What advertisers are having a hard time doing is tracking visitors across sites or across casual visits to the same site, and I'm THRILLED by that.
Well, that's one positive effect, but what you're missing is that individual sites cannot track their repeat visitors. This is one of the most important numbers you can track - it makes it pretty hard to cater to your audience as a content provider if you don't know how many of the 50,000 people you get to your site in a day have even seen it before.
Remember, it's not just advertisers that track visitors. It's mostly the sites themselves, and site providers use those numbers to try to provide better content for their readers (which will in turn hopefully lead to greater numbers of readers). If, for example, you know that 50% of your audience is repeat visits, and that a majority of those repeat visitors actually come to your site more than once per day (a-la Slashdot), then you will probably want to rotate content in and out more quickly. On the other hand, if you're seeing hardly any repeat visitors at all, then you will know that some substantive changes probably need to be made to the site to encourage repeat business.
Deleting cookies throws this all out of whack and makes it difficult for web sites to know what their readers really want. Of course, there are other ways for sites to track visitors, but it's difficult to do across multiple sessions (repeat visits) without cookies.
Wikipedia has their article on the NES on the main page today.
No mention in that article of the failed Atari deal, one of the biggest and most important non-events in video game history.
I also don't agree with 1983 being listed as the year of the video game crash, as seems to be the current fashion (though Google still lists more hits for "video game crash 1984" than "video game crash 1983"), but I guess it's debateable. 1983 was really the start of trouble, though, not the end of it. It was the year of stock market declines and then a very bad Christmas, but 1984 was when the bottom really fell out, and when all current consoles were pulled from the US market.
Up until a few years ago, when history started being rewritten by those who are too young to even remember it, 1984 was always the year listed for the "great video game crash" - that's when the console gaming industry basically ceased to be. You could argue that the "crash" really came with the stock market declines and the poor 1983 Christmas sales, but it just strikes me as revisionist, and those types of events happen in the industry even today. We called it a "crash" in 1984 because of the cataclysmic events that occured as a result of what happened in 1983 and early 1984, not the events leading up to it.
Clarification: by "redesigning" I meant the cosmetic industrial design, not starting over from scratch on the system itself. I don't necessarily believe this anyway, was just throwing the possibility out there. There are always cosmetic tweaks made to game machines right up to the point of their release regardless.
If they're not actually behind schedule the only other reason i can think of is that they're worried if they reveal too much now then the PS3 will be old hat compared to the X-Box 2 and Nintendo Revolution when E3 comes around.
Tin-foil hat conspiracy theory:
The "leaked" images of the PS3 were real. Sony is now redesigning the system so that competitors don't have time to "steal their ideas" or otherwise capitalize on them. Either that, or they simply do not want to risk further leaks.
Honestly, I can usually spot a fake pretty easily, but the images at the link above would be pretty difficult to fake. I've seen the images that some people think were the originals (before alteration into the PS3 image), one of which is actually at the bottom right of that brochure page, and the angle of the shot is different, the textures are all different, there are no chrome reflections, no reflective plastic finish, I mean these are hard things to alter/add to an image. If this is a fake, it was done by a real pro.
Just because there are a lot of fake mockups floating around the net doesn't mean that all of them are. My bet since I first saw that image is that it's real, and that it was a real leak. The timing of this announcement, putting off the PS3 unveiling, now seems incredibly suspicious to me, coming just a week or so after this photo hit. There are two things you can do after a major leak - make your public announcement immediately (to minimize the current damage) or lock everything down (to minimize future damage, and discredit the current leaked info as fake). It seems possible Sony has chosen to do the latter.
I find it funny that there are complaints about supply when they sell out and worries about systems failing when they don't sell out. How does a gaming system manufacturer win?
Probably by neither over-promising nor under-delivering. It's really not all that difficult.
Sony apparently assumed from their experience with the PS2 that they wouldn't even be able to produce enough units for the demand no matter how many they made; that there was simply an insatiable demand for the PSP. Obviously, they're learning that that's not the case. Hopefully, this will be good for gamers in that:
a) they will tighten their QC (no doubt some people, like myself, are staying away partly due to the screen issues) b) a non-value pack will be released at a lower price... $150 is the maximum I would ever pay for a handheld and if Sony wants to keep the value pack on the market they're gonna need to cut it by $50 too, IMO
I'm interested in the PSP but not for $250 and not with this obvious dead pixel problem. Sony just completely over-estimated the handheld market, IMO - it is not the same as the home console market in terms of what people are willing to pay, the build quality people are willing to accept, and the types of things people want to do with a portable game machine.
(Oh, and Sony also needs to admit that it is a portable game machine, not a half-baked multimedia "swiss army knife" that does nothing particularly well.)
btw, I will take back some of my comments if Sony's rumored UMD burner in the PS3 turns out to be fact.
But 7 percent said their first reaction is the hit the computer, Johnson said, a step that's rarely productive.
That implies that sometimes it *is* productive?
It actually can be, though more often it isn't.
Once, I had a problem with a computer that wouldn't boot. I took out all of the major components (PSU, hard drive, etc.) and tried them in other PC's, where they worked fine. I put everything back, computer still wouldn't boot. Turned it back off, and in a fit of inspiration I kicked it. Turned it back on, and it booted.
The problem was my graphics card was not seated properly. Kicking it seated it just enough for it to boot, and in turn it was pretty obvious to me that it had been a loose connection somewhere. (btw, no, I didn't test either the graphics card or the mobo in another PC, as I didn't think of the graphics card as a possible culprit and the mobo I figured could be eliminated or confirmed as the cause without removing it). When I then went back through the PC and just tightened everything, I felt the card sitting about halfway out of its slot.
It was one of those "d'oh!" moments, and also one of those rare cases where physical violence against a wayward PC actually gained a positive result.
For those who DO have an LCD with a few dead pixels, how annoying are they?
I personally own 4 LCD's with no dead pixels at all, but my wife was using her office laptop at home one day and while we had it I took the liberty of installing some security updates and anti-virus software on it (I could not in good conscience let a Windows PC leave the house without even having Service Pack 1 installed), and it had one stuck blue pixel right at the top of the screen, about 1/4" from the bezel.
