In my opinion, if you need crunch time to finish a software product, you've done something wrong.
You're not quite seeing it the way the publishers see it - it's not crunch time as in "holy crap, the deadline's coming up, we'd better work overtime!" It's more like a standard schedule. It's actually built in to the project timelines. It's not a surprise. You know that four or more times a year you will be working 80 hours a week, and management knows they can create milestones based on that schedule.
The way this came about most likely was accidental... you often hear stories from days of yore about things like the original Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 being developed in 6 weeks because Atari realized they had the license but had no product for Christmas of that year. The problem is, as even this article points out, crunch time does work in short bursts. The publishers learned this fact, and came to rely on it through a series of these happy accidents, where workers who were otherwise excited about what they were doing were asked to put in extra time on projects to make up for mistakes... and they did it successfully.
Once you start to make it less of an anomaly and more of an everyday thing, though, that's when productivity starts to drop and discontent starts to rise. Management doesn't really see it this way, though; they only do the math and figure that more hours equals more productivity at the same salary level. Obviously, this is poor management, because not only does it not hold true after a certain period of time, but it ignores other inevitable problems, like the incredibly high turnover rate that results... which costs a huge amount of money. (Recruiting a new worker for a full-time, non-management, white-collar position costs approximately $80,000, last I read, including lost productivity during the replacement period, training, new benefits, the actual search and interview process, and other miscellaneous HR costs.)
The game industry is young, as are most of the managers and even CEO's involved. (When I worked for a game publisher, my boss - the CEO of the company - was younger than I was, in his late 20's.) They simply do not have any real management skills or training. They are wasting huge amounts of money without even realizing it, in fact believing they are doing the opposite. They think they have stumbled upon some magic formula for business that nobody else has ever thought of - simply drive your workers as if they're slaves! They don't know that everybody else has already tried this and figured out it doesn't work.
Eventually, as the industry matures, this will likely change... though by how much is anyone's guess, as it's a culture at this point. But already you're seeing quite a bit of consolidation as poorly-managed companies get merged into larger, better-managed companies - or simply go out of business. But even heavyweights like EA obviously have their problems, and once the growth spurt we've seen over the past decade or so subsides, they will have to deal with their management issues too. (If they're smart, they'll do it now, before it's too late.)
...the artists, coders, and designers whose work makes up the game? Why do they deserve royalties any less than a voice actor?
Because they're salaried employees, not contract talent. Their salary is their royalty.
You could say the same about every industry. Why don't GM employees get a cut of the profits for every car sold? Why don't textile workers get a cut of every shirt sold? Why don't McDonalds employees get a penny for every burger they sell?
The fact is they do. It's called a weekly paycheck - where do you think payroll money comes from? Voice actors, like other project-based talent, are instead paid based on a work-for-hire contract - as it stands now, they're paid only once, regardless of whether a game sells a million copies or a thousand. (This in contrast to a salaried employee, who - theoretically - would see a raise or other increase in benefits if the company is doing well.)
Royalties are intended to fairly compensate non-salaried employees for work they have done, in proportion to the amount of sales their work is bringing in.
You can argue whether or not voice actors deserve this (my opinion is they don't - nobody buys a game because Samuel L. Jackson does one of the voices, they buy the game because it's fun), but you should at least understand the differences between the concept of contract royalties vs. the concept of continuous employment.
I would honestly hope that if voice actors make good on their strike threat, that game developers will simply go back to making good games that aren't so reliant on "Hollywood production values". Pac-Man didn't have Tom Cruise doing the voice acting and that game has endured for more than 25 years. More recently, a game like Katamari Damacy had no big name actors at all (in fact, it had no understandable language in it whatsoever) and it was one of the biggest hits of last year. The game industry is the game industry - it is not the film industry, and it would actually be nice if everybody involved would learn the difference between the two mediums at some point.
The number only seems high because for years the word market-share has been mistakenly used to describe installed base instead of percentage of sales each quarter.
Well, I'm more than a little skeptical of these numbers, because by nature they're talking about Macs connected to the internet, and these numbers do not jibe at all with any results we've ever seen from web use in general.
I'm responsible for tracking web use at my company (a division of the largest media company in the world, but I'll keep it anonymous beyond that), and we get significantly under 10% of our unique visits from Macs - and we're a creative company.
I can't post those numbers but I will post the platform numbers from my own web site, linked in my sig. A lot of these visits come from Slashdot, which is itself pretty Mac-heavy:
34165 Windows XP 3482 Windows 2000 2435 Mac Power PC 1221 Linux 1192 Windows 98 541 Windows ME 208 Windows NT 44 Windows 95 31 FreeBSD 6 Sun 1 WebTV 631 Unknown
If you don't believe my numbers, plenty of more reputable services track web usage as well (Google used to, W3Schools still does). All of these numbers more or less agree and none of them are even close to 16%. And these are tracking real usage, not market share.
So, if 16% of all computer users use Macs, and by definition (based on the test in the parent article) all of those Macs are connected to the internet, then doesn't it seem a bit odd that so few of those Macs are actually used on the internet? That such a large percentage of people buy them and then just let them sit there?
I realize a computer may be on the internet but be used for something like video editing, but that wouldn't account for such a large percentage, especially when the same is true for PC's.
No sir, I believe the numbers I've recorded myself... not such obviously inflated numbers that came from who knows where.
There's probably a good reason for that: these things are stacked about a mile high at every store I go to. I'm in NYC, obviously the biggest market in the United States, and while shopping for a TV last week I went to Best Buy and Circuit City, and as there just always happen to be game stores around electronics stores, I also visited several EB's and GameStops.
Every single one of them had a big stack of PSP's. CC even had a big sign that said "AS ADVERTISED, $249!" So no more forced bundles either.
Now, this is admittedly anecdotal evidence, but when you combine it with others in this thread (and others) who are seeing the same thing around the country, and then you combine that with the fact that Sony is not releasing hard US sales numbers, it's not difficult to extrapolate what's really going on. The PSP is not selling in the US. It had a lackluster launch and has weakened since.
This proclamation about outsourcing sounds like trying to put a positive spin ("we can't keep up with demand!") on an obvious cost-cutting gambit. And they wouldn't be trying to cut costs already if they were actually selling systems and games. The whole thing just doesn't add up.
If Dell wants to play games with pricing, I say there's nothing wrong with playing. You the consumer can be manipulative as well. Sometimes they'll win, and sometimes they'll lose, that's the nature of dynamic pricing. There's nothing unethical about it.
I guess you've never heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right".
I don't even think what Dell is doing is necessarily wrong, but what you are doing (lying) most certainly is. You could pretty successfully argue that Dell pricing products differently for business vs. consumers is simply a strategy related to volume... i.e. a consumer is likely to buy one monitor and stop there, whereas a business is likely to buy one monitor to test it out, then buy 100 more if the price is right. This is nothing specific to the internet; retailers have done this for probably centuries, both online and off.
Lying about being a business to get the best price, though... how do you figure that's ethical? Sounds like a rationalization to me. You could lie about who you are all the way through life to get special favors - there are various names for people who do that, from "identity thieves" to "con artists."
The Flag compliance was a law regarding reception of HDTV, not broadcast. Even though the technology that receives HDTV no longer _has to_ obey the Flag, this doesn't preclude the Flag being put in there to work on devices that were already made to be Flag compliant.
In fact, some channels are already "flagged", although whether or not it's the "broadcast flag" I'm not sure (I'm specifically thinking of HBO HD, which doesn't do OTA broadcasting, but I can't see why they'd adopt a different flag than everyone else). Trying to record from one of these channels on an STB (such as a DVR) will not work. Oh, it'll obviously work on TiVo or something where you're outputting an analog signal and then recompressing, but the BF was never designed to protect against that - that's the equivalent of ripping music by playing it through a speaker and re-recording it with a microphone. No DRM scheme is designed to stop that.
The funny thing is MS Media Center respects this flag in software, even if your hardware doesn't - so if you run Media Center, flagged content can be recorded but it cannot be transcoded and is not supposed to play on other PC's either (though I've heard varying reports on whether this is always the case with these channels). This is true even if you're using the "analog hole" to record on Media Center - say, by tuning with an HD cable box and then outputting via s-video to Media Center. Of course, this is a good argument for using MythTV instead of MCE... but the Myth guys sure make this a difficult choice, as unpolished as Myth is compared to MCE.
In fact, this begs the question of whether or not the MPAA is backing down because they've already gotten major players in the PVR market to implement the Flag anyway, regardless of the struck-down law...
There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the networks are blowing smoke to a large extent, with their statements about withholding their best content from HD if it's not protected. That's simply FUD. There is no way that the networks are going to withhold anything given that most HD watchers are using locked-down cable or satellite STB's to watch their shows... and that those HD users, being as rabid as they (we) are, will simply watch something else in HD versus watching some crappy network TV show in SD. It's hard to watch anything in SD once you've made the jump to HD... (and by the same token, it's pretty easy to watch almost anything in HD, just because it looks so good.) The networks will not give that audience up willingly.
