How about the numerous tests, both independent and Microsoft-sponsored that show iPods and PSP's interfacing with the 360?
As long as the iPod has its mp3's stored in the iPod's mass storage area (in other words, so you can't actually play them through the iPod) and they actually are mp3's, and not DRM'd AAC files from the iTunes Music Store.
For both of these reasons, the 360's "iPod support" is completely useless. You can't buy a song from Apple, sync your iPod with your PC, then connect it to the 360 and play those songs. You can't even do it with your own ripped files from CD, unless you manually drag them over to a folder on your iPod, which your iPod then doesn't even know exists (but the Xbox 360 does).
The PSP support is probably different, because as I understand it, with the PSP you just dump a bunch of mp3 files into a folder and it plays them. Still, there's nothing revolutionary about being able to get these files off there. It's just transferring a bunch of files from one device to another.
How can we trust Microsoft to leave open standards and not pigeon-hole us into their entertainment platform after they've spent the past 20 years doing the exact opposite to the Windows platform?
This is not about open standards. This is classic double-speak, in the Orwellian tradition. This is saying "we are opening up the Xbox 360" when what they are *really* saying is "we have the Xbox 360 and we would like all other companies to open their products up to it." He's painting MS as the good guy and backhandedly saying it's everybody else's fault if they don't want to make products that conform to MS's vision.
All MS has done with the 360 is make it mass-storage compliant. So it'll work with any other device that's also mass storage compliant. Then he says something to the effect of "but if other companies who are not mass storage compliant would like to make 360 products, we'd love to have them." In other words, "Oh, so the iPod doesn't support Janus? Well, that's Apple's fault, isn't it?"
I hope nobody is fooled by this. Of course, every company - Sony, Nintendo, MS, whoever - would love it if all their competitors suddenly started supporting their products. But business doesn't work that way. MS knows that, but they're obviously trying to sell consoles here. This is called "public relations".
Is it good that the Xbox 360 is mass storage compliant and supports Windows DRM? I guess the first part of that is ok, though nothing special, and the last part is not something I'm really interested in. But the spin that's being put on this is really intended to make MS's competitors look bad for not toeing MS's line; it's not about actually doing anything for the consumer, because MS must know that they're really not doing anything for the consumer.
Wouldn't a simple word verification requirement when creating a blog cure this? I don't think many people would bother creating "thousands" of new splogs if they knew they needed to manually enter in user data for each one... why should you even be able to start up a blog using an API?
Blogger already requires word verification for posting comments (if the blog admin turns it on) - am I missing something or would this also work to at least alleviate the splog problem too?
And what are the users going to do, not accept the terms?
Well, in the case of the chargeback example, they can accept the terms knowing what they've agreed to is completely unenforceable.
Say you agree to that in a EULA, then the software won't install and you ask for a refund, which the company will not provide. You call the credit card company and say "they sold me a defective product and won't give me my money back" and the card company calls the software maker to see what's up. The software maker says "but the customer agreed not to do a chargeback!" You know what the CC company's gonna do?
They're gonna laugh in the software company's face. Then they're gonna do a chargeback.
Your relationship is with the CC company. You can't un-agree with a third party to something you've already agreed to with your CC company. Because the CC company is under no obligation whatsoever to abide by that; they haven't agreed to alter their policies to fit this EULA. Their only obligation is to their customers with which they have prior agreements.
Now, IANAL, but I've got plenty of experience dealing with CC companies (including handling chargebacks) through previous jobs I've had, and this is pretty basic contract law anyway. Contracts are between two parties; if you've got a contract that you're trying to apply to a third party but that they haven't signed, it's meaningless. I can't write up a contract that says "you agree that your sister will never ask me to borrow money" and expect that that actually obligates your sister not to do anything, even if you do sign it.
It's just worth pointing out that some people subscribe to this fallacy that anything you put in a contract is binding as long as it's signed. That's just not the case. You can't agree to something that's illegal, you can't sign away most rights given to you under the law, and you can't agree to something on behalf of a third party (unless that third party also signs, as in a guarantor type situation). The purpose of a contract is to get two people to agree in writing to something under the law. A lot of these companies are apparently using EULA's these days to get people to agree to things that are outside the law, but those EULA's just cannot be enforced.
(This is not to say no EULA can be enforced; obviously, we've seen that they can be. But a EULA has to be written properly just like any other contract; you can't just stick random stuff in there.)
I know that his PS2 was pre-ordered, and accquired day-of-launch. I know that it doesn't not play DVDs, and that it does not play PSX/PS1 games. He has attributed this to the machine being pre-ordered/launch-date-ready.
Based on my experience, and the experience of others here, I would be more likely to attribute it to either simple wear and tear or misuse.
I know that there have been other reports of disc read errors on early PS2's, and I'm not ready to discount these reports out of hand, but I have two PS2's - one a US launch system, one a Japanese launch system - and both work basically as well as they did on day one. I take care of my stuff, but I do use them; they're not just sitting there. I just don't move them a lot and I don't bang them around, which is what a lot of people seem to do with game consoles as a matter of course.
I do think today's game consoles are much more fragile than consoles from the "days of yore", back when they all used solid-state cartridges and had no moving parts. No doubt the PS2 would be way more prone to failure than, say, the Atari 2600. Those early systems were like heavily armored battleships. With a few exceptions (the 5200 and its famously-fragile controllers, for example), those early systems were almost impossible to break, right up to the last major cart-based system, the N64.
But I'm not convinced there's anything that makes a current PS2 more reliable than a launch PS2. They all have the same vulnerability - the optical drive - but they're all good enough to last as long as designed (with a few exceptions, as you'd expect). No doubt a few launch systems failed over the years and no doubt a few current PS2 systems will fail over the years too. But it seems to me that if there was an inherent problem with the launch PS2's, it'd affect basically everybody. And the only thing my PS2's do any different than the day I bought them is take a few extra seconds to recognize a disc, which I don't consider a major issue considering one's five years old and the other six. I've never had a DRE on either one.
Minority Report, carries red for violence and profanity
So apparently this rating system can't distinguish between Minority Report and a Quentin Tarantino film. How useless.
That's a big issue with this "proposal"; it's even more vague, arbitrary and uninformative than the current system. But here's another problem, for me anyway. From TFA:
"As far as I know, they use a few gamers that reside in New York. They are trying to follow the way that the NPAA does it in that they are very circumspect about who their reviewers are. From what we can piece together they have a group of gamers who live in New York, watch the videotape footage and then issue a rating based upon what they see."
He adds, with heavy sarcasm, "Of course we know that a group of gamers in New York represent the social and cultural values of everyone in America."
So, quite clearly this guy has something against New Yorkers. He comes off sounding, to me, like a borderline nutcase. Probably some sort of bible belter or equivalent. So what does he think, reviewers in Alabama would better represent the values of America? Or is he, in fact, proposing that everyone in America review the content of games? How else to reflect the "cultural values of everyone in America"?
Regardless, he obviously has no idea how the ESRB works. Because this isn't how it works. The ESRB has a rotating group of content reviewers from a variety of areas in the United States, not just New York (in fact, I'm not sure any of them were actually in New York last I worked in the industry, although the ESRB does have offices there, among other places). And they hire new ones all the time, making sure nobody stays in the system long enough to get jaded. They keep the actual identity of the reviewers secret, but the general demographic of who they are is not secret, and none of them are "gamers". They are selected in part because they are respected members of their communities; some of them are clergy, some are doctors, some are teachers, some are housewives. Few of them are actually of the stereotypical "gamer" age and last I knew of it, none of them actually play games recreationally. (My knowledge dates back about 2 years, but I doubt all that much has changed since then.) Again, none of this is a secret - this guy could have called the ESRB and asked and they would have told him all of this.
Frankly, this all just seems like a guy running an "organization" out of his apartment looking for publicity, which Next Generation seems all too happy to give him. His "ideas", if you can call them that, range from non-existent (he has few actual proposals for change, just simple criticisms of the current system of which he's almost completely ignorant) to unworkable. There's really no reason for me to be wasting my time posting about it except that 70 other people so far seem to think it's important enough to talk about.