I would not have been able to live with this machine. I could not look at anything else but that stuck pixel. No matter what was on screen, my eyes would gravitate towards this one bright blue pixel, and it was clearly visible in my peripheral vision at all times. It was incredibly annoying. It convinced me unequivocably to never again buy an LCD screen (or a laptop) from anywhere without a liberal return policy - preferably 30 days with no questions asked. Unfortunately, that rules out my favorite retailer, Newegg (which has a special policy for LCD screens).
Fortunately, stuck pixels are rare, whatever Sony says. At my last job my entire company had 21" Planar LCD screens - my department had two per person - and not one of them had a single stuck pixel. I'm talking around 300 separate screens. I have never personally owned an LCD with a stuck pixel either. I'm convinced that Sony is just using crap screens to save on costs and then telling everybody there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is. (The very definition of a stuck or dead pixel is a faulty transistor - that is a malfunction/defect, however you want to sugarcoat it.)
First of all, the ad is for the product you're fast forwarding through - that is, if you fast forward throughb a movie ad, you'll see a "billboard" or a banner ad for THAT MOVIE.
And this got modded as INFORMATIVE??
You obviously have not seen one of these ads. I got an ad for The Interpreter last night (apparently the only ad TiVo's got right now) during "24" - there were no ads for this movie during the ads I was ff'ing through (that I could see, anyway).
The ad appears for the exact length of the ad as it's being fast forwarded - that is, about a second or two.
Uh, no. The ad appears for the entire duration you are fast-forwarding. In my case, this meant that yes, I missed the point at which the show came back several times, because the ad takes up more than 50% of the screen area, and it's right in the middle of the screen.
Apparently this is not supposed to happen (the ads are supposed to disappear when the show comes back), but a) to have it work properly TiVo would need some sort of commercial detect technology, and as far as I know it has none (it does know when special "flagged" commercials from co-sponsors run, but not all ads are flagged), b) that commercial detect technology would have to work 100% of the time, and no commercial detection does that, and c) even if TiVo did have such a thing, and it worked all the time, the TiVo boxes are so slow right now with the 7.1a software that they'd probably lag by 3 or 4 seconds anyway, which when ff'ing on 3X (which is really faster than 3X speed) could be two minutes into the TV show.
In short, these ads totally destroy one of the main reasons for using TiVo, and when you see one, you'll feel the same. The idea as I first heard it actually didn't bother me so much in theory (even though I am paying for this service after all, so I don't see why I should be seeing TiVo-delivered ads), but the implementation in practice is absolutely horrendous. It will definitely, 100% cause me to cancel my subscription if it is not completely redesigned.
Ars' video samples are really subpar for this type of device. Slashdot covered a story on a nearly identical setup here about a year ago and the results are *much* more impressive. As with anything, experience and practice make all the difference in the world.
This is probably key - professional steadicam operators are trained specifically in how to operate a steadicam (they're not just camera operators who decide to strap on a rig one day for kicks). If you've ever seen any behind-the-scenes footage of steadicam shots being filmed, it's pretty amazing how smoothly these guys move.
A lot of amateur camera operators - be it still or motion picture cameras - think good camera work is almost entirely dependent on the equipment. In fact, I'd say way more than half of what it takes to get good results lies with the operator. You can't put together a steadicam rig and then walk down the street like you'd walk normally and expect a steady shot - that won't work even with a real steadicam. You need to walk as smoothly as possible and make smooth, even camera movements. It doesn't look like that was done here, although to Ars' credit, they do note that they probably could have gotten better results with a bit of practice.
I do think that a rig like this could be a pretty decent option for indie videographers willing to actually learn and practice the proper techniques.
WTF? The GIMP's had that for quite a while... which reminds me of my non-troll genuine question -- what DOES PS do that the GIMP doesn't? Lots of people say it's better, but I have yet to see any specific reasons (other than CMYK support,
Uh, CMYK support is pretty major. Because, you know, that's how people, like, print stuff. (I'm not talking about home users with their RGB printers, I'm talking about professional printing using a proper CMYK printer.) You can't do any real print proofing with the GIMP, which makes it totally unsuitable for almost any non-home or non-web use.
16 bit support is another thing. This is a basic, basic requirement for high end photo processing, and the GIMP doesn't have it. Honestly, you could get everything else right, you could have every other feature under the sun, but if an image editor can't even open a photo then it's pretty much all wasted, isn't it? Oh sure, you could open that photo in another editor, convert it to 8 bit, and then edit it in the GIMP, but that pretty much destroys the whole point of using 16 bit processing to begin with. You can't get those bits back later.
As for WYSIWYG font selection, most pros wouldn't care. I know all my font names by heart as it is; seeing them visually just slows things down to a crawl when you have a large selection of fonts. I honestly hope there is a way to turn this feature off. If you think this is a big deal and a big selling point for the GIMP, then you don't understand the difference between the home/amateur and professional markets. The only reason why you would need this feature is if you do not work with fonts very often - in which case, why do you have so many useless fonts anyway?
There are thousands of free and commercial projects who manage to solve the problems you are talking about, whats so special about Adobe? Even GIMP which also is a "fairly substantial" app manage to tackle it quite nicely.
Except that the Gimp doesn't do 16 bit, which makes it completely useless for a lot of people. If a program plain and simply will not even open my image files, let alone let me do anything with them, how is it in any way comparable to one that will?
If it's so easy to port apps like this over to Linux, why does the Gimp still not do 16 bit despite the fact that people have been asking for it for years?
Lack of 16 bit support puts the Gimp squarely in the low amateur range of image apps. Probably good enough for the home user, totally inadequate for pros or even advanced amateurs. Not "fairly substantial" enough to compete with Photoshop if it can't support such a basic thing on a supposedly "easy" platform to develop for.
I'm curious if it runs faster on Macs? Same thing about iTunes. Is it just some compatibility layer in Windows versions slowing things down?
It runs pretty much the same. Windows Photoshop is not a port, it's written from the ground up for Windows. For the record, I actually find Photoshop CS faster than Photoshop 7, but then I have a pretty fast machine. I wonder how many people who run PS are trying to do so with less than 512MB of memory - which they really oughta know is PC suicide as it is.
