is attracting that level of support. They really just don't have complete control over their third-party situation - they can wine and dine developers till the cows come home, but at the end of the day they can't force anybody to do anything. So they end up with Spongebob Squarepants instead of GTA to fill out their E3 presentation.
They can claim they've learned whatever they want from the GameCube, but the fact remains that they can only control their own game development for the system; they have very little say over third-party development (apart from veto power in licensing... which they'd never be stupid enough to use on a top-selling franchise).
They should be ditching it on at least the $499 'tard box' version, since it will not be able to play the movies in 1080p High-Def when ICP starts being implemented on Blu-Ray disks.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
The BD drive in the PS3 is being used for games, not just movies. Developers will now have 50GB of texture storage, as opposed to 4.7GB (realistically, due to streaming limitations on DVD's second layer). Sure, it's true that most games don't use up even a full DVD, but a lot of the biggest games do - including the GTA series, the last couple Final Fantasies, etc. Those games will now have much higher-res textures, and more of them (so less repeating).
Removing the BD drive in the low-end version of the PS3 would remove it as a gaming feature for both models. Developers have to develop for the lowest common denominator. This is MS's problem with the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360 - it can never be used for games, only movies. (You can argue that games look great on the Xbox 360 without an HD-DVD drive - though go ahead and look at FFXI sometime and come back and tell me with a straight face that it couldn't have benefited from some better textures.)
If the BD drive's gonna be in there, it only makes sense for it to be in both models. If it's going to be removed from one, it has to be removed from both. But then, Sony loses a major advantage they have over MS. So there's really no impetus for them to remove it.
Our society is too "traditionalist" as a whole, revering the "classics" while ignoring the quality that's both modern..and thus more relevent, that's under our noses.
The problem is, there is no reliable measure of what's "quality" and what isn't in terms of what's modern. Are you saying with a straight face that, for example, kids should be exposed to Britney Spears rather than Beethoven? What determines quality? Simple popularity, or some other measure? Or are you arguing that art, music and film critics should now determine the education of our kids? Should GameSpot and IGN set the nation's high school curriculum?
The classics are classics for a reason; they have stood the test of time and continue to be enjoyed and remembered.
If you would like to argue that kids should be playing games that may one day themselves be considered classics, then you're free to make that argument - but to simply say they should be doing this because it's "modern" makes no sense. A true classic has a lot more relevance today - regardless of when it was created - than even the most popular disposable "art."
As well, reading is much too passive an activity. It encourages mental passiveness, instead of being aware and engaged in our surroundings.
Jesus, have you ever even read a book? It is about the least mentally passive activity possible.
It exercises almost every area of the brain. It encourages imagination in a way that video games never could - with a video game, the visuals and sounds are provided for you. It encourages you to think about things you may have never before considered. It grows your vocabulary. It teaches grammar without you even trying. It is the best way to learn English and all the different ways that you can use it. (It is also the best way to avoid misspelling words like "relevant" - something that you obviously need help with.)
It's scary to me - as a gamer - that there are such uncreative and potentially illiterate people as yourself out there encouraging others to be just as uncreative and illiterate. And people wonder why games themselves have gotten so uncreative lately - from creative minds come creative games. And if you don't read, you're not exercising your imagination on a regular basis.
CMOS is a fine technology but there is nothing magical about it. Canon has proven that it is at least a match to CCD, but I don't get why a new 8mp CMOS sensor is any big deal (I'm not blaming Slashdot, I saw this story on CNN too). And I don't get why the fact that it's CMOS means it can automatically take 10 shots per second, either - that's a function of memory bandwidth and processing speed, not the sensor. And the processors and memory in cell phones are hardly anything to write home about.
The answer seems clear to me: the huge jump in Xbox 360 sales is starting to drive software sales again.
The "huge jump" in Xbox 360 sales was only to 295,000 units. 295,000 units in a whole month, after MS said they were shipping more than a million to retailers. And this after there was supposedly so much pent-up demand caused by the shortage. I think a lot of people had assumed there were literally millions of people out there who just couldn't get an Xbox 360; well, now they can, and only 295,000 of them showed up.
It is true that the 100,000 or so extra Xbox 360's sold probably do mean another 150,000 or so games added to the tally for the month too. But from MS's point of view, that's really got to be a pretty disappointing number. They're still barely even outselling the PlayStation 2, for god's sake, a last-generation system, and by MS's own numbers, there's now a whole bunch of unsold inventory out there.
In other words, whether or not this is sustainable is still up in the air.
After you get over the initial "thrill" of a force-feedback experience, what good are they? All they do is interfere with gameplay.
Well, first of all, if it was force feedback, there wouldn't even be a question of whether it's useful or not. Force feedback certainly is useful, in most cases.
But "rumble" is not the same as "force feedback". Force feedback actually gives you real sensations designed to mimic whatever's being simulated. For example, you can actually feel the stick get heavier as you bank into the wind in a flight sim. Or you can feel the steering wheel start to give way as your tires lose adhesion in a driving sim. This is great stuff, and it really makes you feel like you're "in the game".
IMO, a good tactic to counter Nintendo's Wii would have been to make a controller that truly is a force feedback controller and also works equally well with different types of games. The second part is the hard part, because force feedback is sort of a specialized function right now. But if Nintendo can make a motion-sensing controller that works with all types of games, then someone else could do the same with force feedback.
Anyway, to get back to the point, "rumble" is just a shaking mechanism; it doesn't convey any actual "force" on the controller. It's "feedback", I guess, but not "force feedback".
Even so, though, it's a useful thing to have in a lot of games, just not as useful as true force feedback. It depends on how it's implemented. In a racing game, for example, you can still simulate with a pretty good degree of accuracy that feeling of just being on the edge of losing control. You do that with different degrees of shake. Tapping other cars off to the side can be simulated with jolts, and this can actually be helpful because it's not like you can just look off to the side to see what's happening. These are the sorts of situations where "rumble" is nice to have.
There are games where it's basically useless and where it actually may get annoying after a while. Some games have it just to have it; I've played puzzle games where just putting a puzzle piece down results in a jolt from the rumble motors. That sort of thing just gets tiring.