The ESRB is wise to have not bothered returning Next Gen's calls, though.
Anyway, IMHO the reality of making games today is a far cry from the shots he takes in the article. If there is an "us versus them" relationship between marketing and development -- or between any develoment disciple (art and engineering, design and production, production and art, etc), your game's sales, sequel potential, and eventually your career are going to suffer.
I agree. I worked in marketing for a game publisher for 3 1/2 years (no, I do not consider myself a marketdroid; that's why I quit), and quite honestly there was no adversarial relationship whatsoever between us and the development arm of my company. In fact, our developers liked some of our marketing ideas so much that they ended up incorporating them into the games! (I'm sure at least a few of you guys know what that link is really referencing...)
We also worked with outside developers fairly often and in those cases there was often a bit of push-pull. Depending on the contract, sometimes it would end up being a case of "whatever we say goes", sometimes it was the reverse. (A few times we just had to suck it up and do things we knew were idiotic.) Obviously, when two companies that work together have been doing their thing with success individually for a while, both sides are going to think they know best.
But internally, things were always pretty smooth between the marketing and development sides. And even new acquisitions would get along with us pretty well. The fact of the matter is, if there's dissension at one part of any company vs. another part, that dissension is going to eventually end, one way or another. No company can have an internal rebellion going on at one particular division or another; if necessary, heads will roll and there were times at my company when they did.
And as far as the salaries go, the $60K starting figure is a tad high but not completely ridiculous. Salaries are not the problem in the video game industry. It's the working environment and employee treatment that are the problems.
The performance difference is significant (at least 10%, and often more), and it goes up with bigger files, like video
You would think that a video iPod would be the place you would definitely want Firewire, at least as an option.
It would be nice to still have but you're making too big a deal out of it in this particular case.
The iPod's video files are native 320x240 mpeg-4 files. You can go up to something like 480x480, I guess, and if you compress them yourself you can make them relatively huge (not that you'd want to; it'd just be a waste of space), but the point is that in absolute terms, these are not large video files. You could easily stream them over USB2 with no hiccups whatsoever. You could probably stream a dozen of them at a time if the iPod supported such a thing.
But that's not the way the iPod works anyway. Now, I'm not 100% sure that the 5G iPod works the same as the 4G and previous models (I would assume it does), but you don't generally "stream" anything from the iPod to your PC. You *can*, depending on how you set up your sync preferences, but by default all of your iPod's contents will be greyed out because they're by definition just duplicated on the PC anyway. Probably 95% of iPod users have their systems set up this way, but the remaining 5% will have no trouble streaming video from the iPod over USB2.
Generally, though, the PC connection is just used for syncing. And you don't need to do that more than about once a week, unless you really collect huge amounts of music and movies on a daily basis. So you're not going to notice any speed difference between USB and Firewire there.
Now, if you just want to use the iPod as a mass-storage device for video (which you can also do), and store really high-res, high-def stuff on it (like a full-res.ts file from a high-def 1080i capture), then I don't know, but I'd still think USB2 could handle that. You're still only talking a 19.8mb/sec streaming rate. My wireless internet connection can handle that without a hiccup, so a wired USB2 connection shouldn't have any problem with it. (USB2's theoretical transfer rate is 480mb/sec, although with overhead included, in reality it's much lower.)
What Firewire is primarily used for in terms of video is uncompressed, full-res professional stuff. We use it where I work, for example, to store media on portable drives for transport. That's where the advantages of Firewire really make themselves apparent; USB2 never really gets near its theoretical speed limit and it'll hiccup more and more as you get closer to it, but Firewire stays nice and smooth right up to around 400mbps (assuming you're using Firewire 400, which is what older iPods supported).
But I can't see that anyone who uses the iPod as designed is going to have any problems with video. And nobody who really needs Firewire for video is going to be using an iPod in that capacity anyway; that video would be too important (and probably too big) to transport with anything but an industrial-strength full-size portable hard drive.
I'm glad I have a Firewire-capable 4G iPod only because I can use the included firewire cable and charger that came with my iPod without having to rely on my PC if I don't need to sync. But I could live without it if I didn't have it, and the video on the new iPod's really got no relevance to the issue.
Breaking News: 160 GB hard disks now standard on Dell computers! Company's spokesman claims these will replace the formerly used 120 GB HDs! Stay tuned for our exclusive interview and inside news about this industry-shaking move!!
It actually probably would be far more "industry-shaking" than, say, Apple's bump up in resolution on their PowerBooks, which got a lot of coverage yesterday (including here).
The fact of the matter is a lot more people use Dells than use Apple's computers. If Dell changes specs, IT managers and even end-users are going to pay attention. I've got IT people at my company who literally hover over various news sites looking for info on spec changes to these PC's, and when they see a new configuration that they've been waiting for, they'll buy hundreds of machines in one pop. That's probably also the case at companies all over the world.
Now, that doesn't mean that every news outlet needs to cover every little spec change in every PC maker. Some media organizations cater to a certain market demographic, and that's fine. Slashdot is obviously a Unix/Linux-centric site, so the FreeBSD-based OSX computers that Apple makes now are probably always going to get more positive coverage (and maybe more coverage in general) than Windows-based machines. Design-centric sites, newspapers and magazines will similarly be biased towards Apple (at least compared to any single Windows-based manufacturer).
The real "issue", if you can call it that, is the mainstream media, which is supposed to weigh the importance and interest of stories to the general public. Now, I don't know if this is really something to get all hopped up about, and I don't know if I'd call it a "conflict of interest" that a journalist is covering Apple while using a Mac, as Dvorak does (can nobody write about the machine they actually use?), but I have definitely noticed a lot more favorable articles about relatively minor Apple announcements than I have Windows- or PC-related announcements on sites like CNN, the New York Times and even MSNBC, surprisingly enough.
I would argue that except for the iPod, there is really nothing of interest to the general public whatsoever in any of Apple's offerings. This is a company with 3% market share in computers (and that includes the iMac and Mac Mini). Is a maximum potential of 3% of your audience worth a front page story? There is no reason why any Apple "news" belongs anywhere near the front page of any mainstream general-interest publication. Maybe the inside of a "tech" section, but that's about it. If people are interested in this kind of news, it's not difficult to find regardless, but I do get the feeling sometimes that mainstream journalists are really acting as nothing more than an extension of Apple's PR agency. They obviously want to write these Apple stories, whether or not they mean anything to their readers.
I'm saying all this, btw, as someone who is interested in Apple news (otherwise I wouldn't read Slashdot, or Engadget, or Gizmodo), and who is at this moment typing on a Dual G5 connected to a Cinema Display HD. But people like me are not a major part of the overall computer market, and I'm more interested in seeing journalists do their job properly than I am in seeing Apple plastered all over the internet and the national newspapers.
Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.
It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.
If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.
Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).
I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.
Unless the 5G iPod is different than the 4G, the iPod's s/n ratio is 98-100db. It doesn't get a lot better than that in portable players.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that the iPod has a low s/n ratio - I see people who obviously dislike the iPod bring that up a lot. Probably just one of those internet myths that gets passed around, based on the fact that Apple doesn't put this spec on their specs page (neither do most other portable player makers. When listening with all but the most expensive headphones, it's a pretty irrelevant stat). I don't know if the 5G's s/n ratio is still 100db, but it would surprise me if they actually downgraded the sound while upgrading everything else.
Use lossless compression and really good headphones (or the stereo output) and the iPod is as high-quality a playback device as most home CD players.
This is like MS having elevnty million consecutive quarters beating earnings expectations because they had them lowerered just to beat them every time.
Not sure you really understand how this works. MS can say whatever they want; they can say they expect to sell one single unit and then afterwards claim they beat expectations by 1.5 million percent. But analysts don't base their expectations on what manufacturers say. They never have and they never will.