I use Photoshop on both PC's and Macs every day (my office uses both). There's very little difference in how fast one feels relative to the other.
I don't think you read the sentence you're writing about closely enough:
A tool known as Vanishing Point will allow the user to recolor and transform objects in an image without altering its perspective.
It seems to me it's got something to do with treating objects within a layer as if they are separate layers. This would be new to Photoshop. (Macromedia Fireworks does something like this, and it's one of the reasons why I sometimes use it over PS.)
I may be reading too much into it, but it does specifically say you'll be able to manipulate "objects" without doing anything to the "image". That, to me, implies objects within a layer.
Re:Not the wrong games. The wrong girls.
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Girls Got Game
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But most women I know who game without making a big deal out of it tend to like different sorts of RPGs, simulations, and games with simple interfaces (puzzlers, old-school shooters, Katamari Damacy, etc).
My wife's two biggest favorites right now are Katamari Damacy and The Sims 2. These are not "girl games" either - I enjoy them as much as she does - but they are definitely different from the standard Half-Life 2/Doom 3/Halo 2 type stuff that seems to be popular with the guys these days.
I have no data whatsoever to back this up, but in my personal experience, girls do play different types of games than hardcore guy gamers tend to. But they do not like to be pandered to either; you're not going to suddenly get a bunch of girls to buy a game just because it's got Britney Spears on the cover or because it features the latest Barbie playhouse. It's almost offensive that some game developers still seem to think that's what girls (of all ages) want.
Girls just want to play good games, same as guys do. That doesn't mean you can't design games with the female audience in mind, though - what you can't do is insult their intelligence. If you look at it from the perspective that on the one hand you've got games that guys primarily like, on the other you've got games that maybe girls will primarily like, and then in the middle you can have a subset of games that both sexes will like... I think right now the guy games are way over-represented, the "girl" games (whatever that means) and that middle ground are way under-represented. And that's probably just a reflection of the development community itself.
I think it's honestly very difficult for guys to develop games specifically for a female audience, in the same way it's very difficult for guys to design women's clothing or fashion accessories. That middle ground that appeals to both sexes is maybe easier, but it seems that the development community hits on that market almost more by chance right now than anything else. It would be nice to see a bit more effort put into it and more games like Katamari Damacy come to market. I'm frankly a little sick of first-person shooters and military style games myself, and of course my wife won't even talk to me if I'm playing one, let alone play one herself.
You're not going to find a 'cool' digital camera for $250, unless you consider a crappy camera 'cool.'
You can get 3 and even 4 MP cameras for under $200 now from all of the major manufacturers (Canon, Olympus, Nikon, etc.). A good 3.2MP camera (and remember, megapixels aren't the only measure of detail) can make good prints up to 8x10, a 4MP camera will do the same but will give you more room to crop. My wife has the Canon SD110 - a tiny, 3.2MP camera that makes great prints at all sizes up to 8x10 - and this camera is on closeout at various stores right now for $169. Its replacement also sells for under $250.
Search around and I think you will be surprised at how far digital camera prices have fallen.
The majority of purchases are at retail stores. The online distribution market isn't mature enough as there are few issues that have to be overcome.
I don't even think this is the biggest issue. You want to know what happens when a developer is given free reign to develop a game at their own pace with no strings attached?
Duke Nukem Forever. That's what happens.
Developers are never satisfied with their games. They very often are not even in a position to impose the structure and project management required to actually deliver a final product. They see their job as making the best game possible, however long it takes, however much it costs, and if new technology arises in the meantime, then let's incorporate that too... even if it means starting over from scratch.
This is not all bad, because that's the creative mind at work. But there needs to be a counterbalance to that. Ultimately, there needs to be an actual product, and that's where the publisher comes in. It's the publisher that (generally) sets the milestones, the timelines, the budgets. It's the publisher that does the project management, that guides a game from conception to completion. These are necessary things and, while a lot of developers may not like them, without that external structural force we'd have a whole industry of Duke Nukem Forevers (in fact, the PC game industry has been drifting further and further in that direction as it is... as publishers like VU lose interest and focus on PC gaming), and ultimately, we'd have a whole industry of bankrupt game developers.
The publisher will never be obsolete, because it's the publisher with the greatest financial interest (they are making an investment and expect a return on that investment), and therefore the greatest interest in actually seeing a product come to market. Developers, once they have enough money to make a game and support themselves for a few years, are often (though not always) less interested in delivering a playable product than they are in the process of creation. These are two opposing forces that need each other to function properly.
If you ask me, the underlying problem we have right now is that publishers have been slowly losing their enthusiasm for PC games in general over the past 10 years. The problem is not the existence of publishers in the first place.
Sense of proportion - Copyright infringement: Max 3 years, Murder - 25 to Life. I see a sense of proportion
You can get probation for some pretty serious crimes, including attempted murder and rape. I think the sense of perspective is a bit out of whack here.
Quick clarification to my post - The Neo Geo Pocket actually failed just due to a lack of marketing clout, not any technical issues with the system itself. Same is basically true of the Wonderswan. I think SNK and Bandai are the only two companies who really "got" the handheld market like Nintendo did, but they did not have the resources to market their products against Nintendo. Atari, NEC and Sega did, though; they just had poor products in comparison to the GB (despite their extra horsepower, which doesn't matter much in handheld gaming).
The level of bitterness and resentment in some of the comments here (and also in the initial news post) is a bit scary. Anybody would think Sony had been killing babies for fun rather than releasing a serious competitor to Nintendo's long-running monopoly on the handheld market.
What monopoly? Nintendo's got the market cornered because they make better products than their competitors. You want a list of all the companies that have tried to de-throne them? Off the top of my head:
Atari Sega (twice) SNK Tiger NEC Bandai
Just to name a few. Atari at the time was owned by Warner Communications, and was signigicantly larger than Nintendo. Ditto for NEC, which dwarfs Nintendo even today.
Almost all of these systems were more powerful than the Game Boy, and some of them had extra features that the GB didn't have. Why did they fail?
Poor battery life and price. Sound familiar?