But a lot of games - especially simulators of any kind, action shooters and the like - will miss it.
Odd that the idiot conspiracy theorists have yet propose a solutuion to the following:
1) where is American flight 77? 2) where are all the people that were on board flight 77? 3) why are the family members of all the people on board flight 77 not concerned that a plane is missing.
These are the same questions that (presumably other?) conspiracy theorists are asked about KAL flight 007. Some answers they have given in that case and probably do now about flight 77:
a) There was no flight 77 b) There were no passengers aboard flight 77 c) The "families" are all government employees in on the conspiracy etc. etc.
I mean none of this can really be disproved; that's the thing. It sounds nutty, and it *is* nutty, but to someone who really believes it, there is no way to definitively prove a person's family member isn't secretly a member of the CIA.
Conspiracy theories rely on the idea that in most cases, you can't prove a negative. They rely on "facts" that are refuted only if you don't believe in the conspiracy.
And they also persist because there are real conspiracies that have gone on and are still going on. We've only just gotten the tip of the NSA domestic spying thing, most likely. There was Watergate. There was Iran-Contra. How many more conspiracies have occurred in government that have never been uncovered?
But that doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy. Most events have other explanations and you'd have to have a complete inability to objectively look at where the evidence points to think otherwise.
Windows boxes are the only ones with this notion of being "rebuilt". The rest of us don't ever have to do that.
Well, your problems are:
a) You're misunderstanding the term "rebuilt", and
b) You're confusing "have to" and "want to".
Windows users like to tinker with their hardware. It's a hobby for a lot of us. The fact that you basically can't do this with an Apple machine means this is not in your vocabulary - but it is just the way a lot of power Windows users operate, by choice. Nobody forces me to buy a new motherboard every three years; I do it because I want more features and performance without having to buy a whole new PC. At the same time, I might upgrade my RAM and video card, and maybe I will reinstall Windows. That's called a "rebuild". But I don't "have to" do any of that.
In fact, I can trace both of my current desktops to a lineage that began with one Packard Bell 486 in 1991. I still have files on these machines that date to that PC. Over the years, I have upgraded every single component on it until it was no longer the same PC (I consider the day I bought a new case as the day when it was a "new" machine), then I split off components into a separate PC once I realized I had a whole crate full of parts that were still basically good. So now one machine gets new parts when I upgrade and the other gets hand-me-downs. I have never reinstalled Windows on either of these machines, though - I have simply installed one version on top of another, over and over. A lot of people (especially Mac users who know nothing about it) will tell you that either this is a really bad idea or that it just plain and simply can't be done, but that's not true. I have gone from DOS 6 to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to Windows XP and then Windows MCE, and that PC is running fine. (The other is still on XP Pro and it's also running fine.)
Now, with a laptop, obviously you can't do as much. Nobody "rebuilds" laptops. But that's not what the guy you're replying to was talking about.
With a desktop, the concept of buying a whole new machine is probably just as foreign to a lot of Windows users as the concept of rebuilding a machine is to you. It strikes me as incredibly wasteful - why would you buy a whole new machine just because you wanted a faster CPU or a more feature-filled motherboard?
Natsume (developed by Marvelous) Harvest Moon Disaster: Day of CrisisTM Excite TruckTM Fire EmblemTM Metroid® Prime 3: Corruption Project H.A.M.M.E.R. TM Super Mario® Galaxy The Legend of Zelda®: Twilight Princess WarioWareTM: Smooth Moves
Wow, Nintendo's putting a lot of trust in Natsume and Marvelous to be outsourcing all those games!
Your list has more than formatting problems. These aren't third-party games, and you've also got Nintendo listed separately as a developer. So that's more than 10% of your list off right there.
Plus, most of those titles just aren't very exciting. I mean maybe some people are waiting for "Happy Feet New Vertical Scroll Shooting Game", "Sengoku Action Elebits", "Cooking Mama -Cooking with International Friends" or the ever-popular "Entertainment Title TBD", but I don't personally think this is a very impressive list.
I'll break it down for you a little bit, and separate out only third-party titles. The only games on this list that I think are worth waiting for at all are:
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles 2 Metal Slug Anthology (though this is hardly exclusive) Sonic Wild Fire
If you're a mainstream gamer, you'll also want:
Madden 07 Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam Call of Duty 3 Medal of Honor Airborne Resident Evil
Possibly add Red Steel to that list (though it didn't have a very good showing at E3), maybe Rayman. But nothing else really jumps out at me.
There are some niche titles there that might find an audience in the US - Harvest Moon, maybe even something like Pangya! Golf - but these won't move systems.
Outside of Nintendo's first party stuff - which always seems a given for the reason why people buy any Nintendo system - there just aren't any real A-list titles. There's nothing with the power of a GTA or a true Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest or anything like that.
So what you're left with is pretty much the same situation as the GameCube. Remember, the GC had Madden at first, it had RE, it had Monkey Ball, it had Sonic, it had FF:CC, it had a lot of these titles and also other ones to fill some of the same niches as the smaller ones here.
So, you know, feel free to get excited about "Disney's Meet the Robinsons" or "Chicken Little: Ace in Action" - I won't stop you - but don't blame the rest of us if we're hoping for more.
Final Fantasy? Dragon Quest? both are major series.
It's getting non-canonical side versions of each. A sequel to Crystal Chronicles, which is sort of FF-lite with multiplayer elements, and an action hack-and-slash version of Dragon Quest.
Neither of those games is going to move systems. The people who really want to play FF and DQ will still be buying the PS3, because that's the system Square Enix is going to put the proper games on. The people who buy FF:CC2 and the DQ sword game on Wii are going to be the people who only have a Wii and have no other choice if they want a taste of those series.
What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back.
It didn't "crash". It had a downturn. That's not the same thing.
Some people, especially those that are too young to remember it, don't realize what 1984 was really like. Consider the fact that there were no game consoles on the market. None. (At least not in the US.) That seems impossible now, until you remember that the Atari 2600 hit in 1977 and most people had never heard of video gaming before that. So it was assumed at the time that video games had been a fad whose time had past... and every single company involved in the industry pulled out.