Analysts do their own research. They literally will do things like call up the factories involved in producing the various parts required and asking them how many units they can produce in a month. If necessary, they'll visit said factories to look at the assembly lines themselves. Sub-contractors are usually public corporations themselves so they have to publish stuff like manufacturing capacities, and it's not hard for an analyst to independently verify these numbers. (And they do require verification; the fact that a factory turned out 15 million doorstops last year does not mean it will also be able to turn out 1.5 million Xbox 360 outer casings by the end of November.)
They'll do this for everything; packaging, materials, assembly infrastructure, delivery logistics.
That's on the supply side.
To determine demand, they'll also survey stores to get a sense of the number of preorders in various regions, and with a large enough sample size they can extrapolate that nationally. They'll do their own cold-calling too, random phone or other surveys of end-users, and/or more targeted focus groups and surveys geared just to people of a certain age or who identify themselves as gamers.
There are also laws that govern how these analysts can function; they can be accused of orchestrating or participating in pump and dump schemes just like the companies themselves.
The point being, if an analyst downgrades something like this, it's because he/they knows something we don't and that maybe even MS doesn't want us to know. It's not something that can be orchestrated by MS. In this case, there are probably a few weak links in the supply chain - it doesn't sound like it's the demand that's being downgraded, just the supply. And he even says it's probably not going to affect MS at all in the long run.
I'm not convinced that you won't be able to walk into a store and buy an Xbox 360 at or soon after launch, though, but day one and immediately afterwards, you will probably have to hunt. They're not going to have 3 million systems out there if analysts believe they'll only have half that.
If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
RAW workflow. Apple is calling this "the first of its kind" in that it can work directly on RAW images, but that's not true. I'm not sure if the parent poster really knew what he was talking about or not, but from looking through the features this has on Apple's web site, it does seem that Picasa 2.1 does pretty much the exact same things, and Picasa is free.
(There are probably things that Apple doesn't mention that people like me would consider pretty important, but I can only go by what's on their web site right now. I'm interested to learn more, as a real Photoshop-level app that can work straight on RAW files might be enough to get me to finally switch to Mac.)
It is highly desirable to work directly on RAW files, which as Apple says is "non-destructive", i.e. all of your original sensor data is still there. This is not the case when working with RAW files in Photoshop, which have to be rasterized even before they're actually opened. You can make basic adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW before the file is opened but to do real retouching, you have to rasterize and open in Photoshop itself.
Picasa will let you do editing and retouching on the RAW file, then export it after you've edited. But Picasa's tools are pretty basic. Apple might offer more, but under their "all the tools you need" sidebar on the web site, they just list the same stuff Picasa does and that even Adobe Camera RAW will mostly do. The real questions for me are:
a) does Aperture support layers? b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching. c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
If the answers to all of these questions are "yes", I'm tempted. If the answers to any one out of the three are "no", then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa, and especially if you've already got a combination of Picasa and Photoshop. (So you can use Picasa for images that need only light retouching, and Photoshop for the heavy stuff that Aperture wouldn't be suited for either.)
Of course, both Apple and Adobe will probably improve their products to compete with each other as time goes on. I would love to see true RAW support in Photoshop itself and I would love to see more features in Aperture. Adobe has had no real serious competition in pro image editing for a good while up to now.
There's no real secret to it - Be smart, work hard, apply yourself, and I'm sure it'll all work out.
You mean it's no different than getting any other job?!
Seriously, there are tons of different kinds of jobs in the game industry, and there are lots of different ways to get them. Most of them can be had simply by applying to a classified ad and being the best candidate in an interview. I agree that it's not some big mystery that needs to be solved. The problem is (and I say this from recent experience trying to hire an assistant) that so many people these days seem to lack even the most basic of job-hunting and interviewing skills. Getting *any* job is a mystery to most people. But there's nothing unique about the game industry.
My first job in the game industry was writing for a now-defunct web site (one of the many IGN/Gamespot wannabes) - I got that job because I happened to know a designer at the company and he got me an interview. (Yeah, I got lucky, but social networking is the way a lot of jobs are handed out.) My second industry job, working for a major publisher, I got both because of that first job and because of a web site that I ran on my own at the time. No, I'm not a coder - believe me, you don't want to be a coder working in the game industry. Though I can't say marketing (where I worked) is really much better.
So I broke into the industry with a combination of networking and experience. And yes, the fact that I've been playing games since 1977 did help. Like any other industry, game companies like to know that the people they hire are both interested in and knowledgeable about their products and history. You can't go into an interview and say "now, what kind of products does your company make again?" (I've had people ask me this at my current company during interviews!)
Honestly, though, my experience basically taught me that the game industry is not much fun. So it's all pretty much moot anyway. There are much better industries in which to work.
I will say that that first editorial job was probably the best job I've ever had, and if they hadn't folded I'd still be there despite the ridiculously low pay. But working for an actual publisher sucked. (Despite a doubling in salary.)
New York County, which includes Manhattan, has 66950 people/square mile. No, that's not a typo.
In fact, New York County is only Manhattan. (Queens is Queens County, Brooklyn is Kings, Bronx is Bronx, and Staten Island is Dutchess.) So that number is a bit skewed - Manhattan is far denser than any other borough in New York City or any part of New Jersey.
According to Wikipedia, NYC's population density is 26403 people/square mile (that's rounded up just to match the look of your number). Newark, NJ's population density is 11400 people/square mile and Jersey City's is 16093 people/square mile. Other areas close to NYC in NJ have lower densities (those are the two main "cities" in NJ on the edge of NYC). So the average of the whole NY metro area would be a lot lower than 66950. And nobody's going to bother laying infrastructure for a single borough, although typically the telcos and cablecos will start with one borough and work their way out.
Just to compare, Tokyo is similarly difficult to calculate (it depends on if you're talking the 23 official wards of the city, the prefecture of Tokyo, or something else), but the 23 wards have a density of 34734 people/square mile. So, both cities are pretty dense, but NYC is not even close to twice as dense as Tokyo, which your numbers suggest.
I do sort of agree with your main point, though, which is that there's no real reason why the Northeast Corridor, the California Corridor or the cities of the upper midwest shouldn't be wired up better, if population density is the problem. The USA is extremely regional, and there are whole areas that are just as urban and just as large (in terms of population) as all of South Korea, for example. The NEC has a greater population than South Korea in a smaller area, so it should be theoretically cheaper to wire up on a per capita basis.
Jam a Public Safety frequency with some moronic radio design that doesn't work correctly and then sit around waiting for Ambulances and Fire Departments while some industry standard for not doing stupid things is arranged?
No thanks.
Your example is totally appropriate, but let's take a step back and talk about something most Slashdotters should be able to easily understand.
I unfortunately was too late to this topic to get my snarky comment on the parent article in, but it would have gone something like "The FCC's irrelevant? Tell that to my upstairs neighbor on his 2.4ghz phone while I'm trying to use my wireless internet!"
If people think industries are just going to regulate themselves or that anyone's going to bother building devices smart enough not to trip over each other, they're just completely clueless. Manufacturers fail to do this now despite regulation - de-regulate things even further and we'd all be in for a world of hurt. Radio waves are a finite resource and if anyone was allowed to use whatever radio waves they wanted, it would literally be electronic anarchy and nobody would get anything done. Cell phones wouldn't work anywhere (because they could be legally jammed), wireless internet wouldn't work (because somebody else would be trying to use that spectrum), there'd be no digital OTA TV (because there'd be no impetus for it), and yes, there'd be chaos on the emergency radio bands.
You'd have no more FM radio because everybody could set up a station anywhere they wanted, blasting out 50,000 watts. You'd get nothing but overlapping signals coming mostly from peoples' apartments. Now, FM radio is pretty much dead to me, but a lot of people still listen to it in their cars and also rely on it for emergency broadcasts. (Again, it all comes back to that.)
There are two separate issues here. First, it's one thing to expect companies within the same industry to self-regulate - that's possible, and it happens with wi-fi and cellular stuff all the time. But it's not at all realistic to expect manufacturers to work together across all industries that create radio equipment. If you're a manufacturer of cell phones, is it even going to occur to you to work with a manufacturer of iPod radio tranceivers to make sure your stuff works together (let alone all of them, and every other manufacturer of such niche devices)? No.