Sony is making the same mistakes everybody else has. There are a few differences in the philosophy of the PSP vs., say, the Atari Lynx, but the basic template is the same - you've got an expensive, battery-hungry, big and powerful system going up against a small, cheap system with long battery life (the GBA SP). Why do you think the PSP is going to be any more "serious" of a competitor than any of these other failures were?
Note that I'm not even counting the DS in the equation. The GBA SP is the real PSP competition. At the SP's price, it's practically an impulse buy, whereas the PSP is a major purchase. People may be more excited over the PSP right now but they will continue to buy the GBA SP just because it's cheap and there are a lot of games available for it. You almost don't even need to think about buying one, especially if you're a parent buying something for your kids (which is a huge market in handhelds, and one the PSP ignores).
If somebody else ever figures out what Nintendo has about the handheld market, then I would expect market forces to determine a new winner. But Nintendo has no monopoly; they simply understand the market better than anybody else.
Had the 3 console specific characters been on each port those numbers would have been very different. People who owned Cubes and another system bought the Cube version for Link. If it weren't for Link I cant imagine anyone wanting to play a fighter on that god awful Nintendo controller instead of the PS2 controller, or even (shudder) the Xbox controller.
I bought the GameCube and the Xbox version. I skipped the PS2 version completely because it was clearly the worst of the three - not just in terms of the special characters but in the graphics as well.
If all of the characters had been in every version, I would have actually only bought the GameCube version... but only because it was out in Japan before the domestic release (the Xbox version was not, as I recall). Domestically, I would only have bought the Xbox version. So really, nothing would have changed for me - in both cases, I would have ignored the PS2 version.
I honestly think multi-console owners would have shunned the PS2 release regardless of anything. It looked noticeably worse than the other two, with lots of jaggies and slowdown. Control-wise, I don't have any problem playing the game on the GameCube controller, but real hardcore fighters just use an arcade stick anyway (in other words, playing on the PS2 controller with its non-standard diamond-shaped button layout is no better for fighting games than the GameCube controller). Honestly, the Xbox controller is the worst of the three for fighting games because the action of its buttons is not fast enough, but again, I don't buy games based on the controller, I buy based on what the best version is. There are so many specialized controllers out there these days that the first party controllers really are not a detriment to anything.
Most people who bought the PS2 version bought it because they only own a PS2. I think that would have been true regardless of what characters were involved - in fact, with all else being equal character-wise, there's really no reason at all to buy the PS2 version. Maybe the Xbox and GameCube numbers would have flipped, but PS2 sales would have still been 2nd or even 3rd (you gotta think some people actually did buy it for Heihachi, as he's the only actual fighting game character of the three special characters). The superior version(s) still would have outsold the inferior version.
I would think that the news agency would want to be featured on Google to attract more visitors to its site! Apparently they are simply out for money when no damage has actually been done. Sure it's copyrighted material...
The words are copyrighted. The news isn't. AFP might want to recognize this if they'd like to continue to compete in the modern world.
Being the "oldest" news organization in the world can be a hindrance if you fail to recognize that you're no longerthe only onein existence.
Getting yourself taken off Google does not seem a prudent business decision in such a competitive news market.
Automatically reading all of your email so that Google can target text ads at you sucks even more. I'll take Yahoo's randomly-targeted graphic ads any day.
But the owners love it! So unless you're planning a glorious uprising of the working classes, then we'd better get used to it.
Great attitude. I suppose we all may as well have gotten used to Hitler too - after all, there was nothing anybody could do about him!
Before anyone gets all bent out of shape, I'm not in any way saying DRM is as bad as Hitler. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in these "better get used to it" arguments. There is a line that can be crossed whereby something is no longer worth "getting used to", where a person's rights and liberties simply take precedent over any restrictions somebody wants to place on them, and that line is somewhat different for everybody. This topic exists for the sole purpose of finding out where that line is for each of us respondents. (Obviously for you, DRM does not cross your personal line in the sand, but it does cross mine and a lot of others'.)
The DRM I'm willing to accept os the DRM that I won't even notice. Like the one on the iTMS seem to be.
Yeah, just try upgrading your OS and then tell me how you don't even notice the iTMS DRM.
If you don't want to then fine... wait until you upgrade your computer and find that DRM has locked you out because you 'copied' the files to the new one.
Real-life example: until a week ago I ran Windows XP Pro on one of my desktop machines, which is also the machine I use to sync my iPod with iTunes. I've never actually bought a song on iTunes but I have downloaded some of their free samplers, so I therefore have an iTunes account (and yes, they have my credit card info - I figured I might at some point buy a song or two). And of course I have/had those few free songs.
So a week ago I upgraded this machine to Windows Media Center 2005. I didn't even wipe my machine, mind you, I just installed right on top of XP Pro.
Bang. My computer is no longer "authorized" to play the music I downloaded. If I'd actually paid for these songs, I'd now have a bunch of useless files, and Apple and the RIAA would have a bunch of my money in return. I'm sure there's probably a pretty easy way to re-authorize my machine, but nowhere did iTunes inform me of how (it simply said "your machine is not authorized to play this song" or some such nonsense), and I was not about to waste my time bothering to find out. I shouldn't have to worry about such things anyway.
Instead, my solution was to delete those songs and resolve never to buy anything from the iTunes music store. Is this good business? Are artists really happy with this situation? All of these songs were from new artists that I hadn't heard before, and I hadn't gotten around to listening to all of them yet - maybe one of them would have been my next favorite band. Apple talks a lot about how people would rather "own" their music than rent it, but if my music no longer plays after a simple OS upgrade, I hardly "own" it, do I?
Apple should see PyMusic for what it is - a selling point for their service. It's probably the only way I'll consider buying songs from them, unless they ever decide to strip the DRM out of iTunes themselves (not bloody likely). I do run Linux on another machine so if this continues to work, I may try it out one of these days. Hopefully it'll be like the Trillian/AOL thing (AOL gave up a while ago, in case you weren't aware) and Apple will eventually decide the publicity they're giving the application with this cat and mouse game is just robbing Peter to pay Paul - it's just driving more people to PyMusic. Then maybe they'll leave it alone.
Slashdot Mirror
What advertisers are having a hard time doing is tracking visitors across sites or across casual visits to the same site, and I'm THRILLED by that.