That did not happen in Japan, not even close. For one thing, their downturn was relatively mild compared to the US crash in 1984 - many Japanese companies continued making money through it, and games continued to sell (although there was close to a 50% drop over a few years). In the US, nobody was profitable, and game sales almost literally stopped in the span of about six months. They then did stop completely once stock was cleared off store shelves in early 1984.
The crash was dramatic. Any talk of a future "crash" is hyperbole unless the prediction is for something just as dramatic. I mean, every industry has its ups and downs - there's no news there. Consolidations, downturns, "transition periods" - this is not the same thing as a crash. At least not the crash of 1984, when video game purchases in this country literally ended, at least for one year.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US...
Two things:
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
b) Even if it were true, the conditions for the industry now are still better than they were from 1977-1980, when video gaming first exploded in this country.
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars. And that at a time when unemployment was more than 10%. Yet still, the industry flourished.
There is no economic reason whatsoever why the average American couldn't afford a $400 console and a $500 TV today if they could afford the equivalent of an $800 console and a $1,500 TV in 1977. All this bitching about price is just a lot of whining, nothing more.
I'm not saying everyone can afford it, but if you can't, then you've got bigger problems to solve anyway. There's no use crying about game consoles - work on getting some food on your table and a roof over your head first if you're poor enough that $1,000 for five years or more worth of entertainment is unaffordable. (Remember, TV's can entertain just fine even without a game console hooked up...)
The only difference between now and 1977 is that there is more competition for our disposable income. But why is this something to bitch and moan about? So because you just bought a $300 cell phone or a $1,000 laptop PC or a stack of DVD movies, the electronics and video game industries have to lower their prices for you? To a large extent, they have - adjusted for inflation, everything game-related is cheaper than it used to be (including games). But there's only so far they can go.
I'm not being elitist - I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases. They act like it's the manufacturers' responsibility to just make everything so cheap that they can afford to buy everything they'd ever want. And those that really don't have the money really need to be concentrating on things other than game consoles anyway.
I don't see any cost parallel between now and 1983. Cost wasn't the reason for the crash anyway - in 1983, there were systems at every price point from about $75 up to $275. And in fact, one of the main reasons for the crash was the exodus from game consoles to more expensive computers that played more advanced games. People would have rather paid $400 for a C64 or $800 for an Apple II than $100 for an Intellivision or $150 for a Coleco Vision. So I don't see that affordability really has anything to do with either era, or anything to do with any possible crash, past or present.
A further comment claimed that in America, companies have the right to lay you off, and stop your pay -tomorrow- Surely that isn't right?
It depends, as others have said. But one thing nobody has said is that you are eligible for unemployment insurance in this situation, which lasts for six months. How much this is actually worth depends on the state, and it's typically some percentage of what you were making at your job up to a certain maximum, but it is generally always enough to get by. There are various formulas states use to calculate this, designed to average various variables that come into the real cost of living.
When I was laid off in 2001 (after the dot.com bust), I went from a $30,000 per year job (I was just out of college so wasn't making much) to $405 a week on unemployment. That's an annual pay cut of about 30% if you figured it out by the year. Anyway, even in NYC, $405 per week is enough to live on, provided you've got a reasonable savings to fall back on. The idea isn't to keep paying your wage while you sit on your duff; the idea is to keep you sheltered and eating until you can find another job.
Most states are "at will" states, meaning either side can terminate employment at either time. It's a tradeoff. You work as long as the company needs you - or as long as you need the company. This is not necessarily as bad as it seems, because it's led to a culture where those who get laid off can, provided they're skilled enough, get new jobs fairly easily. So can those who quit simply because they don't like the company they work for. There is no stigma attached to getting laid off or quitting, and in my case, and I suspect that of many others, the job I got after being laid off paid significantly more than my previous job.
In some countries I know of (Japan, for instance), it is very, very difficult to get a new job after getting laid off because companies assume it was for performance reasons. Firing people is uncommon there - rather than fire you or lay you off, they will stick you in a room by yourself until you quit - so anyone who's laid off has a real stigma attached to them. That's not true in the US, where people move from job to job as they or their companies see fit, and that's led to a mobile workforce where the skilled really generally do rise to the top faster than they would have otherwise, because if they're dissatisfied with their work or their pay, they're free to shop themselves around.
It's definitely a different philosophy than some European countries, where it's assumed that corporations owe a debt to their workers. I understand that philosophy - the Darwin-like system we have in the US can be very difficult, and does tend to weed out those who can't hack it and ruthlessly grinds them down into the dirt. But if you do make that effort to continue honing your skills and continue to gain experience and knowledge, you can rise faster and open more doors for yourself in a system like we have in the US.
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This is my beef with Vista. It is late and when it ships, I expect it to be buggy with many follow-on Service Packs. The reason it is late and buggy is the absurd devotion to backwards compatability. I don't understand it. I could accept software compatability, but the hardware aspect is mystifying. Microsoft could spend five more years trying to get Vista to be all things to all people, but its stupid. OS X ships every 18-24 months. Granted this is not a full up new OS, but these releases are much more significant than service packs. I am of the mind that this is possible because they make the hard decisions about what hardware and legacy support should be cut.
I'm waiting for the little light bulb to go off in your mind that explains to you the reason why Macs have a 4% worldwide market share.
Businesses cannot afford to be dealing with full hardware and software upgrades all the time, and waiting for other vendors to update their own software to work on new operating systems. My company does have a few Macs for specific tasks, and we couldn't even upgrade to OSX at all until a few months ago - let alone any "latest version" - because one of the apps we use, Media 100i, wouldn't work properly on OSX (I never tried it in compatibility mode, but was told not to). When we bought new hardware, we had to actually downgrade the OS. A lot of time and effort had to go into keeping those machines stuck in 1999, all because Apple does not believe in backward compatibility.
If you have to upgrade your hardware and apps at the same time as you upgrade your OS, that is both a huge expense and a huge disruption to any company.
You can argue that it makes for a cleaner, more modern system if you don't worry about backward compatibility, but the logistical and business arguments in favor of it should be obvious. MS and Intel (and even AMD) wouldn't be where they are today without it.
