I've tried Picassa, tossed it, and purchased a photo app. Have you ever tried to scroll through a few hundred photos in Picassa? Google has a whole new (and bad) way for the scroll bar to work.
You do realize there's a scrollbar on the right and a scrollbar on the left, didn't you?
The scrollbar on the right can be used in several ways as well. You can pull the slider up and down, you can click anywhere in the scrollbar, you can use the arrow keys at the top and bottom, or you can click the "=" buttons to quickly move p and down a grouping of photos.
If you don't like this, you can use the traditional scrollbar on the left to quickly navigate folders.
I wonder what "photo app" you "purchased". Have you tried actually navigating through a large collection of photos in Photoshop? I actually use Picasa as a front-end to Photoshop; it blows the doors off Adobe Bridge, which is supposed to do some of what Picasa does but does it all very, very poorly (mostly because it takes about five hours for it to do simple things like display a thumbnail collection).
So this runway is only about 428 feet longer than the longest runway at JFK International. (13R/31L - 14,572ft)
Well, to put THAT into perspective, 13R/31L is one of the longest runways in the United States. There are only a few longer:
# Denver Intl Airport (DEN) in Denver, CO has a 16,000' x 200' runway. # Southern California Logistics Airport (VCV) in Victorville, CA has a 15,050' x 150' runway. # Edwards AFB Airport (EDW) in Edwards, CA has a 15,013' x 300' runway. # Nasa Shuttle Landing Facility Airport (X68) in Titusville, FL has a 15,000' x 300' runway. # Vandenberg AFB Airport (VBG) in Lompoc, CA has a 15,000' x 200' runway.
So, still a pretty long runway by any standard. I mean that's nearly three miles, or about 50% longer than the runways at most major airports. (LaGuardia's runways, for example, are only 7,500 feet long, and yes, widebodies can and do use this airport.)
Japan is a small country with a LOT of people, and there isn't room for everyone to have houses, so most people live in skyscraper-tall apartment buildings.
It's kinda beside the point, but it's not that there "isn't room" for everybody to have houses. Ignore the weirdness in the foreground here, but this is the best photo I could find online that shows the Ibaraki prefecture, which a lot of Japan is like (but it just happens to be the one prefecture I know). And Ibaraki is only about 60 miles outside of Tokyo. It's nothing but farmland and forests.
That image itself is from Kamikaze Girls [as it's known in the west], a fun and funny movie that is definitely worth seeing for a whole bunch of reasons. And it is basically all about rural alienation in Japan; it shows you a lot of the rural Japanese lifestyle if you're interested (from the point of view of the young people that hate it).
Anyway, it's just sort of a misnomer in the west that Japan is just crammed full of people with no land available, so everybody has to crowd into these one room apartments. The reality is that most people *choose* to live in crowded cities, for one reason or another. It's a different culture.
Also, most apartment buildings are only a few stories tall - they are not skyscrapers. Japanese earthquake building codes make building tall extremely expensive, which is yet another reason why apartments there are so small. If you look up the stats, the inner wards of Tokyo prefecture (what most people think of as "Tokyo") has about the same population density as Manhattan, but the buildings are much shorter. Something obviously has to give.
But that's not to dispute your main point, which I'm not. Whether by choice or not, the fact of the matter is many Japanese city dwellers live in what we would commonly (and charitably) call walk-in closets, and literally every inch of shelf, storage and even wall space is at a premium. I don't think that really explains why you'd automatically rush out to buy a system that's 1/2" thinner than its predecessor, but it does explain why nobody wanted the original Xbox and why nobody wants the only slightly smaller Xbox 360, which in lieu of its size now has a massive external power brick.
An interesting stat would be to see the ratio of Xbox 360 owners to rural house dwellers vs. the ratio of Xbox 360 owners to city apartment dwellers. I doubt anybody has such a stat, but that's called market research!
IMO, it's not even a matter of boycotting. If my now 5 month old DLP television won't be able to display hi-def content provided by these new media, then what reason do I have to upgrade?
Well, you didn't have much of a reason to buy a DLP set that doesn't include HDMI or DVI inputs either, but you did that anyway.
I don't frankly believe this scenario, and think you're probably purposely being a curmudgeon. I don't know of anybody that sells a DLP TV without at least one HDCP-enabled digital input, and that's been true for more than a year.
But let's say you are telling the truth. I don't have much sympathy for you, anymore than I have sympathy for someone who bought a standard-def set in 2001 without s-video inputs and then said "why would I bother buying a DVD player?" It's not the DVD Consortium's (as they were known then) fault that you bought an obsolete TV. You could have probably paid $20 more for a TV that had the right inputs. Are you telling me you looked at all the DLP sets on the floor, all of which had HDMI or DVI inputs, and you picked the one that didn't because you wanted to save a little money? Well hey, that's your loss. You've demonstrated what your priorities are.
That doesn't mean you need to buy a high-def disc player anyway, but you should quit whining about the fact that you made the decision you did.
There's more, and I could keep going. There was even one in Japan that I'm forgetting the name of that came with a set of ping pong paddle controllers with sensors built in so you could play in first-person (similar to the way the Eye Toy game works, but without needing an Eye Toy).
Most of these have not been released in the US, sure, but you don't think there's a reason for that? Do you think Rockstar knows something about Ping Pong that every other publisher doesn't? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.
- It's probably also the first ping-pong game to have decent graphics.
Take a look at the screenshots in the first link. All modern ping pong games look at least pretty good. The Rockstar game will probably look better just because it's on the Xbox 360, but it won't be the first ping pong game with "decent" graphics. They all have decent graphics.
- Whilst ping-pong isn't going to attract many gamers into GTA, it could be a hit amongst asian gamers.
And as you can see, this is hardly an underserved market. It's really not much different than Capcom deciding to make a basketball game and some guy in Japan says "this could be popular among Americans. Basketball is popular there." Ummm... hello? NBA Live? NBA 2K6? NBA Street? NBA Ballers? How many games in a particular genre do you need?
And anyway, Asians don't own Xbox 360's. This game is not for them. And nobody there is going to buy an Xbox 360 just to play an American-style ping pong game.
Just to put things into perspective, you have a greater chance of being killed or injured by your own car than you do suffering death or injury from a terrorist attack.
Which is why you need a driver's license, are required to wear seat belts, can't drive before a certain age, and have to drive a vehicle that meets government safety standards. It's also why you're required to have regular inspections, and why you can be pulled over and ticketed for driving with faulty equipment, or arrested and jailed for driving under the influence or even just recklessly.
In other words, not a good example to support your argument. (Which I basically agree with otherwise.)
But this all misses the point. Where is the rest of this story? All we know from this article, factually (or at least according to these people, who may or may not be telling the truth), is that one is a retired schoolteacher and they were contacted by homeland security because of a large payment they made. We also know that this guy has a lot of anger towards the government that may or may not have been caused by this action by DHS, or it may have existed previously and manifested itself in other ways. We don't know for how long or why these people were under surveillance by DHS - and some people have pretty good reasons for being under surveillance. (Yes, even Americans - remember Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols?)