Well, that's one positive effect, but what you're missing is that individual sites cannot track their repeat visitors. This is one of the most important numbers you can track - it makes it pretty hard to cater to your audience as a content provider if you don't know how many of the 50,000 people you get to your site in a day have even seen it before.
Remember, it's not just advertisers that track visitors. It's mostly the sites themselves, and site providers use those numbers to try to provide better content for their readers (which will in turn hopefully lead to greater numbers of readers). If, for example, you know that 50% of your audience is repeat visits, and that a majority of those repeat visitors actually come to your site more than once per day (a-la Slashdot), then you will probably want to rotate content in and out more quickly. On the other hand, if you're seeing hardly any repeat visitors at all, then you will know that some substantive changes probably need to be made to the site to encourage repeat business.
Deleting cookies throws this all out of whack and makes it difficult for web sites to know what their readers really want. Of course, there are other ways for sites to track visitors, but it's difficult to do across multiple sessions (repeat visits) without cookies.
Wikipedia has their article on the NES on the main page today.
No mention in that article of the failed Atari deal, one of the biggest and most important non-events in video game history.
I also don't agree with 1983 being listed as the year of the video game crash, as seems to be the current fashion (though Google still lists more hits for "video game crash 1984" than "video game crash 1983"), but I guess it's debateable. 1983 was really the start of trouble, though, not the end of it. It was the year of stock market declines and then a very bad Christmas, but 1984 was when the bottom really fell out, and when all current consoles were pulled from the US market.
Up until a few years ago, when history started being rewritten by those who are too young to even remember it, 1984 was always the year listed for the "great video game crash" - that's when the console gaming industry basically ceased to be. You could argue that the "crash" really came with the stock market declines and the poor 1983 Christmas sales, but it just strikes me as revisionist, and those types of events happen in the industry even today. We called it a "crash" in 1984 because of the cataclysmic events that occured as a result of what happened in 1983 and early 1984, not the events leading up to it.
Sony is now redesigning the system
Clarification: by "redesigning" I meant the cosmetic industrial design, not starting over from scratch on the system itself. I don't necessarily believe this anyway, was just throwing the possibility out there. There are always cosmetic tweaks made to game machines right up to the point of their release regardless.
If they're not actually behind schedule the only other reason i can think of is that they're worried if they reveal too much now then the PS3 will be old hat compared to the X-Box 2 and Nintendo Revolution when E3 comes around.
Tin-foil hat conspiracy theory:
The "leaked" images of the PS3 were real. Sony is now redesigning the system so that competitors don't have time to "steal their ideas" or otherwise capitalize on them. Either that, or they simply do not want to risk further leaks.
Honestly, I can usually spot a fake pretty easily, but the images at the link above would be pretty difficult to fake. I've seen the images that some people think were the originals (before alteration into the PS3 image), one of which is actually at the bottom right of that brochure page, and the angle of the shot is different, the textures are all different, there are no chrome reflections, no reflective plastic finish, I mean these are hard things to alter/add to an image. If this is a fake, it was done by a real pro.
Just because there are a lot of fake mockups floating around the net doesn't mean that all of them are. My bet since I first saw that image is that it's real, and that it was a real leak. The timing of this announcement, putting off the PS3 unveiling, now seems incredibly suspicious to me, coming just a week or so after this photo hit. There are two things you can do after a major leak - make your public announcement immediately (to minimize the current damage) or lock everything down (to minimize future damage, and discredit the current leaked info as fake). It seems possible Sony has chosen to do the latter.
I find it funny that there are complaints about supply when they sell out and worries about systems failing when they don't sell out. How does a gaming system manufacturer win?
Probably by neither over-promising nor under-delivering. It's really not all that difficult.
Sony apparently assumed from their experience with the PS2 that they wouldn't even be able to produce enough units for the demand no matter how many they made; that there was simply an insatiable demand for the PSP. Obviously, they're learning that that's not the case. Hopefully, this will be good for gamers in that:
a) they will tighten their QC (no doubt some people, like myself, are staying away partly due to the screen issues)
b) a non-value pack will be released at a lower price... $150 is the maximum I would ever pay for a handheld and if Sony wants to keep the value pack on the market they're gonna need to cut it by $50 too, IMO
I'm interested in the PSP but not for $250 and not with this obvious dead pixel problem. Sony just completely over-estimated the handheld market, IMO - it is not the same as the home console market in terms of what people are willing to pay, the build quality people are willing to accept, and the types of things people want to do with a portable game machine.
(Oh, and Sony also needs to admit that it is a portable game machine, not a half-baked multimedia "swiss army knife" that does nothing particularly well.)
btw, I will take back some of my comments if Sony's rumored UMD burner in the PS3 turns out to be fact.
But 7 percent said their first reaction is the hit the computer, Johnson said, a step that's rarely productive.
That implies that sometimes it *is* productive?
It actually can be, though more often it isn't.
Once, I had a problem with a computer that wouldn't boot. I took out all of the major components (PSU, hard drive, etc.) and tried them in other PC's, where they worked fine. I put everything back, computer still wouldn't boot. Turned it back off, and in a fit of inspiration I kicked it. Turned it back on, and it booted.
The problem was my graphics card was not seated properly. Kicking it seated it just enough for it to boot, and in turn it was pretty obvious to me that it had been a loose connection somewhere. (btw, no, I didn't test either the graphics card or the mobo in another PC, as I didn't think of the graphics card as a possible culprit and the mobo I figured could be eliminated or confirmed as the cause without removing it). When I then went back through the PC and just tightened everything, I felt the card sitting about halfway out of its slot.
It was one of those "d'oh!" moments, and also one of those rare cases where physical violence against a wayward PC actually gained a positive result.
For those who DO have an LCD with a few dead pixels, how annoying are they?
I personally own 4 LCD's with no dead pixels at all, but my wife was using her office laptop at home one day and while we had it I took the liberty of installing some security updates and anti-virus software on it (I could not in good conscience let a Windows PC leave the house without even having Service Pack 1 installed), and it had one stuck blue pixel right at the top of the screen, about 1/4" from the bezel.