Isn't month-by-month analysis self-defeating? I mean really, some months there just aren't many new games worth buying.
I'd be very surprised if there WEREN'T monthly fluctuations.
Like the stock market, there will be fluctuations, but there should be an upward trend. If there isn't, you start to look at the reasons why. But even within each fluctuation, there are reasons for everything - the only question is whether or not they matter in the long-term. Usually, they don't - unless they keep coming up again and again and turn into a trend. But it is worthwhile to find out what those reasons are so you can identify trends earlier.
I do think that, when you look at the Xbox 360, which supposedly had so much pent-up demand due to shortages, and then it only sold 290-some thousand units in April when the shortage was alleviated, and then actually dropped in May, you can start to look at things and say "hmmm, that's odd." Is that a trend? Maybe, maybe not, but if it's not a trend downward, then it's not a trend upward either. Either way I think you can start to worry if you're MS.
In about a year .. when DS Lite and Wii have had a chance to penetrate the market Nintendo may buy Apple ... at least CNET will tell us so.
That would honestly make more sense. Have we all (or at least C-Net) forgotten this?
Nintendo is for all intents and purposes a privately owned company. If Yamauchi says they're not for sale, they're not for sale. (Yamauchi stepped down only as CEO - he is still majority shareholder.) And we all know him - he's not about to sell out the company for a merger that doesn't help Nintendo in the least.
A hostile takeover of Apple by Nintendo, though, is unlikely but theoretically possible.
Games get cancelled all the time for lots of reasons. But if this actually was a Rockstar game, instead of a game from another studio also owned by Rockstar's parent company, I can't imagine that controversy would have anything to do with it's cancellation.
Indeed, the headline here is completely inaccurate. This game had nothing to do with Rockstar.
I used to work for Rockstar (though I quit several years ago now). Honestly, even calling 2K Games and Rockstar the same company to a Rockstar employee would probably just earn you a punch in the face. The fact is they are owned by the same parent company, but they do completely different things and have completely different employees (yes, the paychecks do say "Rockstar Games Inc." if that's who you work for). Rockstar has a very particular vibe that they go for, and they are run by different people than those running the 2K label. You may as well call NBA 2K6 a "Rockstar" game - it just isn't.
So the implication that this was cancelled because of "controversy" is probably just as inaccurate. I had never even heard of the game before today, and I still follow the industry on a daily basis. Bully? Check. Table Tennis? Odd as it is, check. I still know what's going on at Rockstar. But Snow? WTF is that?
I think 2K would have probably paid good money for the amount of controversy even a b-list Rockstar title like Table Tennis generates. (Though that game was controversial for a different reason.) The simple truth is games get cancelled all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with the heat they attract. This was probably just a crap game and somebody at the company finally realized it.
On price alone, I think Nintendo's going to do well.
If console wars were won and lost on price alone, Nintendo would have been #1 with the GameCube. The fact of the matter is that's not all it takes. In fact, it's rare for the cheapest system to win in any given generation - generally, the cheapest system is cheap for a reason. If Nintendo were operating from a position of strength, they might be able to charge $600 like Sony apparently thinks they can. Trying to compete on price is a sign that you are trying to win back lost market share. It is not confidence-inspiring.
The war will be won or lost on the games available. That's the way it always is; no different now.
From an article I read on the effect of telecommuting, employees are *more* effective, or accomplish more, in less amount of time, when working from home, as it allows for a more relaxed atmosphere, among other benefits.
I could see that being the case for 2-3 days out of the week, depending on what your job is. But really, if you're working in a team situation (as 99% of people are), there is really no way to effectively work from home 100% of the time. You need to be able to sit down with the rest of your team and brainstorm, or just keep each other updated on what's going on. IM and conference calls just aren't effective replacements for face-to-face meetings.
At most companies these days, meetings use up about 30-40% of the time. Some companies are pretty over the top in their meeting culture (at a certain point, it does just cut in to actual work time), but given the complexity of the work done at most companies and the need for all departments to coordinate effectively, there is some amount of necessary (and often impromptu) in-person conversation.
I work in production for my company's web site, and it drives me crazy how slow our network is at the office - if I'm doing nothing but entering content all day, I could work probably five times faster at home. But that's not all I'm doing - about half my time is spent meeting with various people to make sure we're all on the same page in what we're doing, to brainstorm new ideas, or to just put out fires. Ideally I'd love to work from home some of the time, but I just can't see how it'd ever work all of the time, and I'm sure my job is typical of most people working in technology.
If what you want is The Perfect Keyboard for Computer Geeks, then you'll want an Avant Stellar.
The keyswitches themselves seem lower quality than on IBM's old Model M's, though. But this may be a personal preference thing. Avant's keyboards have a lighter touch - some people may like that, but then some people actually prefer rubber domes. I still think if you're a real keyboard snob, you go for a Model M.
It's good to keep in mind, though, that "Model M", despite its name, is not one model of keyboard. It's basically what IBM called all of its standard 101 key keyboards for a while. IBM even made a Model M with rubber dome keys. You need to be a little bit careful in which Model M you get, though all you really need to do is just look at the pictures and read the description carefully. If it says "clicky" or "buckling spring" or "keyswitch", it's the good kind. Then it's mainly a question of cable type - PS/2, the old AT style, coiled, straight, detachable or not. Also, some Model M's had detachable key caps - so you could a) remap the keyboard to a Dvorak layout very easily, and b) clean the key caps a lot more easily than with most keyboards.
IBM did make a Model M in black as well. Check it out. They are harder to find than the standard ones, though, and definitely more expensive. Still a bargain when you consider how much you'll use it, though. But not so much when you consider that you pay basically about an 80% premium for the color.
Had both listened to the air control tower or the onboard warning systems everything would have worked.
And this new system will not solve that problem, because it would require all aircraft to be equipped with it to work, not just Airbus.
If the new system commands the airplane to dive, and the other pilot follows instructions from controllers on his manually-controlled plane to also dive, then you're still looking at an accident. This solves nothing, really.