Now, if large payments alone were a trigger for a DHS audit, you can bet it would be front page news. Millions of people every year make large payments into their IRA's or on their home mortgages at various times for tax purposes, or other reasons. I myself have made payments larger than $6,000 on both my credit cards and student loans, and I can assure you that's not my normal payment amount - but I have yet to be contacted by DHS. Why is that? The only difference between me and this guy, according to this article, is that he is a retired Texas schoolteacher and I work in the entertainment industry. The DHS must love their cable TV.
No, it just sounds fishy. Either the story is made up, or there's a long backstory here that we're not getting. Otherwise this surveillance would appear to be basically random (targetting some people who make payments like this but not others), in which case they may as well just close their eyes, open a phone book and point to get their latest victim. Why even bother?
Sometimes I do get a little tired of seeing these conspiracy theory stories on/.
Re:Someone go to Target and buy them some genres
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Japan's Top 100 Games
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· Score: 1
That's pathetic. Not a single FPS on the list?
Some of us would call that pretty much the opposite of pathetic. I personally think it's refreshing.
Only two PC games that I can see (Wizardry and SimCity?) Only a two sports games I noticed (Gran Tourismo 4 Super Family Fun Baseball Pro Gold Happy or whatever.)
Wow, so you're saying an entirely different culture values games differently than we do? I'm shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you!
Seriously, what's up with your Amerocentric-ness? Just because we like FPS's and sports games doesn't mean we're "correct" in our opinions and the Japanese are not. It doesn't mean the whole rest of the world has to like those games. I, for one, am pretty happy to see any list that does not put freakin' DOOM in the top 20.
The only thing you can realistically argue with any success about this list is whether or not it actually reflects Japanese tastes. I personally think it's not really reflective of the mainstream there - these are pretty hardcore gamers. Among the mainstream, I can guarantee you games like Winning Eleven and DDR would be pretty high on this list and GTA wouldn't be on it at all. This list is reflective of Famitsu readers.
Then again, if you did the same thing with EGM in this country, you'd get similarly skewed results... whereas if you asked the general population you'd probably end up with Madden 2006 at #1.
This just in: Japanese gamers really, really like only Square-Enix games
Considering Square and Enix were the two largest producers of RPG's in Japan before their merger, and that they are now by extension by far the largest producer of RPG's in Japan after the merger, I don't think your statement is as ridiculous as you meant it to sound. I mean, news flash: Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest are popular in Japan! Who knew??
Pen Based PDA's will be replaced by better tablet pcs.
I am not sure why they have not caught on a lot more,
Because people don't want them. In fact, the same dynamic is at work in replacing the pen-based PDA with keyboard-based models. You may not understand it (hey, even unpopular ideas have at least a few fans), but I think the market has proven time and time again that people want keyboard-based input.
Those who argue in favor of pen-based input always talk about how "intuitive" it is, but I think that's a misnomer. Is it more intuitive to jot something down that even you yourself can barely read and that is poorly recognized by the PC than it is to simply type something that everybody can understand? Is it any faster? (The answer to that is clearly no; you can test that yourself.)
Pen-based PDA's are on the way out and so are tablet PC's, except for those certain market segments (medical professionals, construction, etc.) that can benefit from them. But they are not suitable as general purpose machines; not as suitable as PC's with keyboards, anyway.
I frequent one of these "best-in-class" forums (BeyondUnreal), and we get the "HAY CHEK OUT MY SITE" posts all of the time. They usually get banned and culled within five minutes as the community mocks them mercilessly.
Thing is, these are probably not the paid shills. The real shills, you don't even know about.
It is true that companies occasionally get caught for this - it happened to Midway pretty publicly on Usenet about 5-6 years ago, for example. But take it from someone who used to both do it and recruit others to do it as part of my job; you don't know who's shilling and who isn't. Good shills are undetectable, and *every* game developer with a half-decent understanding of the internet and viral marketing does it.
I've been posting stuff on BBS's, blogs, usenet newsgroups and web forums for probably 20 years. So I know the etiquette. And I post on a whole bunch of different topics. When I was tasked with promoting games through forums for the company I worked for, it was with the stipulation that I would continue posting (both positively and negatively) about other subjects - including other games - just as I always did. I might write a post just like this as part of my job. (I could be shilling right now for all you know.) Then five minutes later I'd write another reply somewhere else that subtlely promotes my company's game. If you went back and looked at my posting history, you'd have no idea that I was a company plant.
I have zero doubt that a not insignificant percentage of the top posters on all of the most popular gaming-related web forums are "online street team" members. Sometimes they're obvious, although they don't usually get called out as company shills, just as fanboys. It's very hard to really unmask even the most blatant shill; it's not like you get to see anyone's paychecks. But those who are the best at it aren't even obvious fanboys; their job is simply to plant ideas, not to constantly hawk their company's games. My company kept a really careful watch on street team members, because if the company got caught, they knew it'd be a PR nightmare. It was way more important for street team members to stay anonymous than it was for them to constantly be hawking the company's wares.
And I guarantee that this happens all the time and you don't even know it. Because I used to be one of the people doing it, and I never got called out for it.
The reality is that for most people, setting up two good speakers, or maybe two speakers and a subwoofer in the center, is going to give them the best sound.
Except that DVD's and HDTV are recorded in six discreet channels!
I'm having trouble figuring out why so many people in this thread seem to fail to understand this. Two speakers is not going to give you the best sound from six separate channels. It just isn't. Five full-range speakers or five satellites and a sub is going to give you the best sound from six separate channels. I mean, it's just common sense, isn't it?
There seems to be an assumption among quite a few people here that what people with surround systems are doing is taking two-channel recordings and playing them back through six or more speakers. That is not what we are talking about. The issue is whether 5.1 systems are adequate for recordings with six discreet channels, or whether 7.1 systems offer any advantage.
The bottom line is to get the best sound, you have to match your playback equipment with the way the audio was recorded. For watching DVD movies or HDTV, that means 5.1 - that is how these formats are recorded and mixed. Now, obviously, a 5.1 system can also be used as a stereo system, so it's not as if you're losing anything for music either. You simply don't engage the surrounds. (Most receivers are smart enough to automatically engage whatever speakers are required for a given piece of content.)
It's almost amazing to me the level of ignorance about this that pervades even supposed geeks hanging around Slashdot. Just remember the golden rule of everything (television standards, jumper cables, sex, whatever): you have to match the output to the input.
Unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off just buying two really nice speakers instead of 7 average ones.
This is really akin to saying "unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off buying a 13" CRT than a 47" widescreen plasma set."
Sure, there are applications where a 13" TV and/or 2 speakers work fine. But if your goal is to watch even non-HD DVD's and you want to see them the way they were intended to be seen, then a) you need a decent TV, and b) you need a surround sound system.
Two really nice speakers will work fine for music, but the fact of the matter is modern movie soundtracks have six or more discreet channels. They have all those channels in the theater and they have them on DVD (not to mention HDTV). Listening to these soundtracks with two speakers is akin to listening to all your favorite CD's in mono on a clock radio. I mean, yeah, you can hear what's going on, but you're not hearing it properly. You're not experiencing it the way you could be, or the way you were meant to.
I mean hey, if you don't care, then more power to you. Be happy with your 13" TV and your clock radio and your two speakers. But some people do care, and you don't need to be a videophile to fall into that category. If a movie is recorded with a multi-channel soundtrack, then you may as well have the equipment required to play all those channels back properly.