I think they're saying what they think they have to say to get the BF passed... but at the end of the day, I don't think even they think it's the end of the world if it doesn't happen. Most people do not watch HD over the air, and most people do not want to download resized and recompressed HDTV shows that hardly bear any resemblance to the original (though I admit I've done it when trying to catch up on episodes I've missed - but I don't see how this hurts the networks, as it just makes me more likely to watch new episodes once I've caught up. The alternative is just never getting into a show because I've missed too much.)
You know, I don't think even the MPAA are unrealistic enough to think someone is not going to find a way to "pirate" protected shows anyway - I mean we've had OTA HD cards for PC available for years now and none of those already out there will ever support the broadcast flag. The MPAA was too late to start with, and the more time it takes to implement this thing, the more ineffective it's going to be. It wouldn't surprise me if they weren't basically resigned to that fact, though that doesn't mean they won't exhaust all of their options before giving up, with the thought being even a late broadcast flag law would be better than nothing.
Honestly I hate LCDs. Their color reproduction on all but the most expensive monitors sucks.
Basically any MVA, IPS or Super IPS panel will render colors at least as well as any high-end CRT, and better than most mid-range CRT's (i.e. the ones most people use in their homes and offices). These panels are used in screens such as the Dell 2005FPW, which is a 20" widescreen LCD monitor that can be had for under $400 (with coupons applied).
I just get tired of hearing these same criticisms of LCD's that we've heard for the last 10 years - "their colors suck", "they're not fast enough", "their black level is bad", "they're expensive". I mean, do you go around criticizing DVD-ROM drives because they cost more than CD-ROM drives and only read at 1X? This is 2005, man. We're past all that and have been for years.
(Note that CRT's are still perfectly fine for many things, and in fact I just bought one as an HDTV. But as generalized computer monitors - and in that I'm including common applications such as design or photographic work - LCD's work as well or better than CRT's and good ones don't cost much more, if any.)
I only think it's been downhill since Final Fantasy IX. I know most people don't agree with me, but I think that IX stands alongside VI as one of the the best actual Final Fantasy games ever made.
Well, this is exactly why articles such as the one we're talking about are patently ridiculous. Everybody has their own favorite FF games. For you, IX is a favorite. For others, VII. For still others, VI. I personally think X ranks right up there - I admit to getting a bit misty-eyed at the end, and did not want to finish the game. (X-2, by comparison, played like a series of outtakes from X, which is in fact mostly what it was.)
XI, far from being the "disappointment" that the writer of the article says it is, currently has more than 500,000 subscribers and is a significant contributor to Square's bottom line - it is a highly profitable game for them and, unlike offline games, it will continue to be for some time. X and X-2, the last two "proper" FF games, both sold around 4 million copies worldwide and were also highly profitable.
So whatever your favorites are, I don't see how anyone could argue the series is "dead". It will not be dead until it becomes unprofitable, and right now it is more profitable than it's ever been before.
How many people have said, "We must believe in God, for if we do, and he does not exist, nothing happens. But if we do not believe in him, and he does exist, then we are doomed." But, it's fairly clear he does not exist.
First, I will say that I am not religious. If I had to ID myself, I'd say I'm a Protestant Christian, but the last time I went to church on a Sunday was probably 15 years ago.
But even as a Smart Person, I'm not sure how it's "fairly clear" that God does not exist. A lot of Smart People have, in fact, pretty successfully argued in favor of the existence of God.
One of my favorite arguments in favor of the existence of God is Thomas Aquinas' theory of the "prime mover". Thomas Aquinas was a "religious philosopher" who was actually banished from the Catholic church because of his efforts to prove the existence of God. In any religion, faith is paramount, so proof is neither necessary nor desired - if you need proof of God to believe in him (or her, or it), then you're sort of missing the whole point of religion in the first place. (Aquinas was later made a saint, despite his earlier banishment.)
Anyway, Aquinas posed five proofs in favor of the existence of God, some more convincing than others. The one that I recall as being most convincing, and the one that nobody has been able to refute to this day (because it is based on the laws of physics), is the theory of the prime mover.
Aquinas argued that for every movement or action, there must be a cause or impetus, something to turn potentiality into actuality. He used the example of wood, which at any time has the potential to be either hot or cold, but can only actually be one or the other at any given time (ok, feel free to bring up quantum mechanics, but the point is the Hitchhiker's Guide Improbability Drive does not really exist - things can't be everywhere and everything all the time). If a piece of wood is actually cold, it can potentially be made hot by fire, which will then make it actually hot but no longer actually cold. So anything can have two or more potential states, but only one actual state, and to change that actual state requires an external force.
He then argues that this cannot go on into infinity, for if it did, nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime mover to have set everything in motion. (He wrote this prior to our discovery of the "big bang"). Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created. We know that there was a great buildup of energy and matter that exploded into what we now know of as our universe, but we do not know how or why that buildup occured, and likely never will because it would require peering back beyond the beginning of time.
Aquinas argued that the "prime mover" was God. There is no possible explanation for the creation of the universe that fits the laws of physics. This goes hand in hand with his third proof, that of "possibility and necessity", which states that if everything can either exist or not exist, then there must have been a time when nothing at all existed (we now know that this is, in fact, true). If nothing at all existed, it is impossible for anything to now exist, because nothing can cause its own existence. Therefore, he argued, only God could have caused our existence, ultimately.
So I don't think this is a case of smart people arguing in favor of bad ideas. It's one thing to be skeptical, but there are as many good theories in favor of God's existence as there are against, and nobody's ever going to have a "smoking gun" either way. (Aquinas was also not arguing in favor of a smiling, benevolent, grey-bearded God with a human-like personality - he was arguing in favor of some power beyond our understanding that displayed intelligence and was able to manipulate matter and energy as it saw fit from beyond the confines of our universe and our natural laws.)
In fact, I think your post is more an example of why it pays for smart people to be open-minded rather than simply skeptical all the time.
The point of the article I think is that E3 used to be a 'trade' show, and now its a 'hype' show, and thus useless as a tradeshow.
Exactly. It was originally an industry gathering, a true "convention", like there are in a lot of other industries. The media started covering it because, well, games are popular and a lot of games were being shown there. And that has ended up transforming what E3 fundamentally is.
I wouldn't say E3 serves no purpose. But I do think that it's ultimately irrelevant. Nobody buys a game machine because of what goes on at E3. They buy it because of what happens after E3. I could list you so many years and so many companies that supposedly "won" or "lost" E3, or that had particularly good or bad showings, and then went on to do the exact opposite of what everybody predicted they would do in the real-world marketplace (Sega and Microsoft being at the top of the list with their respective late Dreamcast and early Xbox showings).
There is too much importance placed on E3 by the media. It is ultimately a sideshow. It's interesting, and if you read between the lines you can glean some useful info, but it is basically just a bunch of PR reps trying to put their best face on. Ultimately, the companies that show well at E3 are just the companies with the best PR departments or PR agencies. But that says absolutely nothing about either the actual quality of the games or their ultimate marketability and popularity.
(God, did I just use the word "marketability"?! I've officially crossed to the dark side.)
It's supposed to be eye candy, not give you a doctorate in comparative theology or high-energy physics.
With a $10 million budget, the original Star Wars was never intended to be eye candy. It was intended to be fun, which the new trilogy is not. (I have not seen episode 3 yet, but with all the talk of how "dark" it is, I feel pretty confident in saying that while it may be decent, it probably still does not hold to the original ideals of the series.)
I'll agree with you that Star Wars was never intended to be deep. But that's the problem with the newer films; they're trying to be deep and Lucas just doesn't have it in him. When people say they like the original trilogy better, it's because they were more character and plot driven, more like old adventure serials, vs. the heavy-duty political mumbo-jumbo that weighs down the current stuff.
btw, I saw all the previous Star Wars films in theaters too, though I'm currently going through the first five movies in preparation for seeing episode 3. I don't know how many people have really done this vs. just relying on their memory, but eps. 4 and 5 obviously still hold up well, ep. 6 (Return of the Jedi) is surprisingly much better than most people give it credit for, and episode 1 (which we just watched last night) is even worse than it's reputed to be. It's really laughably bad; the kind of movie you'd expect to see on MST3K if not for the money put into the special effects. I do remember episode 2 being marginally better when I saw it in the theater, but I'll have to confirm when I re-watch it whether that's really true or whether I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn't wasting my time with the whole series (which is also the feeling I get when I hear some people talking about episode 3 these days).
why oh why do we still use mice keyboards & monitors?
Because nobody has yet figured out how to jack our PC's directly into our brain stems. Until that happens, we'll be using mice and keyboards.
You may as well ask why we're still using pens and pencils. They're tools, they work, they're cheap and they're easy to learn. There's no reason why perfectly good tools should ever become "obsolete" - nobody has yet invented something that writes better than a pencil for a lower price, or that allows you to input things into a computer faster or more accurately than a keyboard and mouse.
let me connect 10 racks of assignable buttons.
This does not sound faster or more intuitive than a keyboard to me.
Let me rotate an object in maya by grabbing one side of it with one hand and moving the other side.