This is the FCC's job.
Even if everybody did work together here, without any possibility of penalties you'd have less scrupulous companies overseas (or maybe even within our borders) creating devices specifically designed to overstep other manufacturers' devices. To "hack the network", so to speak. Why not? Without the FCC, who is going to create and enforce the rules that say not to? This is also the FCC's job.
The second issue is that the FCC regulates not just corporations, but individuals. They're the reason why you can't set up a pirate radio station in your house. Do away with the FCC and you'd not just open up the airwaves to corporations but to every 17 year old moron with a credit card. I'd love to see what happens the first time you get one of these kids onto the La Guardia Tower ATC frequency. Yeah, that'll be loads of fun.
I realize it's fashionable to bash the FCC around here because some of us apparently want to see Janet Jackson's ugly-ass ta-tas undisturbed, but it is an organization with a pretty important role.
Also, why is it FUD if it's MS, and rumours if it's anyone else?
It's FUD to say the PS3 won't be shipping in Europe until 2007 when Sony has said no such thing and MS clearly has a financial agenda for spreading such nonsense.
Rumors are spread by people with either a) no vested interest, or b) an unconfirmed (or uncomfirmable) vested interest. You could call this a rumor if you didn't know the source, or if the source was independent, e.g. neither MS nor Sony (nor Nintendo).
Coming from the company with a console going head to head with the PS3, it is FUD to spread unsubstantiated rumors that make the competing system look as bad as possible.
You may as well say it's a "rumor" that there's SCO code in Linux. That's not a rumor, that's FUD coming from SCO. It's an unsubstantiated factoid designed for no other reason than to drive people away from a competing product and towards yours. That's the definition of what FUD is, and this is the same thing.
What on *earth* have the execs at the affiliates being doing the past few years that they've missed the fact that the music business in is absolute turmoil over digital distribution? They can hardly claim that they were so busy producing Reality and Car-Crash TV shows that they didn't realise the inevitability that they were next and Hollywood is going to follow.
You (along with everyone else) have apparently completely forgotten about the concept of VOD. In fact, there is nothing new whatsoever about downloading TV shows! I've got about 50 different channels on my cable box that allow me to do this whenever I want to, and at higher resolutions than iTMS.
The downloading, and the idea of digital distribution, is not new at all. And you're way, way off if you think the affiliates have not been working with the networks on this for years now. The only thing that's new about iTunes and TV shows is the act of putting it on an iPod. Is this really so revolutionary? I would argue that it's not. True, the iPod has never had video before, but plenty of other devices have, and I've been able to download episodes of my favorite TV shows for years now over my cable company's digital VOD system, transfer them to my PC and put them on whatever video device I want to.
Now, you can say "but it's going to bring downloading to the masses!" Well again, VOD is already quite popular. Almost everybody has it (whether they even know it or not) and all that's missing is a quick and easy way to transfer those shows to a portable device (sans PC). But that's a trivial thing to add - all cable boxes these days have high speed data ports of one type or another, and the cable industry's just been waiting for a reason to use them. Well, this might be it - if the cable industry feels truly threatened by iTunes, watch for them to open the floodgates.
I'm not arguing that what Apple's doing isn't a good thing or that it won't push the industry forward. But I don't see how downloading episodes of Lost for $1.99 a piece at 320x240 resolution beats what I've got on my cable box, which has thousands of TV shows available at any given moment for free. (Or at least for no more than I pay for standard cable service.)
In the future, you're more likely to keep your cable company and use them for downloads than you are to switch to iTunes. The TV networks have been pushing VOD forward for years and while iTMS may hasten the transition, the cable and network TV industry are pretty well prepared.
Re:15 Reasons to boycott IMDb
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IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Movies are shared culture, and despite how the MPAA likes to assert property rights to every dimension of commercial film, movies are more than simply business. The stories they borrow from and the stories they tell are all public knowledge and are not owned by anyone.
Er... how very... communist(?) of you.
The fact of the matter is movies have been a business since they were invented. This is not like the music industry, where music existed prior to the music industry - movies did not exist prior to the movie industry. Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money. Movies themselves have been copyrighted for as long as it occured to anyone to do so. That includes the stories, which sure as hell are owned by those that write them, at least until they sell those stories to a studio or producer (at which point they are then owned by the studio or producer). Movie plots don't write themselves, despite the wishes of most Hollywood producers.
Sure, movies are a part of our culture, but just because something's a part of our culture doesn't mean it's not also copyrighted (and copyrightable) as well as a commercial enterprise.
Isn't it obvious? European governments weren't involved in designing or running it. Is it a coincidence that as soon as they decide to inject themselves into the situation that now the net is going to "fall apart"? I don't think so.
It's like when you buy that new DVD player, and only allow the adults in your house to use it. It works fine, right? But as soon as you let your five year old kid near it, all of a sudden it's clogged up with peanut butter. This is no different.
The compression that DVDs use is pretty old and crappy.
It's the same compression used in our HDTV standard. It's intended for use at high bit rates, like HDTV or DVD. You're not going to get any better quality at those bit rates using another encoding scheme.
A 600M xvid file will give you a movie at DVD quality.
No, it won't. It may look similar, and maybe you have to take your eyes off the foreground action to see what xvid is doing to your movies, but I have never, ever seen any xvid rip that comes close to the original DVD.
xvid and other mpeg-4 standards do well at what they're intended for - creating good-looking video at low bit rates. One of the intents of mpeg-4 (including h.264, which is mpeg-4 part 10) is delivery of high-quality movies over the internet. At that, xvid does a good job, but that doesn't mean an xvid movie encoded at 1mbps is going to look anywhere near as good as a DVD encoded at 9mbps. It never will. It's not possible. It will look "good enough" for some people, but not for those who are really interested in quality.
mpeg-2 does not do well at low bit rates required for things like web delivery. This is one big reason why mpeg-4 was created. But if you're talking about encoding a movie such that it looks basically indistinguishable from the original, both mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 are going to require similarly high bit rates. (And yes, I've downloaded Apple's h.264 videos, before anyone brings that up - they are very large, if you've noticed. Some of them hit a couple hundred megabytes for 2-3 minutes of video.)
People get this mixed up; they think because mpeg-4 is newer that it is more advanced than mpeg-2 in every way. It's not. It's better at low bit rates, but even comparing directly at similarly low bit rates, "better" does not mean "perfect". At high bit rates and otherwise identical settings, you can't tell the difference between the two standards.
I encode video both as part of my job and also for laughs at home (and I've tried pretty much everything, including h.264 using Nero Digital, xvid, divx, QuickTime, WM9 and mpeg-2), so I have some level of practical experience with this. At home, I still actually just use mpeg-2 more often than not, because h.264 support is so spotty right now and the quality at the bit rates I use is the same between the two formats. For stuff I want people to download over the web, I've actually gotten better results with WM9 than I have with h.264 yet (probably mainly because playback support of h.264 is so spotty right now).
Huh? The Saturn was not backward-compatible. The PS2 was the first home console that was backward-compatible out of the box since the Atari 7800 in 1987. (The Sega Genesis had an add-on that made it SMS compatible, but it was not standard equipment.)
They covered this on c|Net yesterday and they said that you have to use Internet Explorer. I'm sure it won't be long before Firefox or Opera is compatible but it is just another attempt by Microsoft to *require* users to use Microsoft applications (or you can always switch to another email service).
I would honestly doubt non-IE browsers are incompatible, but they probably won't be able to take advantage of the more advanced features.
I use OWA at work sometimes, and my guess is the new Hotmail will be very similar (in fact, that's basically what this reviewer says). OWA looks and works basically just like Outlook on IE for the PC; on every other browser, it works pretty much like a standard web mail service.
Porting this philosophy over to Hotmail would allow MS to claim continued "support" for other browsers while still promoting IE as "the only way to use all of the advanced features" of the service.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the numerous tests, both independent and Microsoft-sponsored that show iPods and PSP's interfacing with the 360?