(I don't buy the "I hate wires" or the "I don't have room" excuses either; there are ~$300 systems that include wireless satellites that are only a few inches large, and they sound perfectly good for movie soundtracks. You probably wouldn't want to listen to your piano concerto collection on them, but movie soundtracks aren't as sonically demanding as high fidelity musical recordings.)
no, i meant 1982. We aren't quite there yet. I suspect 2005 was 1982, most of 2006 will be 1983
Well, I'm arguing semantics now, but a) you did say "1982 anyone? the market crashes..." and b) we are in 2006 right now. So the title of your post should have really been "1983 anyone?"
But regardless, yes, we're in a downturn. If the original Xbox is akin to the Mattel Intellivision (which is a pretty accurate comparison in every way, IMO) vs. the less powerful but more popular Atari 2600, then by all rights MS should have exited the business by now. But because they're such a large corporation, they can absorb those $4 billion in losses and just keep going. Mattel couldn't, and they pulled out... just like Coleco and eventually Atari did as well. MS is proving that's not going to happen this time, though.
First, there's the price point problem. Rumors of the PS3 launching at $800-$900 are distressing.
There's no rumor that it'll launch at that price. There are rumors that it's costing Sony that much to make, which is a completely different thing. And anyway, those reports are complete bullshit, considering that they don't take into account the fact that Sony is designing and manufacturing all of the highest-price components themselves. There's no way, for example, that it's costing Sony twice as much to make their own Cell processors as it's costing MS to buy custom-designed 3-core PPC chips from IBM.
Sometimes the NTSC pictures look better, because the blurring masks the motion compression artifacts.
I can't even figure out how to respond to this one... I gotta doubt that you've actually seen true HDTV as you say, though.
Sorry dude but that just doesn't look right to me.
It is right. Rockstar names their GTA's basically based on the engine they use and the world they're supposed to take place in. GTA:VC, GTA:SA and GTA:LCS are in the GTA3 family of games.
You're hearing this basically straight from the horse's mouth, as I used to work there. You can choose to believe it or not, but there it is.
Of course, Rockstar is not a company that values consistency above all else, so I suppose things could change. But the plan when I left the company was that the first game on the next console will be GTA4.
You mean 1983/1984. It was Christmas of 1983 that things first went south, then throughout 1984 all of the current console manufacturers pulled out of the market.
The market conditions this time are pretty much the same, that much is definitely true. But the real difference is that nowadays we're dealing with multi-billion dollar major worldwide conglomerates, not little toy companies like Mattel and Coleco. In 1983/84, only Atari had the backing of a major corporation (Warner Bros.), but they were a separate division, and Warner themselves had little to no interest in video games.
At the time, it also wasn't clear that video games were really a continuing concern. They'd only really been around for about six years, so that any major downturn looked like the end of a fad rather than just part of a long-term cycle.
Nowadays, manufacturers are better able to weather these downturns, and they assume that the industry will eventually bounce back, just as it did in 1985. So they're less likely to pull out and cede the market to a relative newcomer (as Atari did for Nintendo after that crash).
The bottom line being that while the conditions right now are very similar to 1983, it's highly unlikely that we'll see a major shakeout like that again. The major manufacturers and publishers will weather this.
What games are they playing that take up 30 hours to complete? Most games take 10 at most, and lack any sort of replay value.
They didn't say most games take 30 hours to complete. They said most games offer 30 hours of gameplay.
How long do you think it takes to "complete" Tetris? (There is no answer, because there is no end to Tetris.) Yet how many hours do you think you've put into it over the years?
And that's ignoring games like Dragon Quest VIII that can take 100 hours or more to actually complete.
You can argue, though, that the 30 hour average is heavily skewed by RPG's, GTA-style adventure games as well as a few quality games that are played for years and years and never get old (like Tetris, or Pac-Man, or whatever). The rest of the games out there are lucky to get played 5 hours before they get put on a shelf forever or resold back to the store. That's where the perceived lack of value comes in. It's not about quantity of gameplay for the money, it's about quality.
They compare movies to video games. Well, for one thing, DVD's cost about ten bucks, and they usually offer 4-5 hours of entertainment if you count the movie and all the extras that DVD's typically include. Now, granted, most movies aren't Citizen Kane either, but for 10 bucks, all you need to do is offer some light entertainment. If you wanted to charge $50 for a DVD, as game companies do for their wares, then you'd better be offering Citizen Kane and then some every time out. But if most games only get played 4-5 hours, and those 4-5 hours aren't even particularly fun, then the value isn't there.
There is a concept of "value pricing" in the games industry, i.e. a lot of publishers put out games now that sell for $20 when new, because they know they're not the same quality as "premium" games. But I would argue that the majority of games made today should cost $20 or less given the quality of gameplay. Only a few true premium titles should command $50 (or $60, in the Xbox 360's case).
I guess it's good he's no longer with the company. We might still be using Performas....
Performas weren't Woz's idea. If Woz still stuck with Apple for all of those years, we'd be seeing very expandable, open, and well-engineered Apple machines (well-engineered from an electrical engineering perspective). All of the modern PC enthusiasts would have stuck with Apple to this day had Apple kept the Apple II and went beyond that (more powerful processors, improved OS, etc.).
You said it, dude.
My first PC was an Apple II. Ok, I admit it, it was an Apple//c. But I bought it based on the reputation of the Apple II line, and even the Apple//c was more expandable and a lot more customizable than the Mac that debuted at around that same time. You could run a large variety of OS's on the Apple//c, anybody could write software for it, and the whole Apple II line was so ubiquitous that the possibilities in both hardware and software seemed limitless to the end user.
The II line was Woz's baby, and he kept it going even as Jobs was pushing his Mac. For a time, the two lines co-existed. This proved problematic for Apple, though, because the II (by then, the IIgs) was more powerful and expandable than the existing Mac, not to mention cheaper, and it remained more popular. Jobs saw the Mac as the future, though, and this contributed to the friction between Woz and Jobs that eventually led to Woz's departure. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you ask me (and you seem to agree), going with the Mac over the well-established II line was a huge mistake. Imagine if IBM, rather than extending their PC line with new chips and architecture that was backward compatible, simply dumped everything they'd built and started over. One way or another, it wouldn't have worked - it probably would have just bankrupted IBM, and clone makers would have kept the PC alive anyway. Well, it almost didn't work for Apple, either - they nearly bankrupted themselves in their switch to Mac, and they never regained the market share they had in the II days. It took them years before the Mac even matched the IIgs in power out of the box, and future expandability. Heck, the Mac didn't even support color until 1987! It's worth remembering that the Mac was originally positioned as a low-cost, easy to use PC alternative for businesses that did not want to take the time to train their staff to use DOS-based applications. It was not a machine for creatives - that was the II.
The day Woz left that company is the day I knew my Apple days were over. After my//c, my next computer was a 486. I haven't looked back, though I still love my Apple II. If Apple had continued to update and expand that line rather than switching to an entirely new platform, I can guarantee that I and a lot of other people would be using Apple machines today instead of PC's.
I am a lighting guy.. and it is important. It has to go with the feel of what is around you. The problem is that you need a hook for the fanbois, so you get a reasonably passing grade.