I would not have been able to live with this machine. I could not look at anything else but that stuck pixel. No matter what was on screen, my eyes would gravitate towards this one bright blue pixel, and it was clearly visible in my peripheral vision at all times. It was incredibly annoying. It convinced me unequivocably to never again buy an LCD screen (or a laptop) from anywhere without a liberal return policy - preferably 30 days with no questions asked. Unfortunately, that rules out my favorite retailer, Newegg (which has a special policy for LCD screens).
Fortunately, stuck pixels are rare, whatever Sony says. At my last job my entire company had 21" Planar LCD screens - my department had two per person - and not one of them had a single stuck pixel. I'm talking around 300 separate screens. I have never personally owned an LCD with a stuck pixel either. I'm convinced that Sony is just using crap screens to save on costs and then telling everybody there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is. (The very definition of a stuck or dead pixel is a faulty transistor - that is a malfunction/defect, however you want to sugarcoat it.)
Bugs found during testing aren't that absurd.
I don't think we're paying $13 a month to be beta testers.
First of all, the ad is for the product you're fast forwarding through - that is, if you fast forward throughb a movie ad, you'll see a "billboard" or a banner ad for THAT MOVIE.
And this got modded as INFORMATIVE??
You obviously have not seen one of these ads. I got an ad for The Interpreter last night (apparently the only ad TiVo's got right now) during "24" - there were no ads for this movie during the ads I was ff'ing through (that I could see, anyway).
The ad appears for the exact length of the ad as it's being fast forwarded - that is, about a second or two.
Uh, no. The ad appears for the entire duration you are fast-forwarding. In my case, this meant that yes, I missed the point at which the show came back several times, because the ad takes up more than 50% of the screen area, and it's right in the middle of the screen.
Apparently this is not supposed to happen (the ads are supposed to disappear when the show comes back), but a) to have it work properly TiVo would need some sort of commercial detect technology, and as far as I know it has none (it does know when special "flagged" commercials from co-sponsors run, but not all ads are flagged), b) that commercial detect technology would have to work 100% of the time, and no commercial detection does that, and c) even if TiVo did have such a thing, and it worked all the time, the TiVo boxes are so slow right now with the 7.1a software that they'd probably lag by 3 or 4 seconds anyway, which when ff'ing on 3X (which is really faster than 3X speed) could be two minutes into the TV show.
In short, these ads totally destroy one of the main reasons for using TiVo, and when you see one, you'll feel the same. The idea as I first heard it actually didn't bother me so much in theory (even though I am paying for this service after all, so I don't see why I should be seeing TiVo-delivered ads), but the implementation in practice is absolutely horrendous. It will definitely, 100% cause me to cancel my subscription if it is not completely redesigned.
Ars' video samples are really subpar for this type of device. Slashdot covered a story on a nearly identical setup here about a year ago and the results are *much* more impressive. As with anything, experience and practice make all the difference in the world.
This is probably key - professional steadicam operators are trained specifically in how to operate a steadicam (they're not just camera operators who decide to strap on a rig one day for kicks). If you've ever seen any behind-the-scenes footage of steadicam shots being filmed, it's pretty amazing how smoothly these guys move.
A lot of amateur camera operators - be it still or motion picture cameras - think good camera work is almost entirely dependent on the equipment. In fact, I'd say way more than half of what it takes to get good results lies with the operator. You can't put together a steadicam rig and then walk down the street like you'd walk normally and expect a steady shot - that won't work even with a real steadicam. You need to walk as smoothly as possible and make smooth, even camera movements. It doesn't look like that was done here, although to Ars' credit, they do note that they probably could have gotten better results with a bit of practice.
I do think that a rig like this could be a pretty decent option for indie videographers willing to actually learn and practice the proper techniques.
WTF? The GIMP's had that for quite a while... which reminds me of my non-troll genuine question -- what DOES PS do that the GIMP doesn't? Lots of people say it's better, but I have yet to see any specific reasons (other than CMYK support,
Uh, CMYK support is pretty major. Because, you know, that's how people, like, print stuff. (I'm not talking about home users with their RGB printers, I'm talking about professional printing using a proper CMYK printer.) You can't do any real print proofing with the GIMP, which makes it totally unsuitable for almost any non-home or non-web use.
16 bit support is another thing. This is a basic, basic requirement for high end photo processing, and the GIMP doesn't have it. Honestly, you could get everything else right, you could have every other feature under the sun, but if an image editor can't even open a photo then it's pretty much all wasted, isn't it? Oh sure, you could open that photo in another editor, convert it to 8 bit, and then edit it in the GIMP, but that pretty much destroys the whole point of using 16 bit processing to begin with. You can't get those bits back later.
As for WYSIWYG font selection, most pros wouldn't care. I know all my font names by heart as it is; seeing them visually just slows things down to a crawl when you have a large selection of fonts. I honestly hope there is a way to turn this feature off. If you think this is a big deal and a big selling point for the GIMP, then you don't understand the difference between the home/amateur and professional markets. The only reason why you would need this feature is if you do not work with fonts very often - in which case, why do you have so many useless fonts anyway?
There are thousands of free and commercial projects who manage to solve the problems you are talking about, whats so special about Adobe? Even GIMP which also is a "fairly substantial" app manage to tackle it quite nicely.
Except that the Gimp doesn't do 16 bit, which makes it completely useless for a lot of people. If a program plain and simply will not even open my image files, let alone let me do anything with them, how is it in any way comparable to one that will?
If it's so easy to port apps like this over to Linux, why does the Gimp still not do 16 bit despite the fact that people have been asking for it for years?
Lack of 16 bit support puts the Gimp squarely in the low amateur range of image apps. Probably good enough for the home user, totally inadequate for pros or even advanced amateurs. Not "fairly substantial" enough to compete with Photoshop if it can't support such a basic thing on a supposedly "easy" platform to develop for.
I'm curious if it runs faster on Macs? Same thing about iTunes. Is it just some compatibility layer in Windows versions slowing things down?
It runs pretty much the same. Windows Photoshop is not a port, it's written from the ground up for Windows. For the record, I actually find Photoshop CS faster than Photoshop 7, but then I have a pretty fast machine. I wonder how many people who run PS are trying to do so with less than 512MB of memory - which they really oughta know is PC suicide as it is.