As long as the iPod has its mp3's stored in the iPod's mass storage area (in other words, so you can't actually play them through the iPod) and they actually are mp3's, and not DRM'd AAC files from the iTunes Music Store.
For both of these reasons, the 360's "iPod support" is completely useless. You can't buy a song from Apple, sync your iPod with your PC, then connect it to the 360 and play those songs. You can't even do it with your own ripped files from CD, unless you manually drag them over to a folder on your iPod, which your iPod then doesn't even know exists (but the Xbox 360 does).
The PSP support is probably different, because as I understand it, with the PSP you just dump a bunch of mp3 files into a folder and it plays them. Still, there's nothing revolutionary about being able to get these files off there. It's just transferring a bunch of files from one device to another.
How can we trust Microsoft to leave open standards and not pigeon-hole us into their entertainment platform after they've spent the past 20 years doing the exact opposite to the Windows platform?
This is not about open standards. This is classic double-speak, in the Orwellian tradition. This is saying "we are opening up the Xbox 360" when what they are *really* saying is "we have the Xbox 360 and we would like all other companies to open their products up to it." He's painting MS as the good guy and backhandedly saying it's everybody else's fault if they don't want to make products that conform to MS's vision.
All MS has done with the 360 is make it mass-storage compliant. So it'll work with any other device that's also mass storage compliant. Then he says something to the effect of "but if other companies who are not mass storage compliant would like to make 360 products, we'd love to have them." In other words, "Oh, so the iPod doesn't support Janus? Well, that's Apple's fault, isn't it?"
I hope nobody is fooled by this. Of course, every company - Sony, Nintendo, MS, whoever - would love it if all their competitors suddenly started supporting their products. But business doesn't work that way. MS knows that, but they're obviously trying to sell consoles here. This is called "public relations".
Is it good that the Xbox 360 is mass storage compliant and supports Windows DRM? I guess the first part of that is ok, though nothing special, and the last part is not something I'm really interested in. But the spin that's being put on this is really intended to make MS's competitors look bad for not toeing MS's line; it's not about actually doing anything for the consumer, because MS must know that they're really not doing anything for the consumer.
Wouldn't a simple word verification requirement when creating a blog cure this? I don't think many people would bother creating "thousands" of new splogs if they knew they needed to manually enter in user data for each one... why should you even be able to start up a blog using an API?
Blogger already requires word verification for posting comments (if the blog admin turns it on) - am I missing something or would this also work to at least alleviate the splog problem too?
And what are the users going to do, not accept the terms?
Well, in the case of the chargeback example, they can accept the terms knowing what they've agreed to is completely unenforceable.
Say you agree to that in a EULA, then the software won't install and you ask for a refund, which the company will not provide. You call the credit card company and say "they sold me a defective product and won't give me my money back" and the card company calls the software maker to see what's up. The software maker says "but the customer agreed not to do a chargeback!" You know what the CC company's gonna do?
They're gonna laugh in the software company's face. Then they're gonna do a chargeback.
Your relationship is with the CC company. You can't un-agree with a third party to something you've already agreed to with your CC company. Because the CC company is under no obligation whatsoever to abide by that; they haven't agreed to alter their policies to fit this EULA. Their only obligation is to their customers with which they have prior agreements.
Now, IANAL, but I've got plenty of experience dealing with CC companies (including handling chargebacks) through previous jobs I've had, and this is pretty basic contract law anyway. Contracts are between two parties; if you've got a contract that you're trying to apply to a third party but that they haven't signed, it's meaningless. I can't write up a contract that says "you agree that your sister will never ask me to borrow money" and expect that that actually obligates your sister not to do anything, even if you do sign it.
It's just worth pointing out that some people subscribe to this fallacy that anything you put in a contract is binding as long as it's signed. That's just not the case. You can't agree to something that's illegal, you can't sign away most rights given to you under the law, and you can't agree to something on behalf of a third party (unless that third party also signs, as in a guarantor type situation). The purpose of a contract is to get two people to agree in writing to something under the law. A lot of these companies are apparently using EULA's these days to get people to agree to things that are outside the law, but those EULA's just cannot be enforced.
(This is not to say no EULA can be enforced; obviously, we've seen that they can be. But a EULA has to be written properly just like any other contract; you can't just stick random stuff in there.)
I know that his PS2 was pre-ordered, and accquired day-of-launch. I know that it doesn't not play DVDs, and that it does not play PSX/PS1 games. He has attributed this to the machine being pre-ordered/launch-date-ready.
Based on my experience, and the experience of others here, I would be more likely to attribute it to either simple wear and tear or misuse.
I know that there have been other reports of disc read errors on early PS2's, and I'm not ready to discount these reports out of hand, but I have two PS2's - one a US launch system, one a Japanese launch system - and both work basically as well as they did on day one. I take care of my stuff, but I do use them; they're not just sitting there. I just don't move them a lot and I don't bang them around, which is what a lot of people seem to do with game consoles as a matter of course.
I do think today's game consoles are much more fragile than consoles from the "days of yore", back when they all used solid-state cartridges and had no moving parts. No doubt the PS2 would be way more prone to failure than, say, the Atari 2600. Those early systems were like heavily armored battleships. With a few exceptions (the 5200 and its famously-fragile controllers, for example), those early systems were almost impossible to break, right up to the last major cart-based system, the N64.
But I'm not convinced there's anything that makes a current PS2 more reliable than a launch PS2. They all have the same vulnerability - the optical drive - but they're all good enough to last as long as designed (with a few exceptions, as you'd expect). No doubt a few launch systems failed over the years and no doubt a few current PS2 systems will fail over the years too. But it seems to me that if there was an inherent problem with the launch PS2's, it'd affect basically everybody. And the only thing my PS2's do any different than the day I bought them is take a few extra seconds to recognize a disc, which I don't consider a major issue considering one's five years old and the other six. I've never had a DRE on either one.
Minority Report, carries red for violence and profanity
So apparently this rating system can't distinguish between Minority Report and a Quentin Tarantino film. How useless.
That's a big issue with this "proposal"; it's even more vague, arbitrary and uninformative than the current system. But here's another problem, for me anyway. From TFA:
"As far as I know, they use a few gamers that reside in New York. They are trying to follow the way that the NPAA does it in that they are very circumspect about who their reviewers are. From what we can piece together they have a group of gamers who live in New York, watch the videotape footage and then issue a rating based upon what they see."
He adds, with heavy sarcasm, "Of course we know that a group of gamers in New York represent the social and cultural values of everyone in America."
So, quite clearly this guy has something against New Yorkers. He comes off sounding, to me, like a borderline nutcase. Probably some sort of bible belter or equivalent. So what does he think, reviewers in Alabama would better represent the values of America? Or is he, in fact, proposing that everyone in America review the content of games? How else to reflect the "cultural values of everyone in America"?
Regardless, he obviously has no idea how the ESRB works. Because this isn't how it works. The ESRB has a rotating group of content reviewers from a variety of areas in the United States, not just New York (in fact, I'm not sure any of them were actually in New York last I worked in the industry, although the ESRB does have offices there, among other places). And they hire new ones all the time, making sure nobody stays in the system long enough to get jaded. They keep the actual identity of the reviewers secret, but the general demographic of who they are is not secret, and none of them are "gamers". They are selected in part because they are respected members of their communities; some of them are clergy, some are doctors, some are teachers, some are housewives. Few of them are actually of the stereotypical "gamer" age and last I knew of it, none of them actually play games recreationally. (My knowledge dates back about 2 years, but I doubt all that much has changed since then.) Again, none of this is a secret - this guy could have called the ESRB and asked and they would have told him all of this.
Frankly, this all just seems like a guy running an "organization" out of his apartment looking for publicity, which Next Generation seems all too happy to give him. His "ideas", if you can call them that, range from non-existent (he has few actual proposals for change, just simple criticisms of the current system of which he's almost completely ignorant) to unworkable. There's really no reason for me to be wasting my time posting about it except that 70 other people so far seem to think it's important enough to talk about.
The ESRB is wise to have not bothered returning Next Gen's calls, though.