The thing is, and I'm not sure if these guys realize it or not, the lighting schemes in ST:TNG (which they're using for reference) were changed in about season two or season three. It's obvious if you watch the shows - the first couple seasons had a much darker, hard-edged look. That worked well later in Enterprise and it works well for new series like Battlestar Galactica, but ST:TNG never had the dark content to go with the somewhat muddy visuals. So they ended up brightening up the lighting and softening the shadows; even the makeup seemed to change in order to reflect less of the lighting off characters' faces. The end result was that ultra-bright, ultra-low contrast look that the series is known for.
I bring this up because the observation lounge/conference room that they're using as a reference appears to be from the first or second season, before they brightened up the lighting. Later seasons had that room evenly lit. The hallway, on the other hand, is from the later seasons. So they are doing a bit of mix and match and not being as careful as they think they are. Which isn't going to please the fanbois.
That being said, it seems like a very short time to announce the features of the system, game lineup and to get everything ready and shipped.
Done, partly done, and all that's left in your mind I guess.
Yep. I don't really know where people are getting this "work in progress" thing. The system is not out yet, it's not in production yet, so why does everyone expect there to be playable units running final game copy on them floating around every time there's a press conference or convention anywhere? You'll get playable units once production has started.
The only thing that's left "in progress" - and Sony has made no bones about saying straight out that this is all that's holding the system up - is AACS for Blu-Ray movies. Yes, that horrible, evil DRM scheme again. That's it. They are waiting on the final spec before they can begin building machines, and that's expected to come within the next two weeks. Could it be delayed further? Sure, and Sony's gonna be screwed if it is. But it's not as if they don't know what hardware's going to be in this machine or what games are gonna be on it. They've got the machine designed, their hardware and software partners lined up, and their factories primed and ready. I'm sure they've got ants-in-the-pants right now just waiting to hit that "go" button.
All they are waiting for is AACS.
So I see no problem with them making a spring launch in Japan. Japanese launches, remember, rarely have more than 5-10 games associated with them, and Sony could put the hype machine in full gear as soon as they can announce a firm launch date. They could even make the end of April (Golden Week in Japan; the biggest holiday/vacation week in the country) if the AACS spec is finalized shortly, and I have no doubt that's their goal, as it always is for "spring" console launches there. Once a date is announced, you will see wall to wall TV commercials, subway ads, billboards, and every other form of marketing you can imagine in Japan - literally overnight. It's a small country with a lot of people in it; the speed at which a large and prepared company like Sony can swing into action would make your head spin. And it's not as if there hasn't been hype already; all of the game magazines and even mainstream news outlets have been covering the PS3, so consumers there are expecting it.
We'll see what happens with the managed-copy spec. But if it's finalized soon, Sony's launch expectations sound pretty realistic to me.
These things are going to be as popular as copy-protected CDs. Just wait until the first few thousand people get home with a shiny new disc, whack it into their machine and get a crappy picture and/or a blank screen.
Ok, I'll bite.
I'm as anti-DRM as anybody, but statements like yours and the article submitter's are more than a little overly dramatic. It's highly likely that "the first few thousand people" who get home with their shiny new discs will have HDMI inputs in their TV's - it's difficult to buy an HDTV these days without one and has been for about the last 5 years. Even my $600 Samsung CRT HDTV has a DVI input, which is fully compatible with HDMI (HDMI is just DVI with audio, so all it takes is a cable with HDMI on one end and DVI on the other to make it work).
The earliest HDTV's only had component inputs. But with the rate HDTV's sold in the early days vs. the rate they're selling now, I'd wager that the vast majority of HDTV's in homes are HDMI-capable. Even many early adopters have probably upgraded their sets by now with larger models that perform better, have more inputs and cost a lot less. HDTV has been around for around 10 years, remember. It's not a new technology anymore.
The joke is that the AUD$8.95 DVD is here to stay.
Yeah, you don't have an HDTV, I guess. (I admit, I don't know what the HD situation is in Australia. But here in the US, it's almost difficult to buy a non-HD set anymore.)
These new formats are specifically for people with high definition displays. DVD is not good enough for those people. You're talking the difference between 720x480 (and that's assuming the disc is anamorphic, otherwise it's more like 480x360) and 1920x1080. That's a huge difference, and it's the entire reason these people bought HDTV's in the first place. If they didn't want that extra resolution, they would have just stuck with standard-def. So there is a large market for these new formats; if you spend $2,000-$3,000 on a TV, you want a format that takes advantage of it.
Standard-def formats will continue to exist, just as standard-def TV continues to exist now. It's no "joke", and you're not saying anything anyone doesn't know. 5-10 years ago you probably would have said "the joke is that VHS is here to stay" in a discussion about the new DVD format. Change doesn't come overnight. But once you see the difference 1080i or 1080p makes over standard definition TV, it's very hard to go back.
Now, all that said, I give it a matter of months before some Chinese or Taiwanese company comes out with an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player that outputs full resolution over component. It'll be one of those "oops!" moments that the manufacturer claims was unintentional but results in a run on that particular model. Eventually, everyone will be doing it... just as happened with region codes on DVD players.
Namco, Konami, Activision, and Capcom are all companies that have survived the last 2 decades.
In fact, Activision was the first ever third-party developer, having been formed by disgruntled Atari employees to write games for the Atari 2600. Atari sued Activision and lost, which opened the door for other third-party developers that came later.
Namco, Konami and Capcom (add Taito and a few others to that list) started out as arcade developers, so their lineage is a bit different. Atari, Taito and Nintendo were probably the original arcade players.
Geeze. Let's take the whole DRM issue out of this as an issue. Why on earth would you drive to your local BB to do this?
Probably more to the point, why would Apple choose to latch onto a dying business? That's the real reason this plan would never happen. When was the last time Steve Jobs purposely looked backwards in terms of content and product distribution?
Lets not forget that copying a DVD is a little less clear cut in the US because of the DMCA which makes bypassing a copy control mechanism illegal...
Read the law. You can find it here. There is no blanket prohibition on bypassing copy control mechanisms - this is a big, big misconception about the DMCA. In fact, there are both specific and non-specific instances (i.e. basically the same provisions as in earlier fair use definitions) in which bypassing technological copy control mechanisms is explicitly allowed.
Whether or not format-shifting would count is not clearly laid out in the law, anymore than it is in earlier copyright laws. According to the DMCA, the Librarian of Congress is supposed to review cases like this every 3 years to determine whether they would be legal under the DMCA's provisions or not.
The entire purpose of this part of the DMCA was not to stamp out fair use, it was to specifically prohibit circumventing technological measures that were implemented in order to prevent copyright violations. But the bottom line is (or is supposed to be) that if you're not violating copyright law, you are allowed to circumvent these technological measures. The DMCA was not supposed to take away your fair use rights.
How the law has been used and referenced since it was enacted may be another story. But that is the way the law was written, and I'm confident that if it was actually tested in court (and format-shifting has not been, to my knowledge), that both the letter and intent of the law would be followed by the court.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried Picassa, tossed it, and purchased a photo app. Have you ever tried to scroll through a few hundred photos in Picassa? Google has a whole new (and bad) way for the scroll bar to work.