I use Photoshop on both PC's and Macs every day (my office uses both). There's very little difference in how fast one feels relative to the other.
What does this tool do again?
I don't think you read the sentence you're writing about closely enough:
A tool known as Vanishing Point will allow the user to recolor and transform objects in an image without altering its perspective.
It seems to me it's got something to do with treating objects within a layer as if they are separate layers. This would be new to Photoshop. (Macromedia Fireworks does something like this, and it's one of the reasons why I sometimes use it over PS.)
I may be reading too much into it, but it does specifically say you'll be able to manipulate "objects" without doing anything to the "image". That, to me, implies objects within a layer.
But most women I know who game without making a big deal out of it tend to like different sorts of RPGs, simulations, and games with simple interfaces (puzzlers, old-school shooters, Katamari Damacy, etc).
My wife's two biggest favorites right now are Katamari Damacy and The Sims 2. These are not "girl games" either - I enjoy them as much as she does - but they are definitely different from the standard Half-Life 2/Doom 3/Halo 2 type stuff that seems to be popular with the guys these days.
I have no data whatsoever to back this up, but in my personal experience, girls do play different types of games than hardcore guy gamers tend to. But they do not like to be pandered to either; you're not going to suddenly get a bunch of girls to buy a game just because it's got Britney Spears on the cover or because it features the latest Barbie playhouse. It's almost offensive that some game developers still seem to think that's what girls (of all ages) want.
Girls just want to play good games, same as guys do. That doesn't mean you can't design games with the female audience in mind, though - what you can't do is insult their intelligence. If you look at it from the perspective that on the one hand you've got games that guys primarily like, on the other you've got games that maybe girls will primarily like, and then in the middle you can have a subset of games that both sexes will like... I think right now the guy games are way over-represented, the "girl" games (whatever that means) and that middle ground are way under-represented. And that's probably just a reflection of the development community itself.
I think it's honestly very difficult for guys to develop games specifically for a female audience, in the same way it's very difficult for guys to design women's clothing or fashion accessories. That middle ground that appeals to both sexes is maybe easier, but it seems that the development community hits on that market almost more by chance right now than anything else. It would be nice to see a bit more effort put into it and more games like Katamari Damacy come to market. I'm frankly a little sick of first-person shooters and military style games myself, and of course my wife won't even talk to me if I'm playing one, let alone play one herself.
You're not going to find a 'cool' digital camera for $250, unless you consider a crappy camera 'cool.'
You can get 3 and even 4 MP cameras for under $200 now from all of the major manufacturers (Canon, Olympus, Nikon, etc.). A good 3.2MP camera (and remember, megapixels aren't the only measure of detail) can make good prints up to 8x10, a 4MP camera will do the same but will give you more room to crop. My wife has the Canon SD110 - a tiny, 3.2MP camera that makes great prints at all sizes up to 8x10 - and this camera is on closeout at various stores right now for $169. Its replacement also sells for under $250.
Search around and I think you will be surprised at how far digital camera prices have fallen.
The majority of purchases are at retail stores. The online distribution market isn't mature enough as there are few issues that have to be overcome.
I don't even think this is the biggest issue. You want to know what happens when a developer is given free reign to develop a game at their own pace with no strings attached?
Duke Nukem Forever. That's what happens.
Developers are never satisfied with their games. They very often are not even in a position to impose the structure and project management required to actually deliver a final product. They see their job as making the best game possible, however long it takes, however much it costs, and if new technology arises in the meantime, then let's incorporate that too... even if it means starting over from scratch.
This is not all bad, because that's the creative mind at work. But there needs to be a counterbalance to that. Ultimately, there needs to be an actual product, and that's where the publisher comes in. It's the publisher that (generally) sets the milestones, the timelines, the budgets. It's the publisher that does the project management, that guides a game from conception to completion. These are necessary things and, while a lot of developers may not like them, without that external structural force we'd have a whole industry of Duke Nukem Forevers (in fact, the PC game industry has been drifting further and further in that direction as it is... as publishers like VU lose interest and focus on PC gaming), and ultimately, we'd have a whole industry of bankrupt game developers.
The publisher will never be obsolete, because it's the publisher with the greatest financial interest (they are making an investment and expect a return on that investment), and therefore the greatest interest in actually seeing a product come to market. Developers, once they have enough money to make a game and support themselves for a few years, are often (though not always) less interested in delivering a playable product than they are in the process of creation. These are two opposing forces that need each other to function properly.
If you ask me, the underlying problem we have right now is that publishers have been slowly losing their enthusiasm for PC games in general over the past 10 years. The problem is not the existence of publishers in the first place.
Sense of proportion - Copyright infringement: Max 3 years, Murder - 25 to Life. I see a sense of proportion
You can get probation for some pretty serious crimes, including attempted murder and rape. I think the sense of perspective is a bit out of whack here.
Quick clarification to my post - The Neo Geo Pocket actually failed just due to a lack of marketing clout, not any technical issues with the system itself. Same is basically true of the Wonderswan. I think SNK and Bandai are the only two companies who really "got" the handheld market like Nintendo did, but they did not have the resources to market their products against Nintendo. Atari, NEC and Sega did, though; they just had poor products in comparison to the GB (despite their extra horsepower, which doesn't matter much in handheld gaming).
The level of bitterness and resentment in some of the comments here (and also in the initial news post) is a bit scary. Anybody would think Sony had been killing babies for fun rather than releasing a serious competitor to Nintendo's long-running monopoly on the handheld market.
What monopoly? Nintendo's got the market cornered because they make better products than their competitors. You want a list of all the companies that have tried to de-throne them? Off the top of my head:
Atari
Sega (twice)
SNK
Tiger
NEC
Bandai
Just to name a few. Atari at the time was owned by Warner Communications, and was signigicantly larger than Nintendo. Ditto for NEC, which dwarfs Nintendo even today.
Almost all of these systems were more powerful than the Game Boy, and some of them had extra features that the GB didn't have. Why did they fail?
Poor battery life and price. Sound familiar?