Relying on ATC in this situation is, in any case, about the worst thing you can do - and it's the reason why standard procedure in the west is not to. Only the pilots of the airplanes, by virtue of their accident avoidance systems, have the situational awareness required to take appropriate action in time to avoid an accident. And these accident avoidance systems will never give conflicting instructions - if the system in one plane says to pull up, the system in the other will say dive.
Anyway, there are good reasons why airline pilots dislike having control taken away from them, especially in critical situations - because software in airliners, just like software in home computers, is prone to bugs. If you could see the software service advisories for the 747-400 flight management computer alone over the life of that airplane, you would probably never want to fly one again. Some of the lesser bugs have still never been patched; the manual simply contains workarounds for them. (These manuals are available to the public, despite the government's security concerns - you can buy one online, legally, if you'd like to see for yourself.) Obviously, anything safety-related would be patched as soon as it was found, but what if the first time a bug is discovered is after it causes an accident?
No thanks. Flight management systems have evolved to the point where I feel comfortable enough flying in airplanes that I know are on auto-pilot in nominal flying conditions (as most are from shortly after takeoff to shortly before landing, or even right through landing), but in critical situations, I want somebody with both learned skill and judgement flying that plane. The key word being "somebody".
Sorry, but you don't know what "proprietary" means. Proprietary means that the format is owned by someone, which it is. The fact that a bunch of big companies got together and formed an association doesn't change that fact.
proprietary
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend's house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.
It all depends on which definition you're using. You are assuming definition #3. But it seems clear from the context that the article itself (written by Joystiq?) is using definition #2.
The point is Blu-Ray is no more proprietary than HD-DVD or even regular DVD. The fact that Joystiq used the word at all is implying that Blu-Ray is somehow proprietary in a way that those other formats are not. Otherwise, there'd be no reason to describe it in that manner - I mean the Xbox 360 is using the "proprietary" DVD format and it only costs $300-$400. So this is not a differential between these two systems, and implying that it is is at best biased reporting and at worst just plain incorrect.
It is almost definitely true that the BD drive is one reason why the PS3 is so expensive, but that's just because it's new technology. It's got nothing to do with it being proprietary or not.
Different user base. Compuserv was far more targeted toward the geeks, and AOL was more newbie and family oriented. Prodigy and GEnie somewhere in the middle.
Well, let's go back to the parent post, which said this:
But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs.
He wasn't talking about demographics, he categorically said there were no other comparable services. Which is not true.
CompuServe was probably the first of these - it's at least the first I remember, and it definitely predates AOL by at least several years. (Side note: it's kind of funny that people now commonly write "CompuServ", as if they automatically assume they need to get cutesy with the name.) Prodigy also came before AOL, and did pretty much the same things - in fact, more at first. Both Prodigy and CompuServe had "instant messaging" (though it was called something else) before AOL, for example. Prodigy was always positioned as an easier-to-use service than CompuServe, and it was as graphical as AOL ever was.
I don't really know how or why AOL suddenly ballooned into the behemoth that it became, but it was probably just the MySpace/Ebay effect - you reach a critical mass of any one group of people and everybody's then gotta be where they think the action is. I think it was the teenagers that drove the rush towards AOL, not the moms and pops. The kids demanded to be on AOL and they brought their parents with them.
Anyway, the point is AOL neither did anything first nor did they do much of anything better than anyone else. They may have hit upon just the right formula of features and marketing to attract just enough of one particular demographic to then push them past the tipping point, beyond which it didn't matter anymore how good they were in relation to any of the other services. And that's the point at which they turned crap.
Nurses are, however, almost the lifeblood of a facility as there are few things they can't & don't do, out of care for the patients as much as pure necessity. You don't see orderlies any more.
Sure you do - they're just called nurse's aides now. These are the people who do stuff like wipe the butts and change the sheets of patients who shit themselves in the middle of the night. (I'm serious.)
For every 2 or so nurses in most units, there is 1 nurse's aide. There have to be more nurses because they have more to do - and about half of a nurse's job is paperwork (who do you think does the charting?).
It is true, though, that nurses - especially in this country - have more medical training and fill more of a medical role than nurses in other countries.
It's not unusual for a minimum of the staff, working directly or indirectly for the hospital, to be more than 1/3 nurses.
I'm not sure what nurses work "indirectly" for a hospital - the number of freelance nurses out there could probably be counted on one hand. But 1/3 of the staff? Not even close. Most of a major hospital's staff is administrative.
Smaller hospitals with only 20 or 30 employees might have 5-10 nurses. But a hospital with 2,000 employees does not have 700 nurses. Maybe 100-150 at most. The larger a hospital gets, the more overhead and the more administration required, at all levels.
There's only one thing which nurses do not cope with very well: hospitals which offshore nurses; i.e., bring in 3rd-world nurses. There is almost nothing they won't do -- trumping the nurses we believe so strongly in. Fortunately, this is a rare, rare situation.
Uh... it kinda has to be, because you can't work as a nurse here without proper licensure. And that takes quite a long time to get, not to mention the proper immigration status.
I'm saying all this both first-hand and second-hand. My wife is a nurse at a major hospital in NYC, and she's from Japan (where she was also a nurse). I myself have been a recent and pretty frequent (unfortunately) patient at various hospitals as I've been dealing with a recurrent spontaneous pneumothorax condition and subsequent major surgery. So first I lived through my wife's experience trying to transfer her occupation to the United States, then lately I've been experiencing things through the other end of the looking glass.
Anyway, you can't just "offshore" a nurse. Nursing licenses do not transfer, not even from state to state within the US. This is why there is such a persistent nursing shortage in the US - if hospitals could just poach nurses from elsewhere, they would. It is not that easy. They can recruit from third-world countries, but they then have to pay for their education in the US, they have to help them with their immigration issues (and hope there are no snags), and hope that they eventually obtain their licenses here. Often that doesn't happen because of the language barrier - as hard as it is to learn English in the first place, just imagine how hard it is to learn English medical terminology. My wife, with ten years experience as a nurse in Japan, took four years to obtain her nursing license in the US. It doesn't have to take that long, but I'd imagine for some people it takes even longer. Japan is a pretty advanced country and she was pretty advanced in English when she got here - for a less accomplished English speaker from a less medically advanced country, it would be even harder.