This may well happen someday, but it would not be practical in many office environments where space is at a premium. It would also not be at all accurate (your hand moving through the air will never be steady enough to "rest" on one particular pixel, which is often the accuracy you need when doing something like retouching a photo). Mice or at the very least a drawing tablet (itself based on technology thousands of years old) will always be required for maximum accuracy in situations that require it.
Myself, I still use an IBM Model M keyboard and an IBM Explorer mouse. I don't believe anybody has ever improved upon these as input devices go, and I doubt anybody ever will - hence the drive to make keyboards and mice cheaper, not necessarily better. Going wireless is nice, but not if the keys on your keyboard offer improper levels of resistance and tactile feedback or the mouse is crowded with buttons that can only be pressed by mistake repeatedly. About the only two complaints I have about my setup are the noise from my keyboard, meaning I can only use it at home (I have a cheap junk Dell keyboard at work), and one extra button near my thumb on my mouse that trips me up sometimes. I'd rather have a two-button mouse (with a scroll wheel, which my Explorer has), but my Explorer is shaped so perfectly for my hand and feels both so solid (in terms of construction) and so soft (in terms of materials used) at the same time that it's worth the tradeoff. I've never found a two-button scroll mouse that felt better.
Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.
I agree, but Disney's talking about manually correcting every single frame and for a 2 hour film you're talking more than 175,000 individual images. That is a huge number of man-hours, and frankly, there's really no need for it.
There's nothing inherently bad about DNR systems. They're a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or evil. The problems come in when you start asking them to do things that they're not very good at doing - like removing hairs or specks of dust. These objects are not "noise" - which is what "noise reduction" is supposed to get rid of - these are things that do need to be manually removed by somebody that knows that a drawn line and a hair are not the same thing. A computer is not going to make the distinction reliably.
I think ideally what you want to do is light digital noise reduction to reduce noise, and then further manual correction of individual frames that need it (or really, the other way around). There's no reason to manually go through 175,000 frames, though - there should really only be maybe 1,000 or so that would need manual attention on any given film. That's a cost-effective way of ensuring high quality without breaking either the budget or the schedule.
Unfortunately, a lot of studios apparently don't even go that far; they just rely on the computers to do everything. There are still QC monitors at the end of the process, but when all is said and done do you think their complaints that "the picture looks a little fuzzy" are going to be met with anything other than "there's no noise, there's no hairs, ship it out!"?
Are we surprised that the latest batch will be more expensive yet?
Generally speaking, pricing at the launch of new systems has been lower than the generation previous, not higher, when adjusted for inflation. For the most part, absolute pricing has remained within the same general range.
Here are some launch prices of various systems and the cost in today's dollars:
NES (1985) (note that Nintendo has consistently been on the low end of console pricing) Launch price: $159 Today's dollars: $282.17
Sega Genesis (1989) Launch price: $189 Today's dollars: $294.60
PlayStation (1995) Launch price: $299 Today's dollars: $372.01
Personally, my thinking is the next systems will be in the $300-$350 range, and that's not really out of line with previous launches. Nintendo will probably come in at $200 and undercut the competition, like they usually do (the one exception was the SNES, which came in at $199 compared to Sega's $149 at the time).
$400 might be a stretch and will limit the launch of these systems but it's still not totally out of the range people have paid for systems in the past, in terms of dollar purchasing power. Prices do go up over time, but then so do salaries. People may have a bit of sticker shock at $400 but they'll probably get over it.
One thing I was thinking to myself the other night, though, is that the focus on HDTV with these systems may actually hurt them - at the end of the day people do only have a limited amount of money, and a lot of people are now upgrading their TV's (not specifically for games, but just generally). Spend $1,000 or $2,000 on a TV - even for unrelated reasons - and that's $1,000 or $2,000 less that you have to spend on games or game consoles. It's sort of similar to what happened in 1983, when the industry crashed - people stopped buying consoles as they spent money on computers and other devices. People in general budget a certain amount for entertainment and games have to compete with TV, DVD's, PC's, whatever else... and we're at a point in the cycle now where a lot of people are spending a major chunk of money to upgrade one component in their entertainment system.
When you add in the fact that major game stores all seem to now have mountains of used games for $10 or less (whole shelves devoted to them at my local EB), I'm getting a little concerned that people may hold off on buying new systems for a little while in favor of just sticking with current systems no matter what the launch prices are. Some people have been arguing another crash is coming for a long time, and I've always argued against it - I still don't think a 1983-style near-complete stoppage of the industry is coming, but a slowdown leading to a medium-sized shakeout seems pretty possible at this point.
I think it's safe to assume that most of the market cares about graphics. A lot.
BS. If this were true, the GameCube would be outselling the PS2 and the Dreamcast would have outsold the PS1. Neither happened.
The public cares about games and image. That's all. If the next GTA game came out on the N64, you'd suddenly have a mad rush of people buying up used N64's to play it.
People like good graphics but they generally consider it a bonus to the gameplay. There's a small subset of vocal people who may feel otherwise, but that's all they are - a small subset. The majority of the public has demonstrated time and time again that graphics don't guide their purchases.
All they need to do is host an E3 show in a building directly next to a strip club.
They already pretty much do. The LA Convention Center is not really in the "heart" of downtown, it's down near the basketball arena (what is it called these days, the Staples Center?) in an area of town that's sort of borderline - it's not bad but it's not great either, and it kind of feels like the middle of nowhere. I walked around outside the convention center a while both times I went to E3 and I did see some strip clubs.
Most of the E3 "booth babes" are hired right out of these strip clubs. Most of them are regulars at E3 too, so it's not as if they don't (for the most part) know what they're getting into. You see the same ones every year.
At Japanese game shows, the booth babes are usually college girls hired for the day from around the whole area. Some of them get to be regulars too, though, because it's good money. But they're not models or strippers like the E3 women are (which may be better or worse depending on your tastes and your personal chauvinism level).
as for punishment, sure, that sounds good, but would be nearly impossible to implement in a fair manner as, in this case, lexisnexis was not responsible for the breach in any way, shape, or form. therefore to punish them for a breach not resulting from their actions would be unjust.
How about punishing them for their inactions? If somebody walked in to a military base and stole a nuclear warhead, would you throw up your hands and say "well, it wasn't the military's fault; they're not the ones who stole it"? Of course it's their freakin' fault! Who's supposed to be guarding this stuff??
Then of course, there's the issue of why they need to have this info in the first place. Just as you could argue if we didn't have nuclear weapons in the first place then there'd be no reason to worry about them being stolen, so you could argue that Lexis-Nexis - a company most of us have absolutely no contact with - should not have things like our social security numbers (which are for, you know, our individual social security payments, not anything else) to begin with.
If you are going to take it upon yourself to store my information, then you had damn well better safeguard it. And if you don't, then you should be held liable, and you should be punished severely when data is stolen through your negligence. (And in this case, I define negligence as "any case where your security was lax enough to allow data to be stolen" - or in other words, every single case of a security breach.)
If a company cannot secure this data to the point where it cannot be stolen, then they have no business holding this data to begin with.
Depends on your SciFi. In Star Trek, absolutely. It "energizes" your matter into an energy stream and sends that actual energy to another place where it coalesces. It's your very quarks being transported.
This still doesn't answer the question, though. We really have such a limited understanding of personality and even what constitutes the "soul" (for lack of a better word) that you can't make any assumption about what would happen if your body was broken down into particles, transported somewhere and then reassembled. You really don't know if you'd really be you anymore, if you'd have the same memories, the same mannerisms, etc. unless you really do believe that all we are is a collection of electrical impulses firing randomly (and not even many scientists believe that).
You can not-very-safely assume that taking a brain apart and then putting it back together again the exact same way would give you the same exact person again, but there is no proof of that. And much of what we do know about the brain is completely non-intuitive, so it's just as possible that you'd wipe all memories clean as soon as you particle-ized a brain (meaning the person coming out the other end would be almost a vegetable, and would certainly never be the same person again). After all, memories are persistent because those areas of our brains are in constant use and in constant electrical contact with other areas of our brains... to teleport under the Star Trek model you basically have to "kill" a person and then re-animate them, and I don't really see how you'd keep a person's memories intact. (And by "memories" I don't just mean happy reminiscences about when you were a child, I mean things like how to use a fork to put food in your mouth, how to speak, who your friends and family are. The stuff of life, basically.) It's similar to when somebody's heart stops for more than a few minutes and they end up brain-damaged from oxygen starvation - their brain still physically exists as it always did, but it no longer works properly. I would think that process or something like it would happen instantly and completely if that person was broken down into individual atoms.
If you can disassemble and then reassemble somebody somewhere else, what's to prevent you from assembling somebody new from scratch? If you're taking it down to the quark level, all you need to do is collect enough matter and with the knowledge you have about re-building people, you should be able to build copies of copies and even new people all day long. But we don't know if that would really actually work (these "people" would be blank slates), and if it did, it would be kind of a sad day, wouldn't it? Talk about de-valuing humanity...
Teleportation, even of the Star Trek kind (or maybe especially of the Star Trek kind), would be illegal under the laws of many religions for the reasons listed above, and others too (when you atomize somebody, they are no longer "alive" as such, meaning their soul has departed. The person coming out the other side would not be considered a person under Christianity and many other religions). It would probably eventually be illegal under the laws of many countries too, just as human cloning is starting to be now.