Sony is making the same mistakes everybody else has. There are a few differences in the philosophy of the PSP vs., say, the Atari Lynx, but the basic template is the same - you've got an expensive, battery-hungry, big and powerful system going up against a small, cheap system with long battery life (the GBA SP). Why do you think the PSP is going to be any more "serious" of a competitor than any of these other failures were?
Note that I'm not even counting the DS in the equation. The GBA SP is the real PSP competition. At the SP's price, it's practically an impulse buy, whereas the PSP is a major purchase. People may be more excited over the PSP right now but they will continue to buy the GBA SP just because it's cheap and there are a lot of games available for it. You almost don't even need to think about buying one, especially if you're a parent buying something for your kids (which is a huge market in handhelds, and one the PSP ignores).
If somebody else ever figures out what Nintendo has about the handheld market, then I would expect market forces to determine a new winner. But Nintendo has no monopoly; they simply understand the market better than anybody else.
Had the 3 console specific characters been on each port those numbers would have been very different. People who owned Cubes and another system bought the Cube version for Link. If it weren't for Link I cant imagine anyone wanting to play a fighter on that god awful Nintendo controller instead of the PS2 controller, or even (shudder) the Xbox controller.
I bought the GameCube and the Xbox version. I skipped the PS2 version completely because it was clearly the worst of the three - not just in terms of the special characters but in the graphics as well.
If all of the characters had been in every version, I would have actually only bought the GameCube version... but only because it was out in Japan before the domestic release (the Xbox version was not, as I recall). Domestically, I would only have bought the Xbox version. So really, nothing would have changed for me - in both cases, I would have ignored the PS2 version.
I honestly think multi-console owners would have shunned the PS2 release regardless of anything. It looked noticeably worse than the other two, with lots of jaggies and slowdown. Control-wise, I don't have any problem playing the game on the GameCube controller, but real hardcore fighters just use an arcade stick anyway (in other words, playing on the PS2 controller with its non-standard diamond-shaped button layout is no better for fighting games than the GameCube controller). Honestly, the Xbox controller is the worst of the three for fighting games because the action of its buttons is not fast enough, but again, I don't buy games based on the controller, I buy based on what the best version is. There are so many specialized controllers out there these days that the first party controllers really are not a detriment to anything.
Most people who bought the PS2 version bought it because they only own a PS2. I think that would have been true regardless of what characters were involved - in fact, with all else being equal character-wise, there's really no reason at all to buy the PS2 version. Maybe the Xbox and GameCube numbers would have flipped, but PS2 sales would have still been 2nd or even 3rd (you gotta think some people actually did buy it for Heihachi, as he's the only actual fighting game character of the three special characters). The superior version(s) still would have outsold the inferior version.
I would think that the news agency would want to be featured on Google to attract more visitors to its site! Apparently they are simply out for money when no damage has actually been done. Sure it's copyrighted material...
The words are copyrighted. The news isn't. AFP might want to recognize this if they'd like to continue to compete in the modern world.
Being the "oldest" news organization in the world can be a hindrance if you fail to recognize that you're no longer the only one in existence.
Getting yourself taken off Google does not seem a prudent business decision in such a competitive news market.
Yahoo has graphic ads.
Graphic ads SUCK.
Automatically reading all of your email so that Google can target text ads at you sucks even more. I'll take Yahoo's randomly-targeted graphic ads any day.
But the owners love it!
So unless you're planning a glorious uprising of the working classes, then we'd better get used to it.
Great attitude. I suppose we all may as well have gotten used to Hitler too - after all, there was nothing anybody could do about him!
Before anyone gets all bent out of shape, I'm not in any way saying DRM is as bad as Hitler. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in these "better get used to it" arguments. There is a line that can be crossed whereby something is no longer worth "getting used to", where a person's rights and liberties simply take precedent over any restrictions somebody wants to place on them, and that line is somewhat different for everybody. This topic exists for the sole purpose of finding out where that line is for each of us respondents. (Obviously for you, DRM does not cross your personal line in the sand, but it does cross mine and a lot of others'.)
The DRM I'm willing to accept os the DRM that I won't even notice. Like the one on the iTMS seem to be.
Yeah, just try upgrading your OS and then tell me how you don't even notice the iTMS DRM.
If you don't want to then fine... wait until you upgrade your computer and find that DRM has locked you out because you 'copied' the files to the new one.
Real-life example: until a week ago I ran Windows XP Pro on one of my desktop machines, which is also the machine I use to sync my iPod with iTunes. I've never actually bought a song on iTunes but I have downloaded some of their free samplers, so I therefore have an iTunes account (and yes, they have my credit card info - I figured I might at some point buy a song or two). And of course I have/had those few free songs.
So a week ago I upgraded this machine to Windows Media Center 2005. I didn't even wipe my machine, mind you, I just installed right on top of XP Pro.
Bang. My computer is no longer "authorized" to play the music I downloaded. If I'd actually paid for these songs, I'd now have a bunch of useless files, and Apple and the RIAA would have a bunch of my money in return. I'm sure there's probably a pretty easy way to re-authorize my machine, but nowhere did iTunes inform me of how (it simply said "your machine is not authorized to play this song" or some such nonsense), and I was not about to waste my time bothering to find out. I shouldn't have to worry about such things anyway.
Instead, my solution was to delete those songs and resolve never to buy anything from the iTunes music store. Is this good business? Are artists really happy with this situation? All of these songs were from new artists that I hadn't heard before, and I hadn't gotten around to listening to all of them yet - maybe one of them would have been my next favorite band. Apple talks a lot about how people would rather "own" their music than rent it, but if my music no longer plays after a simple OS upgrade, I hardly "own" it, do I?
Apple should see PyMusic for what it is - a selling point for their service. It's probably the only way I'll consider buying songs from them, unless they ever decide to strip the DRM out of iTunes themselves (not bloody likely). I do run Linux on another machine so if this continues to work, I may try it out one of these days. Hopefully it'll be like the Trillian/AOL thing (AOL gave up a while ago, in case you weren't aware) and Apple will eventually decide the publicity they're giving the application with this cat and mouse game is just robbing Peter to pay Paul - it's just driving more people to PyMusic. Then maybe they'll leave it alone.
(Wishful thinking, I know.)