Anyway, IMHO the reality of making games today is a far cry from the shots he takes in the article. If there is an "us versus them" relationship between marketing and development -- or between any develoment disciple (art and engineering, design and production, production and art, etc), your game's sales, sequel potential, and eventually your career are going to suffer.
I agree. I worked in marketing for a game publisher for 3 1/2 years (no, I do not consider myself a marketdroid; that's why I quit), and quite honestly there was no adversarial relationship whatsoever between us and the development arm of my company. In fact, our developers liked some of our marketing ideas so much that they ended up incorporating them into the games! (I'm sure at least a few of you guys know what that link is really referencing...)
We also worked with outside developers fairly often and in those cases there was often a bit of push-pull. Depending on the contract, sometimes it would end up being a case of "whatever we say goes", sometimes it was the reverse. (A few times we just had to suck it up and do things we knew were idiotic.) Obviously, when two companies that work together have been doing their thing with success individually for a while, both sides are going to think they know best.
But internally, things were always pretty smooth between the marketing and development sides. And even new acquisitions would get along with us pretty well. The fact of the matter is, if there's dissension at one part of any company vs. another part, that dissension is going to eventually end, one way or another. No company can have an internal rebellion going on at one particular division or another; if necessary, heads will roll and there were times at my company when they did.
And as far as the salaries go, the $60K starting figure is a tad high but not completely ridiculous. Salaries are not the problem in the video game industry. It's the working environment and employee treatment that are the problems.
The performance difference is significant (at least 10%, and often more), and it goes up with bigger files, like video
.ts file from a high-def 1080i capture), then I don't know, but I'd still think USB2 could handle that. You're still only talking a 19.8mb/sec streaming rate. My wireless internet connection can handle that without a hiccup, so a wired USB2 connection shouldn't have any problem with it. (USB2's theoretical transfer rate is 480mb/sec, although with overhead included, in reality it's much lower.)
You would think that a video iPod would be the place you would definitely want Firewire, at least as an option.
It would be nice to still have but you're making too big a deal out of it in this particular case.
The iPod's video files are native 320x240 mpeg-4 files. You can go up to something like 480x480, I guess, and if you compress them yourself you can make them relatively huge (not that you'd want to; it'd just be a waste of space), but the point is that in absolute terms, these are not large video files. You could easily stream them over USB2 with no hiccups whatsoever. You could probably stream a dozen of them at a time if the iPod supported such a thing.
But that's not the way the iPod works anyway. Now, I'm not 100% sure that the 5G iPod works the same as the 4G and previous models (I would assume it does), but you don't generally "stream" anything from the iPod to your PC. You *can*, depending on how you set up your sync preferences, but by default all of your iPod's contents will be greyed out because they're by definition just duplicated on the PC anyway. Probably 95% of iPod users have their systems set up this way, but the remaining 5% will have no trouble streaming video from the iPod over USB2.
Generally, though, the PC connection is just used for syncing. And you don't need to do that more than about once a week, unless you really collect huge amounts of music and movies on a daily basis. So you're not going to notice any speed difference between USB and Firewire there.
Now, if you just want to use the iPod as a mass-storage device for video (which you can also do), and store really high-res, high-def stuff on it (like a full-res
What Firewire is primarily used for in terms of video is uncompressed, full-res professional stuff. We use it where I work, for example, to store media on portable drives for transport. That's where the advantages of Firewire really make themselves apparent; USB2 never really gets near its theoretical speed limit and it'll hiccup more and more as you get closer to it, but Firewire stays nice and smooth right up to around 400mbps (assuming you're using Firewire 400, which is what older iPods supported).
But I can't see that anyone who uses the iPod as designed is going to have any problems with video. And nobody who really needs Firewire for video is going to be using an iPod in that capacity anyway; that video would be too important (and probably too big) to transport with anything but an industrial-strength full-size portable hard drive.
I'm glad I have a Firewire-capable 4G iPod only because I can use the included firewire cable and charger that came with my iPod without having to rely on my PC if I don't need to sync. But I could live without it if I didn't have it, and the video on the new iPod's really got no relevance to the issue.
Breaking News: 160 GB hard disks now standard on Dell computers! Company's spokesman claims these will replace the formerly used 120 GB HDs! Stay tuned for our exclusive interview and inside news about this industry-shaking move!!
It actually probably would be far more "industry-shaking" than, say, Apple's bump up in resolution on their PowerBooks, which got a lot of coverage yesterday (including here).
The fact of the matter is a lot more people use Dells than use Apple's computers. If Dell changes specs, IT managers and even end-users are going to pay attention. I've got IT people at my company who literally hover over various news sites looking for info on spec changes to these PC's, and when they see a new configuration that they've been waiting for, they'll buy hundreds of machines in one pop. That's probably also the case at companies all over the world.
Now, that doesn't mean that every news outlet needs to cover every little spec change in every PC maker. Some media organizations cater to a certain market demographic, and that's fine. Slashdot is obviously a Unix/Linux-centric site, so the FreeBSD-based OSX computers that Apple makes now are probably always going to get more positive coverage (and maybe more coverage in general) than Windows-based machines. Design-centric sites, newspapers and magazines will similarly be biased towards Apple (at least compared to any single Windows-based manufacturer).
The real "issue", if you can call it that, is the mainstream media, which is supposed to weigh the importance and interest of stories to the general public. Now, I don't know if this is really something to get all hopped up about, and I don't know if I'd call it a "conflict of interest" that a journalist is covering Apple while using a Mac, as Dvorak does (can nobody write about the machine they actually use?), but I have definitely noticed a lot more favorable articles about relatively minor Apple announcements than I have Windows- or PC-related announcements on sites like CNN, the New York Times and even MSNBC, surprisingly enough.
I would argue that except for the iPod, there is really nothing of interest to the general public whatsoever in any of Apple's offerings. This is a company with 3% market share in computers (and that includes the iMac and Mac Mini). Is a maximum potential of 3% of your audience worth a front page story? There is no reason why any Apple "news" belongs anywhere near the front page of any mainstream general-interest publication. Maybe the inside of a "tech" section, but that's about it. If people are interested in this kind of news, it's not difficult to find regardless, but I do get the feeling sometimes that mainstream journalists are really acting as nothing more than an extension of Apple's PR agency. They obviously want to write these Apple stories, whether or not they mean anything to their readers.
I'm saying all this, btw, as someone who is interested in Apple news (otherwise I wouldn't read Slashdot, or Engadget, or Gizmodo), and who is at this moment typing on a Dual G5 connected to a Cinema Display HD. But people like me are not a major part of the overall computer market, and I'm more interested in seeing journalists do their job properly than I am in seeing Apple plastered all over the internet and the national newspapers.
Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.
It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.
If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.
Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).
I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.
And relatively low S/N ratio, i.e. shitty sound.
Unless the 5G iPod is different than the 4G, the iPod's s/n ratio is 98-100db. It doesn't get a lot better than that in portable players.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that the iPod has a low s/n ratio - I see people who obviously dislike the iPod bring that up a lot. Probably just one of those internet myths that gets passed around, based on the fact that Apple doesn't put this spec on their specs page (neither do most other portable player makers. When listening with all but the most expensive headphones, it's a pretty irrelevant stat). I don't know if the 5G's s/n ratio is still 100db, but it would surprise me if they actually downgraded the sound while upgrading everything else.
Use lossless compression and really good headphones (or the stereo output) and the iPod is as high-quality a playback device as most home CD players.
This is like MS having elevnty million consecutive quarters beating earnings expectations because they had them lowerered just to beat them every time.
Not sure you really understand how this works. MS can say whatever they want; they can say they expect to sell one single unit and then afterwards claim they beat expectations by 1.5 million percent. But analysts don't base their expectations on what manufacturers say. They never have and they never will.
Analysts do their own research. They literally will do things like call up the factories involved in producing the various parts required and asking them how many units they can produce in a month. If necessary, they'll visit said factories to look at the assembly lines themselves. Sub-contractors are usually public corporations themselves so they have to publish stuff like manufacturing capacities, and it's not hard for an analyst to independently verify these numbers. (And they do require verification; the fact that a factory turned out 15 million doorstops last year does not mean it will also be able to turn out 1.5 million Xbox 360 outer casings by the end of November.)