You do realize there's a scrollbar on the right and a scrollbar on the left, didn't you?
The scrollbar on the right can be used in several ways as well. You can pull the slider up and down, you can click anywhere in the scrollbar, you can use the arrow keys at the top and bottom, or you can click the "=" buttons to quickly move p and down a grouping of photos.
If you don't like this, you can use the traditional scrollbar on the left to quickly navigate folders.
I wonder what "photo app" you "purchased". Have you tried actually navigating through a large collection of photos in Photoshop? I actually use Picasa as a front-end to Photoshop; it blows the doors off Adobe Bridge, which is supposed to do some of what Picasa does but does it all very, very poorly (mostly because it takes about five hours for it to do simple things like display a thumbnail collection).
So this runway is only about 428 feet longer than the longest runway at JFK International. (13R/31L - 14,572ft)
Well, to put THAT into perspective, 13R/31L is one of the longest runways in the United States. There are only a few longer:
# Denver Intl Airport (DEN) in Denver, CO has a 16,000' x 200' runway.
# Southern California Logistics Airport (VCV) in Victorville, CA has a 15,050' x 150' runway.
# Edwards AFB Airport (EDW) in Edwards, CA has a 15,013' x 300' runway.
# Nasa Shuttle Landing Facility Airport (X68) in Titusville, FL has a 15,000' x 300' runway.
# Vandenberg AFB Airport (VBG) in Lompoc, CA has a 15,000' x 200' runway.
That's from MyAFD.com.
So, still a pretty long runway by any standard. I mean that's nearly three miles, or about 50% longer than the runways at most major airports. (LaGuardia's runways, for example, are only 7,500 feet long, and yes, widebodies can and do use this airport.)
Japan is a small country with a LOT of people, and there isn't room for everyone to have houses, so most people live in skyscraper-tall apartment buildings.
It's kinda beside the point, but it's not that there "isn't room" for everybody to have houses. Ignore the weirdness in the foreground here, but this is the best photo I could find online that shows the Ibaraki prefecture, which a lot of Japan is like (but it just happens to be the one prefecture I know). And Ibaraki is only about 60 miles outside of Tokyo. It's nothing but farmland and forests.
That image itself is from Kamikaze Girls [as it's known in the west], a fun and funny movie that is definitely worth seeing for a whole bunch of reasons. And it is basically all about rural alienation in Japan; it shows you a lot of the rural Japanese lifestyle if you're interested (from the point of view of the young people that hate it).
Anyway, it's just sort of a misnomer in the west that Japan is just crammed full of people with no land available, so everybody has to crowd into these one room apartments. The reality is that most people *choose* to live in crowded cities, for one reason or another. It's a different culture.
Also, most apartment buildings are only a few stories tall - they are not skyscrapers. Japanese earthquake building codes make building tall extremely expensive, which is yet another reason why apartments there are so small. If you look up the stats, the inner wards of Tokyo prefecture (what most people think of as "Tokyo") has about the same population density as Manhattan, but the buildings are much shorter. Something obviously has to give.
But that's not to dispute your main point, which I'm not. Whether by choice or not, the fact of the matter is many Japanese city dwellers live in what we would commonly (and charitably) call walk-in closets, and literally every inch of shelf, storage and even wall space is at a premium. I don't think that really explains why you'd automatically rush out to buy a system that's 1/2" thinner than its predecessor, but it does explain why nobody wanted the original Xbox and why nobody wants the only slightly smaller Xbox 360, which in lieu of its size now has a massive external power brick.
An interesting stat would be to see the ratio of Xbox 360 owners to rural house dwellers vs. the ratio of Xbox 360 owners to city apartment dwellers. I doubt anybody has such a stat, but that's called market research!
IMO, it's not even a matter of boycotting. If my now 5 month old DLP television won't be able to display hi-def content provided by these new media, then what reason do I have to upgrade?
Well, you didn't have much of a reason to buy a DLP set that doesn't include HDMI or DVI inputs either, but you did that anyway.
I don't frankly believe this scenario, and think you're probably purposely being a curmudgeon. I don't know of anybody that sells a DLP TV without at least one HDCP-enabled digital input, and that's been true for more than a year.
But let's say you are telling the truth. I don't have much sympathy for you, anymore than I have sympathy for someone who bought a standard-def set in 2001 without s-video inputs and then said "why would I bother buying a DVD player?" It's not the DVD Consortium's (as they were known then) fault that you bought an obsolete TV. You could have probably paid $20 more for a TV that had the right inputs. Are you telling me you looked at all the DLP sets on the floor, all of which had HDMI or DVI inputs, and you picked the one that didn't because you wanted to save a little money? Well hey, that's your loss. You've demonstrated what your priorities are.
That doesn't mean you need to buy a high-def disc player anyway, but you should quit whining about the fact that you made the decision you did.
- It's the first ping-pong game to have come out in years.
Want a bet?
Here's one
Here's another
And another
And another (it's one of the included games in Eye Toy: Play 2)
There's more, and I could keep going. There was even one in Japan that I'm forgetting the name of that came with a set of ping pong paddle controllers with sensors built in so you could play in first-person (similar to the way the Eye Toy game works, but without needing an Eye Toy).
Most of these have not been released in the US, sure, but you don't think there's a reason for that? Do you think Rockstar knows something about Ping Pong that every other publisher doesn't? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.
- It's probably also the first ping-pong game to have decent graphics.
Take a look at the screenshots in the first link. All modern ping pong games look at least pretty good. The Rockstar game will probably look better just because it's on the Xbox 360, but it won't be the first ping pong game with "decent" graphics. They all have decent graphics.
- Whilst ping-pong isn't going to attract many gamers into GTA, it could be a hit amongst asian gamers.
And as you can see, this is hardly an underserved market. It's really not much different than Capcom deciding to make a basketball game and some guy in Japan says "this could be popular among Americans. Basketball is popular there." Ummm... hello? NBA Live? NBA 2K6? NBA Street? NBA Ballers? How many games in a particular genre do you need?
And anyway, Asians don't own Xbox 360's. This game is not for them. And nobody there is going to buy an Xbox 360 just to play an American-style ping pong game.
Just to put things into perspective, you have a greater chance of being killed or injured by your own car than you do suffering death or injury from a terrorist attack.
/.
Which is why you need a driver's license, are required to wear seat belts, can't drive before a certain age, and have to drive a vehicle that meets government safety standards. It's also why you're required to have regular inspections, and why you can be pulled over and ticketed for driving with faulty equipment, or arrested and jailed for driving under the influence or even just recklessly.
In other words, not a good example to support your argument. (Which I basically agree with otherwise.)
But this all misses the point. Where is the rest of this story? All we know from this article, factually (or at least according to these people, who may or may not be telling the truth), is that one is a retired schoolteacher and they were contacted by homeland security because of a large payment they made. We also know that this guy has a lot of anger towards the government that may or may not have been caused by this action by DHS, or it may have existed previously and manifested itself in other ways. We don't know for how long or why these people were under surveillance by DHS - and some people have pretty good reasons for being under surveillance. (Yes, even Americans - remember Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols?)