It ain't a competition, people! If it was, Sega'd still be making consoles and Microsoft would be out of the business (after their initial E3 in 2000, which was a disaster).
The competition comes later in the marketplace. And as has been proven time and time again, the public knows or cares not a whit what happens at E3. E3 is interesting to follow for those of us who do follow it, but it means absolutely nothing to the fortunes of anybody concerned.
Articles like the one at GameSpot serve no purpose, and the analyst they quote is a moron. Things may or may not shake out the way he predicts, but it won't be because of E3. It has happened time and time again that the "winner" of any individual E3 goes on to lose badly in marketplace in the following years, and vice versa. I'd even go so far as to say "winning" E3, especially when new consoles are introduced, is almost a jinx.
Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Well, this is pretty OT now, and I can't believe I'm about to defend Rick Berman, but you apparently didn't see the last couple seasons of Enterprise. Jolene Blalock's T'Pol was easily one of the most tormented characters in the history of Star Trek, with a mixed race (species?) just like Spock, but with the added burden of a pretty serious drug addiction that made her unable to fully suppress her emotions (though she never stopped trying).
I used to watch Enterprise just to look at her, but towards the middle of the 2004 season her character started getting almost too deep for a Star Trek series. If they'd pushed it any further it would have been too much, and honestly in the hands of a different actress it may have been too much already... she played everything as understated as possible, but always you could tell there was this undercurrent of fear and pain (she's one of those actresses that can really convey a lot just by flicking her eyes back and forth).
I do think Berman was a hack, but I don't think it's necessarily because he was as clueless as you think. I think he knew what he was doing, he just wasn't as interested in the same things you (or most Trek fans) were. But he occasionally did go out of his way to show that he was capable of doing interesting things with his characters.
Let's also not forget that Roddenberry's characters weren't all particularly tormented either... Kirk, for example, wasn't really wrestling with any personal demons. The only one who really did have personal issues in the original series was Spock - the rest of the characters had to have external forces put upon them to cause conflict in any episodes that featured them.
They spring a few new titles, release the innovations of their controller, their low price-point, and the reality that their processing power is right in line with the competition, and bingo you've got a winner.
You could have copied and pasted this from 2001 and been talking about the GameCube.
Didn't happen then - what makes you think it'll happen this time? There's a reason why Sony and MS are successful (and why even Nintendo was successful in the 80's and early 90's), and it wasn't because they hung back and let their bigger competitors hog all the media attention.
Of course, I say that realizing that "success" has different definitions depending on who you talk to... Nintendo is profitable with their limited market share and maybe they're content with that. But they're losing share with every new hardware launch lately, and that can't keep going on forever. Profits do depend on actually selling some product.
Why were they a disaster? That's what I want to know. It's not in the article at all. Is it because there were no gameplay movies?
He was talking about the original Xbox demos. Which yes, were a disaster.
GameSpot assumes a certain familiarity with the material in the articles they write, which is probably the correct way to go. You don't go to Gamespot looking for a primer in every single article; they sort of expect you've been keeping up for a while. That's why the backstory is not in there.
In 2000 (or was it 2001?), MS unveiled the Xbox and then went to E3. Prior to E3, they showed a bunch of tech demos that looked technically amazing, then their E3 showing was awful. I was there; it was pretty bad, and everybody knew it. Their biggest games at that E3 were Blood Wake and PGR, and while a lot of people were impressed with the water effects in Blood Wake, the game itself was dark and drab, as was pretty much every other game in their booth. Worse for them, hardly any of these games were in a state worthy of being on the E3 floor - they were almost all extremely choppy, for one thing (not unlike the Xbox 360 stuff released so far), and many of them crashed repeatedly.
They took a beating in the press, and it probably did hurt their initial launch numbers.
But, what it also showed is that E3 ultimately doesn't matter. Two years before, Sega had come in and supposedly blown the doors off everybody else showing 80 games for the Dreamcast in their booth alone, many of which looked really amazing and really fun and got them a ton of good press. Two years later, MS had as negative a showing as Sega had a positive one.
In the end, the fortunes of the two companies in the game industry turned out exactly the reverse of what you'd expected had you been reading the post-E3 coverage of those events. It's very easy to get sucked into thinking the majority of the public even knows what E3 is, much less cares about what goes on there. They really don't, and so much can happen between E3 and when the products you see there actually go on sale that you really can't make any judgements at all based on anything that happens there.
As for your second question:
We see all these cool demos that the PS2, PS3, X-Box, X-Box 360, GC and such can do, but why don't they put those on a disc and include it with the hardware just as a way of saying "see, this is what it can do" to the consumer, as a way of showing off.
Sometimes they do. All three current system at one point or another have included pack-in games that also have demos on them, or demo discs themselves. It's just not a standard thing, because the early demos often don't represent final product (and often won't even run on final hardware), so it's tough to include them in the first run of systems, and then there's always the question of when to update them. I think it's just a headache that the manufacturers don't really want to deal with, but you can still get demos if you wait a while for the right package.
Generally, at launch, most manufacturers assume you'll be buying a few games with your system, so demos aren't really necessary. MS does like to include demos on game discs, though, so it's pretty likely they'll keep doing that through the Xbox 360 release. (No idea of Sony or Nintendo will take up that same policy, but both of those companies have also released demo discs as pack-ins and also separately for the PS2 and GameCube.)
that means LESS than $465. It is probably just someone saying the equivalent of "my car cost less than $100k." True statement, vague though.
I was going to post this exact thing - the fact is Sony probably doesn't know what the pricing is going to be yet. But there is an obvious ceiling that they can point to and say "we're pretty confident we can bring the costs in below this number". That doesn't mean they won't be able to bring them down even further, and it doesn't mean they won't choose to sell the system at even more of a loss in a grab for market share.
We don't know the original context for this. (As a side note, I don't know why the blurb here links to IGN - the official translation of the original article is on the Mainichi web site here, if you want to see the source for this.) We don't know what was said in the original Japanese interview (there's no actual quote here, it's all paraphrased) and we don't know what question was asked of Sony. It could have been something like "how much would you need to sell a PS3 for to turn a profit?" for all we know.
My guess is the PS3 will be priced to compete with the Xbox 360; whatever the Xbox is at, the PS3 will be at.
Also keep in mind that pricing in Japan and the US rarely correlates directly on game consoles. The disconnect can be upwards of $100 in some cases.
I should add one more thing to my post - you know, what you see online, especially at tech sites, is often a very male-centric view of things. I'll just tell you what my wife said when she saw the PlayStation 3:
"I feel sorry for Microsoft's designers."
That was her reaction. I think Sony's hit the mark with both men and women with the PS3, whereas MS looks like that's what they were trying desperately to do but they're a bit short of a bullseye. So far, most of the people I see praising the Xbox 360 design are men. (I said "most", not "all".)
* Xbox 360 - overdesigned. Clearly trying way too hard to project some sort of coherent idea (the whole "inhale" motif). Form is not following function. There's no obvious reason for it to look the way it does, and the end result is that its curves look oddly out of place, the power button looks too large, and the whole system just generally looks a little bit wonky.
* Revolution - underdesigned. First, keeping in mind that Iwata said this is not the final design (meaning the whole point could be moot), to me this system looks like a car stereo, or an external CD-ROM drive. It is frankly boring - it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think up a thin black box. Some people like how minimalist it is, but I think it's a mistake - people will stick it on top of whatever stack of something they've already got and forget about it. And you don't want people forgetting about your company's game console.
* PlayStation 3 - Just right. It's graceful and almost elegant. It stands out without being gaudy (like the Xbox 360). For some, the curves might take some getting used to, but being convex they don't look as self-conscious and randomly-applied as the Xbox 360's curves. They make the system look like it's saying "look how powerful I am, I am frankly bulging with power!" That's probably not true, but it still comes off looking tasteful yet still unlike anything else you'll have sitting in your A/V rack. The design of the system projects an image but it also does not look like that's its sole purpose. On the other hand, it doesn't look like somebody simply stumbled on a surplus supply of external drive casings and stuffed a console inside. You can tell some thought went into this design.
I ultimately do think console designs matter, in as much as they help shape public perception of a system - just look at what happened to the Xbox in Japan. Reactions to these new designs seem sort of all over the place, but my guess is the Xbox 360 is still going to have a tough time in Japan on looks and size (it's still pretty big, and despite being designed partly in Japan it does not have a Japanese look and feel). The PS3 will appeal to consumers worldwide, though maybe some will need to get used to it more than others. The Revolution is too nondescript even for the Japanese, who value size but also power - and nothing about the Revolution's design suggests it's in the same class as the other two systems.
Time will tell if I'm right or wrong... but I do think the PS3 is quite a bit better-looking than the other two systems from an aesthetic design standpoint. The Revolution is in the middle simply because it's inoffensive, and the Xbox 360 is, frankly, offensive.
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In my opinion, if you need crunch time to finish a software product, you've done something wrong.