In the meantime, they can work as a medical assistant or nurse's aide. (And yeah, as a nurse's aide you'd better be prepared to do anything.) That sort of experience usually doesn't do anything but make them anxious for the day when they can give up all that stuff and turn over the crap jobs to a new batch of nurse's aides, though. So I wouldn't say nurses that have immigrated from third-world countries do anything more than nurses born here.
You may be confus
I know Nintendo stays away from games like GTA:SA and they are one of the greatest game makers ever (Mario is still the king) but it's games like GTA:SA that sell like gasoline at a SUV convention.
Nintendo would give their left nut for a port of GTA:SA, and don't let anyone tell you different.
Nintendo themselves have no interest in making games like that, but nobody should ever suggest that they would turn down the opportunity to have a game that sold 10 million copies on their system.
Nintendo's problem is attracting that level of support. They really just don't have complete control over their third-party situation - they can wine and dine developers till the cows come home, but at the end of the day they can't force anybody to do anything. So they end up with Spongebob Squarepants instead of GTA to fill out their E3 presentation.
They can claim they've learned whatever they want from the GameCube, but the fact remains that they can only control their own game development for the system; they have very little say over third-party development (apart from veto power in licensing... which they'd never be stupid enough to use on a top-selling franchise).
They should be ditching it on at least the $499 'tard box' version, since it will not be able to play the movies in 1080p High-Def when ICP starts being implemented on Blu-Ray disks.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
The BD drive in the PS3 is being used for games, not just movies. Developers will now have 50GB of texture storage, as opposed to 4.7GB (realistically, due to streaming limitations on DVD's second layer). Sure, it's true that most games don't use up even a full DVD, but a lot of the biggest games do - including the GTA series, the last couple Final Fantasies, etc. Those games will now have much higher-res textures, and more of them (so less repeating).
Removing the BD drive in the low-end version of the PS3 would remove it as a gaming feature for both models. Developers have to develop for the lowest common denominator. This is MS's problem with the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360 - it can never be used for games, only movies. (You can argue that games look great on the Xbox 360 without an HD-DVD drive - though go ahead and look at FFXI sometime and come back and tell me with a straight face that it couldn't have benefited from some better textures.)
If the BD drive's gonna be in there, it only makes sense for it to be in both models. If it's going to be removed from one, it has to be removed from both. But then, Sony loses a major advantage they have over MS. So there's really no impetus for them to remove it.
Our society is too "traditionalist" as a whole, revering the "classics" while ignoring the quality that's both modern..and thus more relevent, that's under our noses.
The problem is, there is no reliable measure of what's "quality" and what isn't in terms of what's modern. Are you saying with a straight face that, for example, kids should be exposed to Britney Spears rather than Beethoven? What determines quality? Simple popularity, or some other measure? Or are you arguing that art, music and film critics should now determine the education of our kids? Should GameSpot and IGN set the nation's high school curriculum?
The classics are classics for a reason; they have stood the test of time and continue to be enjoyed and remembered.
If you would like to argue that kids should be playing games that may one day themselves be considered classics, then you're free to make that argument - but to simply say they should be doing this because it's "modern" makes no sense. A true classic has a lot more relevance today - regardless of when it was created - than even the most popular disposable "art."
As well, reading is much too passive an activity. It encourages mental passiveness, instead of being aware and engaged in our surroundings.
Jesus, have you ever even read a book? It is about the least mentally passive activity possible.
It exercises almost every area of the brain. It encourages imagination in a way that video games never could - with a video game, the visuals and sounds are provided for you. It encourages you to think about things you may have never before considered. It grows your vocabulary. It teaches grammar without you even trying. It is the best way to learn English and all the different ways that you can use it. (It is also the best way to avoid misspelling words like "relevant" - something that you obviously need help with.)
It's scary to me - as a gamer - that there are such uncreative and potentially illiterate people as yourself out there encouraging others to be just as uncreative and illiterate. And people wonder why games themselves have gotten so uncreative lately - from creative minds come creative games. And if you don't read, you're not exercising your imagination on a regular basis.
(and whatever Canon's models use CMOS sensors).
That would be all of their DSLR's.
I believe some of their P&S's too.
CMOS is a fine technology but there is nothing magical about it. Canon has proven that it is at least a match to CCD, but I don't get why a new 8mp CMOS sensor is any big deal (I'm not blaming Slashdot, I saw this story on CNN too). And I don't get why the fact that it's CMOS means it can automatically take 10 shots per second, either - that's a function of memory bandwidth and processing speed, not the sensor. And the processors and memory in cell phones are hardly anything to write home about.
The answer seems clear to me: the huge jump in Xbox 360 sales is starting to drive software sales again.
The "huge jump" in Xbox 360 sales was only to 295,000 units. 295,000 units in a whole month, after MS said they were shipping more than a million to retailers. And this after there was supposedly so much pent-up demand caused by the shortage. I think a lot of people had assumed there were literally millions of people out there who just couldn't get an Xbox 360; well, now they can, and only 295,000 of them showed up.
It is true that the 100,000 or so extra Xbox 360's sold probably do mean another 150,000 or so games added to the tally for the month too. But from MS's point of view, that's really got to be a pretty disappointing number. They're still barely even outselling the PlayStation 2, for god's sake, a last-generation system, and by MS's own numbers, there's now a whole bunch of unsold inventory out there.
In other words, whether or not this is sustainable is still up in the air.
After you get over the initial "thrill" of a force-feedback experience, what good are they? All they do is interfere with gameplay.
Well, first of all, if it was force feedback, there wouldn't even be a question of whether it's useful or not. Force feedback certainly is useful, in most cases.
But "rumble" is not the same as "force feedback". Force feedback actually gives you real sensations designed to mimic whatever's being simulated. For example, you can actually feel the stick get heavier as you bank into the wind in a flight sim. Or you can feel the steering wheel start to give way as your tires lose adhesion in a driving sim. This is great stuff, and it really makes you feel like you're "in the game".