Now, if large payments alone were a trigger for a DHS audit, you can bet it would be front page news. Millions of people every year make large payments into their IRA's or on their home mortgages at various times for tax purposes, or other reasons. I myself have made payments larger than $6,000 on both my credit cards and student loans, and I can assure you that's not my normal payment amount - but I have yet to be contacted by DHS. Why is that? The only difference between me and this guy, according to this article, is that he is a retired Texas schoolteacher and I work in the entertainment industry. The DHS must love their cable TV.
No, it just sounds fishy. Either the story is made up, or there's a long backstory here that we're not getting. Otherwise this surveillance would appear to be basically random (targetting some people who make payments like this but not others), in which case they may as well just close their eyes, open a phone book and point to get their latest victim. Why even bother?
Sometimes I do get a little tired of seeing these conspiracy theory stories on
That's pathetic. Not a single FPS on the list?
Some of us would call that pretty much the opposite of pathetic. I personally think it's refreshing.
Only two PC games that I can see (Wizardry and SimCity?) Only a two sports games I noticed (Gran Tourismo 4 Super Family Fun Baseball Pro Gold Happy or whatever.)
Wow, so you're saying an entirely different culture values games differently than we do? I'm shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you!
Seriously, what's up with your Amerocentric-ness? Just because we like FPS's and sports games doesn't mean we're "correct" in our opinions and the Japanese are not. It doesn't mean the whole rest of the world has to like those games. I, for one, am pretty happy to see any list that does not put freakin' DOOM in the top 20.
The only thing you can realistically argue with any success about this list is whether or not it actually reflects Japanese tastes. I personally think it's not really reflective of the mainstream there - these are pretty hardcore gamers. Among the mainstream, I can guarantee you games like Winning Eleven and DDR would be pretty high on this list and GTA wouldn't be on it at all. This list is reflective of Famitsu readers.
Then again, if you did the same thing with EGM in this country, you'd get similarly skewed results... whereas if you asked the general population you'd probably end up with Madden 2006 at #1.
This just in: Japanese gamers really, really like only Square-Enix games
Considering Square and Enix were the two largest producers of RPG's in Japan before their merger, and that they are now by extension by far the largest producer of RPG's in Japan after the merger, I don't think your statement is as ridiculous as you meant it to sound. I mean, news flash: Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest are popular in Japan! Who knew??
Pen Based PDA's will be replaced by better tablet pcs.
I am not sure why they have not caught on a lot more,
Because people don't want them. In fact, the same dynamic is at work in replacing the pen-based PDA with keyboard-based models. You may not understand it (hey, even unpopular ideas have at least a few fans), but I think the market has proven time and time again that people want keyboard-based input.
Those who argue in favor of pen-based input always talk about how "intuitive" it is, but I think that's a misnomer. Is it more intuitive to jot something down that even you yourself can barely read and that is poorly recognized by the PC than it is to simply type something that everybody can understand? Is it any faster? (The answer to that is clearly no; you can test that yourself.)
Pen-based PDA's are on the way out and so are tablet PC's, except for those certain market segments (medical professionals, construction, etc.) that can benefit from them. But they are not suitable as general purpose machines; not as suitable as PC's with keyboards, anyway.
I frequent one of these "best-in-class" forums (BeyondUnreal), and we get the "HAY CHEK OUT MY SITE" posts all of the time. They usually get banned and culled within five minutes as the community mocks them mercilessly.
Thing is, these are probably not the paid shills. The real shills, you don't even know about.
It is true that companies occasionally get caught for this - it happened to Midway pretty publicly on Usenet about 5-6 years ago, for example. But take it from someone who used to both do it and recruit others to do it as part of my job; you don't know who's shilling and who isn't. Good shills are undetectable, and *every* game developer with a half-decent understanding of the internet and viral marketing does it.
I've been posting stuff on BBS's, blogs, usenet newsgroups and web forums for probably 20 years. So I know the etiquette. And I post on a whole bunch of different topics. When I was tasked with promoting games through forums for the company I worked for, it was with the stipulation that I would continue posting (both positively and negatively) about other subjects - including other games - just as I always did. I might write a post just like this as part of my job. (I could be shilling right now for all you know.) Then five minutes later I'd write another reply somewhere else that subtlely promotes my company's game. If you went back and looked at my posting history, you'd have no idea that I was a company plant.
I have zero doubt that a not insignificant percentage of the top posters on all of the most popular gaming-related web forums are "online street team" members. Sometimes they're obvious, although they don't usually get called out as company shills, just as fanboys. It's very hard to really unmask even the most blatant shill; it's not like you get to see anyone's paychecks. But those who are the best at it aren't even obvious fanboys; their job is simply to plant ideas, not to constantly hawk their company's games. My company kept a really careful watch on street team members, because if the company got caught, they knew it'd be a PR nightmare. It was way more important for street team members to stay anonymous than it was for them to constantly be hawking the company's wares.
And I guarantee that this happens all the time and you don't even know it. Because I used to be one of the people doing it, and I never got called out for it.
The reality is that for most people, setting up two good speakers, or maybe two speakers and a subwoofer in the center, is going to give them the best sound.
Except that DVD's and HDTV are recorded in six discreet channels!
I'm having trouble figuring out why so many people in this thread seem to fail to understand this. Two speakers is not going to give you the best sound from six separate channels. It just isn't. Five full-range speakers or five satellites and a sub is going to give you the best sound from six separate channels. I mean, it's just common sense, isn't it?
There seems to be an assumption among quite a few people here that what people with surround systems are doing is taking two-channel recordings and playing them back through six or more speakers. That is not what we are talking about. The issue is whether 5.1 systems are adequate for recordings with six discreet channels, or whether 7.1 systems offer any advantage.
The bottom line is to get the best sound, you have to match your playback equipment with the way the audio was recorded. For watching DVD movies or HDTV, that means 5.1 - that is how these formats are recorded and mixed. Now, obviously, a 5.1 system can also be used as a stereo system, so it's not as if you're losing anything for music either. You simply don't engage the surrounds. (Most receivers are smart enough to automatically engage whatever speakers are required for a given piece of content.)
It's almost amazing to me the level of ignorance about this that pervades even supposed geeks hanging around Slashdot. Just remember the golden rule of everything (television standards, jumper cables, sex, whatever): you have to match the output to the input.
Unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off just buying two really nice speakers instead of 7 average ones.
This is really akin to saying "unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off buying a 13" CRT than a 47" widescreen plasma set."
Sure, there are applications where a 13" TV and/or 2 speakers work fine. But if your goal is to watch even non-HD DVD's and you want to see them the way they were intended to be seen, then a) you need a decent TV, and b) you need a surround sound system.
Two really nice speakers will work fine for music, but the fact of the matter is modern movie soundtracks have six or more discreet channels. They have all those channels in the theater and they have them on DVD (not to mention HDTV). Listening to these soundtracks with two speakers is akin to listening to all your favorite CD's in mono on a clock radio. I mean, yeah, you can hear what's going on, but you're not hearing it properly. You're not experiencing it the way you could be, or the way you were meant to.
I mean hey, if you don't care, then more power to you. Be happy with your 13" TV and your clock radio and your two speakers. But some people do care, and you don't need to be a videophile to fall into that category. If a movie is recorded with a multi-channel soundtrack, then you may as well have the equipment required to play all those channels back properly.