You're not quite seeing it the way the publishers see it - it's not crunch time as in "holy crap, the deadline's coming up, we'd better work overtime!" It's more like a standard schedule. It's actually built in to the project timelines. It's not a surprise. You know that four or more times a year you will be working 80 hours a week, and management knows they can create milestones based on that schedule.
The way this came about most likely was accidental... you often hear stories from days of yore about things like the original Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 being developed in 6 weeks because Atari realized they had the license but had no product for Christmas of that year. The problem is, as even this article points out, crunch time does work in short bursts. The publishers learned this fact, and came to rely on it through a series of these happy accidents, where workers who were otherwise excited about what they were doing were asked to put in extra time on projects to make up for mistakes... and they did it successfully.
Once you start to make it less of an anomaly and more of an everyday thing, though, that's when productivity starts to drop and discontent starts to rise. Management doesn't really see it this way, though; they only do the math and figure that more hours equals more productivity at the same salary level. Obviously, this is poor management, because not only does it not hold true after a certain period of time, but it ignores other inevitable problems, like the incredibly high turnover rate that results... which costs a huge amount of money. (Recruiting a new worker for a full-time, non-management, white-collar position costs approximately $80,000, last I read, including lost productivity during the replacement period, training, new benefits, the actual search and interview process, and other miscellaneous HR costs.)
The game industry is young, as are most of the managers and even CEO's involved. (When I worked for a game publisher, my boss - the CEO of the company - was younger than I was, in his late 20's.) They simply do not have any real management skills or training. They are wasting huge amounts of money without even realizing it, in fact believing they are doing the opposite. They think they have stumbled upon some magic formula for business that nobody else has ever thought of - simply drive your workers as if they're slaves! They don't know that everybody else has already tried this and figured out it doesn't work.
Eventually, as the industry matures, this will likely change... though by how much is anyone's guess, as it's a culture at this point. But already you're seeing quite a bit of consolidation as poorly-managed companies get merged into larger, better-managed companies - or simply go out of business. But even heavyweights like EA obviously have their problems, and once the growth spurt we've seen over the past decade or so subsides, they will have to deal with their management issues too. (If they're smart, they'll do it now, before it's too late.)
Because they're salaried employees, not contract talent. Their salary is their royalty.
You could say the same about every industry. Why don't GM employees get a cut of the profits for every car sold? Why don't textile workers get a cut of every shirt sold? Why don't McDonalds employees get a penny for every burger they sell?
The fact is they do. It's called a weekly paycheck - where do you think payroll money comes from? Voice actors, like other project-based talent, are instead paid based on a work-for-hire contract - as it stands now, they're paid only once, regardless of whether a game sells a million copies or a thousand. (This in contrast to a salaried employee, who - theoretically - would see a raise or other increase in benefits if the company is doing well.)
Royalties are intended to fairly compensate non-salaried employees for work they have done, in proportion to the amount of sales their work is bringing in.
You can argue whether or not voice actors deserve this (my opinion is they don't - nobody buys a game because Samuel L. Jackson does one of the voices, they buy the game because it's fun), but you should at least understand the differences between the concept of contract royalties vs. the concept of continuous employment.
I would honestly hope that if voice actors make good on their strike threat, that game developers will simply go back to making good games that aren't so reliant on "Hollywood production values". Pac-Man didn't have Tom Cruise doing the voice acting and that game has endured for more than 25 years. More recently, a game like Katamari Damacy had no big name actors at all (in fact, it had no understandable language in it whatsoever) and it was one of the biggest hits of last year. The game industry is the game industry - it is not the film industry, and it would actually be nice if everybody involved would learn the difference between the two mediums at some point.
The number only seems high because for years the word market-share has been mistakenly used to describe installed base instead of percentage of sales each quarter.
Well, I'm more than a little skeptical of these numbers, because by nature they're talking about Macs connected to the internet, and these numbers do not jibe at all with any results we've ever seen from web use in general.
I'm responsible for tracking web use at my company (a division of the largest media company in the world, but I'll keep it anonymous beyond that), and we get significantly under 10% of our unique visits from Macs - and we're a creative company.
I can't post those numbers but I will post the platform numbers from my own web site, linked in my sig. A lot of these visits come from Slashdot, which is itself pretty Mac-heavy:
34165 Windows XP
3482 Windows 2000
2435 Mac Power PC
1221 Linux
1192 Windows 98
541 Windows ME
208 Windows NT
44 Windows 95
31 FreeBSD
6 Sun
1 WebTV
631 Unknown
If you don't believe my numbers, plenty of more reputable services track web usage as well (Google used to, W3Schools still does). All of these numbers more or less agree and none of them are even close to 16%. And these are tracking real usage, not market share.
So, if 16% of all computer users use Macs, and by definition (based on the test in the parent article) all of those Macs are connected to the internet, then doesn't it seem a bit odd that so few of those Macs are actually used on the internet? That such a large percentage of people buy them and then just let them sit there?
I realize a computer may be on the internet but be used for something like video editing, but that wouldn't account for such a large percentage, especially when the same is true for PC's.
No sir, I believe the numbers I've recorded myself... not such obviously inflated numbers that came from who knows where.
The American numbers aren't so easy to find.
There's probably a good reason for that: these things are stacked about a mile high at every store I go to. I'm in NYC, obviously the biggest market in the United States, and while shopping for a TV last week I went to Best Buy and Circuit City, and as there just always happen to be game stores around electronics stores, I also visited several EB's and GameStops.
Every single one of them had a big stack of PSP's. CC even had a big sign that said "AS ADVERTISED, $249!" So no more forced bundles either.
Now, this is admittedly anecdotal evidence, but when you combine it with others in this thread (and others) who are seeing the same thing around the country, and then you combine that with the fact that Sony is not releasing hard US sales numbers, it's not difficult to extrapolate what's really going on. The PSP is not selling in the US. It had a lackluster launch and has weakened since.
This proclamation about outsourcing sounds like trying to put a positive spin ("we can't keep up with demand!") on an obvious cost-cutting gambit. And they wouldn't be trying to cut costs already if they were actually selling systems and games. The whole thing just doesn't add up.
If Dell wants to play games with pricing, I say there's nothing wrong with playing. You the consumer can be manipulative as well. Sometimes they'll win, and sometimes they'll lose, that's the nature of dynamic pricing. There's nothing unethical about it.
I guess you've never heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right".
I don't even think what Dell is doing is necessarily wrong, but what you are doing (lying) most certainly is. You could pretty successfully argue that Dell pricing products differently for business vs. consumers is simply a strategy related to volume... i.e. a consumer is likely to buy one monitor and stop there, whereas a business is likely to buy one monitor to test it out, then buy 100 more if the price is right. This is nothing specific to the internet; retailers have done this for probably centuries, both online and off.
Lying about being a business to get the best price, though... how do you figure that's ethical? Sounds like a rationalization to me. You could lie about who you are all the way through life to get special favors - there are various names for people who do that, from "identity thieves" to "con artists."
The Flag compliance was a law regarding reception of HDTV, not broadcast. Even though the technology that receives HDTV no longer _has to_ obey the Flag, this doesn't preclude the Flag being put in there to work on devices that were already made to be Flag compliant.
In fact, some channels are already "flagged", although whether or not it's the "broadcast flag" I'm not sure (I'm specifically thinking of HBO HD, which doesn't do OTA broadcasting, but I can't see why they'd adopt a different flag than everyone else). Trying to record from one of these channels on an STB (such as a DVR) will not work. Oh, it'll obviously work on TiVo or something where you're outputting an analog signal and then recompressing, but the BF was never designed to protect against that - that's the equivalent of ripping music by playing it through a speaker and re-recording it with a microphone. No DRM scheme is designed to stop that.
The funny thing is MS Media Center respects this flag in software, even if your hardware doesn't - so if you run Media Center, flagged content can be recorded but it cannot be transcoded and is not supposed to play on other PC's either (though I've heard varying reports on whether this is always the case with these channels). This is true even if you're using the "analog hole" to record on Media Center - say, by tuning with an HD cable box and then outputting via s-video to Media Center. Of course, this is a good argument for using MythTV instead of MCE... but the Myth guys sure make this a difficult choice, as unpolished as Myth is compared to MCE.
In fact, this begs the question of whether or not the MPAA is backing down because they've already gotten major players in the PVR market to implement the Flag anyway, regardless of the struck-down law...
There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the networks are blowing smoke to a large extent, with their statements about withholding their best content from HD if it's not protected. That's simply FUD. There is no way that the networks are going to withhold anything given that most HD watchers are using locked-down cable or satellite STB's to watch their shows... and that those HD users, being as rabid as they (we) are, will simply watch something else in HD versus watching some crappy network TV show in SD. It's hard to watch anything in SD once you've made the jump to HD... (and by the same token, it's pretty easy to watch almost anything in HD, just because it looks so good.) The networks will not give that audience up willingly.
I think they're saying what they think they have to say to get the BF passed... but at the end of the day, I don't think even they think it's the end of the world if it doesn't happen. Most people do not watch HD over the air, and most people do not want to download resized and recompressed HDTV shows that hardly bear any resemblance to the original (though I admit I've done it when trying to catch up on episodes I've missed - but I don't see how this hurts the networks, as it just makes me more likely to watch new episodes once I've caught up. The alternative is just never getting into a show because I've missed too much.)