IMO, a good tactic to counter Nintendo's Wii would have been to make a controller that truly is a force feedback controller and also works equally well with different types of games. The second part is the hard part, because force feedback is sort of a specialized function right now. But if Nintendo can make a motion-sensing controller that works with all types of games, then someone else could do the same with force feedback.
Anyway, to get back to the point, "rumble" is just a shaking mechanism; it doesn't convey any actual "force" on the controller. It's "feedback", I guess, but not "force feedback".
Even so, though, it's a useful thing to have in a lot of games, just not as useful as true force feedback. It depends on how it's implemented. In a racing game, for example, you can still simulate with a pretty good degree of accuracy that feeling of just being on the edge of losing control. You do that with different degrees of shake. Tapping other cars off to the side can be simulated with jolts, and this can actually be helpful because it's not like you can just look off to the side to see what's happening. These are the sorts of situations where "rumble" is nice to have.
There are games where it's basically useless and where it actually may get annoying after a while. Some games have it just to have it; I've played puzzle games where just putting a puzzle piece down results in a jolt from the rumble motors. That sort of thing just gets tiring.
But a lot of games - especially simulators of any kind, action shooters and the like - will miss it.
Odd that the idiot conspiracy theorists have yet propose a solutuion to the following:
1) where is American flight 77?
2) where are all the people that were on board flight 77?
3) why are the family members of all the people on board flight 77 not concerned that a plane is missing.
These are the same questions that (presumably other?) conspiracy theorists are asked about KAL flight 007. Some answers they have given in that case and probably do now about flight 77:
a) There was no flight 77
b) There were no passengers aboard flight 77
c) The "families" are all government employees in on the conspiracy
etc. etc.
I mean none of this can really be disproved; that's the thing. It sounds nutty, and it *is* nutty, but to someone who really believes it, there is no way to definitively prove a person's family member isn't secretly a member of the CIA.
Conspiracy theories rely on the idea that in most cases, you can't prove a negative. They rely on "facts" that are refuted only if you don't believe in the conspiracy.
And they also persist because there are real conspiracies that have gone on and are still going on. We've only just gotten the tip of the NSA domestic spying thing, most likely. There was Watergate. There was Iran-Contra. How many more conspiracies have occurred in government that have never been uncovered?
But that doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy. Most events have other explanations and you'd have to have a complete inability to objectively look at where the evidence points to think otherwise.
Thank you. I was hoping that people hadn't forgotten that Apple actually introduced the notion of a beige computer.
Huh?
The IBM 5100, September 1975. The Apple II was launched in 1976.
There may be other beige computers that pre-date the 5100. But you only need one to prove that the Apple II wasn't the first.
Windows boxes are the only ones with this notion of being "rebuilt". The rest of us don't ever have to do that.
Well, your problems are:
a) You're misunderstanding the term "rebuilt", and
b) You're confusing "have to" and "want to".
Windows users like to tinker with their hardware. It's a hobby for a lot of us. The fact that you basically can't do this with an Apple machine means this is not in your vocabulary - but it is just the way a lot of power Windows users operate, by choice. Nobody forces me to buy a new motherboard every three years; I do it because I want more features and performance without having to buy a whole new PC. At the same time, I might upgrade my RAM and video card, and maybe I will reinstall Windows. That's called a "rebuild". But I don't "have to" do any of that.
In fact, I can trace both of my current desktops to a lineage that began with one Packard Bell 486 in 1991. I still have files on these machines that date to that PC. Over the years, I have upgraded every single component on it until it was no longer the same PC (I consider the day I bought a new case as the day when it was a "new" machine), then I split off components into a separate PC once I realized I had a whole crate full of parts that were still basically good. So now one machine gets new parts when I upgrade and the other gets hand-me-downs. I have never reinstalled Windows on either of these machines, though - I have simply installed one version on top of another, over and over. A lot of people (especially Mac users who know nothing about it) will tell you that either this is a really bad idea or that it just plain and simply can't be done, but that's not true. I have gone from DOS 6 to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to Windows XP and then Windows MCE, and that PC is running fine. (The other is still on XP Pro and it's also running fine.)
Now, with a laptop, obviously you can't do as much. Nobody "rebuilds" laptops. But that's not what the guy you're replying to was talking about.
With a desktop, the concept of buying a whole new machine is probably just as foreign to a lot of Windows users as the concept of rebuilding a machine is to you. It strikes me as incredibly wasteful - why would you buy a whole new machine just because you wanted a faster CPU or a more feature-filled motherboard?
Natsume (developed by Marvelous) Harvest Moon Disaster: Day of CrisisTM Excite TruckTM Fire EmblemTM Metroid® Prime 3: Corruption Project H.A.M.M.E.R. TM Super Mario® Galaxy The Legend of Zelda®: Twilight Princess WarioWareTM: Smooth Moves
Wow, Nintendo's putting a lot of trust in Natsume and Marvelous to be outsourcing all those games!
Your list has more than formatting problems. These aren't third-party games, and you've also got Nintendo listed separately as a developer. So that's more than 10% of your list off right there.
Plus, most of those titles just aren't very exciting. I mean maybe some people are waiting for "Happy Feet New Vertical Scroll Shooting Game", "Sengoku Action Elebits", "Cooking Mama -Cooking with International Friends" or the ever-popular "Entertainment Title TBD", but I don't personally think this is a very impressive list.
I'll break it down for you a little bit, and separate out only third-party titles. The only games on this list that I think are worth waiting for at all are:
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles 2
Metal Slug Anthology (though this is hardly exclusive)
Sonic Wild Fire
If you're a mainstream gamer, you'll also want:
Madden 07
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
Call of Duty 3
Medal of Honor Airborne
Resident Evil
Possibly add Red Steel to that list (though it didn't have a very good showing at E3), maybe Rayman. But nothing else really jumps out at me.
There are some niche titles there that might find an audience in the US - Harvest Moon, maybe even something like Pangya! Golf - but these won't move systems.
Outside of Nintendo's first party stuff - which always seems a given for the reason why people buy any Nintendo system - there just aren't any real A-list titles. There's nothing with the power of a GTA or a true Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest or anything like that.