(I don't buy the "I hate wires" or the "I don't have room" excuses either; there are ~$300 systems that include wireless satellites that are only a few inches large, and they sound perfectly good for movie soundtracks. You probably wouldn't want to listen to your piano concerto collection on them, but movie soundtracks aren't as sonically demanding as high fidelity musical recordings.)
no, i meant 1982. We aren't quite there yet. I suspect 2005 was 1982, most of 2006 will be 1983
Well, I'm arguing semantics now, but a) you did say "1982 anyone? the market crashes..." and b) we are in 2006 right now. So the title of your post should have really been "1983 anyone?"
But regardless, yes, we're in a downturn. If the original Xbox is akin to the Mattel Intellivision (which is a pretty accurate comparison in every way, IMO) vs. the less powerful but more popular Atari 2600, then by all rights MS should have exited the business by now. But because they're such a large corporation, they can absorb those $4 billion in losses and just keep going. Mattel couldn't, and they pulled out... just like Coleco and eventually Atari did as well. MS is proving that's not going to happen this time, though.
First, there's the price point problem. Rumors of the PS3 launching at $800-$900 are distressing.
There's no rumor that it'll launch at that price. There are rumors that it's costing Sony that much to make, which is a completely different thing. And anyway, those reports are complete bullshit, considering that they don't take into account the fact that Sony is designing and manufacturing all of the highest-price components themselves. There's no way, for example, that it's costing Sony twice as much to make their own Cell processors as it's costing MS to buy custom-designed 3-core PPC chips from IBM.
Sometimes the NTSC pictures look better, because the blurring masks the motion compression artifacts.
I can't even figure out how to respond to this one... I gotta doubt that you've actually seen true HDTV as you say, though.
Sorry dude but that just doesn't look right to me.
It is right. Rockstar names their GTA's basically based on the engine they use and the world they're supposed to take place in. GTA:VC, GTA:SA and GTA:LCS are in the GTA3 family of games.
You're hearing this basically straight from the horse's mouth, as I used to work there. You can choose to believe it or not, but there it is.
Of course, Rockstar is not a company that values consistency above all else, so I suppose things could change. But the plan when I left the company was that the first game on the next console will be GTA4.
You mean 1983/1984. It was Christmas of 1983 that things first went south, then throughout 1984 all of the current console manufacturers pulled out of the market.
The market conditions this time are pretty much the same, that much is definitely true. But the real difference is that nowadays we're dealing with multi-billion dollar major worldwide conglomerates, not little toy companies like Mattel and Coleco. In 1983/84, only Atari had the backing of a major corporation (Warner Bros.), but they were a separate division, and Warner themselves had little to no interest in video games.
At the time, it also wasn't clear that video games were really a continuing concern. They'd only really been around for about six years, so that any major downturn looked like the end of a fad rather than just part of a long-term cycle.
Nowadays, manufacturers are better able to weather these downturns, and they assume that the industry will eventually bounce back, just as it did in 1985. So they're less likely to pull out and cede the market to a relative newcomer (as Atari did for Nintendo after that crash).
The bottom line being that while the conditions right now are very similar to 1983, it's highly unlikely that we'll see a major shakeout like that again. The major manufacturers and publishers will weather this.
What games are they playing that take up 30 hours to complete? Most games take 10 at most, and lack any sort of replay value.
They didn't say most games take 30 hours to complete. They said most games offer 30 hours of gameplay.
How long do you think it takes to "complete" Tetris? (There is no answer, because there is no end to Tetris.) Yet how many hours do you think you've put into it over the years?
And that's ignoring games like Dragon Quest VIII that can take 100 hours or more to actually complete.
You can argue, though, that the 30 hour average is heavily skewed by RPG's, GTA-style adventure games as well as a few quality games that are played for years and years and never get old (like Tetris, or Pac-Man, or whatever). The rest of the games out there are lucky to get played 5 hours before they get put on a shelf forever or resold back to the store. That's where the perceived lack of value comes in. It's not about quantity of gameplay for the money, it's about quality.
They compare movies to video games. Well, for one thing, DVD's cost about ten bucks, and they usually offer 4-5 hours of entertainment if you count the movie and all the extras that DVD's typically include. Now, granted, most movies aren't Citizen Kane either, but for 10 bucks, all you need to do is offer some light entertainment. If you wanted to charge $50 for a DVD, as game companies do for their wares, then you'd better be offering Citizen Kane and then some every time out. But if most games only get played 4-5 hours, and those 4-5 hours aren't even particularly fun, then the value isn't there.
There is a concept of "value pricing" in the games industry, i.e. a lot of publishers put out games now that sell for $20 when new, because they know they're not the same quality as "premium" games. But I would argue that the majority of games made today should cost $20 or less given the quality of gameplay. Only a few true premium titles should command $50 (or $60, in the Xbox 360's case).
I guess it's good he's no longer with the company. We might still be using Performas....
//c. But I bought it based on the reputation of the Apple II line, and even the Apple //c was more expandable and a lot more customizable than the Mac that debuted at around that same time. You could run a large variety of OS's on the Apple //c, anybody could write software for it, and the whole Apple II line was so ubiquitous that the possibilities in both hardware and software seemed limitless to the end user.
//c, my next computer was a 486. I haven't looked back, though I still love my Apple II. If Apple had continued to update and expand that line rather than switching to an entirely new platform, I can guarantee that I and a lot of other people would be using Apple machines today instead of PC's.
Performas weren't Woz's idea. If Woz still stuck with Apple for all of those years, we'd be seeing very expandable, open, and well-engineered Apple machines (well-engineered from an electrical engineering perspective). All of the modern PC enthusiasts would have stuck with Apple to this day had Apple kept the Apple II and went beyond that (more powerful processors, improved OS, etc.).
You said it, dude.
My first PC was an Apple II. Ok, I admit it, it was an Apple
The II line was Woz's baby, and he kept it going even as Jobs was pushing his Mac. For a time, the two lines co-existed. This proved problematic for Apple, though, because the II (by then, the IIgs) was more powerful and expandable than the existing Mac, not to mention cheaper, and it remained more popular. Jobs saw the Mac as the future, though, and this contributed to the friction between Woz and Jobs that eventually led to Woz's departure. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you ask me (and you seem to agree), going with the Mac over the well-established II line was a huge mistake. Imagine if IBM, rather than extending their PC line with new chips and architecture that was backward compatible, simply dumped everything they'd built and started over. One way or another, it wouldn't have worked - it probably would have just bankrupted IBM, and clone makers would have kept the PC alive anyway. Well, it almost didn't work for Apple, either - they nearly bankrupted themselves in their switch to Mac, and they never regained the market share they had in the II days. It took them years before the Mac even matched the IIgs in power out of the box, and future expandability. Heck, the Mac didn't even support color until 1987! It's worth remembering that the Mac was originally positioned as a low-cost, easy to use PC alternative for businesses that did not want to take the time to train their staff to use DOS-based applications. It was not a machine for creatives - that was the II.
The day Woz left that company is the day I knew my Apple days were over. After my
I don't know what I had in mind, walking in there. I thought I'd see some new games, I guess. And I did. Unfortunately, they were all in Chinese.
Gee wiz. I wonder why the games would be in Chinese at the Taipei Game Show??