They'll do this for everything; packaging, materials, assembly infrastructure, delivery logistics.
That's on the supply side.
To determine demand, they'll also survey stores to get a sense of the number of preorders in various regions, and with a large enough sample size they can extrapolate that nationally. They'll do their own cold-calling too, random phone or other surveys of end-users, and/or more targeted focus groups and surveys geared just to people of a certain age or who identify themselves as gamers.
There are also laws that govern how these analysts can function; they can be accused of orchestrating or participating in pump and dump schemes just like the companies themselves.
The point being, if an analyst downgrades something like this, it's because he/they knows something we don't and that maybe even MS doesn't want us to know. It's not something that can be orchestrated by MS. In this case, there are probably a few weak links in the supply chain - it doesn't sound like it's the demand that's being downgraded, just the supply. And he even says it's probably not going to affect MS at all in the long run.
I'm not convinced that you won't be able to walk into a store and buy an Xbox 360 at or soon after launch, though, but day one and immediately afterwards, you will probably have to hunt. They're not going to have 3 million systems out there if analysts believe they'll only have half that.
If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
RAW workflow. Apple is calling this "the first of its kind" in that it can work directly on RAW images, but that's not true. I'm not sure if the parent poster really knew what he was talking about or not, but from looking through the features this has on Apple's web site, it does seem that Picasa 2.1 does pretty much the exact same things, and Picasa is free.
(There are probably things that Apple doesn't mention that people like me would consider pretty important, but I can only go by what's on their web site right now. I'm interested to learn more, as a real Photoshop-level app that can work straight on RAW files might be enough to get me to finally switch to Mac.)
It is highly desirable to work directly on RAW files, which as Apple says is "non-destructive", i.e. all of your original sensor data is still there. This is not the case when working with RAW files in Photoshop, which have to be rasterized even before they're actually opened. You can make basic adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW before the file is opened but to do real retouching, you have to rasterize and open in Photoshop itself.
Picasa will let you do editing and retouching on the RAW file, then export it after you've edited. But Picasa's tools are pretty basic. Apple might offer more, but under their "all the tools you need" sidebar on the web site, they just list the same stuff Picasa does and that even Adobe Camera RAW will mostly do. The real questions for me are:
a) does Aperture support layers?
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
If the answers to all of these questions are "yes", I'm tempted. If the answers to any one out of the three are "no", then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa, and especially if you've already got a combination of Picasa and Photoshop. (So you can use Picasa for images that need only light retouching, and Photoshop for the heavy stuff that Aperture wouldn't be suited for either.)
Of course, both Apple and Adobe will probably improve their products to compete with each other as time goes on. I would love to see true RAW support in Photoshop itself and I would love to see more features in Aperture. Adobe has had no real serious competition in pro image editing for a good while up to now.
There's no real secret to it - Be smart, work hard, apply yourself, and I'm sure it'll all work out.
You mean it's no different than getting any other job?!
Seriously, there are tons of different kinds of jobs in the game industry, and there are lots of different ways to get them. Most of them can be had simply by applying to a classified ad and being the best candidate in an interview. I agree that it's not some big mystery that needs to be solved. The problem is (and I say this from recent experience trying to hire an assistant) that so many people these days seem to lack even the most basic of job-hunting and interviewing skills. Getting *any* job is a mystery to most people. But there's nothing unique about the game industry.
My first job in the game industry was writing for a now-defunct web site (one of the many IGN/Gamespot wannabes) - I got that job because I happened to know a designer at the company and he got me an interview. (Yeah, I got lucky, but social networking is the way a lot of jobs are handed out.) My second industry job, working for a major publisher, I got both because of that first job and because of a web site that I ran on my own at the time. No, I'm not a coder - believe me, you don't want to be a coder working in the game industry. Though I can't say marketing (where I worked) is really much better.
So I broke into the industry with a combination of networking and experience. And yes, the fact that I've been playing games since 1977 did help. Like any other industry, game companies like to know that the people they hire are both interested in and knowledgeable about their products and history. You can't go into an interview and say "now, what kind of products does your company make again?" (I've had people ask me this at my current company during interviews!)
Honestly, though, my experience basically taught me that the game industry is not much fun. So it's all pretty much moot anyway. There are much better industries in which to work.
I will say that that first editorial job was probably the best job I've ever had, and if they hadn't folded I'd still be there despite the ridiculously low pay. But working for an actual publisher sucked. (Despite a doubling in salary.)
I knew I should have used the preview button:
Staten Island is Dutchess
Staten Island is Richmond. Sorry 'bout that.
New York County, which includes Manhattan, has 66950 people/square mile. No, that's not a typo.
In fact, New York County is only Manhattan. (Queens is Queens County, Brooklyn is Kings, Bronx is Bronx, and Staten Island is Dutchess.) So that number is a bit skewed - Manhattan is far denser than any other borough in New York City or any part of New Jersey.
According to Wikipedia, NYC's population density is 26403 people/square mile (that's rounded up just to match the look of your number). Newark, NJ's population density is 11400 people/square mile and Jersey City's is 16093 people/square mile. Other areas close to NYC in NJ have lower densities (those are the two main "cities" in NJ on the edge of NYC). So the average of the whole NY metro area would be a lot lower than 66950. And nobody's going to bother laying infrastructure for a single borough, although typically the telcos and cablecos will start with one borough and work their way out.
Just to compare, Tokyo is similarly difficult to calculate (it depends on if you're talking the 23 official wards of the city, the prefecture of Tokyo, or something else), but the 23 wards have a density of 34734 people/square mile. So, both cities are pretty dense, but NYC is not even close to twice as dense as Tokyo, which your numbers suggest.
I do sort of agree with your main point, though, which is that there's no real reason why the Northeast Corridor, the California Corridor or the cities of the upper midwest shouldn't be wired up better, if population density is the problem. The USA is extremely regional, and there are whole areas that are just as urban and just as large (in terms of population) as all of South Korea, for example. The NEC has a greater population than South Korea in a smaller area, so it should be theoretically cheaper to wire up on a per capita basis.
Jam a Public Safety frequency with some moronic radio design that doesn't work correctly and then sit around waiting for Ambulances and Fire Departments while some industry standard for not doing stupid things is arranged?
No thanks.
Your example is totally appropriate, but let's take a step back and talk about something most Slashdotters should be able to easily understand.
I unfortunately was too late to this topic to get my snarky comment on the parent article in, but it would have gone something like "The FCC's irrelevant? Tell that to my upstairs neighbor on his 2.4ghz phone while I'm trying to use my wireless internet!"
If people think industries are just going to regulate themselves or that anyone's going to bother building devices smart enough not to trip over each other, they're just completely clueless. Manufacturers fail to do this now despite regulation - de-regulate things even further and we'd all be in for a world of hurt. Radio waves are a finite resource and if anyone was allowed to use whatever radio waves they wanted, it would literally be electronic anarchy and nobody would get anything done. Cell phones wouldn't work anywhere (because they could be legally jammed), wireless internet wouldn't work (because somebody else would be trying to use that spectrum), there'd be no digital OTA TV (because there'd be no impetus for it), and yes, there'd be chaos on the emergency radio bands.
You'd have no more FM radio because everybody could set up a station anywhere they wanted, blasting out 50,000 watts. You'd get nothing but overlapping signals coming mostly from peoples' apartments. Now, FM radio is pretty much dead to me, but a lot of people still listen to it in their cars and also rely on it for emergency broadcasts. (Again, it all comes back to that.)
There are two separate issues here. First, it's one thing to expect companies within the same industry to self-regulate - that's possible, and it happens with wi-fi and cellular stuff all the time. But it's not at all realistic to expect manufacturers to work together across all industries that create radio equipment. If you're a manufacturer of cell phones, is it even going to occur to you to work with a manufacturer of iPod radio tranceivers to make sure your stuff works together (let alone all of them, and every other manufacturer of such niche devices)? No.