So what you're left with is pretty much the same situation as the GameCube. Remember, the GC had Madden at first, it had RE, it had Monkey Ball, it had Sonic, it had FF:CC, it had a lot of these titles and also other ones to fill some of the same niches as the smaller ones here.
So, you know, feel free to get excited about "Disney's Meet the Robinsons" or "Chicken Little: Ace in Action" - I won't stop you - but don't blame the rest of us if we're hoping for more.
Final Fantasy? Dragon Quest? both are major series.
It's getting non-canonical side versions of each. A sequel to Crystal Chronicles, which is sort of FF-lite with multiplayer elements, and an action hack-and-slash version of Dragon Quest.
Neither of those games is going to move systems. The people who really want to play FF and DQ will still be buying the PS3, because that's the system Square Enix is going to put the proper games on. The people who buy FF:CC2 and the DQ sword game on Wii are going to be the people who only have a Wii and have no other choice if they want a taste of those series.
What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back.
It didn't "crash". It had a downturn. That's not the same thing.
Some people, especially those that are too young to remember it, don't realize what 1984 was really like. Consider the fact that there were no game consoles on the market. None. (At least not in the US.) That seems impossible now, until you remember that the Atari 2600 hit in 1977 and most people had never heard of video gaming before that. So it was assumed at the time that video games had been a fad whose time had past... and every single company involved in the industry pulled out.
That did not happen in Japan, not even close. For one thing, their downturn was relatively mild compared to the US crash in 1984 - many Japanese companies continued making money through it, and games continued to sell (although there was close to a 50% drop over a few years). In the US, nobody was profitable, and game sales almost literally stopped in the span of about six months. They then did stop completely once stock was cleared off store shelves in early 1984.
The crash was dramatic. Any talk of a future "crash" is hyperbole unless the prediction is for something just as dramatic. I mean, every industry has its ups and downs - there's no news there. Consolidations, downturns, "transition periods" - this is not the same thing as a crash. At least not the crash of 1984, when video game purchases in this country literally ended, at least for one year.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US...
Two things:
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
b) Even if it were true, the conditions for the industry now are still better than they were from 1977-1980, when video gaming first exploded in this country.
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars. And that at a time when unemployment was more than 10%. Yet still, the industry flourished.
There is no economic reason whatsoever why the average American couldn't afford a $400 console and a $500 TV today if they could afford the equivalent of an $800 console and a $1,500 TV in 1977. All this bitching about price is just a lot of whining, nothing more.
I'm not saying everyone can afford it, but if you can't, then you've got bigger problems to solve anyway. There's no use crying about game consoles - work on getting some food on your table and a roof over your head first if you're poor enough that $1,000 for five years or more worth of entertainment is unaffordable. (Remember, TV's can entertain just fine even without a game console hooked up...)
The only difference between now and 1977 is that there is more competition for our disposable income. But why is this something to bitch and moan about? So because you just bought a $300 cell phone or a $1,000 laptop PC or a stack of DVD movies, the electronics and video game industries have to lower their prices for you? To a large extent, they have - adjusted for inflation, everything game-related is cheaper than it used to be (including games). But there's only so far they can go.
I'm not being elitist - I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases. They act like it's the manufacturers' responsibility to just make everything so cheap that they can afford to buy everything they'd ever want. And those that really don't have the money really need to be concentrating on things other than game consoles anyway.
I don't see any cost parallel between now and 1983. Cost wasn't the reason for the crash anyway - in 1983, there were systems at every price point from about $75 up to $275. And in fact, one of the main reasons for the crash was the exodus from game consoles to more expensive computers that played more advanced games. People would have rather paid $400 for a C64 or $800 for an Apple II than $100 for an Intellivision or $150 for a Coleco Vision. So I don't see that affordability really has anything to do with either era, or anything to do with any possible crash, past or present.
A further comment claimed that in America, companies have the right to lay you off, and stop your pay -tomorrow-
Surely that isn't right?
It depends, as others have said. But one thing nobody has said is that you are eligible for unemployment insurance in this situation, which lasts for six months. How much this is actually worth depends on the state, and it's typically some percentage of what you were making at your job up to a certain maximum, but it is generally always enough to get by. There are various formulas states use to calculate this, designed to average various variables that come into the real cost of living.
When I was laid off in 2001 (after the dot.com bust), I went from a $30,000 per year job (I was just out of college so wasn't making much) to $405 a week on unemployment. That's an annual pay cut of about 30% if you figured it out by the year. Anyway, even in NYC, $405 per week is enough to live on, provided you've got a reasonable savings to fall back on. The idea isn't to keep paying your wage while you sit on your duff; the idea is to keep you sheltered and eating until you can find another job.
Most states are "at will" states, meaning either side can terminate employment at either time. It's a tradeoff. You work as long as the company needs you - or as long as you need the company. This is not necessarily as bad as it seems, because it's led to a culture where those who get laid off can, provided they're skilled enough, get new jobs fairly easily. So can those who quit simply because they don't like the company they work for. There is no stigma attached to getting laid off or quitting, and in my case, and I suspect that of many others, the job I got after being laid off paid significantly more than my previous job.
In some countries I know of (Japan, for instance), it is very, very difficult to get a new job after getting laid off because companies assume it was for performance reasons. Firing people is uncommon there - rather than fire you or lay you off, they will stick you in a room by yourself until you quit - so anyone who's laid off has a real stigma attached to them. That's not true in the US, where people move from job to job as they or their companies see fit, and that's led to a mobile workforce where the skilled really generally do rise to the top faster than they would have otherwise, because if they're dissatisfied with their work or their pay, they're free to shop themselves around.
It's definitely a different philosophy than some European countries, where it's assumed that corporations owe a debt to their workers. I understand that philosophy - the Darwin-like system we have in the US can be very difficult, and does tend to weed out those who can't hack it and ruthlessly grinds them down into the dirt. But if you do make that effort to continue honing your skills and continue to gain experience and knowledge, you can rise faster and open more doors for yourself in a system like we have in the US.