This guy is the reason why the rest of the world hates us.
I am a lighting guy.. and it is important. It has to go with the feel of what is around you. The problem is that you need a hook for the fanbois, so you get a reasonably passing grade.
The thing is, and I'm not sure if these guys realize it or not, the lighting schemes in ST:TNG (which they're using for reference) were changed in about season two or season three. It's obvious if you watch the shows - the first couple seasons had a much darker, hard-edged look. That worked well later in Enterprise and it works well for new series like Battlestar Galactica, but ST:TNG never had the dark content to go with the somewhat muddy visuals. So they ended up brightening up the lighting and softening the shadows; even the makeup seemed to change in order to reflect less of the lighting off characters' faces. The end result was that ultra-bright, ultra-low contrast look that the series is known for.
I bring this up because the observation lounge/conference room that they're using as a reference appears to be from the first or second season, before they brightened up the lighting. Later seasons had that room evenly lit. The hallway, on the other hand, is from the later seasons. So they are doing a bit of mix and match and not being as careful as they think they are. Which isn't going to please the fanbois.
That being said, it seems like a very short time to announce the features of the system, game lineup and to get everything ready and shipped.
Done, partly done, and all that's left in your mind I guess.
Yep. I don't really know where people are getting this "work in progress" thing. The system is not out yet, it's not in production yet, so why does everyone expect there to be playable units running final game copy on them floating around every time there's a press conference or convention anywhere? You'll get playable units once production has started.
The only thing that's left "in progress" - and Sony has made no bones about saying straight out that this is all that's holding the system up - is AACS for Blu-Ray movies. Yes, that horrible, evil DRM scheme again. That's it. They are waiting on the final spec before they can begin building machines, and that's expected to come within the next two weeks. Could it be delayed further? Sure, and Sony's gonna be screwed if it is. But it's not as if they don't know what hardware's going to be in this machine or what games are gonna be on it. They've got the machine designed, their hardware and software partners lined up, and their factories primed and ready. I'm sure they've got ants-in-the-pants right now just waiting to hit that "go" button.
All they are waiting for is AACS.
So I see no problem with them making a spring launch in Japan. Japanese launches, remember, rarely have more than 5-10 games associated with them, and Sony could put the hype machine in full gear as soon as they can announce a firm launch date. They could even make the end of April (Golden Week in Japan; the biggest holiday/vacation week in the country) if the AACS spec is finalized shortly, and I have no doubt that's their goal, as it always is for "spring" console launches there. Once a date is announced, you will see wall to wall TV commercials, subway ads, billboards, and every other form of marketing you can imagine in Japan - literally overnight. It's a small country with a lot of people in it; the speed at which a large and prepared company like Sony can swing into action would make your head spin. And it's not as if there hasn't been hype already; all of the game magazines and even mainstream news outlets have been covering the PS3, so consumers there are expecting it.
We'll see what happens with the managed-copy spec. But if it's finalized soon, Sony's launch expectations sound pretty realistic to me.
These things are going to be as popular as copy-protected CDs. Just wait until the first few thousand people get home with a shiny new disc, whack it into their machine and get a crappy picture and/or a blank screen.
Ok, I'll bite.
I'm as anti-DRM as anybody, but statements like yours and the article submitter's are more than a little overly dramatic. It's highly likely that "the first few thousand people" who get home with their shiny new discs will have HDMI inputs in their TV's - it's difficult to buy an HDTV these days without one and has been for about the last 5 years. Even my $600 Samsung CRT HDTV has a DVI input, which is fully compatible with HDMI (HDMI is just DVI with audio, so all it takes is a cable with HDMI on one end and DVI on the other to make it work).
The earliest HDTV's only had component inputs. But with the rate HDTV's sold in the early days vs. the rate they're selling now, I'd wager that the vast majority of HDTV's in homes are HDMI-capable. Even many early adopters have probably upgraded their sets by now with larger models that perform better, have more inputs and cost a lot less. HDTV has been around for around 10 years, remember. It's not a new technology anymore.
The joke is that the AUD$8.95 DVD is here to stay.
Yeah, you don't have an HDTV, I guess. (I admit, I don't know what the HD situation is in Australia. But here in the US, it's almost difficult to buy a non-HD set anymore.)
These new formats are specifically for people with high definition displays. DVD is not good enough for those people. You're talking the difference between 720x480 (and that's assuming the disc is anamorphic, otherwise it's more like 480x360) and 1920x1080. That's a huge difference, and it's the entire reason these people bought HDTV's in the first place. If they didn't want that extra resolution, they would have just stuck with standard-def. So there is a large market for these new formats; if you spend $2,000-$3,000 on a TV, you want a format that takes advantage of it.
Standard-def formats will continue to exist, just as standard-def TV continues to exist now. It's no "joke", and you're not saying anything anyone doesn't know. 5-10 years ago you probably would have said "the joke is that VHS is here to stay" in a discussion about the new DVD format. Change doesn't come overnight. But once you see the difference 1080i or 1080p makes over standard definition TV, it's very hard to go back.
Now, all that said, I give it a matter of months before some Chinese or Taiwanese company comes out with an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player that outputs full resolution over component. It'll be one of those "oops!" moments that the manufacturer claims was unintentional but results in a run on that particular model. Eventually, everyone will be doing it... just as happened with region codes on DVD players.
Namco, Konami, Activision, and Capcom are all companies that have survived the last 2 decades.
In fact, Activision was the first ever third-party developer, having been formed by disgruntled Atari employees to write games for the Atari 2600. Atari sued Activision and lost, which opened the door for other third-party developers that came later.
Namco, Konami and Capcom (add Taito and a few others to that list) started out as arcade developers, so their lineage is a bit different. Atari, Taito and Nintendo were probably the original arcade players.
Geeze. Let's take the whole DRM issue out of this as an issue. Why on earth would you drive to your local BB to do this?
Probably more to the point, why would Apple choose to latch onto a dying business? That's the real reason this plan would never happen. When was the last time Steve Jobs purposely looked backwards in terms of content and product distribution?
Lets not forget that copying a DVD is a little less clear cut in the US because of the DMCA which makes bypassing a copy control mechanism illegal...
Read the law. You can find it here. There is no blanket prohibition on bypassing copy control mechanisms - this is a big, big misconception about the DMCA. In fact, there are both specific and non-specific instances (i.e. basically the same provisions as in earlier fair use definitions) in which bypassing technological copy control mechanisms is explicitly allowed.
Whether or not format-shifting would count is not clearly laid out in the law, anymore than it is in earlier copyright laws. According to the DMCA, the Librarian of Congress is supposed to review cases like this every 3 years to determine whether they would be legal under the DMCA's provisions or not.
The entire purpose of this part of the DMCA was not to stamp out fair use, it was to specifically prohibit circumventing technological measures that were implemented in order to prevent copyright violations. But the bottom line is (or is supposed to be) that if you're not violating copyright law, you are allowed to circumvent these technological measures. The DMCA was not supposed to take away your fair use rights.
How the law has been used and referenced since it was enacted may be another story. But that is the way the law was written, and I'm confident that if it was actually tested in court (and format-shifting has not been, to my knowledge), that both the letter and intent of the law would be followed by the court.