You know, I don't think even the MPAA are unrealistic enough to think someone is not going to find a way to "pirate" protected shows anyway - I mean we've had OTA HD cards for PC available for years now and none of those already out there will ever support the broadcast flag. The MPAA was too late to start with, and the more time it takes to implement this thing, the more ineffective it's going to be. It wouldn't surprise me if they weren't basically resigned to that fact, though that doesn't mean they won't exhaust all of their options before giving up, with the thought being even a late broadcast flag law would be better than nothing.
Honestly I hate LCDs. Their color reproduction on all but the most expensive monitors sucks.
Basically any MVA, IPS or Super IPS panel will render colors at least as well as any high-end CRT, and better than most mid-range CRT's (i.e. the ones most people use in their homes and offices). These panels are used in screens such as the Dell 2005FPW, which is a 20" widescreen LCD monitor that can be had for under $400 (with coupons applied).
I just get tired of hearing these same criticisms of LCD's that we've heard for the last 10 years - "their colors suck", "they're not fast enough", "their black level is bad", "they're expensive". I mean, do you go around criticizing DVD-ROM drives because they cost more than CD-ROM drives and only read at 1X? This is 2005, man. We're past all that and have been for years.
(Note that CRT's are still perfectly fine for many things, and in fact I just bought one as an HDTV. But as generalized computer monitors - and in that I'm including common applications such as design or photographic work - LCD's work as well or better than CRT's and good ones don't cost much more, if any.)
I only think it's been downhill since Final Fantasy IX. I know most people don't agree with me, but I think that IX stands alongside VI as one of the the best actual Final Fantasy games ever made.
Well, this is exactly why articles such as the one we're talking about are patently ridiculous. Everybody has their own favorite FF games. For you, IX is a favorite. For others, VII. For still others, VI. I personally think X ranks right up there - I admit to getting a bit misty-eyed at the end, and did not want to finish the game. (X-2, by comparison, played like a series of outtakes from X, which is in fact mostly what it was.)
XI, far from being the "disappointment" that the writer of the article says it is, currently has more than 500,000 subscribers and is a significant contributor to Square's bottom line - it is a highly profitable game for them and, unlike offline games, it will continue to be for some time. X and X-2, the last two "proper" FF games, both sold around 4 million copies worldwide and were also highly profitable.
So whatever your favorites are, I don't see how anyone could argue the series is "dead". It will not be dead until it becomes unprofitable, and right now it is more profitable than it's ever been before.
How many people have said, "We must believe in God, for if we do, and he does not exist, nothing happens. But if we do not believe in him, and he does exist, then we are doomed." But, it's fairly clear he does not exist.
First, I will say that I am not religious. If I had to ID myself, I'd say I'm a Protestant Christian, but the last time I went to church on a Sunday was probably 15 years ago.
But even as a Smart Person, I'm not sure how it's "fairly clear" that God does not exist. A lot of Smart People have, in fact, pretty successfully argued in favor of the existence of God.
One of my favorite arguments in favor of the existence of God is Thomas Aquinas' theory of the "prime mover". Thomas Aquinas was a "religious philosopher" who was actually banished from the Catholic church because of his efforts to prove the existence of God. In any religion, faith is paramount, so proof is neither necessary nor desired - if you need proof of God to believe in him (or her, or it), then you're sort of missing the whole point of religion in the first place. (Aquinas was later made a saint, despite his earlier banishment.)
Anyway, Aquinas posed five proofs in favor of the existence of God, some more convincing than others. The one that I recall as being most convincing, and the one that nobody has been able to refute to this day (because it is based on the laws of physics), is the theory of the prime mover.
Aquinas argued that for every movement or action, there must be a cause or impetus, something to turn potentiality into actuality. He used the example of wood, which at any time has the potential to be either hot or cold, but can only actually be one or the other at any given time (ok, feel free to bring up quantum mechanics, but the point is the Hitchhiker's Guide Improbability Drive does not really exist - things can't be everywhere and everything all the time). If a piece of wood is actually cold, it can potentially be made hot by fire, which will then make it actually hot but no longer actually cold. So anything can have two or more potential states, but only one actual state, and to change that actual state requires an external force.
He then argues that this cannot go on into infinity, for if it did, nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime mover to have set everything in motion. (He wrote this prior to our discovery of the "big bang"). Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created. We know that there was a great buildup of energy and matter that exploded into what we now know of as our universe, but we do not know how or why that buildup occured, and likely never will because it would require peering back beyond the beginning of time.
Aquinas argued that the "prime mover" was God. There is no possible explanation for the creation of the universe that fits the laws of physics. This goes hand in hand with his third proof, that of "possibility and necessity", which states that if everything can either exist or not exist, then there must have been a time when nothing at all existed (we now know that this is, in fact, true). If nothing at all existed, it is impossible for anything to now exist, because nothing can cause its own existence. Therefore, he argued, only God could have caused our existence, ultimately.
So I don't think this is a case of smart people arguing in favor of bad ideas. It's one thing to be skeptical, but there are as many good theories in favor of God's existence as there are against, and nobody's ever going to have a "smoking gun" either way. (Aquinas was also not arguing in favor of a smiling, benevolent, grey-bearded God with a human-like personality - he was arguing in favor of some power beyond our understanding that displayed intelligence and was able to manipulate matter and energy as it saw fit from beyond the confines of our universe and our natural laws.)
In fact, I think your post is more an example of why it pays for smart people to be open-minded rather than simply skeptical all the time.
The point of the article I think is that E3 used to be a 'trade' show, and now its a 'hype' show, and thus useless as a tradeshow.
Exactly. It was originally an industry gathering, a true "convention", like there are in a lot of other industries. The media started covering it because, well, games are popular and a lot of games were being shown there. And that has ended up transforming what E3 fundamentally is.
I wouldn't say E3 serves no purpose. But I do think that it's ultimately irrelevant. Nobody buys a game machine because of what goes on at E3. They buy it because of what happens after E3. I could list you so many years and so many companies that supposedly "won" or "lost" E3, or that had particularly good or bad showings, and then went on to do the exact opposite of what everybody predicted they would do in the real-world marketplace (Sega and Microsoft being at the top of the list with their respective late Dreamcast and early Xbox showings).
There is too much importance placed on E3 by the media. It is ultimately a sideshow. It's interesting, and if you read between the lines you can glean some useful info, but it is basically just a bunch of PR reps trying to put their best face on. Ultimately, the companies that show well at E3 are just the companies with the best PR departments or PR agencies. But that says absolutely nothing about either the actual quality of the games or their ultimate marketability and popularity.
(God, did I just use the word "marketability"?! I've officially crossed to the dark side.)
It's supposed to be eye candy, not give you a doctorate in comparative theology or high-energy physics.
With a $10 million budget, the original Star Wars was never intended to be eye candy. It was intended to be fun, which the new trilogy is not. (I have not seen episode 3 yet, but with all the talk of how "dark" it is, I feel pretty confident in saying that while it may be decent, it probably still does not hold to the original ideals of the series.)
I'll agree with you that Star Wars was never intended to be deep. But that's the problem with the newer films; they're trying to be deep and Lucas just doesn't have it in him. When people say they like the original trilogy better, it's because they were more character and plot driven, more like old adventure serials, vs. the heavy-duty political mumbo-jumbo that weighs down the current stuff.
btw, I saw all the previous Star Wars films in theaters too, though I'm currently going through the first five movies in preparation for seeing episode 3. I don't know how many people have really done this vs. just relying on their memory, but eps. 4 and 5 obviously still hold up well, ep. 6 (Return of the Jedi) is surprisingly much better than most people give it credit for, and episode 1 (which we just watched last night) is even worse than it's reputed to be. It's really laughably bad; the kind of movie you'd expect to see on MST3K if not for the money put into the special effects. I do remember episode 2 being marginally better when I saw it in the theater, but I'll have to confirm when I re-watch it whether that's really true or whether I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn't wasting my time with the whole series (which is also the feeling I get when I hear some people talking about episode 3 these days).
why oh why do we still use mice keyboards & monitors?
Because nobody has yet figured out how to jack our PC's directly into our brain stems. Until that happens, we'll be using mice and keyboards.
You may as well ask why we're still using pens and pencils. They're tools, they work, they're cheap and they're easy to learn. There's no reason why perfectly good tools should ever become "obsolete" - nobody has yet invented something that writes better than a pencil for a lower price, or that allows you to input things into a computer faster or more accurately than a keyboard and mouse.
let me connect 10 racks of assignable buttons.
This does not sound faster or more intuitive than a keyboard to me.
Let me rotate an object in maya by grabbing one side of it with one hand and moving the other side.
This may well happen someday, but it would not be practical in many office environments where space is at a premium. It would also not be at all accurate (your hand moving through the air will never be steady enough to "rest" on one particular pixel, which is often the accuracy you need when doing something like retouching a photo). Mice or at the very least a drawing tablet (itself based on technology thousands of years old) will always be required for maximum accuracy in situations that require it.