This is the FCC's job.
Even if everybody did work together here, without any possibility of penalties you'd have less scrupulous companies overseas (or maybe even within our borders) creating devices specifically designed to overstep other manufacturers' devices. To "hack the network", so to speak. Why not? Without the FCC, who is going to create and enforce the rules that say not to? This is also the FCC's job.
The second issue is that the FCC regulates not just corporations, but individuals. They're the reason why you can't set up a pirate radio station in your house. Do away with the FCC and you'd not just open up the airwaves to corporations but to every 17 year old moron with a credit card. I'd love to see what happens the first time you get one of these kids onto the La Guardia Tower ATC frequency. Yeah, that'll be loads of fun.
I realize it's fashionable to bash the FCC around here because some of us apparently want to see Janet Jackson's ugly-ass ta-tas undisturbed, but it is an organization with a pretty important role.
Also, why is it FUD if it's MS, and rumours if it's anyone else?
It's FUD to say the PS3 won't be shipping in Europe until 2007 when Sony has said no such thing and MS clearly has a financial agenda for spreading such nonsense.
Rumors are spread by people with either a) no vested interest, or b) an unconfirmed (or uncomfirmable) vested interest. You could call this a rumor if you didn't know the source, or if the source was independent, e.g. neither MS nor Sony (nor Nintendo).
Coming from the company with a console going head to head with the PS3, it is FUD to spread unsubstantiated rumors that make the competing system look as bad as possible.
You may as well say it's a "rumor" that there's SCO code in Linux. That's not a rumor, that's FUD coming from SCO. It's an unsubstantiated factoid designed for no other reason than to drive people away from a competing product and towards yours. That's the definition of what FUD is, and this is the same thing.
What on *earth* have the execs at the affiliates being doing the past few years that they've missed the fact that the music business in is absolute turmoil over digital distribution? They can hardly claim that they were so busy producing Reality and Car-Crash TV shows that they didn't realise the inevitability that they were next and Hollywood is going to follow.
You (along with everyone else) have apparently completely forgotten about the concept of VOD. In fact, there is nothing new whatsoever about downloading TV shows! I've got about 50 different channels on my cable box that allow me to do this whenever I want to, and at higher resolutions than iTMS.
The downloading, and the idea of digital distribution, is not new at all. And you're way, way off if you think the affiliates have not been working with the networks on this for years now. The only thing that's new about iTunes and TV shows is the act of putting it on an iPod. Is this really so revolutionary? I would argue that it's not. True, the iPod has never had video before, but plenty of other devices have, and I've been able to download episodes of my favorite TV shows for years now over my cable company's digital VOD system, transfer them to my PC and put them on whatever video device I want to.
Now, you can say "but it's going to bring downloading to the masses!" Well again, VOD is already quite popular. Almost everybody has it (whether they even know it or not) and all that's missing is a quick and easy way to transfer those shows to a portable device (sans PC). But that's a trivial thing to add - all cable boxes these days have high speed data ports of one type or another, and the cable industry's just been waiting for a reason to use them. Well, this might be it - if the cable industry feels truly threatened by iTunes, watch for them to open the floodgates.
I'm not arguing that what Apple's doing isn't a good thing or that it won't push the industry forward. But I don't see how downloading episodes of Lost for $1.99 a piece at 320x240 resolution beats what I've got on my cable box, which has thousands of TV shows available at any given moment for free. (Or at least for no more than I pay for standard cable service.)
In the future, you're more likely to keep your cable company and use them for downloads than you are to switch to iTunes. The TV networks have been pushing VOD forward for years and while iTMS may hasten the transition, the cable and network TV industry are pretty well prepared.
Movies are shared culture, and despite how the MPAA likes to assert property rights to every dimension of commercial film, movies are more than simply business. The stories they borrow from and the stories they tell are all public knowledge and are not owned by anyone.
Er... how very... communist(?) of you.
The fact of the matter is movies have been a business since they were invented. This is not like the music industry, where music existed prior to the music industry - movies did not exist prior to the movie industry. Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money. Movies themselves have been copyrighted for as long as it occured to anyone to do so. That includes the stories, which sure as hell are owned by those that write them, at least until they sell those stories to a studio or producer (at which point they are then owned by the studio or producer). Movie plots don't write themselves, despite the wishes of most Hollywood producers.
Sure, movies are a part of our culture, but just because something's a part of our culture doesn't mean it's not also copyrighted (and copyrightable) as well as a commercial enterprise.
Wonder how it has held up all of these years.
Isn't it obvious? European governments weren't involved in designing or running it. Is it a coincidence that as soon as they decide to inject themselves into the situation that now the net is going to "fall apart"? I don't think so.
It's like when you buy that new DVD player, and only allow the adults in your house to use it. It works fine, right? But as soon as you let your five year old kid near it, all of a sudden it's clogged up with peanut butter. This is no different.
The compression that DVDs use is pretty old and crappy.
It's the same compression used in our HDTV standard. It's intended for use at high bit rates, like HDTV or DVD. You're not going to get any better quality at those bit rates using another encoding scheme.
A 600M xvid file will give you a movie at DVD quality.
No, it won't. It may look similar, and maybe you have to take your eyes off the foreground action to see what xvid is doing to your movies, but I have never, ever seen any xvid rip that comes close to the original DVD.
xvid and other mpeg-4 standards do well at what they're intended for - creating good-looking video at low bit rates. One of the intents of mpeg-4 (including h.264, which is mpeg-4 part 10) is delivery of high-quality movies over the internet. At that, xvid does a good job, but that doesn't mean an xvid movie encoded at 1mbps is going to look anywhere near as good as a DVD encoded at 9mbps. It never will. It's not possible. It will look "good enough" for some people, but not for those who are really interested in quality.
mpeg-2 does not do well at low bit rates required for things like web delivery. This is one big reason why mpeg-4 was created. But if you're talking about encoding a movie such that it looks basically indistinguishable from the original, both mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 are going to require similarly high bit rates. (And yes, I've downloaded Apple's h.264 videos, before anyone brings that up - they are very large, if you've noticed. Some of them hit a couple hundred megabytes for 2-3 minutes of video.)
People get this mixed up; they think because mpeg-4 is newer that it is more advanced than mpeg-2 in every way. It's not. It's better at low bit rates, but even comparing directly at similarly low bit rates, "better" does not mean "perfect". At high bit rates and otherwise identical settings, you can't tell the difference between the two standards.
I encode video both as part of my job and also for laughs at home (and I've tried pretty much everything, including h.264 using Nero Digital, xvid, divx, QuickTime, WM9 and mpeg-2), so I have some level of practical experience with this. At home, I still actually just use mpeg-2 more often than not, because h.264 support is so spotty right now and the quality at the bit rates I use is the same between the two formats. For stuff I want people to download over the web, I've actually gotten better results with WM9 than I have with h.264 yet (probably mainly because playback support of h.264 is so spotty right now).
Between tending home, taking care of the kids, ...
Or is it the married woman, who takes care of a husband..."
Dude, is it suddenly like, 1953 in here?
You realize not every woman is a housewife or a spinster, don't you?
I thought the Saturn was reverse compatible
Huh? The Saturn was not backward-compatible. The PS2 was the first home console that was backward-compatible out of the box since the Atari 7800 in 1987. (The Sega Genesis had an add-on that made it SMS compatible, but it was not standard equipment.)
They covered this on c|Net yesterday and they said that you have to use Internet Explorer. I'm sure it won't be long before Firefox or Opera is compatible but it is just another attempt by Microsoft to *require* users to use Microsoft applications (or you can always switch to another email service).
I would honestly doubt non-IE browsers are incompatible, but they probably won't be able to take advantage of the more advanced features.
I use OWA at work sometimes, and my guess is the new Hotmail will be very similar (in fact, that's basically what this reviewer says). OWA looks and works basically just like Outlook on IE for the PC; on every other browser, it works pretty much like a standard web mail service.
Porting this philosophy over to Hotmail would allow MS to claim continued "support" for other browsers while still promoting IE as "the only way to use all of the advanced features" of the service.