Myself, I still use an IBM Model M keyboard and an IBM Explorer mouse. I don't believe anybody has ever improved upon these as input devices go, and I doubt anybody ever will - hence the drive to make keyboards and mice cheaper, not necessarily better. Going wireless is nice, but not if the keys on your keyboard offer improper levels of resistance and tactile feedback or the mouse is crowded with buttons that can only be pressed by mistake repeatedly. About the only two complaints I have about my setup are the noise from my keyboard, meaning I can only use it at home (I have a cheap junk Dell keyboard at work), and one extra button near my thumb on my mouse that trips me up sometimes. I'd rather have a two-button mouse (with a scroll wheel, which my Explorer has), but my Explorer is shaped so perfectly for my hand and feels both so solid (in terms of construction) and so soft (in terms of materials used) at the same time that it's worth the tradeoff. I've never found a two-button scroll mouse that felt better.
Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.
I agree, but Disney's talking about manually correcting every single frame and for a 2 hour film you're talking more than 175,000 individual images. That is a huge number of man-hours, and frankly, there's really no need for it.
There's nothing inherently bad about DNR systems. They're a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or evil. The problems come in when you start asking them to do things that they're not very good at doing - like removing hairs or specks of dust. These objects are not "noise" - which is what "noise reduction" is supposed to get rid of - these are things that do need to be manually removed by somebody that knows that a drawn line and a hair are not the same thing. A computer is not going to make the distinction reliably.
I think ideally what you want to do is light digital noise reduction to reduce noise, and then further manual correction of individual frames that need it (or really, the other way around). There's no reason to manually go through 175,000 frames, though - there should really only be maybe 1,000 or so that would need manual attention on any given film. That's a cost-effective way of ensuring high quality without breaking either the budget or the schedule.
Unfortunately, a lot of studios apparently don't even go that far; they just rely on the computers to do everything. There are still QC monitors at the end of the process, but when all is said and done do you think their complaints that "the picture looks a little fuzzy" are going to be met with anything other than "there's no noise, there's no hairs, ship it out!"?
Are we surprised that the latest batch will be more expensive yet?
Generally speaking, pricing at the launch of new systems has been lower than the generation previous, not higher, when adjusted for inflation. For the most part, absolute pricing has remained within the same general range.
Here are some launch prices of various systems and the cost in today's dollars:
Atari 2600 (1977)
Launch price: $199
Today's dollars: $645.75
Intellivision (1980)
Launch price: $299
Today's dollars: $759.36
Colecovision (1982)
Launch price: $199
Today's dollars: $403.70
NES (1985) (note that Nintendo has consistently been on the low end of console pricing)
Launch price: $159
Today's dollars: $282.17
Sega Genesis (1989)
Launch price: $189
Today's dollars: $294.60
PlayStation (1995)
Launch price: $299
Today's dollars: $372.01
Personally, my thinking is the next systems will be in the $300-$350 range, and that's not really out of line with previous launches. Nintendo will probably come in at $200 and undercut the competition, like they usually do (the one exception was the SNES, which came in at $199 compared to Sega's $149 at the time).
$400 might be a stretch and will limit the launch of these systems but it's still not totally out of the range people have paid for systems in the past, in terms of dollar purchasing power. Prices do go up over time, but then so do salaries. People may have a bit of sticker shock at $400 but they'll probably get over it.
One thing I was thinking to myself the other night, though, is that the focus on HDTV with these systems may actually hurt them - at the end of the day people do only have a limited amount of money, and a lot of people are now upgrading their TV's (not specifically for games, but just generally). Spend $1,000 or $2,000 on a TV - even for unrelated reasons - and that's $1,000 or $2,000 less that you have to spend on games or game consoles. It's sort of similar to what happened in 1983, when the industry crashed - people stopped buying consoles as they spent money on computers and other devices. People in general budget a certain amount for entertainment and games have to compete with TV, DVD's, PC's, whatever else... and we're at a point in the cycle now where a lot of people are spending a major chunk of money to upgrade one component in their entertainment system.
When you add in the fact that major game stores all seem to now have mountains of used games for $10 or less (whole shelves devoted to them at my local EB), I'm getting a little concerned that people may hold off on buying new systems for a little while in favor of just sticking with current systems no matter what the launch prices are. Some people have been arguing another crash is coming for a long time, and I've always argued against it - I still don't think a 1983-style near-complete stoppage of the industry is coming, but a slowdown leading to a medium-sized shakeout seems pretty possible at this point.
I think it's safe to assume that most of the market cares about graphics. A lot.
BS. If this were true, the GameCube would be outselling the PS2 and the Dreamcast would have outsold the PS1. Neither happened.
The public cares about games and image. That's all. If the next GTA game came out on the N64, you'd suddenly have a mad rush of people buying up used N64's to play it.
People like good graphics but they generally consider it a bonus to the gameplay. There's a small subset of vocal people who may feel otherwise, but that's all they are - a small subset. The majority of the public has demonstrated time and time again that graphics don't guide their purchases.
All they need to do is host an E3 show in a building directly next to a strip club.
They already pretty much do. The LA Convention Center is not really in the "heart" of downtown, it's down near the basketball arena (what is it called these days, the Staples Center?) in an area of town that's sort of borderline - it's not bad but it's not great either, and it kind of feels like the middle of nowhere. I walked around outside the convention center a while both times I went to E3 and I did see some strip clubs.
Most of the E3 "booth babes" are hired right out of these strip clubs. Most of them are regulars at E3 too, so it's not as if they don't (for the most part) know what they're getting into. You see the same ones every year.
At Japanese game shows, the booth babes are usually college girls hired for the day from around the whole area. Some of them get to be regulars too, though, because it's good money. But they're not models or strippers like the E3 women are (which may be better or worse depending on your tastes and your personal chauvinism level).
as for punishment, sure, that sounds good, but would be nearly impossible to implement in a fair manner as, in this case, lexisnexis was not responsible for the breach in any way, shape, or form. therefore to punish them for a breach not resulting from their actions would be unjust.
How about punishing them for their inactions? If somebody walked in to a military base and stole a nuclear warhead, would you throw up your hands and say "well, it wasn't the military's fault; they're not the ones who stole it"? Of course it's their freakin' fault! Who's supposed to be guarding this stuff??
Then of course, there's the issue of why they need to have this info in the first place. Just as you could argue if we didn't have nuclear weapons in the first place then there'd be no reason to worry about them being stolen, so you could argue that Lexis-Nexis - a company most of us have absolutely no contact with - should not have things like our social security numbers (which are for, you know, our individual social security payments, not anything else) to begin with.
If you are going to take it upon yourself to store my information, then you had damn well better safeguard it. And if you don't, then you should be held liable, and you should be punished severely when data is stolen through your negligence. (And in this case, I define negligence as "any case where your security was lax enough to allow data to be stolen" - or in other words, every single case of a security breach.)
If a company cannot secure this data to the point where it cannot be stolen, then they have no business holding this data to begin with.
Depends on your SciFi. In Star Trek, absolutely. It "energizes" your matter into an energy stream and sends that actual energy to another place where it coalesces. It's your very quarks being transported.
This still doesn't answer the question, though. We really have such a limited understanding of personality and even what constitutes the "soul" (for lack of a better word) that you can't make any assumption about what would happen if your body was broken down into particles, transported somewhere and then reassembled. You really don't know if you'd really be you anymore, if you'd have the same memories, the same mannerisms, etc. unless you really do believe that all we are is a collection of electrical impulses firing randomly (and not even many scientists believe that).
You can not-very-safely assume that taking a brain apart and then putting it back together again the exact same way would give you the same exact person again, but there is no proof of that. And much of what we do know about the brain is completely non-intuitive, so it's just as possible that you'd wipe all memories clean as soon as you particle-ized a brain (meaning the person coming out the other end would be almost a vegetable, and would certainly never be the same person again). After all, memories are persistent because those areas of our brains are in constant use and in constant electrical contact with other areas of our brains... to teleport under the Star Trek model you basically have to "kill" a person and then re-animate them, and I don't really see how you'd keep a person's memories intact. (And by "memories" I don't just mean happy reminiscences about when you were a child, I mean things like how to use a fork to put food in your mouth, how to speak, who your friends and family are. The stuff of life, basically.) It's similar to when somebody's heart stops for more than a few minutes and they end up brain-damaged from oxygen starvation - their brain still physically exists as it always did, but it no longer works properly. I would think that process or something like it would happen instantly and completely if that person was broken down into individual atoms.
If you can disassemble and then reassemble somebody somewhere else, what's to prevent you from assembling somebody new from scratch? If you're taking it down to the quark level, all you need to do is collect enough matter and with the knowledge you have about re-building people, you should be able to build copies of copies and even new people all day long. But we don't know if that would really actually work (these "people" would be blank slates), and if it did, it would be kind of a sad day, wouldn't it? Talk about de-valuing humanity...
Teleportation, even of the Star Trek kind (or maybe especially of the Star Trek kind), would be illegal under the laws of many religions for the reasons listed above, and others too (when you atomize somebody, they are no longer "alive" as such, meaning their soul has departed. The person coming out the other side would not be considered a person under Christianity and many other religions). It would probably eventually be illegal under the laws of many countries too, just as human cloning is starting to be now.
Gamespot tells us who 'won'
It ain't a competition, people! If it was, Sega'd still be making consoles and Microsoft would be out of the business (after their initial E3 in 2000, which was a disaster).
The competition comes later in the marketplace. And as has been proven time and time again, the public knows or cares not a whit what happens at E3. E3 is interesting to follow for those of us who do follow it, but it means absolutely nothing to the fortunes of anybody concerned.
Articles like the one at GameSpot serve no purpose, and the analyst they quote is a moron. Things may or may not shake out the way he predicts, but it won't be because of E3. It has happened time and time again that the "winner" of any individual E3 goes on to lose badly in marketplace in the following years, and vice versa. I'd even go so far as to say "winning" E3, especially when new consoles are introduced, is almost a jinx.
Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Well, this is pretty OT now, and I can't believe I'm about to defend Rick Berman, but you apparently didn't see the last couple seasons of Enterprise. Jolene Blalock's T'Pol was easily one of the most tormented characters in the history of Star Trek, with a mixed race (species?) just like Spock, but with the added burden of a pretty serious drug addiction that made her unable to fully suppress her emotions (though she never stopped trying).
I used to watch Enterprise just to look at her, but towards the middle of the 2004 season her character started getting almost too deep for a Star Trek series. If they'd pushed it any further it would have been too much, and honestly in the hands of a different actress it may have been too much already... she played everything as understated as possible, but always you could tell there was this undercurrent of fear and pain (she's one of those actresses that can really convey a lot just by flicking her eyes back and forth).
I do think Berman was a hack, but I don't think it's necessarily because he was as clueless as you think. I think he knew what he was doing, he just wasn't as interested in the same things you (or most Trek fans) were. But he occasionally did go out of his way to show that he was capable of doing interesting things with his characters.
Let's also not forget that Roddenberry's characters weren't all particularly tormented either... Kirk, for example, wasn't really wrestling with any personal demons. The only one who really did have personal issues in the original series was Spock - the rest of the characters had to have external forces put upon them to cause conflict in any episodes that featured them.
They spring a few new titles, release the innovations of their controller, their low price-point, and the reality that their processing power is right in line with the competition, and bingo you've got a winner.
You could have copied and pasted this from 2001 and been talking about the GameCube.
Didn't happen then - what makes you think it'll happen this time? There's a reason why Sony and MS are successful (and why even Nintendo was successful in the 80's and early 90's), and it wasn't because they hung back and let their bigger competitors hog all the media attention.
Of course, I say that realizing that "success" has different definitions depending on who you talk to... Nintendo is profitable with their limited market share and maybe they're content with that. But they're losing share with every new hardware launch lately, and that can't keep going on forever. Profits do depend on actually selling some product.
Why were they a disaster? That's what I want to know. It's not in the article at all. Is it because there were no gameplay movies?
He was talking about the original Xbox demos. Which yes, were a disaster.
GameSpot assumes a certain familiarity with the material in the articles they write, which is probably the correct way to go. You don't go to Gamespot looking for a primer in every single article; they sort of expect you've been keeping up for a while. That's why the backstory is not in there.
In 2000 (or was it 2001?), MS unveiled the Xbox and then went to E3. Prior to E3, they showed a bunch of tech demos that looked technically amazing, then their E3 showing was awful. I was there; it was pretty bad, and everybody knew it. Their biggest games at that E3 were Blood Wake and PGR, and while a lot of people were impressed with the water effects in Blood Wake, the game itself was dark and drab, as was pretty much every other game in their booth. Worse for them, hardly any of these games were in a state worthy of being on the E3 floor - they were almost all extremely choppy, for one thing (not unlike the Xbox 360 stuff released so far), and many of them crashed repeatedly.
They took a beating in the press, and it probably did hurt their initial launch numbers.
But, what it also showed is that E3 ultimately doesn't matter. Two years before, Sega had come in and supposedly blown the doors off everybody else showing 80 games for the Dreamcast in their booth alone, many of which looked really amazing and really fun and got them a ton of good press. Two years later, MS had as negative a showing as Sega had a positive one.
In the end, the fortunes of the two companies in the game industry turned out exactly the reverse of what you'd expected had you been reading the post-E3 coverage of those events. It's very easy to get sucked into thinking the majority of the public even knows what E3 is, much less cares about what goes on there. They really don't, and so much can happen between E3 and when the products you see there actually go on sale that you really can't make any judgements at all based on anything that happens there.
As for your second question:
We see all these cool demos that the PS2, PS3, X-Box, X-Box 360, GC and such can do, but why don't they put those on a disc and include it with the hardware just as a way of saying "see, this is what it can do" to the consumer, as a way of showing off.
Sometimes they do. All three current system at one point or another have included pack-in games that also have demos on them, or demo discs themselves. It's just not a standard thing, because the early demos often don't represent final product (and often won't even run on final hardware), so it's tough to include them in the first run of systems, and then there's always the question of when to update them. I think it's just a headache that the manufacturers don't really want to deal with, but you can still get demos if you wait a while for the right package.
Generally, at launch, most manufacturers assume you'll be buying a few games with your system, so demos aren't really necessary. MS does like to include demos on game discs, though, so it's pretty likely they'll keep doing that through the Xbox 360 release. (No idea of Sony or Nintendo will take up that same policy, but both of those companies have also released demo discs as pack-ins and also separately for the PS2 and GameCube.)
that means LESS than $465. It is probably just someone saying the equivalent of "my car cost less than $100k." True statement, vague though.
I was going to post this exact thing - the fact is Sony probably doesn't know what the pricing is going to be yet. But there is an obvious ceiling that they can point to and say "we're pretty confident we can bring the costs in below this number". That doesn't mean they won't be able to bring them down even further, and it doesn't mean they won't choose to sell the system at even more of a loss in a grab for market share.
We don't know the original context for this. (As a side note, I don't know why the blurb here links to IGN - the official translation of the original article is on the Mainichi web site here, if you want to see the source for this.) We don't know what was said in the original Japanese interview (there's no actual quote here, it's all paraphrased) and we don't know what question was asked of Sony. It could have been something like "how much would you need to sell a PS3 for to turn a profit?" for all we know.
My guess is the PS3 will be priced to compete with the Xbox 360; whatever the Xbox is at, the PS3 will be at.
Also keep in mind that pricing in Japan and the US rarely correlates directly on game consoles. The disconnect can be upwards of $100 in some cases.
I should add one more thing to my post - you know, what you see online, especially at tech sites, is often a very male-centric view of things. I'll just tell you what my wife said when she saw the PlayStation 3:
"I feel sorry for Microsoft's designers."
That was her reaction. I think Sony's hit the mark with both men and women with the PS3, whereas MS looks like that's what they were trying desperately to do but they're a bit short of a bullseye. So far, most of the people I see praising the Xbox 360 design are men. (I said "most", not "all".)
does anyone like the PS3 design over the 360/Rev
I do.
and if so what is it you like?
My take on the three system designs:
* Xbox 360 - overdesigned. Clearly trying way too hard to project some sort of coherent idea (the whole "inhale" motif). Form is not following function. There's no obvious reason for it to look the way it does, and the end result is that its curves look oddly out of place, the power button looks too large, and the whole system just generally looks a little bit wonky.
* Revolution - underdesigned. First, keeping in mind that Iwata said this is not the final design (meaning the whole point could be moot), to me this system looks like a car stereo, or an external CD-ROM drive. It is frankly boring - it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think up a thin black box. Some people like how minimalist it is, but I think it's a mistake - people will stick it on top of whatever stack of something they've already got and forget about it. And you don't want people forgetting about your company's game console.
* PlayStation 3 - Just right. It's graceful and almost elegant. It stands out without being gaudy (like the Xbox 360). For some, the curves might take some getting used to, but being convex they don't look as self-conscious and randomly-applied as the Xbox 360's curves. They make the system look like it's saying "look how powerful I am, I am frankly bulging with power!" That's probably not true, but it still comes off looking tasteful yet still unlike anything else you'll have sitting in your A/V rack. The design of the system projects an image but it also does not look like that's its sole purpose. On the other hand, it doesn't look like somebody simply stumbled on a surplus supply of external drive casings and stuffed a console inside. You can tell some thought went into this design.
I ultimately do think console designs matter, in as much as they help shape public perception of a system - just look at what happened to the Xbox in Japan. Reactions to these new designs seem sort of all over the place, but my guess is the Xbox 360 is still going to have a tough time in Japan on looks and size (it's still pretty big, and despite being designed partly in Japan it does not have a Japanese look and feel). The PS3 will appeal to consumers worldwide, though maybe some will need to get used to it more than others. The Revolution is too nondescript even for the Japanese, who value size but also power - and nothing about the Revolution's design suggests it's in the same class as the other two systems.
Time will tell if I'm right or wrong... but I do think the PS3 is quite a bit better-looking than the other two systems from an aesthetic design standpoint. The Revolution is in the middle simply because it's inoffensive, and the Xbox 360 is, frankly, offensive.